The Birth of The Pink Panther

That was the working title of The Pink Panther (circa 2006), which I just got back from seeing. As such a huge part of my paradigm, it is very appropriate that the movie came out on my birthday. Some of you, of course, know very well that The Pink Panther has played this role in my life, given that I used it as the theme in my Ditch Day stack and the fact that I hosted several viewings of Pink Panther movies in Lloyd back in the day.

This film was billed as a prequel, although it takes place in the modern era (Clouseau isn't lonely because of the internet, for example). What makes it so is that we see how Clouseau is promoted to Inspector, which is where we get the working title.

Steve Martin did a good job as Clouseau, although I wish Dreyfuss were more neurotic (though Dreyfuss was given roughly the correct amount of abuse). The opening cartoon was awesome. The Clouseau in it was (sensibly) made to look like Steve Martin rather than Peter Sellers. Martin's pre-Inspector outfit reminds me a bit of my version of Clouseau. (There are also some familiar people in the picture with me.) I also wish Cato were around.

Anyway, the movie was very good, although it doesn't match the genius of the original series of films. (The key, of course, is not to hold it up to such standards.) Blake Edwards kind of got shafted in the making of this film, which is really too bad. Nevertheless, I recommend the film highly---don't let the low IMDB rating scare you.

Here are some other not-so-random thoughts: The identity of the murderer was pretty obvious to the audience very early in the film (from meta-knowledge). The James Bond reference was gratuitous (though somewhat amusing). The thing about finding everybody with the name 'You' was highly amusing (and was brought back in the end in a cool manner). At the end, Clouseau solved the murder by figuring things out rather than by stumbling into the perpetrator. True, there was plenty of stumbling, but (IMO) Clouseau simply shouldn't be actually solving any crimes by correct deduction!

Anyway, stop reading this and go see the film!

Happy 197th Birthday to Charles Darwin!

Continuing the recent birthday theme, Charles Darwin would be 197 if he were alive today. Arcane Gazebo has also posted on this topic.

By the way, I forgot to mention that I have started my research into "Intelligent Congress"---you know, the fact that the Rules and Homeland Security committees have close ties they're not supposed to (during the 107th and 108th Congresses) because of Jesus. So there! :)

I can be so nice in what I say/write sometimes...

Shrooms!

The cover story of the March issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society (the AMS's analog of Physics Today) comes from my work. The actual cover is a portion of a phase portrait of a particular mushroom billiard (to be explained shortly). This is my third cover story overall, but my first in about 4.5 years. One of the others was also for an expository paper and the other was for a pair of research articles that appeared back-to-back.

The first important thing here is to define and discuss mathematical billiards, which come in both classical and quantum varieties. In the classical version, a particle (usually but not always a point particle) collides elastically inside (or sometimes outside) a boundary of some shape, and the properties one gets (whether it's chaotic or not, for example) depend fundamentally on the shape. In the language of classical mechanics, this system has two degrees of freedom, so whether or not a region is chaotic depends on whether anything besides energy is a constant of motion there. The quantum version is essentially a particle-in-a-box, but with funky properties coming from the weird box shapes. (Quantum billiards are fundamental to the subject of quantum chaos, on which I did my Ph.D. thesis.)

Anyway, billiards can either be fully "integrable" (non-chaotic, loosely speaking---though this is not entirely accurate and is certainly not a definition), fully chaotic---either via a direct dispersing mechanism, as in the Sinai billiard (which consists of an exterior square boundary and interior circular one), or a net defocusing mechanism after initial focusing, as in the Bunimovich stadium (which consists of two parallel line segments with circular caps), or mixed (with some integrable regions and some chaotic regions). (The previous sentence is stylistically poor, but I hope you can parse it.) Bunimovich was my postdoc advisor at Georgia Tech, by the way.

A mushroom billiard is a generalization of the stadium billiard. Behavior is regular for trajectories that stay in the cap (because circular billiards are integrable) and chaotic for all trajectories (except for a set of measure zero) that enter the stem. The expository article in question discusses both mushroom billiards and generalized mushroom billiards. Billiards of very precise geometries can---and have been---built in laboratories, by the way. Cold atoms probably give the best control in terms of geometry, but several other systems have been used to do this as well. Also, the infamous question of "Can you hear the shape of a drum?" is a quantum billiard problem (because one again has the Helmholtz equation with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions).

You can find more details in the expository article and an about-to-appear research article of mine (I'll post an entry on this once the published version gets posted online, which might actually be any day now), as well as the references in the expository article, of course.

The plots in the article (and on the cover) were created using a GUI billiard simulator for Matlab that I had one of my students designed. (I subsequently supervised this student's work on scientific problems with the GUI and on some multiple-particle billiards that didn't use the GUI but had some similarities in its code.) Technically, figure 1 was based on a pair of those plots rather than being produced from the GUI per se.

Incrementing the 10s digit

Today I turned 30, or---in the preferred hexadecimal system---1D.

Now that I have achieved one full dimension, I'll try for existence and uniqueness of solutions. (Then I'll try for a non-constructive solution.)

Headline: "World's Scientists Admit They Just Don't Like Mice"

This was passed along to me from Maria King, a friend from high school. The article is here. OK, so the press conference actually occurred in 2004, but this was news to me, so I'm passing it along now.

Now, I wonder what those mice in Hitchhiker's Guide would think about this?

Happy Birthday to Jing!

It's Jing's birthday today. She is now 31. As she is a die-hard Scurve, I encourage people to send her pentagrams in celebration.

We need to do a joint birthday party. You should come to Pasadena on Wednesday. :)

Fresh from the crackpot files

Here's an abstract of a paper that just got posted on the arXiv:

\Paper: physics/0602051
Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2006 15:02:44 GMT (15kb)

Title: A Tempt To Measure Reality
Authors: Bhag C. Chauhan
Comments: 17 pages, Submitted for Foundation of Physics
Subj-class: Popular Physics; Physics and Society
\ Despite the extraordinary successes the two great bastions of $20^{th}$ century science (Quantum Theory and General Relativity) are troubled with serious conceptual and mathematical difficulties. As a result, further growth of fundamental science is at stake. Is this the end of science? Optimistic answer is ``NOT''! In this work, it is argued that science must continue its cruise, but with anew strategy -- a thorough recourse into the grass-root level working of science is inevitable. In fact, our conventional scientific methods are based upon ordinary sense perception, which keeps the outer physical
universe as a separate entity, that is something quite independent of the observer. Basically, it is the observer -- the knower (human mind) -- which makes perception possible. It makes a person or scientist to recognize or refute the existence of an object or a phenomenon. It is also tempted to evince that working of human mind is epistemically scientific and can, in principle, be completely deciphered. It's inclusion in scientific theories, although tedious, can certainly spark a revolution in our understanding of nature and reality.
\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0602051 , 15kb)
%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-%-
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And even if it isn't the end of science as we know it, it may well be the end of spell-checking as we know it...

How to design a bathroom in the least ergonomic way possible

This room is kind of funny, although it's got a big bed and wireless, so all the necessities of life are basically here.

The bathroom is placed where I thought there would be a closet (I briefly thought there might not be a bathroom). The toilet is flushed via a button rather than a nob, and the button is on top of the thing rather than to the side (it's right under the platform that extends from where the sink is). The towel racks are all about as far away from the sink as possible and the toilet paper rack is on the opposite side of the room as the toilet. Seriously, who designed this?

Anyway, if I don't wrench my arm out of its socket while I get ready for bed and then when I get ready for the big day tomorrow, I am very much looking forward to the discussions and lab tour during the next couple days. I know a bunch of the people here from before, so I'll get a chance to see what research they're up to nowadays + I'll meet some new people (some of whom have posted arXiv articles I didn't have time to read, so this is my chance to learn about them), so this should be fun. The seminar part is kind of stressful, but the one-on-one conversations (and lab tours!) are the part of a scientific interview where I get to enjoy myself even while the stakes are high.

I'm trying for one of my dream jobs and how many people get that chance.

This is a new one

I flew via Alaska Airlines for the first time. (It was the most convenient/cheapest flight I saw on Expedia.) When they gave us our food, I noticed that the meal came with a card that said 'Alaska Airlines' and a psalm on it (I mention their logo to highlight that the airline is sponsoring this). I've never seen this before, and it annoyed me. (I made a point to tear up that card and leave it on top of my leftovers.) Have any of you seen this before on an airplane? I'm assuming the owner of the airline is a devote Christian or something and is proselytizing, because I otherwise don't see the purpose of this. Presumably, there's no reason they wouldn't be allowed to do it, but this makes me uncomfortable, so I'm going to be voting with my wallet on this one and choosing other airlines if the price is comparable. (If Alaska Airlines is cheaper, I'll suck up their annoying cards, because of sense of cheapness is pretty acute as well.)

By the way, it occurred to me during the flight that churches should have 'Beware of God' signs in front of them. Maybe the bark is worse than the bite?

I'm tired and hungry. Damn flight delays. I considered ordering food, but I need to get up early tomorrow, so I'm better of being hungry now and eating breakfast (which is unusual for me) tomorrow.

What global warming?

Here is an article concerning the resignation of George Deutsch, who was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA's public affairs office in Washington last year after working on George II's re-election campaign and inaugural committee. This guy was helping to try to prevent people from bringing global warming issues to the public. It turns out that his resume was padded in the sense that he attended Texas A & M but didn't actually graduate from it (despite the claim on his resume). This was first reported in a blog on Monday, so I'm waiting for the Gazebo to take his shot at ending the career of someone in Washington. :)

Also, I wanted to make a brief comment on the issue of resume padding. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but I remember a discussion I had with a couple people at Georgia Tech (a Masters student who then got hired at GTRI and a couple undergrads) who apparently are not flagrantly against crap like this the way I am. Their attitude (which seems to correspond far more closely to the prevalent one than mine does) is it's ok if one can get away with it. They didn't take too kindly when I informed them how disgusting that attitude was. Their counter was to invoke a situation in which I found out that somebody who worked for me (and who I felt was doing very good work) had padded their resume that had been part of the decision-making process when I hired them. They felt I should be happy because of the quality of the work and that the other stuff didn't matter. Basically, that's utter shit because once I find out that they've done that, I can't trust them to be honest with me about their science. There's no way, for example, that I'd be able to vouch for their work again because in my head I'd always have this feeling that they might be dishonest about that too (after having seen precedent for it). This seems so obvious to me, but apparently it's not for many people.

700 Sundays + a couple other notes

I spent today at my parents' place. (Well, my brother picked me up a little after 11am, we dealt with a doctor's appointment, and another errand, and then we headed home.) I went with my brother and mother to see Billy Crystal's "700 Sundays" at the Wilshire Theatre. It was decent and definitely had some very funny moments (especially in the second half), but it wasn't anything special in my opinion and he dwelled on many points far longer than they deserved. My brother was actually seeing it for the second time, so I guess he really likes it. Most of the audience seemed to love it, but to me it was no more than decent.

My mother was having lots of trouble walking, and I noticed one of those 4-legged things people can use to help stabilize themselves when they walk (although she didn't use it). I hadn't seen that before (including when I was here a month ago), nor had I noticed this degree of difficulty in her walking before. Getting down the stairs after the show was quite a chore, and the theatre was not designed in a way that facilitates things for people having such trouble. Anyway, my grandparents were already old when I came into the world, so this is obviously a bit different mentally (as far as the way I see these things).

There's stuff I found out today I could rant about a great deal (like apparently having to suddenly write a check for a HUGE sum within two weeks when the person [my brother] who informed me of this today already knew about this several months ago and never bothered to tell me---actually, I still don't have a complete explanation of where this is coming from, so I'll be getting that and seeing the "bill" before I am willing to pay a cent---and the simple apology I got for this was on the order of an I'm sorry I ate your hamburger apology that just doesn't come close to cutting it), but I'll stick with this for now. If I go completely all out on this, it will help to remove the calm state I am attempting to attain for my interview. I have managed to calm myself down today, and maybe it's just the existence of other problems removing the "immediate" stress I've been experiencing lately.

Oh, and a nice microcosm of what it's like dealing with my family (and why I don't consider myself to really be a part of it---it's like I'm their et mathematician or something---he's refuting what we say; oh how cute!) comes from the following snippet of an exchange with my father about 30 minutes ago:

My father: [[states an opinion]]

Me: "That's against all empirical evidence."

My father: "It doesn't matter."


Note that there was no attempt to refute my statement about where the evidence lies (which is fair; maybe there's some reason to believe that's not what the evidence shows)---just a statement that empirical evidence makes no difference to when it comes to his making his claim. My comment was simply dismissed.

Now the matter being discussed happened to be inconsequential, but I've seen him do the same thing on political stuff, world events, etc.

My response was to give a firm rebuke, finish the conversation, and return to the comfort of my computer and solitude. If attempts to bring evidence into play are just going to be dismissed as being irrelevant, there's really not much point to having any sort of conversation.

Oh, so how many separate 666 point cards are getting played from this one?

At least I ranted while remaining calm. Hell, I ranted more about the microcosm than about the fucking over I got, and the latter is kind of more important (at least financially)---probably because I couldn't have remained calm if I went on too long about the latter.

Now it's time to do the best I can with my interview. The place is a really good fit for me, and I think this is the best opportunity I've ever had.

Preferential attachment model for wikipedia

A paper discussing a preferential attachment model for wikipedia was just posted on the arXiv:

\Paper: physics/0602026
Date: Sat, 4 Feb 2006 00:07:39 GMT (50kb)

Title: Preferential attachment in the growth of social networks: the case of
Wikipedia
Authors: A. Capocci, V.D.P. Servedio, F. Colaiori, L.S. Buriol, D. Donato, S.
Leonardi and G. Caldarelli
Comments: 4 pages, 4 figures, revtex
Subj-class: Physics and Society
\ We present an analysis of the statistical properties and growth of the free on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. By describing topics by vertices and hyperlinks between them as edges, we can represent this encyclopedia as a directed graph. The topological properties of this graph are in close analogy with that of the World Wide Web, despite the very different growth mechanism. In particular we measure a scale--invariant distribution of the in-- and out-- degree and we are able to reproduce these features by means of a simple statistical model. As a major consequence, Wikipedia growth can be described by local rules such as the preferential attachment mechanism, though users can act globally on the network.
\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0602026 , 50kb)



Also just appearing on the arXiv was the archival sequel of my paper on Congress. I'll discuss this more later after we go through the refereeing process, but maybe you'll be interested in taking a look at what I like to call the "Zell Miller plot". Here is the arxiv entry:

\Paper: physics/0602033
Date: Sat, 4 Feb 2006 22:41:34 GMT (376kb)

Title: Community Structure in the United States House of Representatives
Authors: Mason A. Porter, Peter J. Mucha, M. E. J. Newman, and A. J. Friend
Comments: 46 pages (double spaced, 10 pt), 11 figures (some with multiple parts
and most in color), submitted to Social Networks
Subj-class: Physics and Society; Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
\ We investigate the networks of committee and subcommittee assignments in the United States House of Representatives from the 101st--108th Congresses, with committees connected according to ``interlocks'' or common membership. We
examine the House's community structure using several methods, which reveal strong links between different committees as well as the intrinsic hierarchical structure within the House as a whole. We identify structural changes, including additional hierarchical levels and higher modularity, resulting from the 1994 elections, in which the Republican party earned majority status in the House for the first time in more than forty years. We also combine our network approach with analysis of roll call votes using singular value decomposition to uncover correlations between the political and organizational structure of
House committees.
\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0602033 , 376kb)


You can also find the paper here.

Superbowl commercials

Thanks to this link posted by the Gazebo, I was able to take a look at the new Superbowl commercials (or at least some reasonable fraction thereof) without actually watching the Superbowl. (Today was a tremendously "fun" day of preparing seminar slides...)

The Emerlad Nuts one was cool, and the Jackie Chan "stunt double" one also stands out.

D & D scheduling for weekend of 2/10

I am out of town until about 12:30 on Saturday, so I am available all day on Sunday and starting in the late afternoon on Saturday.

That said, I have a strong preference for Sunday if it's possible because I'm going to be very tired on Saturday. I would, however, like to go out to dinner on Saturday (Black Angus?) to help me unwind from my interview.

Let me know what your availabilities are next weekend.

My birthday celebration will be on Wednesday 2/15. I'll send a separate e-mail about this. I still need to figure out precise timing.

Transamerica

I saw Transamerica today. It's kind of like Brokeback Mountain (which I haven't seen), except with Transformers instead of cowboys. If you want to find out about the real relationship between Megatron and Soundwave, then this is the movie to see! (Well, what did you think all those cassettes were for? They're props, of course!)

OK, so the movie is really about a transgendered person getting a grip with past life to be able to move ahead. It's not great as a whole (it's decent), although the Oscar-nominated song from the film actually is pretty reasonable and Felicity Huffman gave an extremely good performance in the starring role. The movie has some good lines and does a good job sending it's message, but it wasn't entirely my cup of tea. (Basically, it's clear to me why the movie is getting rave reviews, but I was hoping it would have more of the comedic moments that I was under the impression were included.)

I've been wanting to see Munich and Capote, but I just haven't been in the mood for movies that serious (that are also on touchy subjects). I want more vampires.

Will a Tit-for-Tat strategy win this contest too?

James Fowler, a UC Davis political scientist (with whom I may be collaborating on some future Congressional networks research---we've been discussing some of this stuff on and off since May) is co-running a contest with Michael Laver of NYU a tournament for party strategies in a dynamic agent-based spatial model of party competition. This contest is directly motivated by Robert Axelrod's famous tournament for strategies in the repeat-play prisoner’s dilemma game, in which some variant of the Tit-for-Tat strategy keeps winning every time. (The simplest version of this strategy is to do in turn N [namely, defect or cooperate] exactly what your opponent did in turn N - 1 with a 50/50 initial condition.)

The link I gave has a lot more details for this contest, which is ideal for applied mathematics/CS/algorithm people. The deadline is 4/15 (probably no coincidence there). I only remembered to pass along this info recently---James asked me to pass this along recently when he was giving me some comments on a paper draft I'm about to submit for publication. I saw the announcement on his website earlier, but I hadn't remembered to spread the news. Stuff like this would make a superb project for Caltech undergrads (ignoring their time constraints, for a second) and former ones, for that matter.

(Note: This is a republishing of an entry from yesterday that accidently got erased. Blogspot's been a bit flaky during the last day or so.)

"Honk if you're in an excited state."

This is a bumper sticker that I would like to see.

One that I saw (on a stop sign in Atlanta's gay epicenter) was "Too many gerbils, too little time." One of which I have heard but have never seen is "Sorry I didn't go to church on Sunday. I was too busy practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian."

Any favorites you want to share?

Phoning home in San Francisco's ballpark

The San Fransisco Giant's ballpark is again changing its name from that of one communications company to another. It has been known as SBC Park but will now be called AT & T Park. Actually, it's not really fair for me to use the term "different company" because SBC purchased AT & T and will be changing its name to the latter one. Before it was called SBC Park, the stadium was called Pacific Bell Park. Where is The Stick when we need it? (Candlestick Park ended its life under the name of 3Com Park.)

Notice the trend...?

Coming February 14th: The Red Hand of Doom

No really... A Dungeons & Dragons accessory called The Red Hand of Doom is scheduled to be released on Valentine's Day. I love it!

Here is a blurb about the product, which faces the players against Tiamat worshippers. While looking at this, I noticed that a 3rd edition version of the Tome of Magic is coming out in March. The link is here. It looks like it may not share much more than the name with the second edition version of that book, but we'll see. I'm intrigued, at the very least.

In deference to Ben Williamson, at least we're talking about the Red Hand of doom instead of The Black Hand of doom. (Do any of you know to whom that refers? There is a specific Caltech alum who some of us known as The Black Hand (out of respect for Ben).

The Disciples of Millikan Man

I was getting a haircut after work today and NBC news was on. They were discussing some murders (including an apparently record-setting spree by a postal worker or former postal worker who, as the saying goes, went postal) when they gave a teaser for after their commercial break for a rescue of Caltech students dressed in tutus after an incident that the police were investigating in the context of hazing. Right before the next commercial break, they gave another teaser (essentially repeating the statements from before) but also showed a very brief video clip of campus. Basically, all they showed was the a pan of the words "Page House" (what a shock).

The initiation ritual in question was the annual Mount Wilson trip for Page frosh, where they are paraded around parts of Pasadena in funny outfits (in this case, capes and tutus were mentioned in the article), driven up to Mt. Wilson at night, from which they had to walk 10 miles back to Page. Now, I can't say anything about this year's event, but I know from my era that Page frosh were not forced to participate (at least not in Winter 97, to be technically accurate about my statement). I wouldn't put it past some of the people from Page (Sux) to do this, but I'm guessing there was no hazing involved here.

What happened was some unforseen road blockage, so the Techers had to call for a rescue, and they got picked up at around 3am. According to the AP Wire report (shown here in the San Jose Mercury News), they didn't have appropriate equipment (like flashlights and clothing for cold weather) with them. As one of the rescuers said, "You've got to remember that common sense is not factored into the intelligence quotient." I know we've all seen that at Tech...

I just checked Travis's blog to see if he already wrote something about this. He did, so here is his entry.

Update (2/2/06): I was misremembering something yesterday. As Lemming mentioned in the comments on Travis's entry, the upperclassmen are waiting in cars two or three miles away (although I wonder if the frosh have had to walk all the way back some years?). However, I do have vague memories of Greg Fricke '00 missing the pick-up and actually walking all the way back to Page.