New Year's resolution (as determined by iTunes): Take 3

Just like last year and the year before that.


As usual, here is the key for how to read this resolution/fortune. Now let's see what the iTunes Oracle has to say for 2008:

1. The Covering: Wolfsheim, Blind (radio edit)
2. The Crossing: Billy Joel, Keeping the Faith
3. The Crown: EMF, Lies
4. The Root: Level 42, Forever Now
5. The Past: Squeeze, Loving You Tonight
6. The Future: R.E.M., Daysleeper
7. The Questioner: Tom Lehrer, Silent E
8. The House: George Carlin, Incomplete List of Impolite Words
9. The Inside: Celine Dion, (If There Was) Any Other Way
10. The Outcome: Novuelle Vague, Waves (cover of Blancmange)

Bonus song: Alison Moyet, Love Resurrection


Now let's try to figure what all this actually means. The Covering refers to some important stuff surrounding the situation, like the fact that I am often blind to social cues. The Crossing refers to current obstacles, perhaps a need to not give up on certain things. The Crown refers to the best that can be achieved with the current situation --- in this case, lies, which isn't exactly a very positive outcome. (To this song's credit, however, this is EMF's other, much-better big hit, because they are actually not the one-hit-wonder that most people believe them to be.) I don't understand The Root at all. Any ideas? The Past is also confusing --- what the fuck is it with these love songs? They're always so damned hard to interpret! The Future, however, clearly refers to the increasingly nocturnal lifestyle that I am about to possess. The Questioner quite clearly refers to American versus British spelling, which is starting to play quite a substantial role in my grant proposals. This is pretty eerie, isn't it? I'm somewhat disturbed that The House is represented by a George Carlin rant. I guess that means that other people view this whole spelling conundrum as a bunch of crap? On The Inside, however, I am apparently evoking Celine Dion. (In fact, this is one of her really good songs, as opposed to her slower-paced lousy ones.) Somehow, I want some other way to go about doing things other than whatever is I have planned. The Outcome of 'Waves' simply means that I'm going to say 'fuck it' and just continue doing research on nonlinear waves. What else could it possibly mean? Also, the bonus song refers to zombies (or perhaps more generally to my future as a necromancer) because I apparently love resurrection. All the alternate interpretations of the bonus song are even more disturbing, so let's just stick with the current one.

(Incidentally, both artists in my upcoming concert series are present: I'll be seeing Alison Moyet on February 10th and Nouvelle Vague on February 23rd.)

OK, that's about it for this installment of the New Year's iTunes Oracle. I'm going to continue revising a research paper now---it concerns nonlinear wave propagation.

Hip Nintendo clothing

In Electronic Gaming Monthly, I read about a website that offers Nintendo-themed shirts and jackets with some street cred. Some of the stuff is cool, but the clothing is a bit pricey. Instead, I bought three Mario-esque mushroom lamps for myself from a different website that EGM also mentioned. I need to continue personalizing my apartment a bit more, and I think this will be a great way to do it. Maybe their default location should be next to my stuffed Chinese dragon?

2007: The Year in Movies

Now it's time to discuss the movies of 2007. My move to England confused matters a bit because of the different release dates. Among other things, some of the movies that came out this year in the States will be coming out next year in the UK. I'll discuss those as part of my 2008 discussion.

Before I get into this year's films, here is what I wrote in 2006.

Let's look at the movies from best to worst:

Fantastic: Stardust, Juno, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, The Namesake

Extremely good but not quite awesome: 300, Ratatoullie (just a notch below fantastic, though I considered putting it there), Transformers (though I almost put it at fantastic because of all the nostalgia bonuses it got), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The Darjeeling Limited

Very good: TMNT, The Simpsons Movie, King of California, Knocked Up (bordering on great), The Golden Compass, Control

Good: Grindhouse, Spiderman 3, Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End, Rush Hour 3

Pretty good: Ghost Rider, Shrek the Third, Ocean's 13, You Kill Me, Balls of Fury (though I should really put it in a separate "fun" category)

Fair: Wild Hogs (a generous fair), Blades of Glory, Superbad (a generous fair), Death at a Funeral (I was hoping for so much more from this one)

Bad: Well, I am not listing any of the new films that I saw this year as truly bad, a couple of the fair ones could easily be listed here.



Overall, I think the film selection from 2007 wasn't quite as good as in 2006, though there were definitely a number of standouts. (I don't remember how I listed films last year, but my mind is definitely telling me that 2006 was a bit weaker overall than 2007, so I'm going to go with that.)


Now let's give some awards for this year's films:


Best film: The King of Kong

Best film that was not a documentary: Stardust

Biggest dick portrayed on film: Billy Mitchell, who played himself in The King of Kong

Wittiest dialogue: Juno

Most appropriate song lyrics from soundtrack: Juno

Best animated film: Ratatouille

Biggest disappointment: Death at a Funeral

Most nostalgic moment: Listening to Peter Cullen as the voice of Optimus Prime in The Tranformers (which wins for most nostalgic film)

Best movie moment: When I first hear Optimus Prime narrating the story at the beginning of The Transformers (I hadn't realized he'd be doing Optimus's voice in the film)

Most familiar quote: "You failed me yet again, Starscream!" (from The Transformers)

Best quote: "I detest American television!" (from The Namesake)

Best cameo: Bill Murray, in The Darjeeling Limited

Film whose name I can't remember: The one I saw with Lemming that had the 'chubby chaser' but in it. What was this called? Anyway, I rate this film somewhere between pretty good and fair.


I'm not sure if I have any other awards to hand out for this year's films. There were several (like Beowulf) that I wanted to see but didn't get around to seeing.




A special nod in this blog entry goes to Buffy and Angel. I have watched the first 5 seasons of the former (and hope to watch some of season 6 before I head back to England), and I am three episodes into season 3 of the latter. Those are the only two tv shows I've been watching this year (aside from baseball games, Baseball Tonight, and podcasts of Bill Maher's tv program), and I didn't want to do a separate year-in-review post for them. Let me end, however, by saying that the hand that is typing this message is evil. It can't help itself---it's evil.


P.S. Go see Juno!!!!

Not just a city in Alaska anymore

It's a good thing I haven't yet written up my summary of the movies I've seen this year, because tonight I saw Juno, which is (a) fantastic and (b) definitely one of the best movies of the year. I especially recommend this film to Lemming, who was formerly my usual "date" (well, only because neither of us could do better) for such indie fare. We've both moved on since then. :)

This film is a so-called "coming of age story" involving awkward teenagers, and like Rushmore and Thumbsucker (and unlike Napoleon Dynamite, which was ok but extremely overrated), this one is spot on. In fact, I definitely like this movie better than Thumbsucker overall and I might even like it as much as Rushmore (we'll see what I think after more time passes), which is very high praise indeed. The dialogue and acting are both fantastic, and the music complements the film extremely well (and has some very amusing lyrics --- including the songs that play during the credits, so I suggest you stay to listen to them).

The main player in the film ("Juno") previously starred as Kitty Pryde in the X-Men films, and the some of the other people are also very familiar: Jason Bateman from Arrested Development (and, back in the day, Silver Spoons), one of the kids from Arrested Development (and Superbad), and the guy who starred as Julian Jamieson in the Spiderman films (he played the father). There were a huge number of priceless lines in this film, which resonates with me a great deal. (I have a very soft spot for witticisms and snarkiness.) It certainly helps that the main character is someone who is going through something very serious but nevertheless maintains a sense of humor and is always making lots of snarky, tactless comments. I approve!

Here is one of my favorite lines:

Vanessa Loring: Your parents are probably wondering where you are.

Juno MacGuff: Nah... I mean, I'm already pregnant, so what other kind of shenanigans could I get into?


Here's another one:

Juno MacGuff: You should've gone to China, you know, 'cause I hear they give away babies like free iPods. You know, they pretty much just put them in those t-shirt guns and shoot them out at sporting events.


As I mentioned above, this is clearly one of the best films this year. Go see it!

"Quantization of a free particle interacting linearly with a harmonic oscillator"

As just promised, the full-length article that I wrote with my former SURF student Tom Mainiero just came out. The proofing stage took a little longer than usual; in fact, the journal was apparently waiting on our final approval after several proof iterations (with a couple of mess-ups on our part and a rather large number of mess-ups on their part --- including forgetting to capitalize the title of the article, changing our grammatically-correct corrections to grammatically incorrect statements [which I found irksome], and a comedy of errors in the display style for one of the equations) in order to finish posting the final articles in their December 2007 issue. I definitely managed to annoy the publishers a bit for this particular article (they gave this away with a couple of statements in the notes they conveyed to us along with the second set of page proofs), but if they're not going to implement one of my corrections (or if they adjust how they do so), I expect an explanation of why or else I'm just going to ask them to correct it again when I get the subsequent round of page proofs. As anybody who knows me should know, I am extremely anal about things like this; just look at how I mark up the pages of any paper drafts that my students have submitted to me! Of course, the publishers and typesetters were very much attempting to get things right -- they were just a little sloppier than I would have liked on this particular occasion.

The article is titled, "Quantization of a free particle interacting linearly with a harmonic oscillator."

The abstract reads as follows:

We investigate the quantization of a free particle coupled linearly to a harmonic oscillator. This system, whose classical counterpart has clearly separated regular and chaotic regions, provides an ideal framework for studying the quantization of mixed systems. We identify key signatures of the classically chaotic and regular portions in the quantum system by constructing Husimi distributions and investigating avoided level crossings of eigenvalues as functions of the strength and range of the interaction between the system’s two components. We show, in particular, that the Husimi structure becomes mixed and delocalized as the classical dynamics becomes more chaotic.


I think the best thing to add to convey which this is interesting, let me also reproduce the bold introductory paragraph from the article:

Typical classical Hamiltonians systems are neither fully integrable nor fully chaotic, but instead possess mixed dynamics, with islands of stability situated in a chaotic sea. In this paper, we investigate the quantization of a recently-studied system with mixed dynamics [1]. This example consists of a free particle that moves around a ring that is divided into two regions. At the boundaries between these regions, the particle is kicked impulsively by a harmonic oscillator (in a manner that conserves the system’s total energy), but the particle and oscillator otherwise evolve freely. Although the system is not generic, its separation into regular and chaotic components also allows more precise investigations (both classically and quantum-mechanically) than is typically possible, making this an ideal example to achieve a better understanding of the quantization of mixed systems. By examining avoided level crossings and Husimi distributions in the quantum system, we investigate the quantum signatures of mixed dynamics, demonstrating that the Husimi structures of nearby states become mixed and delocalized as chaos becomes a more prominent feature in the classical phase space.

Horoscope of the Day

I found the following horoscope in the December 2007 issue of Electronics Gaming Monthly (which I just finished reading... my magazines got sent to Lemming's place, so I've been catching up on them a bit during my visit):

"Cancer (June 21-July 22): Though you long for love, your princess will forever be in another castle. So you might as well hump the hell out of the next toadstool you find."

I am very amused!

"Avoided Level Crossings in the Quantization of a Mixed Regular-Chaotic System"

In March 2007, my student Tom Mainiero and I submitted a "videos/mainieroporter_0011.wmv">video entry for the Nonlinear Science Gallery on display at the APS March Meeting. (Don't forget to crank up the volume to full blast before you click on the link to the video.)

Today, the one-page article based on this video was posted by Chaos. (The research article based on the same project will be appearing in Chaos in the very near future --- possibly within a few days.)

The one-page article basically functions as an extended abstract, so I won't comment on the project itself here. I'll discuss it a bit more when I post a blog entry about the research article.

More press coverage for Caltech pranks

Here is a recent article from the Pasadena Star-News about pranking at Caltech in general and the Rose Bowl pranks in particular. My Legends coauthor (Autumn Looijen '99) and I were interviewed for this article. (Whenever somebody contacts Caltech's PR department about things related to pranks, they are basically passed along to us at this point.) I love my comment in the article's ending, as well as how the article's author stated how I "declined to state" the identity of an upcoming movie that has a 'DEI' in it. :)

In looking up this article (which I had neglected to do because of how busy I was), I also noticed that Elise Kleeman '03 is apparently a staff writer for the Pasadena Star-News. I guess she's been very successful getting into journalism.

Also, for people reading this who know of events in my personal life, remember that my blog policy (just like my general perspective) is that the show must go on and the tone of my blog entries is not necessarily going to be affected by that. Aside from the present ambiguous comment, I'm just making an active decision to leave that stuff off of this venue. (Also, that should not be interpreted as callousness. Blogging is a form of escapism, and sometimes I need escapism more than at other times.)

2007: The Year in Literature (and other reading)

We're almost at the end of the year, so it's time to start writing up my end-of-year summaries.

I'll start with literature and other readings. Here is what I wrote in 2006.

Just like last year, I am defining "literature" rather broadly, as I really just mean whatever I read this year.

The book I am currently reading is the final book in the Taladas Trilogy, which is the first set of Dragonlance novels covering events on Krynn's other continent (that is, on Taladas rather than on Ansalon). The first book in the series was ho-hum, but I liked the second one a lot, so I immediately moved on to the third one.

In the Forgotten Realms world, I have read the first book in a new series that follows Halistra Melarn from a recent 6-book story on "The War of the Spider Queen." I also read the first book in a series that follows an alu-fiend from that same series. These were two of the interesting surviving characters from those books, so I am pleased to read about more of their adventures. I also read the second book in the Dragonlance "Lost Chronicles" series, which allowed me to read about old friends again. The two main foci this time were Kitiara and Laurana.

I think I also read another book or two from my old queue of D & D novels (and perhaps one or two that spent a much shorter period of time on my shelf), but they aren't coming to mind at the moment.

I also finally read Flatland and Neuromancer, which I intended to read years ago. I read Oath of Fealty as well because part of it was inspired by life at Tech. I read some more short stories by Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison. In fact, I finally finished my Ellison collection, so I ought to buy a new one at some point.

I think I read other literary things, but they're not coming to mind at the moment. I'll add them to this entry later if I can think of them.

I read my usual websites: friends' blogs, ESPN.com's baseball page, baseball-reference.com, pages from various academic societies, and so on. I also made it a point to read The California Tech online after I moved to Oxford.

I also read my usual magazines: Electronic Gaming Monthly, various Caltech publications, and so on.

And of course I read lots of technical scientific material --- I always do.

Once I am done with the third book in the Taladas trilogy, I'll move on either to the new Drizzt book or to Amber and Blood, if the latter is out by the time I am ready for it. (Amber & Blood got delayed from last summer until February, and I've been anticipating that one for a while because it is the conclusion to the current trilogy containing the main Dragonlance storyline.)

I think that's about it. I'll post some other year-end reviews later.

Conference registration imitates Spaceballs

Today, I've spent a bit of time catching up on some administrative stuff from both work and life (dealing with some Somerville stuff, changing my home address for my banks, etc.) in addition to goofing off and helping (Mike)^2 clean up a bit so that he, Lanth, Zifnab, and I can have a holiday dinner at his place. (For the last couple of days, I haven't done much serious work.) Among the things I am doing is registering for a conference. Part of the registration instructions read as follows:

"6. When the "submit" button is hit, one is prompted to upload a
file containing the abstract. Please limit individual talk abstracts to
100 words of plain text.

8. The deadline is *** January 18 ***.

Any problems, please do email me directly.
Kind regards
Eddie Wilson"


Naturally, I sent Eddie an e-mail which only contained the text, "Whatever happened to 7?"

I've been waiting so long to use that line in real life in a manner that isn't contrived! Dude!

Quote of the Day (education edition)

Here's a vignette that I recently read in an issue of ESPN: The Magazine:

D'Brickashaw Ferguson and Burton Rocks are penning a kids book about a young D'Brick's learning math using football stats. Why the co-writer? "I'm more of a calculator guy," the Jets LT says.

Wow. (In the meantime, maybe I should co-write a book on how I learned how to make Aspirin in my garage because the fact that I have occasionally taken Aspirin as medication makes me qualified to do this?)

"Community structure in Congressional cosponsorship networks"

Another of my papers on communities in Congressional networks just came out in Physica A. This one arose out of a SURF project I sponsored in 2006, and the student in question (Yan Zhang) is the first author of the paper. The next two authors, A. J. Friend and Mandi Traud, are also undergrads. Then we have all the non-students: Me, political scientist James Fowler (best known for a recent well-publicized paper on the spread of obesity through a social network), and applied mathematician Peter Mucha.

The abstract for the paper reads as follows:

We study the United States Congress by constructing networks between Members of Congress based on the legislation that
they cosponsor. Using the concept of modularity, we identify the community structure of Congressmen, who are connected via
sponsorship/cosponsorship of the same legislation. This analysis yields an explicit and conceptually clear measure of political
polarization, demonstrating a sharp increase in partisan polarization which preceded and then culminated in the 104th Congress
(1995–1996), when Republicans took control of both chambers of Congress. Although polarization has since waned in the U.S.
Senate, it remains at historically high levels in the House of Representatives.


Ye Pei's SURF project from 2007 followed up on this work and looked at political realignments using voting networks. Essentially, we have found that a particular graph-theoretic concept called "modularity" (which looks at the connections inside a group of nodes in a subset of a graph versus connections between nodes in different subsets) can be used to give a nice measure of political partisanship. Realignments occur when the best splitting gives a much higher modularity than the splits one obtains by dividing the graph purely by party identification. We are going to start writing up a research paper on this stuff pretty soon, but in the meantime, you can take a look at Ye's SURF report.

Happy Festivus!

Yesterday was Festivus (a holiday for the rest of us). I forgot to blog about it on the correct day, and I vaguely remember being late about wishing people a 'Happy Festivus' last. Well, it turns out that I was completely delinquent last year and a few days late in 2005. To my credit, however, I wasn't as late this year, although that really just says that I found something sooner that reminded me of it. I had dinner with my family last night, but it wasn't technically to celebrate Festivus. Moreover, there were no Feats of Strength and few Airings of Grievances at dinner, so we certainly didn't celebrate it in any proper manner.

Unlike the old entry to which I linked, I don't plan on ranting here.

I'll post a few more entries in the next few days (such as some end-of-year media reviews), so stay tuned.

Joint Math Meetings wiki

The conference I am attending in a couple of weeks (the Joint Math Meetings) has an official wiki this year. I think this is an absolutely awesome idea. I approve!

There is a grad student who is going to be posting blogs from the conference at that wiki, though I hereby guarantee that my blog entries about the conference will be much snarkier than hers. You can count on it.

Curt Schilling on Clemens and Canseco

Rob Neyer's blog today had an interesting entry with some excerpts and discussion of a blog entry by baseball player Curt Schilling (among the more thoughtful players in the Major Leagues).

His dog ate his World Series ball

Apparently, Jon Papelbon's dog has eaten part of the ball that he used to record the final out in the 2007 World Series. First they eat homework assignments and now this...

Back to the Old Grind

As people reading my blog know, I've been hanging out with my old friends in Pasadena since Monday night. It's very easy to slip into one's previous life, especially when one was living centrally in it only 2.5 months ago. I basically haven't been gone long enough to no longer be used to the day-to-day things. (Well, they would retain familiarity no matter how long I've been gone, but since I've barely been gone, it is especially familiar.) I only told a few of my friends that I'm around, and I need to bug some others to see if they're in the area at all for the next couple of weeks.

Having dinner with friends I haven't seen for a couple of months is obviously awesome, and I also appreciate going out to lunch and dinner at some of the restaurants I've missed --- particularly when it comes to types of food that aren't readily available (at least, for which high-quality versions aren't readily available) at Oxford. One example of this is chicken and waffles. Hmmm... it occurs to me that taking Oxford students and faculty dressed in sub-fusc to Roscoe's would be extremely amusing. It would be kind of like senior-frosh breakfast, except with better food. We're going to have to adapt this tradition and make it one of Somerville's own. I'll just have to think of an appropriate place in Oxford to use for this purpose.

A pleasant, unexpected surprise is that Cat is also in town for a few days, which means that the old lunch gang is basically here. Our conversations even picked up right where they last left off! I approve!

Spock: The Website

Through the SOCNET mailing list, I found out about an article in Wired about a new people-search website called Spock, which debuted last week. I find this sight to be potentially worrisome, though we'll see how things go. By the way, check out the name of the CEO in the article! It should be familiar to some of you. I'm guessing it's the same person we know from Tech, and that makes me really want to hear the unrated version of the comments he gave to Wired...

"Word" of the day

Today's word is "formulism," which appears to be a combination of "formulas" and "formalism" that appears inadvertently on page 1 of this paper. Although the authors wrote this accidently, I actually quite like this combination -- though not as much as I like "Eurocracy."

Congratulations to Dr. Travis Hime!

Mr. Travis Hime has officially become Dr. Travis Hime, as one can see by these signatures.

In fact, Lemming and I had very fortuitous timing in calling to congratulate him this morning. We reached him while he was in an office waiting for an official piece of paper signifying the end of his life as a graduate student. (Hence, the transition from Mr. to Dr., which appears to have been continuous, occurred during our congratulatory phone call.)

So, what are you going to do now? (Have you decided which company you're working for?)

Also, I recently asked Travis about a paper on rf-SQUIDs that looks at phenomena of interesting to me, and it indeed does look like I will be attempting to build on that paper (one of my main collaborators is also really interested in building on that paper, so we are now discussing possible projects). So I'm not going to allow Travis to forget too much about SQUIDs, as I'll certainly be needing to ask him for insights.

Anyway, congrats!

How important is somebody?

Here is an interesting-looking article that was just posted on the arxiv. I don't plan on reading it in detail immediately, but its abstract is certainly intriguing. Here's the abstract:


Co-occurrence Network of Reuters News

Arzucan Ozgur, Burak Cetin, Haluk Bingol

Networks describe various complex natural systems including social systems. We investigate the social network of co-occurrence in Reuters-21578 corpus, which consists of news articles that appeared in the Reuters newswire in 1987. People are represented as vertices and two persons are connected if they co-occur in the same article. The network has small-world features with power-law degree distribution. The network is disconnected and the component size distribution has power law characteristics. Community detection on a degree-reduced network provides meaningful communities. An edge-reduced network, which contains only the strong ties has a star topology.
"Importance" of persons are investigated. The network is the situation in 1987. After 20 years, a better judgment on the importance of the people can be done. A number of ranking algorithms, including Citation count, PageRank, are used to assign ranks to vertices. The ranks given by the algorithms are compared against how well a person is represented in Wikipedia. We find up to medium level Spearman's rank correlations. A noteworthy finding is that PageRank consistently performed worse than the other algorithms. We analyze this further and find reasons.

The life expectancy of singers

I saw this one in an e-mail newsletter from the Annals of Improbable Research, and I suspect there may be a future Ig Nobel for this one...


"Androgens Shorten the Longevity of Women: Sopranos Last Longer,"
E. Nieschlag, U. Kramer, S. Nieschlag, Experimental and Clinical
Endocrinology and Diabetes, vol. 111, no. 4, August 2003, pp.
230-1.

(Thanks to Ig Nobel Prize winner Richard Wassersug for bringing
this to our attention.) The authors, who are at Institute of
Reproductive Medicine of the Westphalian Wilhelms-University,
Munster, Germany, report that:

"Earlier we found that longevity of castrati was identical to
that of intact singers.... We have now continued our research
into the life expectancy of singers... resulting in the finding
that sopranos, being more oestrogenised, live significantly
longer than altos who are more androgenised, while basses, more
androgenised, show a tendency towards a longer life than tenors,
who are less androgenised."


Right. (Let's see what my opera singer friend has to say about this one.)

Gatwick Airport

I am writing this post from Lemming's house back in good old Pasadena.

First, I need to say that I am "awesome". Some of you have seen me accidently wear shirts backwards before. This was especially memorable with my xml shirt. In that case, one way to tell the shirt was on backwards was to see the incorrect syntax. Today, however, I soared to new heights. I happen to be wearing a Somerville shirt that clearly identifies me as being affiliated with both Somerville and Oxford. Of course, I didn't put it on backwards; instead, I accidently put it on inside-out! I didn't realize it until I was in line to check in my luggage. (The check-in at that stage was craptacular. The line wasn't that long, but that didn't stop things from being ridiculously slow. I was at London Gatwick airport 2.5 hours before my flight, and it turns out that I needed the entire time. One advantage of the slow line, however, was that I had plenty of time to ponder things -- like the fact that I had been wearing my shirt incorrectly for the past several hours.) I don't remember ever having done that before, and I'm a bit surprised that it took me so long to notice. When I finally reached the security person before checking in my luggage, she altered the normal line of questioning and started out with, "Are you tired?" (I'm guessing she asked because of the shirt, although my eyes and body language probably also gave it away.)

It turns out that in the UK, only one carry-on is allowed. This was somewhat annoying, as I had prepared to be able to bring the two small items I had always been allowed to carry on everywhere. Apparently, for about a year, it's been this way when going outbound in the UK. It hadn't been that way the last time I flew out of the UK, so I didn't realize this had changed. I obviously would have prepared differently, but as a short-term solution, I basically stuffed necessary things like my iPod, DS, and wallet into my computer bag (which has taken a lot of abuse during it's 9+ years in my possession). The security person even asked me how long I've owned each of my bags. Why does that matter? (I'm surprised they still have the whole bit about 'Did anyone else give you anything to put on?' here. Maybe terrorists are supremely honest folks? Or perhaps they always pack their bombs and knives on their own?)

One couple in the check-in line had to open and "disarm" all of their Christmas crackers, which are a traditional part of Christmas in the UK. They were going to bring them to other people after their flight, and they were unsurprisingly displeased about this.

Once I had checked in my luggage, the rest of security was thankfully trivial. I guess each airport has a different rate-limiting step? I'm used to the check-in being faster (and typically much faster) for lines of comparable size and the x-ray part of things being slower.

By the way, this was my first experience with London Gatwick airport. Among the UK airports, I had only sampled London Heathrow in the past.

On the flight from Dallas to Burbank, one passenger almost managed to get herself thrown off. She settled for delaying the flight by 10 minutes with her shenanigans. Otherwise, the trip was basically uneventful, which is good. (At the Dallas airport, I did walk past the area where we camped out many moons ago.)

What happens in Pasadena stays in Pasadena

In ten minutes, I'll be hauling myself over to Gloucester Green to catch a coach to Gatwick to fly to LA. My layover is at Dallas, and some of you know what happened the last time I had a layover there. Hopefully, there will be no need for any liveblogging from the Dallas Airport. From there, I fly to Burbank airport to be picked up by Lemming (and company?) and to have a late dinner.

My work will be a mix of work and pleasure. Besides hanging out with friends (and watching Buffy, Angel), I am visiting a collaborator at Caltech and (early in the new year) going to a mathematics conference in San Diego. I have two papers with that collaborator that I hope to be able to submit while I'm in town and a third one that shouldn't be too far away.

California here I come...

Steroid network in baseball

Here is a link to a New York Times article which shows a graphical depiction of the steroid network in baseball. When I was reading the list of names in the Mitchell Report and the brief description of each one (and who introduced whom to the dealers), I was already thinking in this direction.

The Darjeeling Limited

Two weeks ago, I saw The Darjeeling Limited, which I recommend highly. The main stars were excellent (particular Jason Schwartzman, who also helped write the script) and the cameos by Bill Murray and Anjelica Huston were absolutely fantastic. One thing to notice with this film is that several of Wes Anderson's favorite actors were in it, though of course he is far from the only person who does that.

I'm not sure of a good way to describe the film concisely (and I don't want to write a long entry about this, because I want to go play Zelda: Twilight Princess --- I'll write a blog entry in the near future that provides an update on my progress in that game), so let me end by urging you to go and see the film if you haven't already.

The Golden Compass

I saw The Golden Compass today and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's not as good as Stardust (of course, most movies aren't) but it's really good and I'm very much looking forward to the sequel. It is based on a book by Philip Pullman, a graduate of Oxford (he was in Exeter College). One of my colleagues recommended to me a couple of week's ago that I read Pullman's stuff. I had not realized (a) that The Golden Compass (called by a different name in the UK) was his, although I remember seeing the trailer and being extremely interested in seeing the film, and (b) that he was an Oxonian.

As discussed on the wikipedia page, there are some familiar locales in the film (Radcliffe Hall, and The Queen's College/Queen's Lane) --- though I actually thought the college in the film was one I had walked through when I visited Cambridge. Oops. I'm waiting for Somerville to appear on film, and maybe that will happen when we see biopics on Margaret Thatcher or Indira Ghandi.

Anyway, I highly recommend this film. Go see it! (Before the film, I saw a trailer for Be Kind Rewind, a new film by Gondry that I really want to see. It doesn't excite me as much as the trailer for The Science of Sleep did, but it still looks really awesome (and how can I not be partial to a trailer that includes Ray Parker, Jr.'s Ghostbusters Theme?).


Update: I completely forgot to mention that this movie contains an evil blonde woman named Mrs. Coulter.

Plays, Musicals, and Concerts for the new year

I found various early 2008 schedules for plays, musicals, and concerts in Oxford. Here is my slate of events thus far:


1/26/08: The Rivals

2/2/08: Alice - Through the Looking Glass

2/9/08: A Trip to Scarborough (by Sheridan, just like The Rivals --- this is apparently a modernized version that has iPods in it)

2/10/08: Alison Moyet

2/22/08: Nouvelle Vague

5/3/08: Fiddler on the Roof

5/24/08: The Pirates of Penzance

5/31/08: Hello, Dolly!



I'm hoping to see Van Morrison in March, but I haven't bought tickets yet because I want to keep that open in case I am coming back to the US at that time for Jing's wedding. (Once I find out when her wedding will be, I'll be able to figure out if I can make the Van Morrison concert.)

There weren't that many musicals, plays, or concerts I wanted to see this fall (and the only one I was actually able to make was Carmen), but thankfully there is a lot more stuff that I want to see in the spring. Time to immerse myself in culture! Additionally, the only one with a walk of more than 10 minutes from my home is the Nouvelle Vague concert! Having all this stuff so close to me is incredibly awesome!

Shocked!

Do you know what I find really shocking? In fact, I'm completely outraged!

It's this recent firestorm that has hit baseball with the unsettling, horrifying, completely shocking news that Josias Manzanillo used steroids!

(People who follow baseball will certainly get the sarcasm above, and I imagine that the rest of you will get it from the context of the rest of the comment. For those in the Old World, I purposely mentioned a no-name player in the comment above. Obviously, none of this should be surprising at all at this point---especially when it comes to people like Roger Clemens and Eric Gagne whose names had surfaced repeatedly in rumors.)

Sigh...

Finding local bathrooms using network theory

You don't believe me?

Take a look here.

Anyway, in case you didn't believe that network navigation is an important scientific problem, I hope you do now. (Though, I must say that this web site is pretty craptacular even if you don't consider the intended application.)

Plasma Pong

Here's my second equation of the day: Pong + plasma physics = Plasma Pong! That's just bloody awesome!

Oxford admissions = House roompicks (on crack) + Rotation + high stakes

Well, I think the equation in the title says it all.

Technically, there is stuff I can say, but that's going to have to be restricted to private conversations. The title is just to convey some idea of things in terms of Caltech lingo. The amount of PS12ing I've seen in the last several days definitely puts roompicks to shame (by several orders of magnitude).

Now that we're done, I can finally come up for air --- which, among other things, means looking at some postdoc applications and having some necessary meetings before I leave town and (shortly) finishing up a paper my collaborators and I meant to submit several months ago. (It is, in fact, pretty likely that I'll be submitting two papers while I am visiting Caltech.)

I played my role in bringing novel jargon to Oxford admission discussions; this includes such self-explanatory terms as "epic failure" and "upper blah". On occasion, I also found myself yearning to apply a "champ stamp". I timed my interviews using an iPod, which I am told has been traditionally employed for such purposes in Oxford interviews since at least 1512.

Debate over inclusion into baseball writers' association

There's quite a spat going on about the inclusion of internet journalists in the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA).

Before I make comments, here is one article that discusses stuff and names names. Here is an associated blog in which some of the issues are being discussed and the so-called "credentials" of many members of the BBWAA are being tabulated.

Recently, the BBWAA finally decided to allow membership (which eventually results in things like the ability to vote for membership in the Hall of Fame) to internet writers (in addition to newspaper writers). This should have happened years ago, but at least this oversight has finally been corrected --- well, sort of. Two notable nominees (Rob Neyer and Keith Law) of ESPN.com were the only two nominees rejected, despite their enormously high credentials and certain "luminaries" managed to get in without a problem. The "official" reason was that they don't attend enough games, despited the fact that they have written about baseball daily for something like 10 years. A fundamental problem with this so-called "criterion", however, is that most of the people who are actually in the BBWAA are not being held to anything remotely like this standard. The blog to which I linked is dissecting the list of BBWAA members ad nauseum. And guess what? Some of them write about baseball on the order of once a year or less. Basically, Neyer and Law were excluded because they're actually willing to criticize others in print. This whole thing is utter tripe. If you want an official standard, apply the fucking thing to everybody --- not just to exclude the people you don't want!

Ideally, the BBWAA will be faced with the choice of fixing this problem or becoming irrelevant. In any event, the story has really mushroomed over the past several days.

Dodgers offer the moon for Johan Santana

I saw this on Rob Neyer's blog.

According to The Onion, the Dodgers have quite literally offered the moon to the Twins in exchange for Johan Santana.

I approve!

Cambridge's applied math group: Gilbert & Sullivan style

I really ought to be looking over materials for interviewing students tomorrow (or, at the very least, doing something that is somehow more productive than following potentially-interesting links on the internet), but I found another thing I want to mention here because I think my OCIAM colleagues will find it amusing. Namely, it is about Cambridge, which I am trying to learn to pronounce with the dismissive tone that I believe is expected of me.

Anyway, the object of interest can be found on a recent blog entry at Asymptotia, which is maintained by a theoretical particle physicist at USC (he used to write for Cosmic Variance).

It was penned by Oliver Rosten and appeared here.

So, without further ado, here is Cambridge's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan:


The DAMTP

(To be sung to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan's `I am a Very Model of a Modern Major General'.)

When naming a department,
The shorthand's not academical,
Particularly when the work
Is mostly theoretical;
Noble and Perspicuous,
Yet positively memorable,
And at the very least,
It should be certainly pronounceable.


When said out-loud,
It should inspire feelings operatical,
Befitting of a subject
Both applied and mathematical;
Noble and Perspicuous,
Yet positively memorable,
And at the very least,
It should be certainly pronounceable.


To start it's clear that we should state
The matters operational,
Achieved in such a way that all
Agree is democratical.
The Department of Applied Mathematics,
That is surely optimal,
But looming right in front of us
Is something reprehensible!


For now we find we can't proceed
In manner purely logical,
For if we do then what we have
Is not remotely lyrical;
Above all else we must avoid:
An acronym tongue-twistable,
The only way to end is therefore,
Physics, Theoretical.




So, does anybody out there want to write an OCIAM song? Maybe to the tune of The Spam Song?

Cyber Times

Here is a website called Cyber Times that takes various snippets of pop culture and updates them (in terms of old nomenclature versus current nomenclature, which can either be real or imagined) for modern times or states their (real or imagined) modern equivalent. It is maintained by Barry Wellman of social networks fame.

Examples:

"Collage" -> "Mash-Up"

"Courier" -> "Times New Roman" (I think this one is accurate; take a look at some old newspapers.)''

"Heard around the water cooler" -> "Read on a blog"

"Junk Mail" -> "Spam"

"OED" -> "dictionary.com"

"Pravda" -> "Fox News" (my personal favorite so far)



This website is really long and I only glanced at it for a few minutes, but if there are more Pravda/Fox News gems, then I'm going to have to take a longer look at some point. (Many of the items are dumb, but some of them are highly amusing.)

Where in Oxford is Carmen?

Hint: It's not in San Diego.

Rather, I saw Carmen at the New Theatre in Oxford. (I'll be seeing Alison Moyet in concert there on my birthday, and I also plan to catch next spring's performances of Pirates of Penzance and Fiddler on the Roof. If I can find a chance next week, I'll also see Starlight Express. I'm also still hoping the March performance of Van Morrison will be doable.)

Anyway, I assume most of you reading this have heard of Carmen. I had heard of it before, knew a couple of songs, and recognized some others (without knowing they were from this opera... this would be far from the first time that some of the familiar songs in a performance were not ones I had known were there). I wanted to see Carmen because I knew it had songs I liked. Ordinarily, I like musicals much better than operas, but I really enjoyed the performance tonight (basically because I like the music... I'm sure that's such a shock). The most notable song that I knew but didn't know was from Carmen is one I ordinarily see in baseball blooper reels. (This is the song that gets played when the people are at the stadium to see the bullfighters and the various players are essentially parading in front of the crowd. Hmmm... I really want to mention Tom Lehrer's comment about the sight of "one man facing single-handedly half a ton of angry pot roast.")

Of course, the song that runs through the entire performance (which I knew would be there, and which is now unsurprisingly stuck in my head) is The Toreador Song. I really like that song, but the version in tonight's performance unfortunately didn't include some of the alternate lyrics of my childhood:

"Toreador-a
Don't piss on the floor-a.
Use the whatchamacallit.
What do you think it's for-a?"

(Sometimes, "toilet" was used instead of "whatchamacallit", but then one needs to extend the 'Use' so it sounds like multiple syllables.)

With that lovely piece of imagery, I finish this entry.

Dodgers sign Andruw Jones to 2-year contract

In a stupid move, the Dodgers have signed free agent Andruw Jones to a 2-year contract. We have young outfielders who will now get less playing time (or get traded) who I think will do better than Jones next year. What the Hell are we doing making moves like this? It's not as bad as signing Juan Pierre, but this doesn't improve our team. At least the contract is only for two years...

Low shot of the day

This one is courtesy of ShysterBall. (I found the link on Rob Neyer's blog at ESPN.com.)

They write:

'According to the Denver Post, the Rockies have deals in place for the "key cogs" of their playoff run.

Question: do they have to sign the lightning and the bottle separately, or are they a package deal?'

The Other Side of Thesis Exams ("Vivas")

And by the "Other Side," I really mean "The Dark Side."

Anyway, today I was an Internal Examiner in a defense of a doctoral thesis. This was my first time on this side of the table, and I have apparently perfected my scowl so that the student doesn't know what I am thinking about his answer (or thinks that I am thinking the worst). Though I wasn't doing that on purpose --- it's just the way I look when I'm really concentrating on something.

I needed to dress up in full academic regalia (white tie, gown, weird scarf thingy whose name I can't remember, and hat), though thankfully I didn't need to keep my hat on during the exam. Because of my hair's current length, it wouldn't stay on anyway and somehow the one that was "fitted" for me is too large for my head (though given more time in Oxford I fully expect the size of my head to expand accordingly).

The topic of the dissertation concerned complex networks and the relevant subtopics allowed me to bring up a lot of the usual suspects -- including generating functions (my fondness for which dates all the way back to my junior year... just ask the people who took my probability course what they think about generating functions!), modularity, a dig on a certain professor in the networks business who is a bit of an easy target, and so on. (It was also relevant to bring up interesting things like contact matrices.)

The Exam took 3 hours. The student passed and now just needs to correct some stuff on his thesis and he'll be done with this business. I didn't try to make things painful, but then when the student came back in, the External Examiner and I were apparently less clear than I thought about explaining that we only wanted "Minor Corrections" so the student was apparently worried for about 10 minutes that he'd have to defend again. (Oops! Sorry about that!)

Blockbuster trade

There has been a lot more trading activity in the current baseball offseason than has been typical for several years, and a veritable blockbuster was just announced: the Marlins have apparently traded both Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis to the Marlins.

Visit from Danny

My friend Danny Schwarzblatt, who I have known since I was 4 years old, visited me for a few days last week.

We spent Saturday and Sunday in London. Here are some pictures from those two days. Notice that the Caltech emblem on my jacket is glowing in every shot, almost like some heavenly light is emanating from me. (This jacket has a long history of doing this. It's simply divine.)

By the way, my favorite picture by far from this online album is this one, in which I strike a victorious pose. The shot isn't centered, but when it comes to style points it wins handily.

The visit was quite fun, although my work sadly continued to pile up while I was gone and I am still trying to catch up so I can do more research. (Of course, my plans for my first scientific book are crystalizing and I might already get a deal to do it from Princeton University Press when I go to the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January.) We saw a lot of really neat architecture in London (well, duh) and we ate some really good toads-in-the-hole (sausages and mashed potatoes in Yorkshire pudding) at a local pub that Charlie Chaplin apparently used to frequent. On the way back from London on the second day (we took the train from Oxford on both days), we met a crazy 16-year old named Lucy who is waaaaaaay too immature to be traveling on her own to London. (In some ways, it was good that she has ADD because otherwise I would have been stuck spending more than just a few minutes helping her on her math homework... long story.) Back in Oxford, we walked around to a bunch of places -- including stuff I hadn't had the time to explore before. We went to the top of the St. Mary church tower (whatever the building is exactly called) and the view was spectacular! (In fact, many of the locales in both Oxford and London are really spectacular to look at. It's really one of the great perks of being here --- just walking around and soaking up the history while trying to bring my newfangled style to the place.) Now I just need to find someone with the proper key so that I can see the view from the top of Magdalen College... I also made it a point to have Danny as a guest at High Table so he could see what that is like and to have a dinner with the Monday young'uns crowd in Somerville.

I still need to blog on my first trip to London a few weeks ago (and give a review of The Darjeeling Limited, which I highly recommend), but I'll do that later. I also still need to finish writing an exam, be an Examiner, interview students, and play Zelda:Twilight Princess (not to mention work on Legends IV...).

If you want more details about shenanigans during Danny's visit, let me know.

2008 Sigma Xi Young Investigator Award

Please excuse the narcissism, but this deserves a blog entry.

I got an e-mail today informing me that I won this award, which is for people within 10 years of their highest degree. In even years, all members of Sigma Xi (an engineering honor society) in the areas of engineering and physical sciences (including mathematics) were eligible. I'll be giving a lecture at their annual conference in Washington DC in November 2008, so mark your calendars. (Yes, my talk will likely include both random walker rankings and Congressional communities.) Press releases are forthcoming...

Update: Here is a link to the news item from Oxford's Mathematical Institute.

First Oxford games night

This evening, I had my first games night at Oxford. It took forever and a day to get my stuff and it also took additional time to unpack stuff, so it took me a while to have my first games night at Oxford. The turn-out included only a few people, which isn't that surprising considering it's the first day after the end of the term and I think some people wanted to just chill out at home quietly (and others may have already had plans, because I only gave a few days warning without checking availability and it is Saturday night). But we had fun --- we played Wii Sports (mostly tennis), the British Isles version of Apples to Apples, and Trivial Pursuit (where I finally sealed my team's victory with an answer of Three Mo' Tenors). Oh, and yes, my Wii is set up. Then I'll get my two new controllers when I'm home. (They've supposedly arrived at Lemming's place now, though he hadn't seen them, so I may have to go bust some Amazon kneecaps to see what's up.) And maybe I'll even have Super Smash Bros to play with the various people who have expressed a desire to come here and play. Mah Jongg games are also in the works, and I haven't had a chance to play that since I was at Cornell.