What Happens in Limerick Stays in Limerick

I'll be flying to Limerick tonight for a grant meeting tomorrow. In honor of my trip, I present the following:

There once was an Oxford professor.
Who wasn't much of a confessor.
When his rigor was pondered.
He said his mind wandered.
But at least he was a possessor.


(I think the last line could be better, but I didn't exactly spend a long time on this.)

Update: "Assessor" would also work (and give a slightly different flavor) instead of "confessor".

The Community Structure Limerick

By semipopular demand (of just a few people, most of whom are in the humanities), I hereby present The Community Structure Limerick:

When detecting a network’s communities,
Try not to do it with impunity.
For it is not enough
To stop with that stuff.
Be sure to think about functionality.


It took me an hour to write this (and I really should have been working on other parts of the talk), and I note that I did not sacrifice any accuracy in my talk's conclusions to present them in limerick form. (That's why I have a slant rhyme with the first line. Had I made it singular, I would have lost some accuracy.)

For the network science folks out there, I spent a bit of time trying to find a good way to end a line with modularity, but I decided that both the poem and message worked better than it did in any of the ways I was able to incorporate it.

What happens in Limerick stays in Limerick

I am writing this from a very nice hotel in Limerick, Ireland. (This is my first time in Ireland.) I will be giving a talk on community detection tomorrow at the University of Limerick, and I will be presenting my conclusions in limerick form. (Also, to this day, I can't see or hear the word "limerick" without thinking of Kerry Ryan's limericks at Lloyd House dinners or, especially, her announcing it with a screeching yell of "I have a limerick!")

Another limerick competition from Annals of Improbable Research

For the second month in a row, the Annals of Improbable Research limerick contest pertains to a paper within one of my fields. Last time, it was dynamical systems and this time it's applied dynamical systems (and, in particular, granular media). Moreover, I even know one of the paper's authors. (Last time, I had once met the person who was mentioned in the title of the article but didn't know if the author of the article per se.)

Anyway, here is the article being used for this month's contest:

"Maximum Angle of Stability of a Wet Granular Pile," Sarah Nowak,
Azadeh Samadani, and Arshad Kudrolli, Nature Physics, vol. 1,
August 15, 2005, pp. 50-2.

(Thanks to Charles Oppenheim for bringing this to our attention.)
The authors explain:

"Anyone who has built a sandcastle recognizes that the addition
of liquid to granular materials increases their stability.
However, measurements of this increased stability often conflict
with theory and with each other.... Using the frictionless model
and performing stability analysis within the pile, we reproduce
the dependence of the stability angle on system size, particle
size, and surface tension observed in our experiments."


RULES: Please make sure your rhymes actually do, and that your
poem is in classic, trips-off-the-tongue limerick form.

PRIZE: The winning poet will receive a (if we manage to send it
to the correct address) a free, possibly sandy issue of the
Annals of Improbable Research. Send entries (one entry per
entrant) to:

SANDCASTLE STABILITY LIMERICK COMPETITION
c/o [marca AT chem2.harvard.edu]



For the second month in a row, I hope I have time to sit down and compose a limerick. Last time, I unsurprisingly didn't end up having time and I suspect the same will be true this month. I'm especially eager to submit a limerick this month because it will give me a chance to make fun of self-organized criticality (which is an easy target), or as Predrag Cvitanovic calls it, "self-organized triviality."

But just in case I don't have time to write a limerick, here are some physics haikus that I wrote a few years ago for an APS contest. One of my haikus was deemed a winner -- ironically, it was the only one of the haikus that was serious rather than snarky! -- and it earned me a free physics t-shirt.

One of my haikus was, in fact, devoted to self-organized criticality:

The world's a sandpile.
Self-organized, trivial...
But it gives tenure.


As I have been known to say to any statistical physicist who will listen, "The world is not a sandpile." (Granted, I do some statistical physics research too, but there are times when I very much agree with Steve Strogatz's comment during an invited talk in which he compared them to piranhas.)

And the good news about doing this blog entry is that it turns out all my links to my creative writing on the Oxford server were dead because I had forgotten to copy the files over when I set up the web page. Thankfully, that problem is now fixed.