"The View from Trump Tower"

The View from Trump Tower is a new (and clever) take on the classic cover from The New Yorker.

(Tip of the cap to Tim Harford.)

"Granular Crystals: Nonlinear Dynamics Meets Materials Engineering"

Chiara Dario, Panos Kevrekidis, and I have written an expository article about granular crystals for the magazine Physics Today.

"All Possible Humanities Dissertations Considered as Single Tweets"

The New Yorker has very kindly presented all possible humanities dissertations considered as single tweets. I am highly amused. :)

(Tip of the cap to Bruno Gonçalves.)

30th Anniversary of the "Sidd Finch" Prank

This snuck up on me.

Baseball Tonight's Facebook post, which links to this article, brings up (and reminds me of) the Sidd Finch prank from 1 April 1985. It's amazing that that prank is now 30 years old. Sidd Finch had his 168 mile per hour fastball (and various other oddities), and the New York Mets played along with the hoax. So awesome!

Stranded Magazine

Stranded magazine is finally out. This is the magazine induced by ash clouds that was produced by stranded people. I have a couple of contributions in it.

"All proceeds go directly to the International Rescue Committee to help people stranded in a more permanent way."

Noodly Appendages in Nature

I so, so, so approve of this article title in the journal Nature.

Long live the FSM!

Ashtastic Magazine

When opportunity knocks...

As Boing Boing reports, there is now a magazine by and for the volcano-stranded.

I might actually try to contribute something.

(Tip of the cap to Justin.)

Six Degrees of Nolan Ryan

Last night, I had an emergency interview with Wired about a recent article my collaborators and I wrote about matchup networks of pitchers and batters. Here is the resulting article in Wired's online science section.

Somehow, I managed to resist the urge to insult Juan Pierre during the entire 1.5 hour interview, and I also got my opinion about Bert Blyleven in there. :)

From the archives (or, how I once almost made it into Time Magazine)

When I was in grad school, I saw an article in Time Magazine about mathematics and mathematicians suddenly becoming sexy, so I decided to send a letter to the editor. My letter almost got printed.

It's worth noting that I wrote this letter before I started studying granular chains, for which one of the most important elements is the stiffness of one's balls. (Acoustic waves travel faster in stiffer materials.) Also, Techers will recognize a bit of this from back in the day...

I think I want this on my tombstone.

Today I'd like to blog about the editorial by American Scientist Editor-in-Chief David Schoonmaker in the May-June issue of that magazine. This is the issue in which my article on the origin of the FPU problem appears, and David spent a lot of his editorial writing about our memorable in-person editing incident when I was visiting Peter Mucha, a collaborator at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I had spent the entire day working on network science research with Peter and then we started our marathon meeting at 6pm. As David writes:

... Still, as someone who has lived through the advent of television and dial phones and the invention of fax and the Internet, I recognize that there also have been losses. A recent evening spent with the first author of "Fermi, Pasta, Ulam and the Birth of Experimental Mathematics" (pages 214--221) really brought that home (he visited here, much as I would have enjoyed visiting him in Oxford, England).

Mason Porter, contributing editor David Schneider and I sat for almost four hours fussing over the details of the text, captions and figures for the article. Refreshingly, Mason is a young scientists---indeed the recipient of the 2008 Sigma Xi Young Investigator Award---who cares deeply about language. He felt no compunction about challenging our choices in wording, yet was perfectly willing to be reasoned out of his own preferences. (Thank goodness there were two of us editors!)

The result could not have happened in an e-mail exchange. Together, the three of us found solutions that wouldn't have arisen without the spontaneity of human contact. It was not lost on me that Enrico Fermi, John Pasta and Stanislaw Ulam made their "little discovery" at a time (1955) when personal communications were rarely more electronically enhanced than the telephone. Would they have found what they did using e-mail?

In the aftermath of that stimulating but exhausting evening, I have reflected on my working relationship with other American Scientist authors. ...

After we were done, it was too late to get dinner and I had some other urgent work to do (and a talk to prepare from scratch for the next day). I spent about 3 more hours on various bits of urgent work that night before I needed to crash because my body was starting to shake somewhat uncontrollably. I didn't even have time to start preparing my slides, so I did that the next morning. (I somehow managed to give a really good talk on some results that I had never presented before, so I guess I am able to do a reasonable job under that kind of time crunch---though I don't want to do it again!)

In some ways, David's editorial would be appropriate for my tombstone---though there are other things I would actually prefer there; for example, I really like the one that says, "I told you I was sick."---though it's perhaps more accurate to say that I want to be remembered as someone who is really, really anal. Since this article came out, I have received a small number of compliments by e-mail both from people I know and from those I don't, and one of the ones I know even mentioned especially enjoying the editorial comments about that incident. I won't be surprised if others who know me bring it up as will, because I think it will ring rather familiar to them.

In closing, I must admit that I am pondering at the moment whether I should e-mail David to let him know that his editorial doesn't have any Oxford commas. Sadly, however, it is American Scientist policy not to include them.

Fermi, Pasta, Ulam, and the Birth of Experimental Mathematics

The May-June 2009 issue of the magazine American Scientist will include the article, Fermi, Pasta, Ulam and the Birth of Experimental Mathematics, which I coauthored with Norm Zabusky, Bambi Hu, and David Campbell. (I added an extra comma in the title of the blog entry, as I prefer that style. I was not allowed to use it in the article because of the magazine's official style policy.

This article is basically "FPU for Dummies", as it attempts to discuss the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem (and the massive amount of exciting work it has spawned; this includes multiple subdisciplines of math and physics!) without using mathematical equations. This is really hard for a subject like this...

"The Rise of Coffee"

Continuing further into the backlog of popular and/or expository science articles I want to highlight is this gem on the origins of coffee. Mmmmm... coffee. (Click on the cover of the magazine for the article's abstract. If you or your institution have appropriate subscriptions, you should be able to access the full text as well.)

According to the article, the first coffeehouse in Europe opened in Venice in 1645 and the second opened in Oxford in 1650. I believe that Queen's Road Cafe is supposed to be in the location of the first one in Oxford (at least according to the claim on their menu... ), though I don't know for sure if there has been one continuously in that location. (Queen's Road's menu seems to claim that this is the case.)

There is no known truth to the rumors that they had iced lattes and wi fi access back in the day. (Actually, I have no idea if they have wi fi access now!).

I'll end this entry with a question: Do you turn coffee into theorems or theorems into coffee?

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.

Quote of the Day

Well, this was really yesterday's quote of the day, but I was too busy doing numerical simulations of bead chains (damn boundary conditions... though at least I feel less stupid because I found out today it took 6 months for the UCSD people to get the particular boundary condition straight that's been confounding me --- it better take me much less than that amount of time), so I'm presenting it today.

This comes from Electronic Gaming Monthly's review of "Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2" and it wasn't exactly a glowing endorsement, though it amused me: "But once the novelty of a zero-gravity tit simulator wears off---which, for me, was about 30 seconds in---it all gets very unexciting." (Apparently, among the game's numerous problems are its extremely shaky physics.)

On the opposite page is a review of a game of which I had heard that sounds really cool: "Viva Piñata".

In the same issue, the new Zelda was lauded by multiple reviewers as the best Zelda ever. While I'm obviously going to reserve judgement on that, it makes me want a Wii even more. Sigh. (Of course, I have been getting some work done at night, so I guess this has been good for my productivity. Granted, some of this has been because a certain problem is bugging me, so I'm not sure if even Zelda would be able to counteract this serious a case of OCD. I have a new toy in Civ IV and it couldn't draw me away from the work that was getting under my skin.)