What Happens in Athens (Georgia) Stays in Athens (Georgia)

I am heading off to Athens for my niece's bat mitzvah. Maybe I will see some homage to the Athens music scene at some point?

Today is International Ada Lovelace Day

Today is International Ada Lovelace Day!

Here are some blurbs about women in mathematics (and more generally in science and technology).

The 'T' in the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam(-Tsingou) Problem

Today is International Women's Day, and today some venues (e.g., IFLS) are posting articles with the theme 'women you should have heard of' (‪#‎womenyoushouldhaveheardof‬), and I would like to contribute one who was intimately involved in introducing (and conducting subsequent studies of) one of my favorite mathematics/physics problems.

The lady in question is Mary Tsingou, and the problem is the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam(-Tsingou) problem.

Seven years ago, Thierry Dauxois wrote an opinion piece in Physics Today about the decades of omission of credit that Tsingou had experience. To quote his abstract, "The computations for the first-ever numerical experiment were performed by a young woman named Mary Tsingou. After decades of omission, it is time to recognize her contribution."

If you look at the original technical report, you'll notice typed text that indicates that the report was "written by" Fermi, Pasta, and Ulam but that "Work done by" credits Fermi, Pasta, Ulam, and Tsingou. Dauxois's paper discusses Mary Tsingou's contribution to the original technical report and advocates renaming the problem as the "FPUT" problem. Tsingou also worked on the FPU(T) problem later---e.g., on "superecurrences" that occur in very long-time calculations. For more information about the FPU(T) problem, see the Scholarpedia article devoted to it, a Scholarpedia article devoted to its mathematical aspects, and an expository article that I coauthored.

Irony

In conjunction with a one-day furlough on his lifetime ban for gambling, Pete Rose is going to be honored by the Cincinnati Reds for breaking Ty Cobb's record for total number of hits. However, the event is going to occur 1 day after the anniversary of hit number 4192 (though note that Cobbs' hit total has since been adjusted to 4189 due to corrections in the historical record) because Rose has a prior commitment to appear at the Hollywood Casino. Oh, man.

10-year anniversary of my (in)famous Black Celebration

As I briefly discussed in this space two years ago today, February 14, 1998 was a special day in my life. It was my favorite episode of the radio show that I broadcast on Lloyd Radio with Lemming.

Given my propensity for enjoying groups like Depeche Mode, mood swings, and an enjoyment of bittersweet songs in general, there would occasionally be special episodes of our radio show (and of the radio show I did by myself the previous year) that I liked to call "All Depressing and Cynical Song Specials". On this day ten years ago, we decided to have the "All Depressing and Cynical Song Special: Valentine's Day Edition" in which we started with a live version of Depeche Mode's "Black Celebration", play depressing and cynical songs about love for about 2.5 hours, and ended with "Blow Your Brains Out" (What is this song actually called? And who sings it? I never remember...).

While we were doing this, there were naturally two recently-hooked-up couple slurping each other right outside where we were broadcasting for the entirety of the show. (It's not clear precisely how much they were aware of what we were doing just a few feet away.) One of the things I distinctly remember is our Resident Associate walking out of her apartment (which was also next to where we were broadcasting) and giving us (or was it just me?) just about the most horrified look I have ever seen in my life. She also seemed to have a sort of helpless feeling because there was simply nothing that she could do about it. It was wonderful.

By the way, there were a couple of other episodes of my radio show that were rather memorable. One of them was when my show was "taken over" by certain people who insisted that I play The Ride until they got showered (people finally had to come over from Ruddock to help with this). Autumn Looijen and I are planning to include a blurb about this incident in Legends IV. (It was punted from Volume III to Volume IV at the last minute.) The other was when I got the folks on the second floor of page to drunkenly sing along with the chorus to Faust and Lewis's "Save the Beer" back when Lloyd Radio was still broadcast from the "Llove Shack" (the bunker that Nestor Ocampo and Walter Brisken built for their Ditch Day stack).

Braaaaaaains: The real way to celebrate a birthday

I'm referring, of course, to zombies.

There is a zombie mob in San Fransisco planned for my birthday:

WHERE & WHEN
* Justin Herman Plaza nearest Embarcadero BART
* Meet up at noon on February 10th. (hang 'em high).
* Rain date (February 17th)
* Will Critical Ghast elsewhere at 12:30.


If you want to see information pictures about past zombie mobs go to eatbrains.com.

I need to bring this tradition to Oxford...