"I Am Here to Help"

My tweet went viral.

I am here to help. pic.twitter.com/JBQbTAPTQX

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) June 17, 2020

Tales from the ArXiv: Awesome First Sentence

The first sentence of the abstract of this paper is wonderful!

In case you're wondering, it is from this song

A Two-Sentence Paper in Physical Review

Yes, that's right: the entire paper is two sentences. There are various short abstracts (with a couple that consist of just one word) — such as those described here, here, and here — but this is the first time that I have seen an entire paper that is this short.

The shocking discovery of the shortest article ever published in Physical Review (1951), a serious physics journal. Two sentences. Moreover, the article relates 6*pi^5 to the ultimate structure of physical reality. pic.twitter.com/Gs1ERmLjXu

— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) March 31, 2019

Tales from the ArXiv: "Blueberry Earth"

I am amused. :)

(However, I do wish that the author had used the subjunctive in the 'what if' question.)

"Blueberry Earth" (new paper) by Anders Sandberg: https://t.co/hn1T10qErC

Abstract: 'This paper explores the physics of the what-if question "what if the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries?" ... '

— DynamicalSystemsSIAM (@DynamicsSIAM) July 30, 2018

Update: Here is the first paragraph of the Summary: So, to sum up, to a person standing on the surface of the Earth when it turns into blueberries, the first effect would be a drastic reduction of gravity. Standing on the blueberries might be possible in theory, except that almost immediately they begin to compress rapidly and air starts erupting everywhere. The effect is basically the worst earthquake ever, and it keeps on going until everything has fallen 715 km. While this is going on everything heats up drastically until the entire environment is boiling jam and steam. The end result is a world that has a steam atmosphere covering an ocean of jam on top of warm blueberry granita.

Tales from the ArXiv: Building on "Seminal but Laconic" Findings

I am highly amused by one of the sentences in the abstract of this paper, which is called "Systematic elimination of Stokes divergences emanating from complex phase space caustics".

The sentence in the abstract reads as follows: Building on the seminal but laconic findings of Adachi, we show that the deviation from second order can be used to rigorously determine the Stokes lines and therefore the region of the space that should be removed.

I think I need to steal the first part of that sentence, and I know that I have felt that way on many occasions (e.g., with respect to work by Nesterenko) in my career.

Tales from the ArXiv: A Poetic Opening

This paper's topic isn't my cup of tea (or, rather, coffee), so to speak, but its abstract has among the best opening sentences that I have ever seen in a scientific paper: When drinking a cup of coffee under the morning sunshine, you may notice white membranes of steam floating on the surface of the hot water.

I approve!

Update: I do actually find fluid mechanics fascinating --- and this was true even before I joined the applied math group at Oxford --- even though it is not a topic on which I have (yet) published. However, the 'cup of tea' pun still applies and absolutely had to be part of this blog entry. (Also, in general, I am fond of papers that just start with some everyday phenomenon and try to figure out what's up.)

"Directed Evolution of the Full Professor"

Easter Eggs in Scientific Papers has pointed out a gem this time. It is a farcical abstract for a paper called "Directed Evolution of the Full Professor". Read the whole fake abstract; it's awesome! Here is one of the sweet parts:

"Assistant professors that displayed such proteins (so-called ‘stressed-out’ mutants) were then fused to the M13 coat protein, displayed on phages and passed over a friend and family members column to identify those that were incapable of functional interactions. These were called ‘full professors’. Although these mutants arose independently, they shared striking phenotypes. These included the propensity to talk incessantly about their own research, the inability to judge accurately the time required to complete bench work, and the belief that all of their ideas constituted good thesis projects."

"(Then again, it may not.)"

One of the new papers on the arXiv today has an abstract that ends with the following sentence: "The work may shed light on the possible properties of different ensembles of mixed systems."

Whenever I see a sentence like that to end an abstract, I automatically think about the implicit "(Then again, it may not.)" sentence that naturally follows as the next sentence.

Update (9/19/14): This also applies to sentences that end conclusions.

Tales from the ArXiv: Best. Abstract. Ever.

Michael Berry, one of my academic heroes, has posted a new paper to the arXiv that official has the Best. Abstract. Ever.

Title: Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement?

Authors: M. V. Berry, N. Brunner, S. Popescu, P. Shukla

Abstract: Probably not.

(Tip of the cap to Annals of Improbable Research.)


Update: I am reminded by AIR (who were in turn reminded by one of their readers) that a certain John Doyle from Caltech previously had what one might construe as a Best. Abstract. Ever. [Actually, I had seen that paper before and totally forgot about that abstract. And, of course, I am absolutely shocked that John Doyle would do something like this. :) ]

Update (10/15/11): Courtesy of AIR, here is yet another Best. Abstract. Ever. However, I don't think that this one is as funny as the other two.

Tales from the arXiv: Intruder dragging edition

I was struck this morning by the abstract for this new arXiv paper:

Title: Journey of an intruder through the fluidisation and jamming transitions of a dense granular media

Abstract: We study experimentally the motion of an intruder dragged into an amorphous monolayer of horizontally vibrated grains at high packing fractions. This motion exhibits two transitions. The first transition separates a continuous motion regime at comparatively low packing fractions and large dragging force from an intermittent motion one at high packing fraction and low dragging force. Associated to these different motions, we observe a transition from a linear rheology to a stiffer response. We thereby call ``fluidisation'' this first transition. A second transition is observed within the intermittent regime, when the intruder's motion is made of intermittent bursts separated by long waiting times. We observe a peak in the relative fluctuations of the intruder's displacements and a critical scaling of the burst amplitudes distributions. This transition occurs at the jamming point characterized in a previous study and defined as the point where the static pressure (i.e. the pressure measured in the absence of vibration) vanishes. Investigating the motion of the surrounding grains, we show that below the fluidisation transition, there is a permanent wake of free volume behind the intruder. This transition is marked by the evolution of the reorganization patterns around the intruder, which evolve from compact aggregates in the flowing regime to long-range branched shapes in the intermittent regime, suggesting an increasing role of the stress fluctuations. Remarkably, the distributions of the kinetic energy of these reorganization patterns also exhibits a critical scaling at the jamming transition.


Comment: "Intruder dragging" sounds like a kind of torture. ("I know how we can get the secret code out of him! Let's drag him into an amorphous monolayer of horizontally vibrated grains at high packing fractions!") Maybe it's just me...

Abstract MadLib

Courtesy Aaron Clauset, here is an Abstract Matlab that Jorge Cham drew for a recent installment of Ph.D. comics.

It looks eerily familiar, both with respect to stuff I've read and with respect to stuff I've written. For shits and giggles, you might want to compare this with the abstract I posted in the blog entry right before this one.