Real Printer (tm): Condensed Matter Edition

The Condensed Matter Group's spiffy new $2000 printer arrived today. (Actually, this printer may only apply to the first-floor condensed matter people. And people like Jim Eisenstein have printers in their own office anyway.) I haven't actually used it yet, but the one it replaced was an increasingly feisty piece of crap that dates back numerous years and (most recently) would become jammed ("Raspberry!") with any document with double-digit pages and very likely was around when I was a Caltech student. (It's close. It might have been bought right after I lefty, but it's really close.) Sadly, the new printer on the block isn't a color printer, but the derivative of the printer quality with respect to time is really bloody positive so I'll take it! (The old printer was crappy when I got here, but it was on its death throes for weeks.)

One of the professors promised me a couple weeks ago that I could have the dying printer to drop off of Millikan Library. I wonder if he'll keep his promise...

What D & D Character are you?

I remember doing one of these that pretty much focused on character class, and I was curious what race and alignment I'd end up with, so I tried the following version of What D & D character are you?.

I actually came up almost exactly what I thought I'd end up with. I am apparently a true neutral dwarf mage thief (and a follower of Dumathoin). I didn't predict thief and I didn't bother picking a Forgotten Realms diety. (I predicted true neutral dwarf mage.)

Here is the longer version (with the requested link from the html code I am copying):

I Am A: True Neutral Dwarf Mage Thief


Alignment:
True Neutral characters are very rare. They believe that balance is the most important thing, and will not side with any other force. They will do whatever is necessary to preserve that balance, even if it means switching allegiances suddenly.


Race:
Dwarves are short and stout, and easily recognizable by their well-cared-for beards. They are hard workers, and adept at stonework and engineering. They tend to live apart from other races; generally in deep, underground excavated systems, and as such tend to be distant from other races.


Primary Class:
Mages harness the magical energies for their own use. Spells, spell books, and long hours in the library are their loves. While often not physically strong, their mental talents can make up for this.


Secondary Class:
Thieves are the most roguish of the classes. They are sneaky and nimble-fingered, and have skills with traps and locks. While not all use these skills for burglary, that is a common occupation of this class.


Deity:
Dumathoin is the True Neutral dwarven god of buried wealth, ores, gems, and mining. He is also known as the Keeper of Secrets under the Mountain. His followers are typically miners and explorers, but also respect the beauty of the earth. They also stand guard over the dwarven dead. Their preferred weapon is the maul. Dumathoin's symbol is a faceted gem set inside a mountain peak.


Find out What D&D Character Are You?, courtesy ofNeppyMan (e-mail)




Some detailed results:

Alignment: True Neutral beat out Lawful Neutral by only one answer. The only chaotic alignment with nonnegative results was CN. Neutral evil had the lowest score of -6.

Race: Dwarf and gnome each got 7 points. (Gnome was actually my second choice for what I thought I'd get.) I got a -5 score on half-orc and a -2 in human. ("I'm a human being!" --- I hope somebody catches this reference.)

Class: +5 on mage, +3 on thief, +2 on bard, +1 on cleric, and negative numbers on everything else (lead by the -6 on fighter, -4 on druid, and -3 on paladin).

Deal or No Deal?

When I was looking something up on IMDB today, I noticed an advertisement for the gameshow Deal or No Deal?. The host is Howie Mandel, who has done some funny stuff before---I really enjoyed his show Good Grief, which lasted all of half a season. (He was also amusing in his occasional appearances on Politically Incorrect.) This show was well-known for being in extremely poor taste, which is one of the reasons I enjoyed it. In it, he works at Sincerity Mortuary, at which all sorts of antics occur. In fact, the original commercial for the show pretended it was a commercial for a reasl mortuary---We see an unctiously cheerful Mandel saying "At Sincerity Mortuary, we cry because we care! [pause] And we bury them because they're dead! [sobs into his hand]." All they were missing during their funerals and burials was the playing of "Another One Bites the Dust" (though there is a commercial for sound-proofing windows in which the guy driving a Heasre is blasting that song---I love that commercial!), so I'll make up for that by putting it in my will that that song is to be played at my funeral. (Yes, I really will be doing that. It's going to be the most tasteless funeral ever!)

Anyway, back to the point at hand.

So, the show is basically like the 'what's behind door # N' minigame of Let's Make a Deal except on crack. The actual show isn't all that fun to watch (because they belabor everything, just like Who Wants to be a Millionaire?), but there's a nice probability problem here (and some nice PS12ing to do). And I wanted to give it a chance and watch it once. Anyway, there are 26 models holding 26 cases, each of which holds some amount of money---ranging from 1 cent to $1 million. I believe that the median values (among the 26 "increments", as Howie Mandel called an individual value one time; oops) are $500 and $1000. The values below $500 don't really matter as far as the expectation is concerned (they can mid-game, but if you're ever in that case, you're pretty screwed anyway). There's also $5000, $10000, $25000, $50000, $75000, $100000, and then 200, 400, 500, and 750 K, and then $1 million. (Anyway, I think I got the numbers mostly correct, but this is at least enough info to see how many of the larger values are around.)

A contestant starts by picking 1 case. (I would so bring my D & D dice with me if I were a contestant on this show.) He/she must then pick 6 of the other cases to reveal. Those values are crossed off. Given the ones left (one of which is in the case the contestant chose), the contestant is offer a deal with an appropriately chosen amount. He/she can either take the money or not. If not, five more cases are revealed. The contestant gets an offer based on the amounts remaining, and can either take it or not. If not, four more cases are revealed. Then it goes to 3, and then 2, and then sequences of 1's. In terms of PS12ing, the key is how many big values are left on the board versus how many cases have to be revealed the next time. (It was amusing how they would root for the lowest value left to be in the chosen case even when the lowest N values would all have essentially isomorphic effects on the expectation.) The public at large has very fundamental issues inderstanding probability... (Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in economics for his research on that subject, by the way.)

In sum, this show makes a nice probability problem.

New Baseball Hall-of-Famers

The results of a special election to consider Negro League (and pre-Negro League minority) players, managers, and executives were announced today. This yielded 17 new Hall-of-Famers, including the first female to be inducted (former team-owner Effa Manley).

The Never-Ending Quest for Power Laws

Here's the abstract for a paper just posted on the arXiv. Its main conclusion seems to be the presence of a power law distribution. Sigh... there are so many ways for such things to occur by accident. It's ok for theoretical work to start with such an observation, but a start is what it should be---not the main result! Maybe the actual contents of the paper are better, but with this abstract, I'm not going to even bother to look.

By the way, I love the last sentence in the abstract.


\Paper: physics/0602165
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 06:23:27 GMT (40kb)

Title: Power-law distribution in Japanese racetrack betting
Authors: Takashi Ichinomiya
Comments: to be published in Physica A
Subj-class: Physics and Society
\ Gambling is one of the basic economic activities that humans indulge in. An investigation of gambling activities provides deep insights into the economic actions of people and sheds lights on the study of econophysics. In this paper we present an analysis of the distribution of the final odds of the races organized by the Japan Racing Association. The distribution of the final odds $P_o(x)$ indicates a clear power law $P_o(x)\propto 1/x$, where $x$ represents the final odds. This power law can be explained on the basis of the assumption that that every bettor bets his money on the horse that appears to be the strongest in a race.
\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0602165 , 40kb)

Baseball America's Top 100 Prospects

Baseball America just posted their Top 100 Prospects of 2006.

Expect a few particular ones to have standout seasons in the Major Leagues this season. Jeremy Hermida of the Marlins comes to mind immediately, as he's basically already been given a starting spot in the lineup. The same goes for Prince Fielder (son of Cecil) for the Brewers, although Hermida offers many more dimensions than Fielder (pure power).

Overheard in New York

Gazebo has mentioned Overhread in New York a couple times in his blog, so I wanted to pass it along for those of you here who aren't already seeing it there (you gotta' love set-theoretic minuses). It has some high-quality stuff.

D & D scheduling for weekend of 3/3

I'm free all weekend.

Early warning: Next weekend, I will only be free on Friday and Saturday (because I fly to the March Meeting on Sunday).

Today's Threesome

Well, we started with some frisbee (although we didn't have enough people for ultimate frisbee). I hadn't played in 6 months, and before that it had been close to 3 years. I want to get back into playing regularly like I did at Cornell, so now that it's starting to get dark later, hopefully that will happen.

Then we watched three movies at Jorian's place. (What kind of threesome did you think I meant? I have trouble enough getting a date, so I'm just going to go for a walk or something. On base percentage is a more important statistic than slugging percentage anyway...)

First off Bull Durham, which right a very important wrong in my life. That was the clear #1 among movies I should have seen but hadn't yet. I can safely pronounce that this movie is fucking awesome. It goes very high on my list and will be on my 80s list of movies when it comes time to discuss that. There are so many one-liners in there! The movie was hilarious! I had heard many of the movie's lines before, including important parts of certain scenes (like the version of the "lollygagging" scene that ESPN used in a Sportscenter commercial). Manager (loudly) : "You know what you are?" (Pitching coach, calmly: "Lollygaggers.") Manager (loudly): "Lollygaggers!"

I saw a headline in the movie about "Whiten" tearing up the minors and wondered if they meant (then-)prospect Mark Whiten, who had an 11-year major league career. As you can see on IMDB, they did indeed mean him. Also, the Costner line about think Oswald acted alone is in direct contradiction to the opinions of the person he played in JFK. (The lines in question here are also ones I have seen several times.)

The movie gets the whole minor league thing really well, and I had been known to occasionally make references to things in the movie even though I hadn't seen it. That wrong has now been righted. The big question now is which movie is now #1 among ones I should have seen but haven't yet seen. In the case of Bull Durham, it was obvious because we had a movie that was a classic, a comedy, and about baseball (and on the short short list of the classic baseball movies [actually, of the classic sports movies]). I haven't seen Field of Dreams and while that too is a crime, it's not obviously #1 on the list. Any ideas of which movie it might be? Suggestions should come from things you think are part of my paradigm.

The second mvoie we saw was Sneakers, which it turns out I have seen before but wasn't sure before we watched it. It was good but not great. This entry is already long and I'm talking about older movies, so I'll stop here.

The third movie we saw was Clerks, which was often very funny but also pretty disturbing at times (which is what one would expect from Kevin Smith). I see from IMDB that there will be a sequel this year; it has the working subtitle of "Passion of the Clerks", which I find highly amusing... hopefully it will have less unintentional necrophilia (or any other kind of necrophilia). I enjoyed the film quite a bit---it's somewhere between good and very good.

Anyway, frisbee + three solid films is a nice way to spend a Saturday. I did less work than I should have (and I feel guilty about that, although that's my own OCD issue), but I had fun. And one of the films was truly genius---an artistic masterpiece.

No lollygagging tomorrow!

This is my fortune for today

Dissed!

That's all I can conclude.

My fortune reads: "Your senior years will be happy and fulfilling."

Well, I've already had several senior years, so let's go through them one-by-one, shall we:


1. Senior year of nursery school: This was in 1981. In this case, senior year was #2 out of 2. The school in question (Temple Emmanuel Nursery School) was more like day care (before day care was overly prevalent), and was associated with my family synagogues. Was it fulfilling? Well, I already had some practice stalking people by the time it was over (well, it would be more accurate to say I had practice listening in on the conversations of other children when they didn't know I was around...children are so naive; there was no literal stocking involved), and I did a damn fine job lip-synching when they made us sing religious songs. And I was the only one in my class who could read and count. They even had a graduation ceremony with paper diplomas. The Dodgers would go on to win the World Series in 1981, and that year of baseball was a big part of what cemented me as a lifelong fan. So I guess that senior year was pretty good.

2. Senior year of elementary school: This was in 1990. I graduated from Hawthorne School (in the Beverly Hills Unified School District). Our district doesn't have a junior high. I was 14 when I graduated. How good could the year have possibly been. Plus, the 80s ended. Our civilization could only go downhill from there. Given that New Kids on the Block were tearing up the charts at the time, I suspect I knew it, too. On the (very!) bright side, the album Violator came out in 1990, so the my senior year of elementary school was also when I truly discovered Depeche Mode. (I liked a lot of their songs a lot before, but I didn't realize they were all by the same group and that that was the group.) I've been hooked ever since.

3. Senior year of high school: The year was 1994. I graduated from Beverly High. Well, graduation meant good things---like going to college and leaving home. (I didn't know at the time that Caltech would tell me to bend over because I still thought I was hot shit. That reminds me: Did I ever tell you about the title of the complex analysis book I want to write: Complex Analysis: How to Compute Contour Integrals Without Bending Over.) I won some academic awards that made me happy at the time (soon, they wouldn't make any difference because everybody else at Caltech got that stuff too). I'm sure there were other things worth mentioning. It was a fairly blah senior year.

4. Senior year at Tech: Now we come to 1998. It was very stressful at times (with all the stuff that was constantly thrown at me and all the work I had to do), but I hung out with great friends, learned a lot of stuff, and had a lot of fun (though also stressful) with my Ditch Day stack, which turned out really well (only one thing didn't work, and that was because we had to rush it). Despite all the stress, I would say I enjoyed my senior year of Tech more than all the others.

5.Senior year of grad school: This was 2002. This isn't typically counted, but what the Hell. I spent the year writing my thesis and then rewriting my thesis. My thesis exam was horrendous, and I was really sick of Ithaca and not all that pleasant to be around that year due to how I was reacting to all the stress. Plus, I didn't really have the friendship network to relieve me of my stress the way I did at Tech. (As a result, my reaction to what may have actually been slightly less stress was far worse.) Anyway, this one definitely sucked.


Now, today's fortune was really about the future rather than the past. While I'm glad it predicts I'll be "busy" (so to speak) when I'm old, I still feel that I've been horribly dissed and mangled.

Recent Progress using Quantum Interrogation

This continues the historical thread of Quantum Cuteness and Quantum Stalking.

Anyway, I just saw on Gazebo's blog a link to an article that discusses a recent paper in Nature paper concerning how to experimentally combine quantum computing and quantum interrogation to find the result of a quantum algorithm without actually running it.

As I just commented on Gazebo's blog, there is an obvious Spaceballs parallel here---the whole thing reminds me of watching a home video of a movie that hasn't even finished yet. It's all just very meta.

Apparently, the new results can potentially be used to reduce errors in quantum computation, which is a very important application of this (currently) "gedanken technology", as David Mermin likes to call it.

Anyway, these experiments are quite exciting, and I expect it will stimulate a lot of cool subsequent work.

Good use of the word 'epitome'

I just got an e-mail from the APS about the March Meeting that included the following line: "All March Meeting registrants will receive a CDRom version of the Bulletin, plus a pocket epitome."

I had forgotten about that meaning of the word. Under normal circumstances, people compare the sizes of their pocket epitomes...

"Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax... "

I borrowed The Big Lebowski from Lemming the other day and watched it on Monday night, finally crossing one movie off the list of the many I should have already seen. (By the way, I recently mentioned Bull Durham in this context. With my baseball fixation, that movie is literally at the top of this list. I'm embarrassed that I've never seen it.) So this review is quite a bit late in coming...

Anyway, the film is obviously very good, although unlike Gazebo (as indicated by a recent comment in his blog), I would not put this on my short short list of 90s films. (I like Fargo, also by the Coen brothers, better, although I would need to think whether that would go on my short list.) It has a lot of memorable quotes (I especially liked the one I used as the title for this entry) and vignettes, but I also found it dragging at several points, which is a big reason why it's not on my short short list. I very much appreciated the Kraftwerk reference (compare a title of one of their most famous songs to that of the German band in the film) as well as the techno music that plays in the background when the band-turned-gang wants to start a street fight. That joke was classy.

A couple covers I know were in this movie. I had forgotten that Shawn Colvin's version of "Viva Las Vegas" was there, and I never knew that the Gypsy King's version of "Hotel California" was in it. (Actually, I am somewhat disturbed by the context of the latter song, and I hope that I will eventually be able to withdraw that from my memory.)

John Goodman did an excellent job, but The Dude got on my nerves sometimes (another reason this stops at very good instead of going on my short short list or even my short list).

Sometimes the half-orc eats the owlbear; sometimes the owlbear eats the half-orc. (Or maybe I should write "owlbar".)

Café Scientifique

Here is an interesting article from today's New York Times about the Café Scientifique "movement" (which seems to be defined similarly to the Alice's Restaurant movement).

The thing that first drew my attention to the article was the following quote: "A lot of people come to see real live scientists ... and see how their brains work." It's kind of like Jane Goodall and her chimps.

Putting the 'joy' back in joystick

Courtesy the current issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, here are instructions for modifying an Atari 2600 joystick to serve other purposes.

The question is: Which game should one play while enjoying oneself?

Perhaps the canonical answer might be "Custer's Revenge", which was supposed to be the equivalent of an X-rated Atari 2600 game. (Don't ask me how they do this on a game system where the shrooms in "Centipede" were constrained to be monochromatic bricks, but screenshots I've seen in past issues of EGM suggest a passing resemblence to the old activision game "Dolphin".)

I think, however, the only truly appropriate answer is "E.T.", which was the worst game ever made. My sister got this game because she loved the movie (which annoyed me even back when it came out in 1982), so I played and beat this game just because it was there (and I was probably waiting for the port of Q*Bert or something else that was actually good---well, Q*Bert was awesome, not just good), and I have been scarred ever since. For example, E.T. repeatedly falls into giant pits and it takes on the order of 30 minutes to get him out (and he's whining the entire time). I was dumb back then. If a game did that to me now, I'd drop it off the top of Millikan. (As a preview, I have been promised the condensed matter group's sucky printer for that very purpose once our new one arrives. We'll see if that actually happens.)

D & D scheduling for weekend of 2/24

Right now, it looks like I'm free at any point.

What does one get as a wedding gift for a former student?

One of my former research students IMed me about 15 minutes ago to invite me to her wedding. The timing is soon and bad, so I know my chance of being able to go is exponentially small. The question is what would be good to get? I am still hoping that she'll get a Ph.D. (she's good enough to do it), so maybe there's an appropriate popular science book to get or something? (I could get her a quantum mechanics book for whenever she has a kid just to ensure that it will cry copiously.) Any ideas here? This is far beyond my areas of expertise.

I'm not expected to get anything, but of course I am going to.

Anyway, the other reason I'm posting this is to provide proof that some of my students like me (although maybe I'll have to scan the invitation to do that).

Fantasy Baseball: 2006 Edition

I have started picking up players for my fantasy baseball team, called the Chaotic Wavefunctions. (Our logo is a \Psi with a nervous tick.) The league in which I play has a salary cap (and moving salaries during the year based on how much a player is bought and sold). I have been using my baseball knowledge to find sleepers. One example is Brad Wilkerson, who is a great player coming off a subpar year who has been traded to a team with a much better lineup and a much more offensive-minded ballpark. He's cheaper than many rookies who have only had a few at-bats in the majors!

I haven't done so well the last couple years, although I have finished in the 50s once (out of about 225000) and # 20 (out of about 25000) once. (I also one my individual league, but with a poor year overall, one time. I got $50 for that. It had cost me $18 to enter.) The 225000 and 25000 are really about the same level of difficulty because each of them contained roughly the same number of players (around 20000 or so) who actually played the game seriously (using all their trades and keeping track of things the whole year). When I finished in the 50s, I got a PC video game of baseball that I never played. When I finished #20, I got an autographed Nolan Ryan baseball that I've been proudly displaying every since. (Nolan Ryan is one of my favorite players of all time, so I was very pleased with that prize.)

One of my friends from grad school keeps kicking as at this game. He didn't play in 04, but he's done well every year he played. We always coordinate to be in the same league and in 2005, he managed to finish 1st overall! (He knows less about baseball and the players than I do, but he's far, far better at coming up with an optimum strategy for this game.) He got $5000 for that. His teams have finished close to the top 10 in both baseball and basketball before (I want to say he actually broke the top 10 another time in baseball), so his strategies have been consistently successful. (There are a couple years in which things blew up in his face, but I have had that as well and his top performances clearly outshine mine.)

Diva

I just got back from seeing Diva at the Pasadena Playhouse. It was good and had some very funny moments, but it wasn't great. (The line about knowing about lesbianism as a result of spending time fucking David Bowie was especially appreciated. I also liked the comment and surrounding context about the fact that Spaceballs is now taught in film school. I approve! There were quite a few references to other people, but I definitely appreciated some far more than others.)

The play is about a diva, but in the old sense of the word (meaning a haughty and spoiled woman) rather than in the sense of a glamerous or distinguished female (especially a singer/actress/etc.). The play follows the travails associated with her sit com (after she had been out of action for a while) and all the broken promises from her, the network, the lead writer, an agent, and just about everybody else associated with the show. (Basically, the show is about Hollywood making fun of itself. The Spaceballs reference came with the idea of people going into and out of style, alternating between being overrated and underrated but never in between. In this case, Mel Brooks was used as the example.)

The thing that really worked about the play is that it progresses backwards in time, so that the broken promises (and several amusing comments) are conveyed very clearly to the audience. This was the play's strongest point. I think this aspect of things was very well done.

I believe that tonight's performance was the last one, so I'll leave this entry with that comment. (Not to end abruptly or anything...)

Tristram Shandy

I just got back from seeing Trsitram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. It was good but not great, although I am told it is very much in the spirit of the original nine-volume tome, with long digressions and an extremely heavy dose of meta. (At some point, it's a film within a film within a film.) As was pointed out in the film, the novel was postmodern before there was even any modern. (I'm curious to read it, but nine volumes seems like quite a chore. I should first go read (and watch) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as discussed in an earlier thread.

The main star played Jackie Chan's buddy in Around the World in 80 Days.