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.)

The Basis of a Good Outfield

An article tagline that I would love to see in a newspaper: "Jayson Werth, Bryce Harper, and Denard Span form the basis of a solid Nationals outfield."

Sadly, I doubt most newspapers like linear-algebraic jokes as much as I do. Maybe an independent newspaper?

Opening Act

Thought of the Day: The Wilson-Fisher Renormalization Group ought to have opened up for The Steve Miller Band at least once.

Adam Ant is Adamant About Adamantium.

The following is possibly one of the best sentences ever: "Adam Ant is adamant about adamantium."

I'm just saying...

"Casual" Relationship Between Time Series

One of the speakers today had a slide that indicated that there was a "casual" relationship between two time series. (Technically, the term on the slide was "casual influence", but it's much more amusing if we think of it as a "casual relationship".) Of course, he meant that the relationship was causal, which is far more serious.

The Before-Math and the After-Math

The before-math is rarely ever as good as the after-math (pun intended).

Tales from the ArXiv: The Random Walk of Life

There is a new article on the arXiv called Brownian Motion in Dire Straits. I guess you might say that this is the "Random Walk of Life" (rim shot!).

I love the English language.

Jürgen Kurths said something like "We make a network of networks to try to build a 'supermodel'."

I then immediately responded with "There was a movie about that."

(Then a couple of us spent several minutes explaining the pun to him.)

Unintentional Pun of the Day

I was sending a somewhat critical letter to the GSNP (Group on Statistical and Nonlinear Physics) leadership, and I accidently wrote an absolutely awesome pun in my message. Namely, they seem to have special sessions on "jamming" year after year, and I complained about the overabundance of "jamming sessions". Sweet!

(By the way, GSNP is one of the groups within the American Physical Society. I consider this my home area, but as with all other organizations, there are some things I think that they can do better, so my letter---while critical---was intended to provide comments that I hope will ultimately be helpful.)

Quote of the Day: Bulwyer-Lytton edition

Today's quote comes from the curator of the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest: "Your submission has arrived and will receive the treatment it deserves." (I guess such comments can also apply to submissions to scientific journals.)

For what it's worth, I was doing the equivalent of 'going for last place' with this particular submission: "Why are you looking at me like I have two heads?" said Officer Cerberus Jones to the criminal he was arresting."

(I want to get 'dishonorable mention' in the fantasy category.)

80s music pun

I saw a listing of upcoming shows at one of the local venues. The one that struck my eye immediately was the show by Glenn Tillbrook & The Fluffers. You might say that I'm tempted to go.

Nilpotent

Excuse the math pun in the title.

There was a power outage yesterday and I found out one of the unfortunate side effects of having my office and apartment across the street from each other. Namely, the power outage took out both places, so I couldn't just go to the other place and get things done easily. Power returned after about 1.5 hours, but I didn't have internet access at all until this morning and the mathematics mail server is still down so there are various e-mails that I might have gotten that I won't get a chance to look at until tomorrow. Se la vie. Hopefully there won't be anything that requires any action on my part. (I have various meetings tomorrow and if anybody sends me anything for those, then I simply will not be able to deal with them until after the meeting has already occurred.)

There's got to be a good joke to go with this...

Or maybe Gazebo can write another comic strip for this one.

The term of the day is "ZZ topology". OK, it's not a real term, but in my current tired state, I noticed an article whose first two words are "Z2 topological" (the e-mail was in plain text, so the latex formatting wasn't present) and I misread it as "ZZ topological".

So, what would a ZZ topology look like? :)

Silly math pun

It's not quite a bad cow pun, but I came up with a line that I hope to eventually have the opportunity to use: "That is orthogonal to the normal situation." Cue the rim shot.

New iPod

Well, the inevitable happened: My iPod, which I earlier reported as terminal, showed the sad face icon again this morning and this time persisted in displaying that when I went to the Apple Store. My Applecare protection plan was still active, so I was able to swap it for a new version of the same model for free.

My first iPod, which I still have even though its battery life has decayed to bubkes, is known as "Hoopak". In Dragonlance, a hoopak is the weapon of choice for kender (never leave home without it!), so it's quite an apt name for one of my iPods.

My second (just replaced) iPod is called "Chotchke". This refers to the Yiddish term for 'small item' (which is not a fully accurate translation). You'll often see it used as a synonym for "swag".

In naming my third iPod, I decided to simultaneously refer to the D & D weapon theme used for my first iPod and to construct a pun with respect to the second one. In Dark Sun, thri-kreen commonly use a weapon called a "chatkcha", which is pronounced in the same manner as chotchke. I thus decided to name my new iPod "Gythka", which is another weapon of choice among thri-kreen.

Ah, the subtleties of harddrive naming...