Thursday, March 31, 2011

"Congress Vanishes into Infinitely Recursive Loop"

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According to a new article in The Economist , the United States Congress has managed to get itself into an infinitely recursive loop with i...
Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Tales from the ArXiv: Damping in Quantum Love Affairs

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Sometimes, an eye-catching paper gets posted on the arXiv preprint server. Here is one such paper: Title : Damping in Quantum Love Affai...

Play Ball!

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Opening Day for the 2011 Major League Baseball season is tomorrow (March 31st) --- as opposed to Tomorrow --- and I'll be watching the ...
Tuesday, March 29, 2011

PhD Comics: The Movie

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Yes, there really will be a move version of PhD Comics . It will be filmed at Caltech and will star several actual Techers. (Tip of the c...
Sunday, March 27, 2011

Art and Science

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As you can see in this picture , sometimes art imitates science (and vice versa). On the left: Community structure in protein-protein inte...
Saturday, March 26, 2011

They're real, and they're fabulous!

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The woman behind the counter at Bojangles asked me, "Are those natural curls or do you curl your hair?" I *should* have answered...

What happens in Urbana-Champaign stays in Urbana-Champaign

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Tomorrow morning I will fly away from North Carolina to visit University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and give a seminar in the Departme...
Friday, March 25, 2011

OMG, LOL, and FYI now in OED

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The Oxford English Dictionary has now officially recognized FYI, LOL, and OMG as words . But how about "WTF"? Seriously, WTF!
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Tsunami Benchmarks

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Randy LeVeque (Progessor of Applied Mathematics at University of Washington) and his collaborators have set up a Tsunami Benchmark to share...

THE Unreasonable Effectiveness of Tree-Based Theory for Networks with Clustering

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After 7 (count 'em!) page proofs, my new paper has just officially appeared in Physical Review E . The title (with "THE" ac...

John Milnor Wins Abel Prize

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John Milnor has won the 2011 Abel Prize , which is a lifetime achievement award (meant to parallel the Nobel Prizes) in mathematics. You c...
Tuesday, March 22, 2011

"The Spread of Ranting in a Large Social Network": Maybe Later

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It was suggested at lunch in the workshop today that my coauthor James Fowler should write (with Nicholas Christakis, of course) a paper cal...
1 comment:
Monday, March 21, 2011

Mathematics Awareness Month 2011

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The theme for Mathematics Awareness Month in 2011 is Unraveling Complex Systems . Of course, that is a subject that is near and dear to my ...
Sunday, March 20, 2011

Radiation Dose Chart

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Here is a radiation dose chart compiled by Randall Munroe of xkcd. Better watch out for that bananaphone! (Tip of the cap to Heidi Elden...
Saturday, March 19, 2011

English-Chinese Ambigrams

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These English-Chines ambigrams are way cool. (Tip of the hat to Jimmy Lin.)

"Where's Wal-Mart?"

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I know that I shouldn't propagate Southern stereotypes, but it's hard not to do so when the list of frequently asked questions in my...
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Spring is Here!

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Spring is here! Spring is here! And perhaps you think that means I'm poisoning pigeons in the park , but alas that is not so. Do yo...

Phenomena (Doo-doo-DOO-de-Doo-doo)

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I interrupt my work to bring you this very important announcement/rant. "Phenomena" is plural, so stop bloody using the word as ...
Friday, March 18, 2011

Super Mario and Matlab

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The Matlab team made a Facebook post today about playing the beginning of the theme to Super Mario Brothers using Matlab . You can download...
Wednesday, March 16, 2011

I see that my work is done here.

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One of my students wrote the following text as part of an e-mail discussion about a seminar that I missed because I am in Los Angeles: The...