All ideas

Reconstructing the 3D shape of lightning strikes from their thunder

A nearby lightning strike is accompanied by a loud roll of thunder that can last for many seconds. The stroke conducts current between cloud and ground, simultaneously superheating the air along the path of the stroke. The resultant shock wave... continue reading

Correspondence Between Sonic Booms and Photonic Booms

A sonic boom is heard by an observer, for example, when a supersonic airplane passes by. A lesser known phenomenon dubbed a photonic boom is seen by an observer, for example, when an always-superluminal... continue reading

Could a primeval version of the Basque 'Jentilak' tale be 25.000-year-old?

In the deepest part at the end of Llonín Cave (Asturias, Northern Spain), a fortuitous configuration of minor protuberances and cracks in the wall suggests the lateral outline of an 80 cm high anthropomorphic head, whereas a minor depression... continue reading

Kickstarting research into end-to-end trigger systems

The data volumes (O(TB/s)) created at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are too large to record. Typical rejection factors are O(100-1000), and using as little CPU time as possible to reject an event is the goal. More powerful decision... continue reading

New Ph.D. students in the empirical sciences should be recruited into ongoing scientific studies right from the start

All too often we come across Ph.D. students who after 2-3 years of effort still struggle with their first (co-)authorship. In many cases, this may be considered a waste of financial resources and human... continue reading

Pre-registration of a test for statistical significance of a GALFA-HI -- WMAP ILC correlation

In 2007 Gerrit Verschuur proposed that HI structures as seen in the Leiden-Argentina-Bonn 36' HI survey of the sky are correlated with structures in the WMAP sky, which are typically ascribed to the CMB.

He... continue reading

The End of the Party: A New Approach to Parliamentary Democracy

Today’s party democracy suffers from two issues. First, members of parliament (MPs) should represent voters’ opinions. Yet their free mandate often suffers from obligations to vote in accordance with party interests and is therefore overridden by... continue reading

A first law of humanities computing

In the course of the last decade, I formulated what I consider to be something of a law concerning the use of computing in Humanities research:

The novel and... continue reading

Hybridization of the Position Sensitive Tunable Laser Diode Microspectroscopy and Laser Ionization Mass Spectrometry on the Scanning Microscopic Stage for Multiparametric Colocalization Imaging

To date there are known methods for mass-spectrometric control of the surgical samples, including MALDI imaging which applies a laser beam. But in most cases these methods provide nonselective measurements of the samples, which were previously... continue reading

Create standalone simulation tools to facilitate collaboration between HEP and machine learning community

Discussions at recent workshops have made it clear that one of the key barriers to collaboration between high energy physics and the machine learning community is access to training data. Recent successes in data sharing through the... continue reading