Tomorrow morning I hop on the bus (in my best Paul Simon impersonation, though I am guessing most of you won't get this allusion) to head to Gatwick airport for a flight to Venice. This will be my second trip to Italy---I went to Rome last July---and my first trip to Venice. I am going to attend NetSci 2009, a physics-oriented network science conference. I will attempt to get a picture with Lazlo Barabasi and Gene Stanley of me wearing my new power-law t-shirt ("I went to a physics conferences and all I got was a lousy power law."), and I also expect good pasta and gelato to ensue.
My new digital camera hasn't arrived yet, so I would lose the last approximately 15 exposures in my last roll of film of the analog camera that I bought during my first year of grad school (so about 10 years ago). One of my friends very kindly offered to loan me her digital camera, but I would feel very guilty if something happened to it, so I declined the offer. (I did waffle a bit, and it's only because this is a very close friend that I even considered accepting the offer.) A few weeks ago, when I mentioned to Somerville's domestic bursar in a conversation that I was going to a conference in Venice, she mentioned that I should find a girl while I'm there. Most likely, this isn't going to happen, but I have an incredible urge to take a picture of jailbait to bring back to the domestic bursar. (Hell, I probably would have borrowed my friend's digital camera if I felt that I were actually going to go through with taking such a picture. Given that I have 2 year's worth of film to get around to developing at some point, things just won't have the same effect if I take the picture with my present camera.) My new camera should arrive right after I return to Oxford, so maybe I'll do this in Sevilla (where I'll be going on July 13th).
Anyway, stay tuned...
1 day ago
4 comments:
If you get a chance to talk with Barabasi, can you ask his opinion about http://www.ams.org/notices/200905/rtx090500586p.pdf and especially "The Scale-free Internet Myth" section?
I'm very much on the side of John Doyle and company for this particular battle. :) Barabasi's published vision of this stuff is grossly oversimplified. The article to which you link, which I have on my list to read but haven't had a chance to go through in detail yet, is the expository article of a series of a papers by Doyle, Willinger, etc. that have appeared the last several years.
My instinct is to believe whatever Doyle says. Especially when he's thought about it to any significant degree. One of the areas that my little niche (immunoinflammatory dynamics) intersects with from time to time (complexity in acute illness) is fraught with power laws and assignments of structure to data that can't be right. Doyle has come to 2 out of the last 3 of these meetings and his points are very clear, well-reasoned and insightful. We are clearly hampered by the crude stone instruments that we use to apprehend biology.
Doyle is definitely quite a smart guy. He's also not afraid to step on people's toes (to put it mildly) when he's making his points. I wanted to work with him a bit while I was at Tech, but in practice he was never around enough for conversations to happen.
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