Luke Drury

Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics in DIAS, member and former president of the Royal Irish Academy, former VP of ALLEA. Interested in open science and the future of scholarly communication. All views expressed here are personal. Languages are English, German and some French.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9257-2270
Location: Dublin, Ireland
DIAS: https://www.dias.ie/2010/08/19/astrostaff-ld/

Last Notes

2025-12-02 12:08:25 UTC

Hobbs said something rather profound which has always stuck in my mind since I first read it: "peace is not the mere absence of war, but the absence of the expectation of war".

2025-08-17 10:43:35 UTC

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Interesting. In Ireland, because all major road building and other construction activity in archaeologically sensitive area required a professional survey, many archaeology graduates were hired by commercial archaeology survey firms. Not sure if this is still the case.

2025-08-07 11:35:08 UTC

According to the Guardian the Israeli mass surveillance of essentially all cell phone calls by Palestinians is partly enabled by Microsoft's Irish data centres and Azure cloud services. Perhaps one reason why the government is so keen to keep "services" out of the occupied territories bill? I
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-israeli-military-palestinian-phone-calls-cloud
#Palestine #Microsoft #IrishDataCentres

2025-05-22 15:04:49 UTC

Good editorial in the Journal of Music about Gaza, the Kneecap prosecution, and Irish history. It is indeed "a carnival of distraction" as was, on the other side of the Atlantic, the farcical ambush of the president of South Africa with accusations of a fake genocide the main purpose of which seems to have been to distract from an all too real one.
https://journalofmusic.com/opinion/history-repeats-itself-british-authorities-get-decide-who-terrorists-are
#Gaza #Kneecap #IrishHistory

2025-05-05 11:44:31 UTC

This is what happens when for profit corporations get to buy up what should be public good serving journals.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01198-6?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20250502&utm_source=nature_etoc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CONR_41586_AWA1_GL_DTEC_054CI_TOC-250502

2025-04-15 16:37:17 UTC

The German Leopoldina academy has a discussion paper on the financing of diamond publishing where they propose to fund it in the same way as research, through competitive grants to academic bodies. The idea has merit.
https://www.leopoldina.org/presse-1/pressemitteilungen/pressemitteilung/press/3129/
#OpenScience #DiamondOA #ResearchFunding #Leopoldina

2025-03-10 14:00:59 UTC

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Not to difficult to insert a mention of the triangle inequality, statistical bias, colour quarks, linguistic gender etc....

2025-03-02 15:01:50 UTC

It is really very simple. Putin does not fear NATO (he has lived with it in Turkey for decades and knows that it is a purely defensive alliance), he hates the EU for spreading the idea of democracy and the rule of law (even if imperfectly) Silicon valley hates the EU for attempting to regulate it (even if with little success so far). American "Republicans" hate Europe for showing that social democracy works (publicly funded health etc). Europe's core values are anathema to these people.

2025-02-22 13:08:09 UTC

We now see the wisdom of Europe having its own satellite positioning system as well as an independent launch capability.
#Galileo #Ariane6

2025-01-28 18:40:05 UTC

Apropos of the Chinese AI panic, worth remembering that the old Soviet Union produced excellent computational fluid dynamics work (Godunov methods etc) precisely because they had limited computational resources and well trained theoreticians. If you can’t just throw money and resources at a problem you are forced to be clever!

2024-12-15 09:25:41 UTC

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I enjoyed reading some of his very well written books. I have always thought it quite ironic that he thought commercial companies would become more like universities, whereas what has happened is that universities have become more like commercial companies.

2024-12-14 12:30:34 UTC

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How long before we see massive pressure on Europe to undo the Digital Services Act and GDPR? The TechBros of Silicon Valley are no fans of the EU.

2024-12-02 06:50:37 UTC

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Unfortunately we don’t really have time for that. The scientific consensus is clear - we need to take decisive action now.

2024-12-01 22:24:32 UTC

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Part of the problem was that all the main parties put green policies in their manifestos and Friends of the Earth actually ranked those of Labour and the SocDems as greener than those of the Green Party! Of course putting an aspirational policy in your manifesto is very different from delivering in a coalition which is what the Greens had achieved, but it meant that the greens looked less unique in the policy space.
Full disclosure, I am a member of the Greens.

2024-12-01 16:58:40 UTC

Sadly the Green Party vote collapsed this time in the Irish general election despite, or perhaps for some because of, a very significant influence on the last government. But the issues remain and will have to be addressed.

2024-11-06 09:06:16 UTC

So Musk and Thiel have managed to buy the US. To quote one of them “let that sink in”.

2024-10-23 10:55:58 UTC

Worked for many years in Ireland at the Armagh Observatory.
#IrishAstronomy #ArmaghObservatory
From: [@gutenberg_org](https://mastodon.social/@gutenberg_org )
https://mastodon.social/@gutenberg_org/113356318559424357