New Dodgers

The Dodgers just traded for Greg Maddux and Julio Lugo.

For one thing, we do seem to have quite a large collection of former Braves these days...

From a baseball standpoint, my feelings are mixed. While Maddux is nowhere close to what he used to be, getting him only cost us Cesar Izturis, who no longer has a starting position on the team (once Jeff Kent comes back from his injury). We didn't trade any prospects to get Maddux, so this is a good trade simply because we traded entirely from surplus. From a personal standpoint (i.e., one that has nothing to do with whether the trade improves the team), Greg Maddux has been one of my favorite players for a very long time. He is an artist on the mound and is an absolute pleasure to watch (and was especially awesome to watch in his prime). I am thus very happy about this trade.

I'm a little confused about the trade for Julio Lugo, which cost us prospects Joel Guzman and Sergio Pedroza. I don't know anything about Pedroza, but I'm not worried about the loss of Guzman. He was once highly touted, but his star has seriously fallen and he has fallen way down our prospect depth chart. (My understanding is that the Dodgers came to consider him a stiff and wanted to get rid of him before the rest of the teams also realized he's a stiff.) The thing that confuses me here is that Lugo is now going to take the role that Izturis had: he'll play second while Kent is injured and then will be a sort of super-utility guy. I can't see him remaining with the Dodgers after this year. (I think he becomes a free agent after the year.) It is true that he is better for this role than Izturis, if for no other reason than he's a much better bat off the bench, but while I don't think we lost much with this trade, would we really be better off with Lugo on the roster than one of our younger guys? (For that matter, why are we still clogging up a roster spot with Sandy Alomar, Jr., who has had something like 5 plate appearances ever since we acquirec catcher Toby Hall. Hmmm... this is our third trade with the Devil Rays since the end of the 2005 season.)

A couple days ago, the Dodgers traded Dannys Baez and Willy Aybar to the Braves for Wilson Betemit. Personally, I think Aybar is about as good a prospect as is Betemit (probably because plate disciplines is one of my turn-ons), so hopefully this is one of those situations where their assessment is better than mine. To be sure, Betemit is an excellent prospect, but I just don't see him as a better prospect than the guy we used in the trade.

All of this notwithstanding, we didn't really lose anything from our farm system, which is still extraordinarily deep. I'm not sure how this year will pan out, but our prospects for 2007 and beyond are extremely bright (where are my shades?) and it will certainly be fun watching Greg Maddux pitch on a regular basis.

Update: It fell under my radar, but it's been pointed out to me that we traded Sandy Alomar Jr already. I looked this up, and indeed on 7/23 we sent him to the White Sox for a minor league pitcher. Clearly, I am not paying enough attention to baseball...

SoaP: the mass market paperback series

I was browsing in Borders and noticed a novelization of Snakes on a Plane. At least one original follow-up work is on the way. (I'm not sure if it's a sequel or set "in the same world.")

Also, the mathematics section was selling a copy of Snakes on a Hyperbolic 3-Manifold.

10 years ago on this date...

Tommy Lasorda retired as Dodger manager.

65th birthday luncheon for my father

This was last Sunday, and I was back home in Beverly Hills for the occasion.

There wasn't really anything noteworthy about the celebration except that there were a lot of old people there. I was at the "kid's table," which consisted of 30-40 year olds (my sister, age 28, was the youngest person at the table) plus one pair of oldsters who crashed the party.

Towards the end, a couple people did whip out their babies ("Let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel."), but we were the youngest ones there for a while.

I was fairly tired after having gotten little sleep the night before, and that had the effect of slightly reducing the number of snarky comments I made during the event (but I still got a few good ones in).

On this date 15 years ago...

I was at the Dodger game on 7/28/91. We were playing the Expos and their pitcher, Dennis Martinez, pitched a perfect game against us. Somewhere in my parents' house, I have the pictures I took that day. (I haven't known where those pictures are since the early 90s, and I would really love to find them...)

Sausagefest

Some places have dot races. Others have (virtual) car races. Milwaukee has sausage races.

In fact, the Milwaukee Brewers have had live sausage races (with people dressed as various types of sausages) at their ballpark since 2000. And starting next year, a new sausage will be in the race. (Well, he'll be in one race this year but then will head back to the Minor Leagues for more seasoning.)

There have been some amusing moments over the years. One time, Dodger pitcher Hideo Nomo wore one of the sausage suits and joined the race. The best one, though, was Sausagegate. (Also, here are some quotes when the particular sausage in question announced her retirement from sausage racing.)

"Kids are like people" (so I hear)

Here is the text of an e-mail I just sent to the editor of Beverly Hills Weekly:



From: Mason A. Porter
To: editor@bhweekly.com
Subject: comment on 'Novel Summer Reads' story



One of the people you interviewed for this article said the following words:

"Kids are like people," she said. "They have a really wide variety of personal tastes and favorite subjects and reading skills."



I find this highly amusing, as I always thought that kids actually were people.

I've heard rumors that adults are like people too, but I suspect that is idle speculation.

-------------------
Mason A. Porter '94




(The article is essentially about some of the popular books people in Beverly Hills are reading this summer. The article isn't anything special per se, but this quote is an absolute gem.)

Key to my favorite Gamer motivational posters

Given the link situation, Lorian asked me at dinner to give some more details so people could actually make a point at looking at the posters I highlighted (though with Safari I had no problem loading them in a new tab). Here they are:

Alignment (I'm the guy with the gun)
Bard
Paranoia/clearance
Feats
Hope (think outliers at Cons)
Int (not everyone uses charisma as a dump stat)
Low Level Supers ("I shovel well!" OK, it's a different group, but still...)
Owlbear (Once again, go Sawtooth!)
Psionics
Sneak Attack
True Neutral ("We will see who uses the duct tape.")
Youthful Innocence


Hmmm... I haven't been to a Con for close to two years. I want to go to a fantasy/sci-fi Con...

Meet me in the back alley at the stroke of midnight

Paper: cond-mat/0607659
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 16:27:26 GMT (109kb)

Title: Response to "Response to the Comment on 'Performance of a Spin Based Insulated Gate Field Effect Transistor' "
Authors: S. Bandyopadhyay and M. Cahay
Comments: This is a response to cond-mat/0607432. We had submitted a Comment on the original paper by Hall and Flatte to Applied Physics Letters which is currently still under review. Cond-mat/0607432 is apparently Hall and Flatte's response to our Comment. Here we show that the arguments in the response are flawed
Subj-class: Mesoscopic Systems and Quantum Hall Effect
\ We show that the arguments in the posting cond-mat/0607432 by Flatte and Hall are flawed and untenable. Their spin based transistor cannot work as claimed because of fundamental scientific barriers, which cannot be overcome now, or ever. Their device is not likely to work as a transistor at room temperature, let alone outperform the traditional MOSFET, as claimed.
\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0607659 , 109kb)



I don't know about you, but I am eagerly awaiting for Response to 'Response to "Response to the Comment on 'Performance of a Spin Based Insulated Gate Field Effect Transistor' " ' to be posted.

Let the games begin!

We suck.

The Dodgers just lost their 7th straight game; it's also their 12th loss in the last 13 games. At least we got rid of Odalis Perez.

Gamer motivational posters

Courtesy Justin, here are some motivational posters for gamers.

Many of them are hilarious.

A couple that particularly resonate with me are this one, this one, this one, this one, this one (one actually does see occasional outliers at cons), this one, this one (though they should have used the Mystery Men), this one (go Sawtooth!), this one (one of my players played an extremely rabid id insinuating thri-kreen when I DMed second edition...), this one, this one, and (last but not least) this one.

The gazebo one is really cool too, of course, but Arcane Gazebo already posted that one.

Quick update: The links are actually correct. For some reason, they're only working for me if I load them into a separate tab and reload. I don't understand this at all.

When verbs don't sound like verbs

A new Cornell study shows that the sound of a word tells us something about how it's used.

The press release (which I find very interesting) begins as follows:

For more than 100 years the standard view among traditional language theorists was that, with the exception of onomatopoeia like "fizz" and "beep," the sound of a word tells us nothing about how it is used. This seemingly arbitrary relationship between words and their meaning in human language is hailed as singular to our species.

A new Cornell study takes that view to task.



For some reason, this report is making me think of a line in Kill Bill, Vol. 1: "My name is Buck. ..."

"Nonlinearity Management in Optics: Experiment, Theory, and Simulation"

My paper, Nonlinearity Management in Optics: Experiment, Theory, and Simulation, just got published in Physical Review Letters.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, this is my first ever PRL. It has been highlighted in Physical Review Focus. A blurb is slated to be published in Laser Focus World and Caltech is considering making a press release about this work.

This was also my first work in which I did stuff really closely with experimentalists. The authors and the abstract are below.

Authors: Centurion, Martin; Porter, Mason A.; Kevrekidis, P. G.; and Psaltis, Demetri

Abstract: We conduct an experimental investigation of nonlinearity management in optics using femtosecond pulses and layered Kerr media consisting of glass and air. By examining the propagation properties over several diffraction lengths, we show that wave collapse can be prevented. We corroborate these experimental results with numerical simulations of the (2+1)-dimensional focusing cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation with piecewise constant coefficients and a theoretical analysis of this setting using a moment method.

This would be called a multi-layer "Kerr sandwich."

I received this advertisement by e-mail a few minutes ago.

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PNAS, Nature, Science and Blood. For a complete list of publications visit our
website at www.ozgene.com.

The latest publication involving mice generated by Ozgene was in June 2006:
York IA, Brehm MA, Zendzian S, Towne CF, Rock KL. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2006
Jun 13;103(24):9202-7

Why not get Ozgene to help generate the mice for your next publication?


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koentgen@ozgene.com




So, do you think I can make a good quantum computer with some mice and a blender?

Darkly Scanning

This entry is a bit late...

A Scanner Darkly (based on a novel by Philip K. Dick) was simply awesome! It is on the short list of the best films I've seen this year.

The film's tone was set at the very beginning with the "aphid" attack. The cel-shading was extremely sweet and Robert Downey Jr. gave a simply commanding performance. (In fact, the entire casting was excellent, but Downey Jr. particular shined.)

It is often not entirely clear what is true and what is delusion, and my understanding is that that is one of Philip K. Dick's specialities. (I haven't read any of his stuff yet, but I have a book of his short stories on my shelf, and it's waiting for me to start reading it.)

The movie was depressing in many respects, but it also had some extremely amusing moments, and I just loved Keanu's 'druggie posing as a narc' comment. That was priceless.


Lemming commented on this movie here. He mentions that this movie really got the Dick feel right. (OK, that was not intentionally phrased that way, but I'm going to suppress the urge to rephrase it.)

In sum, go see this movie. It's awesome.

A new use for bananas

Courtesy Ben Williamson (who IMed me the link), I see that bananas are now being used to support Creatism. What the fuck?

Now, I think that most of you reading this know how vile I think bananas are. Even the thought of eating one of those things makes me nauseous. (I'm probably going to have to delay my lunch a few minutes because of this.) Hence, not only does this video give the typical Creationist bullshit but it (perhaps even more offensively) actually promotes bananas as some sort of evidence of perfection.

First of all, there is no god. (And Christianity is just a red herring...) Second of all, if there were one, if he/she/it proposed bananas as any sort of perfection, I would immediately cease worshipping such a being. Simply, fruits that make me barf are not evidence of divinity!

Sheesh.

Adventures in journal publishing

My collaborators and I submitted a paper to Physica D a couple weeks ago.

The request to review this paper was sent this morning to one of the co-authors of the paper. Um, the editors ought to be checking this...

Anyway, this gives a novel reason to decline to referee a paper: "I'm sorry. I can't referee this paper because I'm one of its bloody authors. That said, you should publish it as is."

Crosseyed and Painless

Earlier today, one of my pupils had something like half the radius of the other. It looked really weird. (The wikipedia link gives the name for this condition and discusses possible causes.)

My eyes look normal right now, so that's a good sign---especially given that my eyes are one of my few aspects that are consistently complimented. (It's basically my eyes, my t-shirts, and my wit---and the latter two are correlated.) I need to hold on to what few boons I have.

Is anyone else surprised by this result?

Fresh from the arxiv...


\Paper: physics/0607183
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2006 18:19:17 GMT (23kb)

Title: Football: A Naive Approximation to the Effect of Increasing Goal Size on the Number of Goals
Authors: J. Mira
Comments: 4 pages
Subj-class: Physics and Society; Popular Physics
\ The effect of increasing goal mouth size on the number of goals scored in a football match is discussed in a very preliminary and simple way, considering elastic collisions of the ball with the posts. The result is obtained on the basis of data taken from the Spanish Professional League, that show a high number of shots-to-post. Surprisingly, there is a direct correlation of the increase in goal mouth area with the increase of goals.
\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0607183 , 23kb)
%%--%%--%%--%%--%%--%%--%%--%%--%%--%%--%%--%%--%%--%%--%%--%%--%%--%%--%%--%%

Signs of the apocalypse

Gazebo already used the standard REM reference with his title, so I decided to be a bit more prosaic.

As he points out, some people are taking the war in the Middle East to be a sign of impending doom. (Some people have also apparently indicated that this may be the beginning of World War III, but I like to think of it more as Super World War II Turbo. Because, really, how much different will this be than the prequel?)

To lend credence to the impending apocalypse, I'd like to point out a few other signs that point in the same direction:

1. Sloan Annex (the building in which I have my office) is sinking into the Pacific Ocean. (There was some really funky bright blue-green goop leaking from the ceiling. Maybe it's not always so good to be in the condensed matter building...)

2. The Pirates have been winning games lately.

3. George Bush is stirring in his slumber. (This increases the toughness of all Rednecks by +1.)



I'd like to encourage other people to contribute their favorite apocaplytic signs. What else has happened recently that might signal the end of the world?