About
I am a physics student, recently having graduated with an Honours degree in Astrophysics. This fall I will begin studying for my DPhil (PhD) in Oceanic, Atmospheric, and Planetary Physics at the University of Oxford. I will be researching the interaction between the ocean and ice-shelves. Ice-shelves are edges glaciers which float on top of the ocean. The fresh water from the glacier is less dense than the salt water of the ocean, resulting in interesting fluid dynamics as the ice shelf melts. I will be investigating what instabilities can develop during the melting process which could lead to the disintegration of the ice sheets.
One of my primary interests outside of physics is politics, resulting in the title of this blog. I am fiercely left-wing and consider myself a socialist. This means that I believe the economy should be collectively owned and democratically controlled. That said I’m not really a Marxist—more Marx-ish. I write various articles expressing a socialist perspective on this blog and, in particular, I try to bring to bear any politics insights arising from my perspective as a scientist. A big part of my politics is protecting the environment—hence my chosen area of study. I believe that science and technology will make it possible to live comfortably and sustainably, but that capitalism is unlikely to be able to apply those technologies in the necessary ways.
My other, more mundane, major hobby is programming. I love tinkering with computers and writing software. In addition to the software which I write as part of my research, I often write programs in my spare time to fill a currently unoccupied niche. I will often post my projects on this blog and much of my code can be found on GitHub. I also designed the theme for this blog and for my professional website. I use this theme with the Pelican static site generator to produce my websites. You are welcome to use and/or modify the theme for any of your own projects.
All blog content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
