Like Caltech's House system, but on crack...

I've been meaning to write a little bit more about the College system at Oxford.

I still don't really know too much as far as specific details go, so I'll give some of my impressions and maybe add in some details on a future occasion.

Oxford has 39 official Colleges and 7 Permanent Private Halls. Much like Caltech's House system, they provide an instant network of people that one can meet. For the undergrads, this seems to be especially true for people who are both in the same year and major, as they are tutored by people like me [this is where I laugh evilly] in very small groups. (Of course, only the people in Somerville College have to put up with me. Well, my OCIAM colleagues and others of that ilk have to put up with me too, but that's a different one of my socio-professional circles.) I am tutoring 3 pairs of 2 people this term. Things like parties, athletics, and so on are also organized by College. The students live and eat together and so on.

The people don't seem as tightly knit as, say, the residents of the Houses at Caltech (and for non-Techers reading this, Caltech's House system took the Oxbridge system as its primary inspiration). But that's easily explained by the numbers: Somerville has about 500 people and, for example, Lloyd House has about 120 people (with 80 living in the confines of the House and the entire Caltech campus being extremely tiny). Of course, given that there are 45 other comparable units, the College system serves to provide a much smaller, more personal social center amidst a much larger whole. Caltech's "larger whole" isn't really all that large, so it's really great to be able to provide this kind of atmosphere at a big school.

The thing that struck me about the being associated with a College (and, in my case, I am also in residence) is that it makes meeting people so much easier. This is the same boon that I experienced as a frosh at Caltech because of the House system and it's been wonderful to have it again---especially given that I am in a new place in which I started out basically not knowing anybody. In this case, I've also met interesting, nice people with academic interests that are so different from mine that I would not have had the chance to meet them elsewhere. And being able to talk to them regularly has really been great. The younger faculty and postdocs have been sticking together as well. (I still don't know anybody really well from either Somerville or OCIAM, but tomorrow is the three-week anniversary of my arrival, so this is obviously very much expected.) I bought my copy of the British Isles edition of Apples to Apples and should soon get my stuff from oversease, so I'm hoping to haost a game night soon. (I checked on wikipedia and the second expansion of the Apples to Apples party box for the U.S. edition is the one that consists of cards that are orthogonal to mine, so please remind me when I'm back in the U.S. that that is the one I should buy for that set.)

Like with the Houses at Tech, the students here seem to identify themselves by College (and I had heard before I got here that that was the case). When I asked my perturbation theory students to write down their e-mail addresses, they instead wrote down their Colleges (which uniquely specifies one of their given Oxford e-mail addresses). The reason I mention that the College system is like the House system but on crack is that not only are the undergrads affiliated, but so are the graduate students, the postdocs, and the faculty. So many of us identify at least a little bit with our College. I have been asked what College I'm in a couple of times, although it doesn't seem to have the ubiquity of "What House are you in?" I'm waiting to find someone who was (or is, in the case of exchange students) a Caltech undergrad so I can ask them what House they were in. :) Having both students and faculty affiliated with the College is a great way to get them to interact with each other much more than they otherwise might.

The students often eat together, but Somerville doesn't have the daily waited dinners that Caltech does. A couple of times a week, there are some fancier dinners that more people attend (including more faculty, postdocs, and staff) that are waited, but other dinners are just like eating lunch in a dorm. There isn't any floating, roll-tossing, table takeovers, or anything like that, so dinners don't seem to bring people together the way they can at Tech. Of course, it's worth noting again that we're talking about 500 students in a College rather than 120.

Another thing that's interesting is that some aspect of my interactions with my students reminds me of my days TAing at Tech while still an undergrad. For one thing, tutoring sessions bear some resemblance to office hours. For another, the "classes" I teach that go with my perturbation theory lectures are pretty much the same thing as the recitation sections from the U.S. (However, attendance for lectures, classes, and [of course!] tutoring sessions is much better here! More of the students are serious about such things here. The quality of the students seems very high --- no surprise there! --- though I've been at Caltech, so you know what I think about the students there... I did see familiar mistakes and conceptual difficulties on the calculus stuff. Some things are universal. :) ) Also, I see several of my students (especially the ones I tutor) around Somerville when I'm doing stuff. It's kind of like running into my SURF students on campus, but there's a bit of the old flavor too in that at least one of them lives in the same building I do and I've occasionally seen them eating in the dining hall. (Of course, I think there will be a duplication of my junior year at Tech. People turned in their assignments to my room --- that actually might happen a bit because the door to the room with my pidgeonhole gets locked --- and one person who was living across the hall from me and in my recitation section could literally turn in his assignments without leaving his room, so he did that on a regular basis just because he could. This won't surprise anybody who knows me, but I very much like being able to have close interactions with my students. That's one of the great perks of this job, which is veritably cushy in many respects. (I have to work my ass off, but I'd do that anyway no matter what faculty job I got. I get as much free food as I want, I don't pay for my apartment, I can get free espresso drinks and pastries [though I still go and pay for proper iced lattes in the morning because I prefer my coffee cold], and Somerville even bought a suit for me that I will be using as an Examiner and at dinner functions like the one with Baroness Jay.)

Thankfully, there is nothing here like Rotation. However, students apply directly to Colleges and people like me interview them and decide who is going to get in. (I don't know exactly how this works yet, but I'll be helping to decide who Somerville's future mathematicians will be. So I'm thinking that the prospective students ought to brush up on their Super Smash Brothers Melee skills before they come here for the interview in order to have any chance of getting in. That could supplement some of the mathematical questions we give them, and it's testing a more important set of skills anyway. :P Well, I'll be taking an online training course and finding out what types of questions actually are given soon enough, but once my stuff arrives from overseas, I plan on digging around my old notes and homework to find the sailboat problem... I'll try to find some framework around here where it fits, and the mathematics curriculum here does include some mechanics.)

I'll add more about the College system when I actually know more about it. (And people who know more about how things work here should definitely correct anything I messed up.) I just wanted to make some comments about some similarities and differences that I see here versus at Caltech. There are, naturally, differences across Colleges. I believe that some of them have waited dinners much more often, for instance. To give another example, some of them are more formal than others. Some of the Colleges have rivalries with each other, although I doubt any of them are as heated as Page-Fleming sometimes gets. (I was asked a couple of weeks ago who Somerville's rival College was. I don't even know if we have one.)

Ah well, this entry is long enough.

Comment of the Day

I uttered an unintended doozy today, and it's actually a quote that is not offensive in any way. (Many of my doozies that get past my filters --- which are very weak filters, for those of haven't experienced me enough yet --- have a tendency to offend somebody, or occasionally several people. Though some of them are also funny, at least in my opinion.)

I was trying to explain to some of my students that the subjects of asymptotics and perturbation theory required a lot of art. (To borrow a phrase from Michael Berry, I called it "witchcraft" at some point --- though to be honest, I was also thinking that I really would like be watching some episodes of Buffy and Angel.) I wanted to make the point that it wasn't just a matter of being mechanical and grinding a crank. So I said something along the lines of "Asymptotics is the Terminator 3 of mathematics; it's only partially mechanical." (I should say that almost none of mathematics is purely mechanical, though many of the things my students have seen up to this point in their careers have largely been mechanical. I was trying to assert how much creativity, thinking, and experience is required in asymptotics compared to most of the stuff they had seen previously. As you can see, I came up with a resoundingly-successful analogy. For that matter, I'm even wondering if the T3 part of my analogy was inaccurate. I never even saw the movie.)

I'll try to be more poetic during my next class.

Interesting new paper (on topics near and dear to my heart)

Here is a really interesting new paper that just got posted to the arxiv.

It discusses a very interest way of constructing datasets for social networks that is very appealing and I would like to use in future research. (In fact, even though I haven't had the chance to read it closely yet --- I started rectifying that earlier this evening, though I don't plan to finish reading it until tomorrow --- this paper has already given me some new ideas for undergraduate and/or Masters research projects for this summer.) Moreover, the working examples in this paper cover three of my favorite groups of people: physicists, U.S. Senators, and baseball players. (It's like the authors are trying to steal my heart: not only did they do something really interesting with real-world networks, but look at the examples they chose! And they even cited one of my papers. If I ever decide to deal with children, I think I'll simply have to adopt some of the authors of this paper.) Also, I very much appreciate the use of the word "googling" in the paper's title. I use the word a lot (and I know others among my crowd at least use it occasionally), but I had never previously seen it in the title of a scientific paper.

Here is the paper's abstract:

Recently, massive digital records have made it possible to analyze a huge amount of data in social sciences such as social network theory. We investigate social networks between people by extracting information on the World Wide Web. Using famous search engines such as Google, we quantify relatedness between two people as the number of Web pages including both of their names and construct weighted social relatedness networks. The weight and strength distributions are found to be quite broad. A class of measure called the R{\'e}nyi disparity, characterizing the homogeneity of weight distribution for each node, is presented. We introduce the maximum relatedness subnetwork, which extracts the most essential relation for each individual. We analyze the members of the 109th United States Senate as an example and demonstrate that the methods of construction and analysis are applicable to various other social groups and weighted networks.


Their idea for gathering data is awesome! Because I haven't read the paper closely yet, I'll reserve comments as to the analysis they do with that data. However, their choice of methodoly has already inspired several ideas in my head, so that alone makes this paper's existence extremely worthwhile in my book.

The most straightforward of my ideas is simply to use their method of data collection to construct other networks that interest me (such as collaborations among mathematicians and various kinds of collaborative connections in the U.K. parliament). However, I'm also wondering if I can come up with some sort of variant involving Google Battle. (For the record, Oxford beats Cambridge according to this index. Sadly, Caltech doesn't fair nearly as well against MIT. In fact, this latter battle was downright embarrassing for the home team.)

T-shirt of the day

Take a look at this t-shirt, which (in a highly amusing fashion!) makes a nice statement about the fact that mascots like Chief Wahoo of the Cleveland Indians simply have to go.

"Community Structure in the United States House of Representatives"

One of my papers, Community Structure in the United States House of Representatives just came out in Physica A. (My coauthors on this paper are Peter Mucha, Mark Newman, and A. J. Friend.) Here is the abstract for the paper:

We investigate the networks of committee and subcommittee assignments in the United States House of Representatives from the 101st–108th Congresses, with the committees connected by ‘‘interlocks’’ or common membership. We examine the community structure in these networks using several methods, revealing strong links between certain committees as well as an intrinsic hierarchical structure in the House as a whole. We identify structural changes, including additional hierarchical levels and higher modularity, resulting from the 1994 election, in which the Republican party earned majority status in the House for the first time in more than 40 years. We also combine our network approach with the analysis of roll call votes using singular value decomposition to uncover correlations between the political and organizational structure of House committees.


I am currently very active in continuing this work, with a current focus on Congress that includes not just committee assignment networks but also legislation cosponsorship networks and roll call voting networks. I also have datasets for US Supreme Court case citations, and I am planning to find some UK political datasets to help entice some of the locals to work with me on this stuff.

If you are interested in this stuff, the paper that just came out is an archival (i.e., very long) sequel to this paper that appeared in 2005 in PNAS. (For those who participated in a certain discussion last Thursday, this 2005 PNAS paper is currently my favorite among all the research papers I've written.)

I will be talking about some of my work on US Congressional and American college football networks on October 30th in Oxford's complex systems seminar series. If nothing else, you can use this as a good excuse to go inside the business school and see how the other half lives.

Presentations by 2007 SURF Students

For those of you near Pasadena, my 2007 SURF students will be presenting talks about their research at Caltech on Saturday (10/20). I don't have final versions of their papers yet, so I'll post those in a future blog entry, but I'll provide links to the two sessions in which they're speaking and give the titles of their talks.

The synchronization students are speaking in this session. They are as follows:

Alex Cayco-Gajic, Synchronization in Coupled Phase Oscillators

Sherry Chen, Antiferromagnetic Synchronization in Nanomechanical Oscillators

Matt Grau, Small Systems of Nonlinear Oscillators



The networks students are speaking in this session. They are as follows:

Ye Pei, A Network Theory Study of Roll Call Votes in the United States Congress

Olga Mandelshtam, Growth Models of Online Social Networks



Additionally, at least four of my former SURF students are going to be giving talks on Saturday about work they have done with other people. They are Sean Li, Tom Mainiero, Austin Webb, and Tatjana Wiese.

For people on my side of the pond, I am very actively continuing my work on social networks and I am trying to find local students to work with me on that stuff. I also plan to continue the synchronization stuff, which is a new area for me.

A show with everything but Gary Coleman

Back when I was still living in the United States --- you know, a few weeks ago --- I finally got a chance to see the musical Avenue Q, which I had really wanted to see ever since I first heard about.

Here is part of wikipedia's description of the musical:

The show is largely inspired by (and is in the style of) Sesame Street: Most of the characters in the show are puppets (operated by actors onstage), the set depicts several tenements on a rundown street in an "outer borough" of New York City, both the live characters and puppet characters sing, and short animated video clips are played as part of the story. Also, several characters are recognizably parodies of classic Muppet characters: for example, the roommates Rod and Nicky are versions of Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie, and Trekkie Monster is based on Cookie Monster. However, the characters are in their twenties and thirties and face adult problems instead of those faced by pre-schoolers. The characters use profanity, and the songs concern adult themes

I enjoyed the show very much! The show-stealer was quite clearly the rendition of "The internet is for porn" by Trekkie Monster (with help from some normal people). It was slightly different than the recorded version, and the differences were pretty cool. Trekkie Monster is my favorite character, though it's really too bad that they didn't have a "Do you know what else starts with 'P'?" line... Or maybe a bit of a play on a certain line from The Music Man...

One thing I found out after going to the show was that the "Gary" of the 'normal people' is actually Gary Coleman. This, of course, makes the line about Gary selling all his stuff on eBay even funnier than I thought it was before; in fact, it makes it bloody hilarious! As far as I can tell, the real Gary Coleman has never actually appeared in Avenue Q (which is a shame, because that would be awesome).

Tales from the Arxiv (Spoooooooky Edition)

The following paper just got posted to the arxiv preprint server:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
\\
arXiv:0710.2537
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:43:48 GMT (232kb)

Title: Spookytechnology and Society
Authors: Charles Tahan
Categories: physics.pop-ph cond-mat.mtrl-sci quant-ph
Comments: Comments welcome. Visit http://www.tahan.com/charlie/nanosociety/ for
more and related information
\\
New technologies based on the exploitation of so-called "second order"
quantum phenomena - such as quantum entanglement - deserve a public-friendly,
rational, and sexy name. Spookytechnology is that unifying term. From
historical and motivational perspectives, this name has greater value than the
many variations of quantum this and quantum that presently used. As many
already believe, the pursuit of spookytechnology has profound implications for
the development of the physical and information sciences and ultimately for
society at large. Spookytechnology will find its place in the increasingly
dense line of major technological revolutions of our time: quantum, info, bio,
nano, spooky.
\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.2537 , 232kb)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------


I'm not sure this really needs any commentary --- that's how "awesome" this is. However, I'm afraid I'm going to have to rethink how I phrase my C.V. and grant proposals. Among other things, I guess this implies that the topic of my thesis was not 'quantum chaos' but was instead 'spooky chaos'.

How did this paper get past the posting filters?

How many World Wonders can I get in one city?

In my current game of Civ IV, I have 10 World Wonders (+ various National Wonders, special buildings from Great People, etc.) in one city. I'm currently working on my 11th Wonder for that city. What's everybody else's record in this extremely important statistic?

See! The third dungeon in Zelda: Twilight Princess is really hard!

OK, I feel vindicated now!

As this recent article in The California Tech demonstrates, I am not the only person who found the 3rd dungeon (the water dungeon) in Zelda: Twilight Princess. Some of you reading this will remember that I got very frustrated by it and kept putting it down for long periods of time on multiple occasions.

Well, many of you have probably heard of the program WikiScanner, "which traces back anonymous edits of Wikipedia entries to corresponding IP addresses and organizations that they are associated with, allowing users to uncover cases of companies, businesses, politicians, and others editing their own entries in a way that benefits them."

And guess how this program came about? It was because its author couldn't beat the 3rd dungeon of Twilight Princess! Here is the evidence in his own words:

“I was playing Zelda and I got all the way to the third dungeon, the water dungeon, and it was very hard,” explained Griffith. “I got very frustrated at the puzzle, I still haven’t beat it, so I had to go do something else. And that’s the only reason that the WikiScanner exists, because that dungeon is too hard.”

Given my experience with that dungeon, I can't overstate how much that quote amused me!

In related news, I really was in the mood to play Zelda today. I hope my stuff from the US arrives soon, so I can set up my Wii again (buying an appropriate new tv, if necessary). I really want to play Twilight Princess right now, although I have been dealing with my gaming needs by playing Civ IV. (I'm well on my way to another cultural victory.) Video games cost roughly twice as much here as I'm used to paying, so my plans for the forseeable future include buying my games in the US (and for the Wii, I have a US version of the system anyway, so I have to buy them that way). Sadly, I found out last night that Super Smash Brothers Brawl got delayed yet again, so it looks like that particular brand of four-player goodness will have to wait a bit. I have requests from people to... um... come over and play with my Wii, and while I can have some fun with some Wii sports to show off the system, I really want to get Super Smash Bros. Brawl and play multiplayer games with that.

Clockwise or Counterclockwise?

I saw this on Rob Neyer's blog.

Here is an interesting web page. Does it look to you like the dancer is going clockwise or counterclockwise?

I can only see the dancer going clockwise (which isn't what one would expect, if the premise behind the page were correct), though I am curious to try concentrating hard enough to make it go counterclockwise.

I was having a brief conversation with a sensory psychologist at lunch today; I want to show this web page to him and see what he thinks.

The Top 10 Differential Equations of All Time

Now that I know that I am providing endless amusement to the grad students, faculty, and (dare-I-say) postdocs in OCIAM, here's a little survey that I have been meaning to do for a while.

Basically, I want to write (or co-write, if anybody else is interested) an article for a venue like the AMS Notices or American Mathematical Monthly that discusses the "top 10 differential equations of all time" (a la David Letterman). The thing is that I need some sort of survey first, so if I just choose 10 that I like, it would be geared too much towards specific subjects. So, if anybody wants to pipe in here, by e-mail, or by any other venue, I would be greatly appreciative. (List of differential equations written on napkins are particularly encouraged, but toilet paper is right out.)

I'd like to get enough lists from people so that I can take the 10 most popular choices from that list and write the article. For each equation, I'd include some (reasonably brief) discussion of where it comes from and why it's important.

Here is a list that partially reflects my opinion but also reflects how little time I'm going to spend typing up the rest of this entry:

10. Lorentz equations

9. the Nesterenko equation*

8. the Klausmeier equation (because it's named after a former colleague who made a great Thanksgiving turkey)

7. Duffing's equation

6. Einstein's field equations (if for no other reason than because it made a guest appearance in The Triplets of Bellevile, and I got a free book out of that)

5. Navier-Stokes equations

4. the linear Schrodinger equation

3. the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation

2. the cubic nonlinear Schrodinger equation (aka, the Gross-Pitaevskii equation) [notice the correlations from 2-4; that's why I need help writing this list]

1. x' = 0


Honorable mention: That equation I "derived" on my AMa 95b final back in the day. (Actually, I could have mentioned any number of courses here, and I think 95b is one of the few in which I didn't develop my own equation of one sort or another with some misplaced derivation. But it amuses me to attribute this to AMa 95, so I won't let the truth get in the way of a good story.)

* This is the "unnamed" equation in a recent paper of mine (and several upcoming ones!) that my collaborators and I decided to name after the person who first derived it because it makes citing his results less cumbersome for the exposition. I wonder if this is how other equations have gotten named?

I swear I'm going to write my review for Avenue Q in the relatively near future.

It's all about the meta-

I'm a bit tired and don't feel like writing too much at the moment. (I think I'll read a bit of Neuromancer, figure out which of my perturbation methods students should be in which sections [without a solution to the optimization problem discussed earlier today], and then turn on the Diamondbacks-Rockies game --- though with the game starting at 1:37 am, I won't actually be able to listen to very much of it.)

I feel like I should make a meta- post today, and I was given a great opportunity to do so because one of my colleagues said she wanted to do something interesting enough to end up in my blog. So if anybody wants to volunteer any good ideas, let me know. But I think the chance for me to go all meta- on everybody is good enough for me (though I think I have more of a fixed point than was in the movie Adaptation). Anyway, I'm always happy to help people out.

There are also games of Mah Jong planned for the future and requests for coming over to my place to play games on the Wii. (This is in addition to the students of mine who come over to play Wii games with me, because I'm just going to have to fail the lot of them if they refuse to do that.)

I didn't end up going to the games night tonight because I went to the pub and then to dinner with my colleagues. Plus, we have plans for future board games (blokus was discussed) and I have gotten a space in a Vampire campaign run by some person I'll meet during the first session. I hope to get into a D & D campaign at some point, but it will be interesting to try Vampire.

Sworn in

Today was the first meeting of Somerville's Governing Body, which included the swearing in of the three new members (including me). Actually, the younger SCR members (which includes the three of us) have been sticking together (sitting together at things like the Governing Body meetings and so on), which is a very good thing. I know the least about the Oxford system, so I'm pretty sure that I'm the most clueless person among us. In any event, I think I've talked to most of the young people in SCR at some point, and the ones I've talked to are all really nice. I should find out if they like board games. Once my games arrive, I'll bring some to one of the Monday night dinners and see if I can convince people to play. (Alternatively, once my UK finances are in order --- I have a bank account now, but it has no money in it --- I can get a copy of the British Isles edition of Apples to Apples that I saw at the local Border's. Like just about everything else around here, it's expensive (25 pounds), but I really want to get it so I'll buy it anyway after I no longer need to preserve cash for immediate use.)

At the Governing Body meetings, one has to wear one flavor of academic robes (I'll need to wear another flavor when I serve as the Examiner for a doctoral student in December), but one can put it over whatever one is wearing. I don't own my own set yet, so I borrowed one that was way too big for me (not that I would know how large these things should be). I had to jump through a couple of hoops to get it (I think the Porters don't all yet realize that I'm faculty rather than an undergrad), but I was able to get help to get one in time for the meeting. My regular clothes were visible underneath the robes, so I looked absolutely stunning taking my oath in my 'magic missles kill people' t-shirt. I thought that was classy --- the perfect mix of formality and casualness --- and provides just the ingredient that Oxford has always needed! Today's meeting was an absolutely mind-numbing 2.5 hours, though several people told me that most of the meetings take far less time. My fellow new Fellows were about as lost as I was. We're all trying to learn things as we go and catch up with the people who have been here a while. I don't think it will be bad, but it takes to get up to speed when one is new.

I already mentioned that I'll need to buy some fancy clothes for the Examination in December. I signed up today for a dinner (which is, of course, free) on November 7th in London with the Baroness Jay, who is a Somerville alum. (This is a fund-raising affair and several of the tutorial fellows will be going.) That's black tie, so I'll need to buy stuff for that as well. I hope that some of this clothing can overlap with the specific stuff I need for the Examination, so I can buy as little of this stuff as possible. One option would be to avoid dinners like this, but I think the idea of having dinner with a member of the House of Lords is pretty cool and is a neat type of opportunity that not many people get a chance to do. Plus, I'll get to explain to her my network analysis of voting networks that can also be used on voting in the English parliament (to look at party realignments, for example, as my SURF student found for the US Congress this summer). (I have been told where I can get relevant data sets, though I haven't tried to find them yet.) That will be really cool.

In completely random news, I saw a flier today advertising a new radio station that is starting in 8 days in Oxfordshire. It's name should be familiar to many of you: JACK fm. They're really spreading rather widely (and doing so pretty fast).

I think that's about it. I'm considering working on my grant proposal a bit tonight. We'll see if that happens. Also, I have my first tutorial sessions tomorrow. That will be fun. I'll get to interact with my students more. I've run into a couple of them here and there (including one math major at the ice cream place I like) since the official meeting last week, but then tomorrow we can start interacting a little more closely.

Learning to grovel

But I ain't got wings... (ok, so the Tom Petty reference doesn't exactly work here).

Today I was complimented on my ability to grovel. See, I can learn traditional Oxford values reasonably fast. :P

I'll send out a wave to the OCIAM grad students that I am told are reading this even though I've hardly met any of them yet. Now I feel like I should actually occasionally put intelligent things here, but that will have to wait until later.

More Oxford stuff

Later on, I'll write a belated review of "Avenue Q" and make some comments about "Superbad", but let me do more Oxford stuff. I'll try to stay out of trouble this time!

Last Wednesday was the dinner to meet the new frosh. I talked with my charges a bit and will have my first tutorial sessions on Thursday. I wrote about the dinner a bit, and as I mentioned I had some nice conversations by dinner.

I am getting proper iced lattes on a daily basis now, which obviously improves my quality of life. Next to the coffee place where I get them is a pub where apparently (as I found out last night) Tolkienn and CS Lewis used to go. Their are supposed to be some letters between them decorating some of the walls (and the food is supposed to be good), so I'll be trying that place pretty soon.

In a new Monday night tradition, the new members of the SCR are going to meet for dinner. We're eating dinner in College and than hanging out. Kudos go out to the person taking the initiative on this! It's an excellent idea, especially for someone like me who is in a brand new place and needs to meet people (especially those my own age)! We talked about redecorating the quaint SCR room, and my tie dye beanbag chair is one thing that might go there. (As one person put it, "Oxford can always use more tie dye.") There are also some really random books in that room (such as a Who's Who from 1989 and 1995), so another plan is put some other book in there and see how long it takes someone to notice. So, yes, there was some flicking after dinner. (Of course, I'm kind of giving that away here, but if this gives me more information on who is reading this, then that's also good. Apparently, most of my OCIAM colleagues are taking a look at this page every so often, so I have more readers now. You know, it's been very consistent that the only time I find out that I have more readers is when I write something stupid or tactless. How come people who haven't already identified themselves as a reader let me know that they're watching me only when I say something amusing? Compliments about my sense of humor would be nice.)

Anyway, the Monday dinner was fun, and I told the other diners my answer to a facetious challenge posed during the frosh dinner last Wednesday. (I think that my idea, which is highly amusing, for that will be hard to top, and there's no way in Hell I'm mentioning that one publicly because that one could get me in real trouble --- as opposed to the good-natured chastising I already got [and perhaps will get more of].)

I received a mailing-list e-mail about stating my nationality to see what my voting rights here will be. The answer in my case is easy: I don't have any. I did mention that I was going to vote by absentee in the US to do my part to keep the Republicans out of office, and I was very enthusiastically encouraged in the response to my e-mail that I should do this.

Oh, and I've finished setting up my research group web page. You can find that page here.

I also now have a course webpage in blog format. You can find that page here.

I think that's it for now. My current set of simulations is still going to take forever (and I'm doing them a second time because Matlab quit automatically after they were done before I could save them last night, as I had already selected to update new firmware... sigh).

A kinder, gentler Mason

Well, maybe not, but I'll try to stay out of trouble. (So some comments might come by e-mail instead of here in appropriate circumstances.)

Anyway, I received some good-natured ribbing today. But I wouldn't want things to go beyond that (especially given the expanded readership), so consider this entry to be a proclamation of increased caution (and that I eventually do learn my lessons, hard as that may be for my friends to believe).

It's been fun here so far. And maybe I have a chance to win snarkiness competitions around here after all. :)

And if nothing else, perhaps I've already guaranteed myself that I will never be the department head, which will leave me more time to devote to my research. (Of course, that would then be giving myself credit for having some sort of strategy, which would of course be patently false.)

Ping pong in Oxford

Or as the Chinese say, "ping pong."

I went to my first meeting of Oxford's table tennis association yesterday. Unsurprisingly, the club here is done more formally than it is at Caltech. They have uniforms, warm-up jackets, and all sorts of other stereotypical things one would expect to see for sports at a place like Oxford. The team members are pretty hardcore, though a couple of them did have trouble with my serve. The other people I played --- others in the club and people considering to join the club --- couldn't hit my serve at all (which is the usual thing I see). I didn't notice anybody using the pen-holder grip, though I did some some play styles that I knew about and had occasionally seen (Wei Wang demonstrated them). It will be good to get more of a chance to play against people who employ those styles regularly.

I only played once during the summer, so I was a bit rusty. One could thing about the club being more formal is that we do some drills during the club meetings, which makes up for not having a class as we do at Tech. This was a very pleasant surprise. The drills we did on Sunday were pretty familiar (though they were specified a little too much, IMO). This included a particular drill with the backhand loop, which I don't have but most of the team members do. Also, there was a variant on this in terms of playing a 21-point game with one's partner and not being allowed to use forehand at all. That was a good drill, although I lost a couple of points when my opponent used forehand anyway (granted, in shots that definitely called for it).

Most of the club members seem nice, but a couple of them seemed to have the sort of stereotypical holier-than-thou attitude that one hears about Oxonians. We'll see how that goes.

I played for 2.5 hours yesterday, which is a bit much for me at one time. The surface on which the tables were placed is made of some sort of rubber turf. The ball wouldn't bounce when it hit it, so there was a lot more bending down to get the ball than I'm used to. I found that to be both annoying and tiring. Also, it didn't help my knee, which was a bit sore before I started. Playing on that surface seemed bad on my knee, so we'll see how that goes as well. I feel like it's much easier to hurt oneself seriously with this surface rather than just a wood one below the tables. One person did suffer a slight ping pong injury, though he was better in a few minutes. (Some dumbass went right behind him while were were in the middle of a point, so of course there was a collision. Why can't people understand that when somebody is in the middle of a point, you give them space and don't go right next to them? I fail to grasp why people find this so difficult, and most of the ping pong injuries I've seen occur when some dumbass does this. Also, is it so hard to wait for the end of a point? It's not like they last that long at non-professional levels!)

This club also charges --- it's 15 pounds per year or 30 for life (as long as one is affiliated with Oxford). I chose the latter because that's a dominant strategy if one is going to be around >= 2 years, and I'll obviously be around a lot longer than that. Oh, and I'm not eligibile for the team because permanent faculty aren't eligible. Grrrr.... At Tech, postdocs weren't eligible because the NCTTA rules work just like the NCAA ones. Now I go to a place where postdocs are eligible but permanent faculty aren't. Ah well. Next Sunday, I'll try out for the team anyway and if I would end up making it (which is iffy, but I might sneak in there at the bottom, which is what happened both at Cornell and at Tech when I was an undergrad), then I'll be allowed to practice with the team in their extra Friday practice and just won't be able to participate in tournaments. Alternatively, I could just be the mascot again...

Anyway, it was great to play ping pong again! (No Sean mauch sighting this time, however... I would have been really impressed had I run into him doing martial arts there.)

A quick note on blogging while on the job market (+ Sharp Dressed Mason)

This is a brief update to a blog entry from last year (late October for the one in question and then maybe I referred in another entry to the head of the Oxford mathematics department having read the entry before I got hired).

I found out while having dinner tonight that the hiring committee apparently had an internal discussion about that given that I mentioned a bit about how my interview went (though without any details of how the process works that wasn't already public information). It was mentioned at dinner that they certainly had never seen that before. See, I'm already changing how they do things around here! :) Playing "Freebird" at the graduation ceremony comes next...

One reason I bring this up is that when one is interviewing, it probably is a good idea to remove links from outside web pages to blogs. (This had been recommended to me the month before my interview but I hadn't gotten around to it yet. It was one of those piece of advice with which I basically agreed but wasn't going to follow anyway. I'm a pain in the ass that way sometimes. But it doesn't mean that it's not good advice...)

Oh, so I'm going to need to buy a suit (and I guess a white tie) to serve as an examiner in December for a thesis defense. (Both the person defending and the faculty have to wear this stuff for that. And I guess an academic robe on top of that... but I can borrow a robe.) I'll deal with this after my bank situation is in order. Apparently, I would be far from the first faculty member who needed to buy the clothes to do this. (The mathematicians here essentially dress like the mathematicians back home, so I think there are a fair number of them [possibly even a very large majority] who prefer to be casual. The head of the applied math group suggested jokingly that I should put this in my blog, so I'll mention it now and maybe have Makeup Party Entry: Part Deux later on when I go to buy the suit.

So I decided to try plugging in my alarm clock (via a power strip)...

... and there was this fantastic flash of light and a popping sound. (The power strip was turned off when I did this, by the way.)

I had counted on basically two possibilities: Either the thing would work or it wouldn't (which could involve nailing some of the stuff I was plugging in). I discussed the different voltage with people at some length before I left and I figured that trying with something cheap like a power strip and an alarm clock wouldn't kill anything I cared about. So I definitely would not have been surprised by things not working. What I didn't count on was a third possibility --- that this whole thing would cause some sort of flip somewhere to switch in some cupboard that would turn off all the power to all the sockets in my apartment. (I still have power for things, such as internet, that don't need sockets.) Then I started wondering if I took down anybody else in the building with me. I really hope not (although I have to admit that part of me would be extremely amused by having that story to tell).

Of course, I can solve my problem by flipping the switch back on. I don't know where it is, of course. I went down to the Porter's Lodge to let him know what was going on. It turns out that for insurance reasons, they're not allowed to turn these things back on. Oh, and the people who come to do this don't come on weekends unless it's an emergency (flooding, gas leaks, and what not). Bloody Hell!

Now, I can plug my computer and so on elsewhere to get power to use in the apartment, but this will make it hard for me to listen to baseball games and music (which I like to have on when I go to bed). I'll be able to get some, but only as long as power lasts.

I am such a champ. (And I can't say that I wasn't warned.)

A baseball record that went under the radar

I've started to look more carefully at the final-season baseball stats to try to figure out who I think should win the various awards and just noticed that Jimmy Rollins had 716 at bats this year, establishing a new Major League record. That was lost amidst what his team was doing and all the more prominent records and milestones being achieved this year.

Also, Jimmy Rollins and Curtis Granderson each stole at least 20 bases and hit at least 20 of doubles, triples, and homeruns. That quartest has only been accomplished a handful of times and it's interesting that two guys did it this year. (Amazingly, the sports media focused almost exclusively on Granderson's attempt to achieve this milestone and Rollins' efforts to do so was almost completely ignored. I'm not sure what was going on there.)

2007 Ig Nobel prizes

As one of my OCIAM colleagues pointed out today, the 2007 Ig Nobel prizes have now been awarded.

One of them was awarded for the infamous gap bomb. Others were avoided for real research, such as that on the wrinkling of an elastic sheet. (That's actually extremely important and interesting research and was done by a very well-known guy.) Aside from the gap bomb one, I think my favorite concerns the side effects of swallowing swords. There are some other big winners as well.

Iced latte!

Today I was able to get my first proper iced latte (and I did it without resorting to go to Starbucks). I'm making progress. Awesome!

Oh yeah, and this is entry 1000.

Tonight we're going to blog likes it's entry 999

Oh wait, this is entry number 999.

Baseball update

Well, the baseball postseason is upon us and I am currently listening to the end of the Rockies-Phillies game.

I had been busy for several hours. First, I met the new math undergrads --- in particular, the ones I will be mentoring. They seem very nice, and they also seemed very happy with the fact that my style is much more informal than that of the stereotypical Oxford tutor. I really like being able to live in residence and interact with the students so closely. It's very much like an RAship, and this whole mechanism is making it much easier for me to meet other people in Somerville, including people in other subject areas who I basically wouldn't meet at all in other circumstances. Then I had dinner, and sat near one of my mentees, a postdoc, and a stray first-year grad student in medicine who had spilled over from the medicine table. [The tables were organized by subject area tonight.] The medical student was really cool, though it will likely be hard to convince someone with her schedule to play D & D even though she played back in the day. (We also talked about music and the Caltech vs. MIT prank rivalry for a fair bit.)

After dinner was a gathering of the Senior Common Room (in the Senior Common Room... recall that it refers to both the room and the group), and I had the chance to meet up with the Tutor assigned as my mentor. He was selected because he too emigrated from the United States, and it appears that he has extra adaptors and knows where to get more! Also, because he's from Boston, I asked him about the Red Sox and he is indeed a huge baseball fan, so then we proceeded to talk a lot of baseball. He has the MLB video internet package (I have the audio one this year and will get the video one next year). It looks when he shows up, there's going to be lots of baseball discussion flying back and forth. So, anyway, I'm basically extremely pleased with this whole setup. I'm not sure if I can make the RPG thing tomorrow because of a small gathering of Tutors to try to meet some more of them (that needs to get priority), but things are going very well and I hopefully should be able to hang out with some people around here. Oh, and basically everybody I met (including the undergrads!) thought I was a new freshman before they knew better. It was awesome! We were at the pre-dinner drinks (it's Oxford policy to get the freshman drunk before classes start), and several of the frosh asked me if I was a new freshman. Graduate students, postdocs, and (least surprisingly) faculty have also confused me for a new frsoh. I've been enjoying this...

In terms of baseball, the Rockies beat out the Padres for the NL West Wild Card in a game that was an instant classic. I wish I had a chance to see it or listen to it! The Rockies-Phillies series is the one that I find the most interesting. I could go for either of them winning, but I think I'd like to see the underdog Rockies get to the World Series. (The Rockies just won game 1.) The other series pits the Cubs against the Diamondbacks. The Diamondbacks are boring, so I'd much rather have the Cubbies win. In the AL, the Yankees are playing the Indians, and I want the Yankes to get their asses kicked! (By the way, I was remarking to that Tutor that he must really have taken offense when the Brits called him a Yankee. It's bad enough to call a Dodger fan that name, but to do it to a Red Sox fan is just horrible!) I'd prefer the Angels to beat the Red Sox, but I could handle any AL team except the Yankees in the World Series. My preference would be for Rockies vs. Angels and for the Angels to win, but there are a lot of other combinations that would also be very cool.

It's a bit tougher to say who I think will win. I'll guess that the Yankees will beat Cleveland in 4 and that Anaheim (or the LAA of A, if you prefer) will beat Boston in 5 games. I think the Rockies will be the Phillies in 4 games (I would have said 5 before today's victory) and that the Cubs will beat the Diamondbacks in 5 games. In the ALCS, I think the Yankees will beat the Angels in 5 games and that the Cubs will beat the Diamondbacks in 6 games. That would leave a Yankees-Cubs World Series, and I'm going to be crass and predict that the Yankees will win in 6 games. That's not what I want to happen, but they seem to be the strongest team by far based on the last few months.

I'll shortly write an entry on my predictions for baseball award winners (maybe in a few days?) and a review of Avenue Q.

An American Mathematician in Oxford

I've got ethernet set up in my apartment now, so I've got regular online access again.

I'm exhausted and I have a ton of stuff to do to get settled (and prepare for my perturbation theory course, which starts next week).

Once I got online at work, I went through the built-up e-mails quickly because I knew there would be a lot of stuff to do. The first thing I did online at home is to check on the Rockies-Padres game. I couldn't get online last night, so I didn't get a chance to listen to it. The Rockies won! Their assent to the playoffs was really incredible! I'll blog some more about baseball later.

One thing I've noticed in Somerville is that I keep getting duplicate online and hard copies of things (actually, I was given multiple copies of some things because different people wanted to make sure I get everything I need). At US universities (at least the ones I've been at), most stuff comes only online now, but here they're still in the transition period where one gets copies both ways. For the one day while I didn't have access it was helpful, but now I see that a lot of Somerville College's resources are going to get wasted this way. Apparently, the older folks don't want to have to go online for such things, and I've heard some of the older Tutors are set in their way, so I'm looking forward to getting chastised for my newfangled ways.

I get free lunches and dinners whenever I want, so I won't have too many expenses for a while. (I do plan to get some ice cream tonight though...) When eating in the dining hall (so, for dinners that aren't for private parties), I get to eat at the High Table, which is quite literally on higher ground than where the students (in full view of the table) are eating. Tonight isn't one of the regular dinner nights where Tutors go and I doubt there will be the requisite minimum of 3 to eat in the private dining room, so I'll eat in the regular hall tonight. This could be my chance to eat at the special seat reserved for the Principal (or, in her absence, the highest-ranking Tutor present), but then it seems to me that that almost becomes like the old Table of Shame situation we had in Lloyd. I'm thinking I might just go ahead and eat on the regular tables with the students (a la Feynman). As the Senior Tutor said, I'm a member of the Senior Common Room (which refers simultaneously to an actual room and to the social group of Tutors and Administators in Somerville), so I can do what I want. Many people have confused me for a new student anyway---so I have the power of faculty (which gives much more benefits in this system than in the US one) and I can blend in (to whatever extent I can blend in with anything) with the students. This could be fun.

The head researcher in OCIAM (Oxford's applied math group) is extremely blunt. I was told about him before, and he really utters some off-the-cuff remarks. He was pleased to know that I'm blunt, though given the stuff that he utters, I'm afraid I am beaten hands down in this regard. Plus, I usually need time to become comfortable for that stuff. Anyway, I met some of my fellow applied math faculty members and they seem really nice. There are 5 new ones out of 20 in total (with a couple of the other 15 to retire soon), so there's a lot of new blood in the department. Two of us are Americans, so we plan on taking over (as I indicated to the head of OCIAM's research program). It's our manifest destiny. (Plus, we need more room to breathe.) This is the largest turnover in this group in a looooooong time, so there are some really exciting opportunities to build up some nice new things in addition to what's already there. Oh, and the Tutor assigned to mentor me is an American. The Senior Tutor figured that somebody else who also had to make the US->UK transition would be a good person to choose, and I agree with her completely. I can also ask my colleague in OCIAM (who finished up as a grad turkey in applied math at Caltech when I was a frosh), as he moved here a couple of months ago and has already figured out some of the stuff I need to figure out.

Getting to Oxford was pretty uneventual. The luggage I was taking with me weighed over a metric fuck ton (by which I mean more than 100 pounds), and having two heavy suitcases was a bit of a pain. My brother helped me with that a bit in LAX and then I used a cart to lug them from the baggage claim to the coach when I arrived at Heathrow. (Incidentally, getting into the country was trivial. They wanted to see my work permit in addition to the VISA. Thankfully, I had the work permit in my carry-on suitcase. (I hadn't remembered if I had put it there or in the check-in stuff, which I didn't have back yet at that point, but thankfully I was thinking clearly at some point.) He stamped that, so now I just need to show my passport to get back in. Using the cart helped a lot but things were still a bit difficult when I went on downhill ramps. I had to exert force to prevent gravity my making the cart careen away and because the wheels on my cart were suboptimal, I think I almost twisted one of my ankles a couple of times. There might have been the chance to do some damage, but I managed to be ok.

I got on the coach and then made it to Oxford at about 3:40 pm yesterday. Here is where the tricky part with luggage would come. It was about a .5 mile walk to Somerville but a .25 mile walk to the place that taxis go without being expressly called. Even the .25 walk promised to be very rough with my laptop, my red carry-on, and about 115 pounds of stuffed pastel purple and light blue suitcases, and I felt pretty stupid walking .25 miles just to take a cab to go another couple of blocks. OK, so what happened? I started trudging my way to the cab stop and a girl (Eda, who just arrived 10 days ago from Turkey for a Masters program in some sort of social work thing) walking in the other direction saw me struggling and offered to help. I normally would be stubborn, but the circumstances were extreme, so I wasn't about to protest in this situation. So, the half mile walk become much more pleasant both because I had someone to talk to and because I was dragging one big suitcase instead of two. Anyway, a big thanks goes out to Eda (I'm pretty sure the second letter was a 'd'; my memory is already hazy), who I'll hopefully run into again at some point.

What else... my apartment is a bigger than the one I had before. The bathroom could be bigger, and I really wish the kitchen were bigger and that the fridge I have weren't so piddly. I have a crapload of bookshelves --- something like the equivalent of 8 or more full-sized bookshelves (8 full shelves, not 8 levels in one shelf) in space, so finding room for all my D & D books won't be a problem... Oh, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but the apartment is too cold and I need to figure out a way to get the heat to blast a bit more.

That's it for now. I'll shortly send a spammy e-mail with my contact information and then I need to start dealing with bank account stuff.

Update: I just got a good-natured ribbing for a subset of the above comments from the head of our research group. (I also watched him put a copy of the text into the OCIAM director's box.) I'm also supposed to expect a witty response, so we'll see how that goes. Oh, and I think I should take this as a lesson to learn to be more careful. This also means that my readership has expanded, which kind of goes hand-in-hand with the being more careful part.

Interesting article on Barry Bonds's former trainer

Here is an interesting article on Greg Anderson, the former personal trainer of Barry Bonds.

The beginning of the article discusses one person who spent some time as Anderson's cellmate in prison. His crime spree, resulting from junk food addiction, was quite a strange one. Describing his arrest, this guy commented, "The fucking pie filling went everywhere."

Oh, and the elk semen thing is just gross.

Leaving on a jet plane

Well, I'm still in Pasadena until sometime on Saturday (and I will then be in LA until my flight on Sunday evening), but I'm now heading out imminently and all the I'm-about-to-leave feelings are setting in a bit more than they were before. Obviously I'm going to miss all my friends (and the city and campus), though relatively recent events also make it important that I'm starting over again.

It's still hard to leave, but I've now done this so many times before that it's partly old hat by now. So, it's hard but not as hard as it used to be. (The one that was really hard was in August 1998 because I had agonized over my Caltech versus Cornell grad school decision right until the last minute. I ultimately left because I decided that if I stayed, it would have been for the wrong reasons. That's why I knew I had to go somewhere else for grad school even though my heart was still in Pasadena.) I'll miss everybody, but I feel like I kind of know how to start over at this point (leaving aside the fact that I'm bad at meeting people) and the magic of e-mail, IM, and other convenient technologies make things like this much more palatable than they otherwise would be. Basically, I'm simultaneously wistful and excited. So it goes.

I was born in LA and grew up in Beverly Hills. But ever since I spent time at Caltech as an undergrad (I don't know exactly when during my 4 years that I realized this), my heart has been in Pasadena (especially on the Caltech campus). It was the first place where I was ever truly accepted and remains the place where I've felt the most like I belong. It was really great to be back for a couple years! After I left, I never thought I'd have the chance to come back for anything other than a visit.

Now, it's time to show those Oxonians what I'm made of.

2007 Random Walker Rankings

Our 2007 random walker rankings are now online.

Bonds record homerun ball to be affixed with asterisk

The votes from the fans are in, and the person who won the auction for the ball Barry Bonds hit for his Major League record 756th homerun will be affixing an asterisk to the ball and then sending it to the Hall of Fame. I approve!

Mike Mussina wins 250th career game

Mike Mussina won his 250th career game today.

You can see Mussina's career stats here. I think he belongs in the Hall of Fame, though he's not a shoo-in. And deserving pitchers like Bert Blyleven are gettings screwed over by the voters, so we'll see what happens. Of course, Mussina is going to get extra credit for being a Yankeee...

Meanwhile, the National League pennant races continue to be interesting. Maybe the Rockies will continue to steamroll past everybody (they just swept the Padres this weekend and have now won 8 games in a row!) and sneak their way in. (Those bastards completely nailed the Dodgers, but given that we have no hope, it would be nice for the Phillies to overtake the Mets, the Padres to overtake the Diamondbacks, and the Rockies to also overtake the Diamondbacks. We'll see what happens.)

Four movies and a musical

I am going to get some reviews out of the way.

8/19/07: The Simpsons Movie: This movie was really good. (The mugging on the way home from it sucked, however.) I was going to write a review of the movie on the night I watched it, which I tend to do for many of the really good movies I see, but that got superceded (as all of you know). The movie redoes several jokes from the tv series (which I haven't watched regularly for close to 15 years, though I catch an occasional episode now and then), but it does them very well and I appreciated the chance to see The Simpsons on the big screen. Plus, the meta- jokes were really great! Anyway, I highly recommend this movie.

9/14/07: I want someone to eat cheese with: This movie was pretty good but not great. It was written and directed by Jeff Garlin, who was also the main star, and it contained a lot of members (and former members, I guess) of the Second City comedy club. In fact, I recognized many of the people in the movie as people who were really good actors but not necessarily huge stars. There were some good moments (and some high-quality one-liners), but as Lemming writes, there was tedium in between these moments. The protagonist's best friend was fantastic, Sarah Silverman played a crazy young women (umm.. she's getting kind of typecast now, although it seems at least partially by choice), and Richard Kind was awesome in his bit role. Anyway, the movie's worth seeing, but it's not great.

9/17/07: Chess: I had been waiting to see this musical for something like 15 years, and after seeing it, I feel like I am still waiting to see a proper version of it. Don't get me wrong --- I enjoyed what I saw because the music was catchy, so the overall night was decent. However, the acoustics were horrible in the first act and only marginally better in the second act. (I missed nearly all the lyrics in all but a few songs. It was very frustrating!) One could hear clipping from the mikes on multiple occasions! Oh, and they butchered One Night in Bangkok, which is only one of the very best songs of all time. They did the opening part of the song well, but the singer really didn't capture the flavor of the song and one particular lyrical change was a complete failure. (The line "Thank God I'm only watching the game" got changed to "Thank God I'm in the game." The reason that is broken is that the game being referenced at this point is not chess the board game but rather the political machinations going on, with which this character is not involved at all whereas his opponent and former manager are. So, in addition to a stylistic change I don't like, it completely fails in the context of the play itself. Whose idea was this? And, yes, I can go all Comic Book Guy when it comes to a song I like as much as this one!) The visual that went with the line, "I get my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine!" was, however, fantastic. Apparently, the musical Chess has massively different incarnations depending on the London performance, the Broadway performance, and many others, so I'm going to have to see another version of this (with reasonable acoustics, damnit!). I'm glad I saw the musical, but I still need to see it for real.

9/18/07: Balls of Fury: As Lemming wrote on his blog, this is what is known as a fun/entertaining movie rather than one that is "good" per se. I expected that the movie would be like this, and it didn't disappoint. That's what I wanted from it. Christopher Waalken was fantastic, by the way! And there is a comment about women in ping pong that I have the urge to use as a reference to this movie, though more likely than not I'd get a swift kick in the butt if I actually bothered. I should note that LA Weekly's review of this movie was in the form of a multiple choice quiz, which gives you an idea of what the reviewer thought of the film. It was about the most scathing review of a film I've read in LA Weekly, although I have since read the short synopsis of their review of Dragon Wars, which suggests that the reviewer was even harsher there. (One of the lines in the synopsis states that Dragon Wars was made for people who make it a point to go to premier showings of Uwe Boll movies. Ouch!) The Maggie Q question in LA Weekly that Lemming mentioned proceeded as follows:

"What role does Maggie Q play in this movie?

A. A pair of breasts.
B. A pair of breasts that knows kung fu.
C. Who's Maggie Q?"


Anyway, Balls of Fury is a fun movie that doesn't even remotely take itself seriously. One can see Caltech table tennis coach Wei Wang (the film's technical consultant) very briefly as a ping pong-playing nun (though practically the entire shot is shown in the trailers). I didn't see her name in the credits, though I zoned out during part of it, so it's probably just my fault. Indeed, Wei is listed under 'other crew' in the IMDB page, so she now has her own IMDB page. (I'll let you know if I get one from the Eddie Murphy flick on which I consulted.)

The ping pong quality in the movie didn't seem very good, and I remember Wei mentioning that they didn't even use real balls but rather video effects. (Also, the number of points it took to figure out that Christopher Waalken didn't have a backhand was far more than it would have taken in a real game. One doesn't learn all of forehand first before learning any backhand --- that's preposterous. Also, anybody playing me who doesn't have a backhand won't be able to return my serve at all...)

Flaws aside, the film is very fun and I definitely recommend it. It might also be a good movie to use with a drinking game.


9/21/07: King of California: On my third solo "date" with Lemming in a span of 8 days --- I guess we're going back to our old patterns --- we saw this movie, which I enjoyed very much. I recommend it highly! A certain part of the ending is really sweet! In the spirit of tv's best dramedies, the movie includes a mixture of light-heartedness and seriousness that was executed extremely well. The main actors (Michael Douglas and Evan Rachel Woods) both gave really good performances (I've heard rumors of a possible Oscar nomination for Douglas). As for what this movie is about, I'd say it's mostly about the relationship and bonding between an out-of-touch (in this case, literally) parent and their child, although there is certainly some adventure thrown in. Anyway, I hope that the rest of you get a chance to see this film at some point.

Lolthulhu

Courtesy Justin, here is lolthulhu, which is about as wrong as it sounds. (It does have some amusing stuff, however.)

Thoughts on temporary `Nay Parking` signs

I be walkin' along San Pasqual an' noticed th' temporary `Nay Parking` signs that ben thar fer a while, an' me recently-acquired knowledge on th' topic compelled me t' eyeball them in more detail an' notice a wee things (which included some PS12in' t' find loopholes).

First, at least one or two o' th' signs be set t' expire on "Septembree 31" rather than Septembree 30th. While this t'ain't a loophole, th' mistake amused me. (I be more amused when I thought that all o' them had th' error, but that turned ou' t' be mistaken.)

Second, some o' th' signs only go until 4pm on a gi'en tide rather than 5pm. Th' swabbies who put th' signs thar really ortin' t' ben more careful about that, but that`s a pretty minor loophole.

Third, one o' th' signs be attached t' a tree, which I found ou' be actually illegal on Mondee while talkin' t' th' appropriate civic folks. (That had been what I be plannin' t' do. After returnin' homeport an' noticin' that thar weren`t poles on which t' post th' signs, Lemmin' an' I sailed' o'er t' OSH t' buy some stakes. We tried t' find a local "Magic Box," but we be unable t' do so an' I thus had t' settle fer some ghetto stakes.) Accordin' t' th' swabbies at Pasadena parkin' enforcement, th' `Nay Parking` signs be nay enforceable when they be put on a tree. (I doubt that`s how 't would work in practice, but technically....)

Fourth, I also found ou' on Mondee that each temporary `Nay Parking` sign in Pasadena be good fer nay more than twenty feet o' space. I saw today on San Pasqual that thar be a gap that be much more than twenty feet long. Strictly speakin', a couple o' cars could fit in th' part in which 'tis technically legal t' park (tho, again, I doubt that`s how things would work in practice).

After countin' inaccuracies, 't dawned on me that I nerehad t' present any verification o' needin' t' reserve th' spots in order t' get things t' happen. This made me imagine a scenario (mind ye, nay a specific algorithm fer doin' this) in which a relatively wee squadron o' swabbies could cause major portions o' a city t' be severely disrupted by ary th' same time removin' a large number o' parkin' spaces from normal use. (I assume --- an' hope! --- that in practice th' city would naice a large spike in requests fer temporary `Nay Parking` signs an' prevent this sort o' skullduggery.)

I then moved on t' more important considerations. Namely, be thar some way t' exploit these rules fer an interestin' prank? Th' only things that came t' mind be either simply th' convenience o' usin' th' parkin' spot (in which case 't wouldna be a central part o' th' prank itself) or stuff that wouldna be funny at all but would rather be really nasty an' obnoxious t' th' city`s residents an' business (obviously nay a cool thin' t' do). Does ere be havin' any ideas o' how this could be used fer a prank without bein' obnoxious? I couldna think o' one, tho I moved on t' other topics after a wee while.

Oh, an' in case any o' ye doubt th' veracity o' me OCD afflication, let this blog post put them t' rest.

(Thanks t' this url.)

Baseball Update

After today`s debacle, 't seems that th' Dodgers be intent on breakin' me heart yet again.

Th' Rockies swept us in a double header, puttin' us 4.5 games behind San Diego fer th' wild card an' 5.5 games behind NL West division-leadin' Arizona. Both th' Padres an' Phillies won (again!), an' all three divisions in th' National League be still up fer grabs. Th' Mets lead o'er th' Phillies be now only 1.5 games, th' Diamondafts be 1 game ahead o' San Diego, an' th' Cubs an' Brewers be tied fer th' NL Central lead. We only be havin' 11 games an' we be now in dire straits. (Sometimes ye`re th' windshield an' sometimes ye`re th' bug.)

Meanwhile, things be much more settled in th' American League. Th' Angels be havin' a giant lead o'er th' Mariners, an' th' Indians be havin' a large lead o'er th' Tigers. Th' Red Sox lead o'er th' thrice-blasted Yankees be reduced t' jus' 2.5 games (damnit!) an' th' Yankees be ahead in th' wild card race by 4.5 games o'er Detroit.

Thar be some interestin' teams that will make th' playoffs, but unfortunately th' Yankees will very likely be one o' them an' th' Dodgers won`t be. At least th' Giants be in last...


Update (9/19/07, 10:30 pm): Th' Dodgers lost t' th' Rockies again tonight. Fer th' second game in a row, our vaunted (an' deservedly so, recent failures notwithstanding) bullpen mainstays blew a lead. Th' Rockies be havin' now leaped ahead o' his in th' standings, leavin' th' Dodgers in 4th place in th' National League West an' a full 5.5 games behind th' wild card-leadin' Padres. (Th' Padres beat th' Seafarin' heartys again tonight! Th' Seafarin' heartys canna e'en win on International Talk Like a Seafarin' hearty tide! What kind o' bullsh'tis that!?!) Thar be only ten games port in th' season, so th' Dodgers be pretty screwed at this point. We had a shot, but th' Padres an' Phillies be havin' played really well an' we completely choked. Also today, th' Yankees won an' th' Red Sox lost, so th' Sox be now only ahead o' th' Yankees by 1.5 games. If th' Yankees win th' AL East, this choke (in terms o' th' size o' th' lead that will ben lost) will end up bein' one o' th' historically monumental ones... In that game, Andy Pettitte earned his 200th career victory.

Update 2 (9/19/07, 10:30 pm): I reckoned that I wrote this post on Septembree 19th, so I changed th' "language" I used in order t' properly celebrate today`s holiday.

Moving my stuff to make room for somebody else's shit

The movers are currently at my apartment. I am moving my stuff to make room for somebody else's shit.

The next stop after the apartment will be my office. Then I'll take a bath and maybe get some work done (or maybe I'll just watch the Dodgers game, though I suspect we'll be between games when the movers finish).

Brief Notes

George Carlin has a section in his routines called "Things that piss me off!" and Bill Maher has a section called "New Rules" of a similar vein at the end of each episode of his current show.

Well, here's a new rule: When the checkout line in the market is an express lane that requires you to have "15 items or less", then you should have no more than 15 items. In particular, this means that having more than 30 items is right out! Similarly, the people who work at the market should enforce this! If you want to not have such a line, that's perfectly fine. But if you're going to have this kind of line, there's no bloody point unless you actually enforce the damned requirement. (It's worth mentioning as well that it is a regular occurrence to see somebody with too many items in these lines.)

In terms of bureaucracy, I am still waiting to get my contacts that were supposed to arrive at my apartment a week before Wednesday. Apparently, they were mailed out on Tuesday, which is the last day I called about them. The doctor's office has a shipping number, so if they don't arrive today, I am to call them and ask them to call the post office with the tracking number to see what's up. There were previous things associated with buying my contacts through them now that my doctor is part of an office with another person. The way I used to order contacts is that I would make one phone call and the contacts and bill would both arrive on the same day. In this case, I am at 5 phone calls and counting (and my credit card was charged over 2 weeks ago and about 3 calls ago).

On a similar note, I didn't have my Blue Cross information with me when I got some shots a little while ago, so I paid directly and then filed a claim with Blue Cross (that I have through Caltech) to get the appropriate subset of that reimbursed. I followed the instructions (and provided exactly the information shown in the sample filled-out form that was included!) only to find out that the sample they include is utter tripe and that there is more information I should get from the doctor. After a couple of rounds of that before I found out what they really wanted, I got the information from the doctor and filed the claim again. On Saturday, I got an incomprehensible statement that didn't indicate that I had overpaid what I was required to pay. I called them today to find out that they had sent the money to the doctor directly and that the doctor is supposed to, in turn, send me a check to reimburse the overpayment. I then called the doctor's office and the person I talked to said she didn't think it worked that way, so she would talk to her boss (the doctor) and then get back to me. I hate insurance companies. Remind me never to forget to bring my insurance information with me when I go to a doctor's office (and, I guess, to have it with me as a standard deal in case there's an emergency). The number of hoops one has to go through is just ridiculous. And I still am not actually done. Sigh...

Enough ranting for the day. I may have more later. Let's hope the moving company stuff goes smoothly. Can you tell that I'm optimistic?

Jim Thome hits 500th career homerun

Jim Thome joined the 500 career homerun club today, joining an increasingly long list of players to achieve a milestone that has become far more run-of-the-mill than it used to be. Thome's achievement today was done in a particularly dramatic fashion, as it was a walk-off job that gave the also-ran White Sox a victory over the Angels.

Because 500 homeruns doesn't have the significance that it used to, it is no longer considered a milestone that comes makes somebody a "lock" for the Hall of Fame (issues like steroids notwithstanding; I mean a lock in the absence of such extracurricular activities). The reason this milestone has lost its former significance is simply that baseball's current era is much more oriented towards offense than previous ones, as one can see (among other means) by how many home runs it now takes to lead the league. (With this context, we can also see how truly amazing the accomplishments of pitchers like Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson, and Pedro Martinez have been!) Of course, one simple number shouldn't be more than a surrogate for a more exacting analysis. Jose Canseco and Dave Kingman both his about 450 homeruns, and you can't tell me that they would be a Hall of Fame "lock" in any era just by achieving a particular round number. A much more accurate statement is that most people with 500 homeruns (again, ignoring extracurricular activities) tend to have careers that make them Hall of Fame locks, but it's not the number itself that makes them a lock.

So, whither Jim Thome? Here is a very interesting article by Rob Neyer on Thome's Hall candidacy. Neyer compares him to other MVP candidates and notes correctly that the MVP voters haven't treated him that well, so one would expect the Hall of Fame voters (a similar crowd in spirit and containing, I believe, some of the same people) to treat him similarly unless his counting stats (numbers of homeruns, RBIs, and so on) are overwhelming. That's not a statement of whether he should be in the Hall of Fame but rather whether he'd be voted in if he stopped playing today. Given the inflation in the numbers of homeruns in recent years, the expectation is that he would not be voted in if he retired today. Instead, Thome will probably have to get up to 600 homeruns, which some people claim is "the new 500 homeruns."

Do I think Thome should get elected to the Hall if he retired today? I'm not sure. Thome is one of the canonical examples of what has become known as a "three outcome player": a majority of his at bats result in a homerun, a walk, or a strikeout. This gives Thome a very high OPS, but he is very much a one-dimensional player. He contributed negatively on defense until he became a DH, he lumbers around the bases, and so on. Thome is currently 37 years old and still hits very well, so there's a very good chance that he has a few good years left. He likely will hit 600 homeruns and compile enough counting stats to get himself deserved enshrinement in the Hall of Fame by virtue of being very good for a very long time (see Don Sutton for an example of a pitcher who elected in that way). Thome has never really shined the way Frank Thomas did for several years*, but by the time he retires, I believe that Thome's counting stats (collectively, not just the homeruns) will be sufficiently overwhelming that (barring information surfaces about performance-enhancing substances; see Rafael Palmeiro for a player who would have gotten elected via the 'very good for a very long time' route if that stuff hadn't surfaced) he'll eventually have a spot in baseball's Hall of Fame.


* Frank Thomas deserved first-ballot election to the Hall long before he got his 500th homerun. Anybody who looks at his stats and doesn't see just how much he dominated the game for over a decade has not been paying attention. Frank Thomas is not a marginal Hall of Famer. he is a mortal lock and on the short list of the very best hitters of all time.

There I was; they rocked me like a hurricane.

I just got back from a concert by The Scorpions (it let out late enough that the Gold Line was already done for the night, and I needed to take a bus [which was 30 minutes late]).

The concert was both fun and loud, and the band was excellent when it came to interacting with audience members (among the best I've seen in that regard). There was a particularly amusing moment when the drummer was doing his solo (each member of the band was given a chance to shine; aside from the lead singer, this was especially true of one guitarist and especially the drummer, who each had extended solos). He kept trying to get different parts of the audience to be louder. Finally, some woman (his wife or girlfriend, maybe?) runs on stage to give him a beer. He stands up, takes a break, and starts chugging the beer; meanwhile, the woman starts rocking on the drums and then they did a duet on the drums (banging them together, so to speak). It was pretty sweet!

I heard all the songs I really wanted to hear except one ("Winds of Change", in an extremely surprising omission). During a couple of the power ballads (in particular, "Send Me an Angel", which is my favorite song by The Scorpions), there was the usual lighting and swaying of lighters and cell phones. Does anybody know how the original tradition (the lighter or, I suppose, candle version) started? I understand that the visual effect is cool and all that, but if anybody knows the origins of this, please let me know.

(P.S. The bloody Padres and Phillies won again. Damnit! Thankfully, the Dodgers kept pace with them.)

Baseball's Worst Hitters and Pitchers for 2007 (by position)

The season isn't over yet, but here is the current list of baseball's worst of the worst for 2007.

The list is compiled by position, with OPS+ as the metric of choice for position players and ERA+ as the metric of choice per pitchers.

OPS, which stands for on-base percentage + slugging percentage, is an excellent quick and dirty method for measuring the quality of somebody's offense. OPS+ just means what one's OPS is realtive to the league average. (I don't know if the National League and American Leagues are being separated in the quoted stats.)

ERA+ refers to what one's ERA (earned run average) is relative to the league average. ERA is computed by taking a pitcher's earned runs, multiplying by 9, and dividing by innings pitched. (That is, it measures how many runs does a pitcher allow during a full-length game that are determined to be his fault.)

Do you want to guess at which player is the worst in the Majors in center field? Here's a hint: he sucks! I can't believe we're going to end up paying this guy over $9 million a year for several years. Yuck. (By the way, Nomar Garciaparra isn't even close to worst among third baseman in terms of OPS+ because Nick Punto's stats are historically bad.) If Nomar were still playing first base as he was for about half of the year, then he would rank worst by a large margin. He currently has an OPS+ of 75 and the listed first baseman, Lyle Overbay, currently has an OPS+ of 85.)

Basically, this is a rather poignant reminder that the Dodgers have had two gaping holes in important spots in the lineup for the entire year. We have better players on the roster, and we should be playing them!

Pictures from PAX (and other stuff!)

I've uploaded 3 rolls of film onto Flickr. This includes many (but not all) of the pictures taken on my camera at PAX. (The others are in the roll currently in the camera, so I'll post those later.) Each roll of film has 25 pictures, so there are 75 unique pictures to see.

You can find all 81 of the pictures I uploaded on this page (assuming I didn't screw up the url... I have this vague feeling that the public url should be different; let me know if this works). How did I get to 81, you ask? Well, 81 is 9^2, you see, because base 9 is just like base 10... if you're missing 1 finger! (I accidently uploaded the same roll twice and wrote some snarky comments I didn't want to erase. I'm such a winner.) The rolls include stuff from Zurich, PAX, Colorado, Florida, Caltech, and the Dallas airport.

Here are a couple of pictures we discussed previously:

1. Me + Microsoft PR guy.

2. The model from the booth at PAX.


I didn't discuss this picture from PAX, but I think it came out well.

Now it's Lemming's turn to post his pictures from PAX. :)

"Uses and Abuses of Mathematics in Biology"

Science invited Robert May, one of the leading mathematical biologists of our time, to contribute an essay to its special section on mathematical biology for its 2/6/04 issue. This link has excerpts from the article, which was very interesting and which I plan to assign the next time I teach a mathematical modeling or mathematical biology course. (I have previously taught one of each type of course.)

May goes through several important examples of both good and bad uses of mathematics in biology. For example, he presents some of the b.s. that occurs in systems biology about which I've ranted before. He makes essentially the same points as I have, but he does so much more cogently and he provides some excellent examples. (One of the sins, for example, is to have a huge set of equations that try to model every single mechanism with a differential equation but then have tons and tons of parameters that one has no hope of measuring with any degree of accuracy. All the supposed "accuracy" one gets from having a complicated set of equations is thereby completely wasted, and one has a system so big that it's impossible to understand everything. Now, there is good systems biology research as well, but one has to be very careful with things like which quantities one can measure and which quantities one can't.)

You can go here for the article's abstract. If you want to use your institution's electronic access to Science, you can follow the link to full text of the article.

Today's News: I get to keep the G5 in my office (oh, and some stuff about books)

Today I got the official word that I can take my Macintosh G5 desktop with me to Oxford. The Center for the Physics of Information had bought it for me, so it wasn't obvious a priori that I'd be allowed to take it with me. Anyway, it looks like I'll be able to use it to start my computer cluster and I'll have something immediately available for students of mine to use. That computer is called "Arkham" and its admin is "Cthulhu", so I guess my first computer cluster is going to be the Lovecraft cluster. So I'm thinking that Dunwich, Ipswich, and so on will be the names of the subsequent computers and their admins will be Elder Gods.

Also, one of the books I wanted to read (that I knew was coming out this month) is now out, so I need to head over to a bookstore to buy it. Another one I want is coming out on September 25th, so I'll also pick that one up before I leave. Both are set on Toril, and both are about drow.

Nature's Casino: Catastrophe Insurance and Heavy Tails

Courtesy David Richard, here is an interesting (but very long!) article on catastrophe insurance.

The part that was most interesting to me was the discussion of heavy-tailed phenomena like catastrophes and how one prices insurance for them as a result of that. (The mathematical problem is that the events are so rare that one does not have a large amount of data to get good results by itself. One of the things around this at which the article hints briefly is to use physical models to generate tons of data and then use that to help with the predictions, though that was tangential to the article's crux.)

Also, while the article is interesting, I do find it a bit creepy that there are basically gamblers betting on future Katrinas and that that has become an enormous business since that disaster struck. (The cynic in me isn't surprised, but I do feel somehow disappointed.)

Finally, the author of the article, Michael Lewis, also wrote Moneyball (which has a more baseball-oriented theme).

Baseball box score of the day

Only in September do we see baseball box scores like this one, in which the Rockies set a National League record and tied a Major League record by using 10 pitchers in a nine inning game. (Similar things sometimes occur in early spring training games, but one typically also gets a lot of position player substitutions in those.)

Old school broadcast: Bill Murray filling in for Harry Caray

On Rob Neyer's blog on ESPN on Wednesday was a link to five clips of the Cubs-Expos game from 1987 in which Bill Murray filled in for Harry Caray. The play-by-play announcer for that game was Steve Stone, who is a really good announcer.

I actually saw parts of this game many years ago, but I had completely forgotten about this. Bill Murray was hilarious, and he said some things that would get people in trouble nowadays if they said them during a broadcast. (Actually, Murray said things that would be considered much worse than things that have gotten people in trouble. Of course, many of those comments were funny. Naturally, we would still be able to see that stuff in a stand-up comedy routine.) This game was a famous one in which the umpires' uniforms didn't arrive, so the game was delayed as they tried to find a mish-mosh of things to wear. Also noteworthy is that one player on the Cubs roster that day, Jamie Moyer, is still pitching in the Major Leagues.

Adventures in Moving Insurance

I just spent an hour and a half futile hours trying to fill out several pages of insurance forms pertaining to my upcoming move to Oxford.

As stated explicitly in the insurance forms, spontaneous combustion is not covered by this insurance. It was listed among several things known collectively as "inherent vices", which means "the inherent nature of the goods to become easily destroyed". (What they're really getting at here is death by natural causes --- such as battery decay in old iPods, rust, and so on --- as opposed to their breaking something, but I find their phrasing to be pretty curious, and I find the explicit statement about spontaneous combustion to be particularly odd.) My goods must repent their sins! Now, damnit! No more spontaneous combustion! I won't stand for it!

Another weird thing is that cordless phones are apparently considered restricted/prohibited goods in the UK. I'm going to have to ask (Mike)^2 about that one. I was hoping to continue using one, because I really like those. Maybe they can only be in certain frequency ranges?

Anyway, I want to insure my stuff by filling out this shit. (OK, that joke didn't work, but there really has to be a way to properly allude to George Carlin's "A Place for my Stuff" with this shit.) I filled this out to the best of my ability (which isn't actually saying much), but when it asks for the quantity of various shit, my case of OCD is no even close to extreme enough to count my books one by one. That's just way too much of a pain in the ass. (I basically did separate estimates for textbooks and other books.) Moreover, prices for a lot of this stuff is different in the UK, and I am not going to spend tons of hours investigating the precise differences. Doing my best to approximate things makes the most sense to me.

The customs part of the form wants you to write down everything bought in the 6 months prior to the move. For me, this would include a bunch of books, and I can't even nail down the precise number of them I'm taking with me that I've purchased in this time frame.

Well, I'll fax this to the people at the UK insurance company and we'll see if I need to be more specific about anything.

The King of Kong

Tonight I saw the movie The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters with Lemming and James Yoon.

This movie is right up there with Stardust, The Namesake, and The Transformers as my favorite films of the year. The movie was fantastic, and I encourage all of you to see it.

The basic premise involves a battle between two middle-aged men to obtain the world record in the arcade game Donkey Kong. (I spent a decent number of quarters on it, and it's pretty damned hard in my opinion. I found many of the older arcade games to be much easier than this one.) One of them, Billy Mitchell, is one of the hotshots from the "Golden Era" of arcade games. (The story of what they've done with their lives is told in the upcoming film, Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade, which is currently making the rounds in the film festivals and which I also really want to see. One of Mitchell's contemporaries was Steve Harris, the founder of a little magazine I like to call EGM.) He was depicted in the movie as a total asshole, which is also how I've read various articles depicting him over the years. The other is a newcomer to competitive gaming, Steve Wiebe, who (to put it mildly) was depicted in a much better light.

The film was amazing. The topic was really interesting, and the humor was rampant. (Wiebe's little girl had the funniest --- and wisest --- line of the film about people ruining their lives to get themselves into the Guinness Book of World Records. The background music included several songs that were both appropriate and awesome --- including Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" and Animotion's "Obsession". There were some other recognizable tunes as well, such as the one that plays during the closing credits for which I wasn't properly braced (Techers: you've been warned).

We also saw some awesome trailers before the movie, so I now have a few more films that I am eagerly anticipating.

Anyway, The King of Kong gets my highest endorsement. Go see it!

Quote of the Day (Vin Scully edition)

I have frequently waxed poetic about Dodger broadcaster Vin Scully's eloquence and sheer awesomeness. His voice is smooth and his broadcasts are replete with metaphors, history and allusions (from baseball, literature, and so on), and lots of other great things. Baseball, he is an artist behind the mike.

The Dodgers are routing the Chicago Cubs today (as I write this, the score is 11-2). Vin described the crowd in Chicago simply as "Sullen if not mutinous."

I have listened to Vin announce games for 28 years now. IMNSHO, he's the best announcer ever! (By the way, in looking up his wikipedia article, I see that its neutrality is disputed. Given how awesome he is, that doesn't surprise me at all.)

Fact of the Day (I get my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine!)

As most of you reading this know, the character of Giles in the show Buffy is played by Anthony Head. The last name is a bit of an odd one (IMO) and it occurred to me a few minutes ago that I know of only one other person with that last name --- Murray Head, the singer of One Night in Bangkok, which is only one of the best songs ever.

Following this whim, I just looked both of them up without really expecting that they have anything to do with each other. As it turns out, however, they're brothers. Awesome!

20th Anniversary of Baseball's Famous Potato Incident

My brother sent me a link to this article that reminded me that August 31st was the 20th anniversary of baseball's famous potato incident. (I remember reading about the incident and seeing it on the local newscasts back in 1987, but I hadn't thought about it for a while.)

The link tells the story really well, but here's the synoposis. Dave Bresnahan, the back-up catcher for a minor league team, had been planning this particular prank for a while. (The article discussions some of his preparations.) There was a runner on third base and he was catching. He threw a potato (that he had prepared) --- that was shaped roughly like a baseball and on which he had drawn appropriate markings --- to third base ostensibly to try to pick off the runner. Bresnahan purposely made a bad throw and the potato sailed into left field. Meanwhile, the runner tried to score because he thought the catcher had thrown the ball away. However, Bresnahan tagged him with the actual baseball when the runner got to the plate. The umpire ended up awarding home plate to the runner and Bresnahan was released the next day. (Note that Bresnahan was likely going to be axed very soon anyway and is now much more famous than he otherwise would have been.) The potato is proudly displayed in the Baseball Reliquary.

Hu's at Shortstop

I've been waiting for this day ever since the Futures Game during the All-Star break.

The rosters expanded on September 1st, so a lot of players have been called up from the minor leagues. In the September 1st game against the Padres (in which we got shut out 7-0 because Jake Peavy pitched yet another masterpiece), Dodger farmhand Chin-Lung Hu made his Majoe League debut, coming in as a defensive replacement for Rafel Furcal at shortstop.

Of course, I'm still waiting for Hu to get his first single or walk so that the announcer will be able to say that "Hu's on first". Ahhhh... I enjoy the simple pleasures in life so very much.

RIP Alfred H. Peet (1920-2007)

Alfred H. Peet, founder of my favorite coffee franchise, died on August 29th.