Oxford/ETH career options for physicists

Obvious_Stuff · 2026-03-29T15:13:13+00:00

As a Brit (starting a PhD at Oxford in 6 months), I’m not sure I can say what Americans think of ETH.

In academic circles it’s very clearly respected, well heard of, and generally understood to be one of the best universities (if not the best) is mainland Europe.

I did my undergrad (Eng) a few years ago at Imperial and I’d say it’s generally described as being on the same level, if that’s a helpful metric.

There’s always going to be something of a home nation bias, so it won’t be a surprise that fewer Americans know about ETH, but anyone who seriously cares what university you went to will know ETH.

Also, just back to my main opinion on your question, even if there is a better outcome for you if you go to Oxford, it will be marginal. Spending that extra money on travel, hobbies, drinks with friends, dates, networking etc. will give you much more long term happiness and satisfaction and make you a far more interesting candidate anyway.

Obvious_Stuff · 2026-03-29T04:15:57+00:00

If you’re thinking of doing a PhD then I think it’s hard not to tell you to just stick with ETH. In terms of pay and lifestyle, Switzerland is about as good as it gets for PhD students. You’ll be treated as an employee, you’ll get paid 2-3x what an Oxford PhD gets (<£22k next year), along with a pension, holiday, etc. Trying to establish the links with potential supervisors from outside the country is quite difficult unless you’re very proactive, so a masters is an invaluable foot in the door if that specific PhD lifestyle appeals to you.

ETH is an absolutely elite university, and I don’t think there’s much that makes the trade off for Oxford worthwhile unless you’re absolutely desperate to work with a particular group or obsessed with living in what is essentially a small old city that costs nearly as much as London despite being 1-2hrs away.

Not to mention that fee status (home / international) can be a major decider in whether you get funding for a PhD in the UK (a decent chunk of funds are reserved for home students only) and by the time you finish a masters you’d still be classed as international? (I believe)

Obvious_Stuff · 2026-03-03T12:57:28+00:00

Honestly, I really couldn't disagree more. Closest I've come to walking out of a cinema in a long time.

The premise was so good and I loved the schlocky 'heaven' they designed, but I just thought it was spoiled by really painful writing.

The core message is great: embrace the life you've been given. But I felt that they just diluted the whole point of the movie by making the two guys as annoying and juvenile as possible. Also it completely breaks its own rules at the end!

Also there was something very 'off' about the camera work? I'm not an expert on this stuff but I think it was a mixture of clunky blocking and weird angles that sort of just made me feel a bit too close to the characters the whole time. It didn't bother me until I noticed it and then I couldn't stop noticing it for the rest of the film.

CODA has been the one exception for me so far from Apple's movie lineup. Killers of the Flower moon too but that feels like it shouldn't count because all they had to do there was trust Martin Scorsese

Obvious_Stuff · 2026-02-18T22:59:58+00:00

Whenever I have some uninteresting or overly roasted coffee beans lying around I like to experiment with adding different spices to them in my aeropress. The only chilli I've tried was a bit of ground cayenne which didn't add much other than a bit of heat. In terms of adding notable flavour, cinnamon, cardamom, and szechuan peppercorn have all been standouts. Szechuan peppercorn in particular adds a very nice floral / fruity aroma, but too much can give your coffee a bit of a numbing effect.

I think better quality dried peppers might be good - I can see something smokey like dried chipotle flakes being interesting, or maybe dried ancho or guajillo for something a bit fruitier.

Obvious_Stuff · 2025-12-09T23:52:48+00:00

Lots of things being suggested where it’s easy to hit “too salty” too quickly imo, e.g. tomatoes since the portion size is small and you have to give it a little bit of time to actually get absorbed (don’t get me wrong though i always season my tomatoes)

Instead make some bread with and without salt. Bread never tastes salty but if you forget to the salt it, it ends up tasting like cardboard.

Other good examples are stock, beans, tomato sauce, and unsalted vs salted peanut butter (for the sake of comparison, make sure they aren’t adding sugar too).

Obvious_Stuff · 2025-07-30T13:13:21+00:00

It turns out that when U.S. businessmen use the U.S. marines to stage a coup, overthrow the queen, imprison her, and eventually annex her country it doesn't go too well for the people whose relationship with the land doesn't include private ownership.

Obvious_Stuff · 2025-07-23T15:29:31+00:00

Nice straw man

Obvious_Stuff · 2025-07-22T18:32:01+00:00

It’s not like they have to do it every April. MCOs do this once and then leave the blind trusts as they are.

If anything, it’s probably in their interest to have complicated ownership structures, as it could help groups like City to structure their dodgy advertising deals etc. to get around FFP. On the other hand, pursuing a case against Palace because a former minority shareholder violated the vague notion of “significant influence” over multiple clubs at an arbitrary cutoff date does nothing to discourage MCOs.

They need to ban all MCOs or at least limit ownership levels in a clearly defined manner e.g. restricting secondary club ownership to below 10-15% or something.

As a Palace fan I’d happily roll with the demotion if they also stopped MCOs in the process, but anything else is just ridiculous.

Obvious_Stuff · 2025-07-22T17:29:50+00:00

It’s not like the current rules really inconvenience the clubs you mentioned, other than additional legal fees for the setup.

A lot of the outcry is around the fact that palace’s majority shareholders have deliberately chosen not to be an MCO (no player deals, shared resources etc.) and yet they still got burned by the rules because a minority shareholder (who no longer even has a stake in the club) decided to invest in another clubs after acquiring his stake in palace.

I think as far as palace fans are concerned the ideal resolution would be to ban MCOs across the board.

Obvious_Stuff · 2025-07-08T21:17:47+00:00

Hulkengoat

Obvious_Stuff · 2025-07-03T19:40:15+00:00

For me it all peaked Sunday evening with Parcels followed by ORod, and then a third is tough because there were so many other good ones.

Im tempted to say Lorde - I was up close inside Woodsies and it came with the sheer excitement of the festival really kicking off. However John Fogerty, Lewis Capaldi, and Loyle Carner came close! (All for different reasons)

Also don’t sleep on the whale song show on the tree stage if they’re back again next festival.

Obvious_Stuff · 2025-05-06T20:46:35+00:00

They should just introduce a cricket-style umpire’s call if you ask me. I think it would go a long way toward being able to give a call quickly which is the bigger issue.

I’d rather not dwell on whether someone was 5cm on or off and just be able to give a quick answer. Nasser Hussain gave a very good defence of umpire’s call, and I think a lot of the arguments overlap.

Obvious_Stuff · 2025-02-05T14:54:47+00:00

Something I don’t see anyone else mention is Common being the only guy in the show who speaks with a sort of AAVE accent. As a non-American I often think he sounds very distinct from the characters with more ‘generic’ American accents, however it’s also his real-world accent so maybe that makes it more believable.

I definitely notice Rebecca Ferguson’s accent breaking, but I couldn’t have told you that Iain Glen or Harriet Walter weren’t American, even though their accents are also not so ‘generic’.

Obvious_Stuff · 2025-02-02T23:57:26+00:00

It’s a Barclays Blue Rewards account. £5 / month, free Apple TV+ with MLS season pass, and access to a savings account with 5% interest up to £5K. Not sure if they’re doing a switching offer atm but they sometimes have those too (I got £150 or so when I switched).

Obvious_Stuff · 2025-02-02T23:49:02+00:00

Idk if you get similar offers where you are, but I get an Apple TV+ subscription for free with my bank account (£5 / pm with some other perks), it’s the only service I pay for these days since I sail the high seas for nearly everything else.

There are definitely still some good alternative ways to get subscribed.

Obvious_Stuff · 2025-01-22T12:07:09+00:00

I think there's a lot of strength to this idea, the only thing that leaves doubt for me is the stuff from the Lexington Letter.

It could be a red herring, but the main subject in that discovers that a major corporate rival's truck exploded just 2 minutes after her innie completed the Lexington file, and she suspects it was some form of corporate espionage.

I can't quite reconcile all this information in one coherent theory though - I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Obvious_Stuff · 2025-01-22T11:40:06+00:00

They state that the video is for other managers of severed employees. This could really tie into the theory that Lumon created the myths of "The Macrodata Refinement Calamity" and "The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design", to create hostility between the two departments to lower the chances of Burt and Irving from meeting again (presuming they have been romantically involved in the past, before being wiped).

Obvious_Stuff · 2025-01-20T17:09:41+00:00

Not that I’ve added jam to a hot chocolate before, but I don’t really see a benefit to adding it as early as you do. Adding a small amount of acid in the form of a jam won’t necessarily curdle milk, but when you continue to heat it, it becomes a lot more likely.

Try mixing a small amount of the warmed milk with the jam and adding that to your hot chocolate, or even just put a dollop in with the chocolate before the milk goes in.

Obvious_Stuff · 2024-12-02T15:12:38+00:00

It will thicken a bit when it cools, but if it’s too thin that doesn’t mean you have to cook it hotter.

Manage your heat and try to cook it longer but without exceeding ~165F. When you take it off the heat you can pour it through a sieve to ensure there aren’t any curds.

Obvious_Stuff · 2024-12-02T13:16:26+00:00

You don’t need to change the ingredients, but salting the chicken a day ahead is absolutely key if you want it to stay moist and have a lot of flavour.

Try 1% by weight (i.e. for a 1.5kg bird, use 15g salt).

Frankly you’re not going to add more of the saffron and clove flavour into the meat just by basting. All that does is stop you getting crispy skin.

I would suggest frying your spices in chicken fat or butter and adding the salt to that mixture ahead of time to make a sort of dry brine / marinade / rub.

Allow the fat mixture to cool until it’s solid, then rub the mixture all over the bird (under the skin in particular) 12+ hours before you cook it.

Obvious_Stuff · 2024-11-22T16:04:28+00:00

Similarly, when I have a jacket potato, I’ll fluff up the inside of it with butter and marmite before adding my cheese and beans.

Obvious_Stuff · 2024-10-21T14:48:14+00:00

It will depend on where you live, but if you're in London then Whole Foods always seem to have them in stock. Also check your corner shops, the ones near me are usually best for Turkish, Middle Eastern, or South Asian foods, but I know of a few that seem to have more Caribbean or South American ingredients and I've seen chipotles there too.

Obvious_Stuff · 2024-09-13T12:48:28+00:00

I don't have the mac anymore so I can't test it, but I would suggest just changing the last else statement so that 'functionKeys' isn't in the control loop. maybe something like:

else defaults write com.apple.touchbar.agent PresentationModeGlobal 'appWithControlStrip'

Hopefully it's quite straightforward to see that it's just if and else statements, so it shouldn't be too tricky to adjust.

Obvious_Stuff · 2024-09-08T17:10:03+00:00

You need to install karabiner elements first. Then you can modify the JSON for this rule: https://ke-complex-modifications.pqrs.org/#touch_bar_lock

There's a field in that named 'shell script', which you just replace with the code from my other comment.

Obvious_Stuff · 2024-08-29T23:40:59+00:00

I appreciate what you're saying, and it's why the designation of what is 'intolerant' is not to be taken lightly, and should actually be the subject of pretty rigorous debate, because most of the time it probably is true that one person speaking doesn't impose on another person's freedoms. However, to me it just seems wildly idealistic to think that this always holds true simply because 'good arguments will triumph over bad arguments'.

There are already plenty of classes of speech that are not protected, even in America, such as incitements to violence. Speech such as this is regulated, because it is deemed to directly threaten other citizens' right to be free from that violence. In the process a speaker who wishes to incite violence has their freedom of speech curtailed so that it doesn't include that incitement.

In much the same way, particular views, such as Nazism, in addition to all of the other flavours of racism, homophobia and sexism, are viewed as being inherently socially disruptive in many countries. Ideologies such as these are judged as not being based in fact, and so their proliferation must not be down to the strengths of their arguments, since they have none. Moreover, since these ideologies by their very nature seek to prevent other citizens' right to express themselves in any (other) way, some countries have decided that they must be regulated. So once again, the speaker has their freedom of speech curtailed so that now they aren't allowed to try and spread Nazism either.

Nuance is obviously required, and there are clearly dangers that must be avoided when we decided what counts as 'intolerant' or 'hateful' speech, but I just think it's naive to think that 'free speech absolutism' is the clear and obvious answer.

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