A 1930s Pictorial Vision of the Future

Hey, look. Flying cars!

There are many cool things about this picture.

A vision of the future, from 1930. What do you find most interesting? https://t.co/g6aV3jtTfm pic.twitter.com/LoBoMuyxzF

— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) June 2, 2019

The Karate Club Will Long Live in Network-Science Infamy

Especially with the new Karate Club lore that has made it into the 2nd edition of Mark Newman's textbook.

(However, Mark misspelled "awesome" as "dubious", for some reason.)

Snarky Karate Club lore (t-shirt + ZKCC) has made the 2nd edition of Mark Newman's textbook on networks (the closest thing we have to a standard introductory text).

Should I be happier about having papers & research cited in the 2nd edition, or about the t-shirt being cited? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/yCjq4MCzer

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) August 27, 2018

P.S. You can see the history of the ZKCC at this website and buy ZKC memorabilia at The Power Law Shop.

Tales from the ArXiv: Low and High Mason Numbers

Here is a new paper on the ArXiv.

Here is a quote from the abstract: In the limit of low Mason number, the dynamical system admits a periodic solution in which the magnetic moment of the swimmer tends to align with the magnetic field. In the limit of large Mason number, the magnetic moment tends to align with the average magnetic field, which is parallel to the axis of rotation.

I operate in the limit of low Mason number, and I claim that this limit is singular.

"Interval Signatures of Celebrities and Researchers on Twitter"

In case you ever wanted to compare my tweeting behavior to that of Lance Armstrong and other celebrities (and several network and data scientists), here is your chance.

It's always nice to be analyzed (for my tweeting behavior) alongside luminaries like Katy Perry, Shaquille O'Neal, and Steve Martin. Lots of my peeps from network and data science are also put under the data-analytic microscope (or perhaps I should write 'mesoscope') on this page.

"Surprise!"

I still love the result of this ‘emotion analysis’ of the profile pictures of mathematicians on Twitter.

In addition to these three categories, no face is detected in 24 images.

Surpise!

I am highly amused by this classification. :)

"SMUG": Generating Music and Lyrics from Academic Papers

Yes, that's right. Using a new tool called "SMUG: Scientific Music Generator", one can now generate music and lyrics from academic papers. I love the acronym. :)

I also decided to try SMUG. I generated this work of art from my review article on multilayer networks.

Update: The paper's bibliography includes a citation of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I am amused. :)

PhDTree: Visualizing Academic Genealogies

PhDTree is now visualizing academic family trees like the Mathematical Genealogy Project (MGP) used to. (You can still find textual listings there but it seems like one now has to pay money to order a visual tree.) Also, PhDTree isn't focusing on mathematicians. On the negative side, I have heard people discussing errors that they found in it. So we seem to have the common tradeoff of more comprehensiveness because the information comes from an algorithm rather than manual entry at the cost of more errors as a byproduct. (That said, one can also do subsequent manual edits in PhDTree to fix one's genealogy.)

Here are my PhDTree and MGP listings.

Interactive Twitter Network from NetSci 2014

I just found Marc Smith's interactive Twitter network from NetSci 2014. Here is a brief description of the network:

"The graph represents a network of 57 Twitter users whose recent tweets contained "netsci", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets, taken from a data set limited to a maximum of 18,000 tweets. The network was obtained from Twitter on Friday, 06 June 2014 at 15:22 UTC."

You can find additional descriptions and some basic calculations about the graph on the site to which I linked. You can also download the network data. Apparently, I contributed to this network, especially with my snark. :)

Tales from the ArXiv: "Deep Community Detection"

This paper, called "Deep Community Detection", makes me want to write a paper called "Shallow Community Detection". It's now officially on my list. One thing that is great about the title is that there is an inherent grammatical ambiguity regarding whether the authors are detecting deep communities (which is what they have in mind) or whether the community detection that they are performing is deep. That is why I like the title.

Also, I love Fig. 8. Once again, the Porter-Mucha-Warmbrand 3-clique makes an appearance in a paper figure. (It occurred in a Physical Review E paper earlier this year, and I got the honor of being an initial condition for that other paper.)

"Best". Figure. Ever.

Check out Figure 15b of this new paper on community detection in directed networks.

Research Buzzword Cloud: 2012 Edition

Here is a research buzzword cloud, which I just created from my freshly updated research synopsis page. I used Wordle to create this piece of art. (Well, it's a piece of something. I like to think of it as art.)

Download Achievements

My paper on visualization of communities in networks was the 4th most downloaded paper in the journal Chaos in November. Then again, the most downloaded paper was "The Mayonnaise Droplet". Go figure.

Quote of the Day

While at Jorian's place, I uttered the following quote concerning my quotes page (that includes lots of my own quotes) and the narcissism it entails:

"There's a sense of narcissim, but I do it for myself... [pause] Oh wait! That is narcissism!"

More media sluttage

Here is the blurb on Legends III by Engineering & Science, one of Caltech's alumni publications.

This is a bit belated, but here is the book review that appeared in The Tech in May. Also, here is an an article from The Tech about the book's release.

By the way, when the judge of the case I might be on found out I worked at Caltech, her next sentence included a comment about Caltech pranks. In particular, she mentioned Rose Bowl hijinks. Under other circumstances, I would have mentioned the book.

More Legends III coverage

Here is a small blurb that appeared on 6/24 in a tiny venue called the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin.

I'll let you know when the scheduled LA Magazine, Popular Science, and San Jose Mercury News things come out.

And I still don't understand why my hometown paper (Beverly Hills Weekly, which often publishes trivial things about alums) and especially the Pasadena papers haven't picked up the story.

Did I mention that I'm a media slut?

My famous jury duty story

It may not be "world famous" like KROQ, but I have a pretty damned cool story to tell about my one of my really slick ways of avoiding jury duty.

I have avoided jury duty on numerous occasions, using multiple methods. My luck had finally run out, as I was to actually show up for the first time tomorrow. However, I am getting at least a one-day reprieve, as my group doesn't have to show up to the courthouse tomorrow. I have my fingers crossed that this luck continues for the rest of the week.

My most recent avoidings of jury duty were a few years ago and went along the following lines: I received a summons for a California court while I was in grad school at Cornell, so I informed them that I live in New York. While in grad school, I also received a summons from a court in Ithaca, so I got out of that by informing them of my voting status in California.

My best story, however, culminated in the summer between my junior and senior years (summer 1996). I had been summoned to one court in Beverly Hills. I tried unsuccessfully to get out of it because of my student status, but I delayed it for the then-maximum 6 months at one time. (If I recall correctly, one was allowed two separate six-month delays at the time.) I was supposed to be taken out of the pool for new summons, but I nevertheless received a summons during this waiting period to appear in another of the Beverly Hills courts. I attempted to get out of this using the reason that I was already summoned elsewhere so that I wasn't supposed to be in the candidate pool, etc. They did not accept this reasoning, which wa clearly valid, and scheduled my appearance for jury duty in that other court.

This, of course, meant war. Yesterday, I read an essay by Harlan Ellison about revenge, and my actions in this particular case fit pretty well within Ellison's discussion. I delayed both of my court appearance dates, which I remind you were in two different courts, to the same day. You might remember that back in 1996, there was some delay as databases got updated, so the solution was simple: I called the first courthouse and informed them of the clerical error that had me showing up to both courts on the same day, which clearly I couldn't do. The guy I talked to checked their database and saw that it was true, so he removed my scheduled appearance at the first courthouse. Then, before the database could be updated, I immediately called the second courthouse and used the same procedure to remove my appearance there. Slam dunk! Of course, this wouldn't work nowadays because the database would have contained the updated information immediately, but the solution was the simple but elegant one for the technology of the day.

Take that, U.S. government bureaucracy!

Observation

This isn't a new observation, but it is blogworthy.

Basically, the fact that I am hyper and talk about projects in a tone that conveys my extreme excitement makes me really good at sucking other people into projects. (It's also one of the things that makes me a very good research mentor.)

By the way, excuse the bragging. You can shoot me down if you'd like, but I do genuinely believe what I just wrote. I think this is actually one of the biggest assets I bring to the scientific table.

More media coverage of Legends III

I'm such a media slut.

There will be coverage of Legends III in Engineering & Science (a Caltech publication, so duh) and Los Angeles Magazine. (The latter one should give the book some good exposure, especially considering that the Caltech bookstore sells something like 250 each of the first two books each year.)

I already linked to the LA Times blurb in an earlier post. There was supposedly something in San Gabriel (though I can't find it online) and there is going to be a book review of Legends III in the San Jose Mercury News. (I think the latter one is kind of using the Autumn as a local person spin, which makes sense. Also, there are a ton of Techers in the Bay Area.) The book is slated to be mentioned (and hopefully discussed at some reasonable length, but I don't really know how much) in an upcoming article on tech-savvy pranks in Popular Science.

At some point, I am supposed to meet with Tom Mannion and some guy who is producing a some sort of documentary on Caltech pranks. (The meeting hasn't been scheduled.) This is the guy who I'll be talking to about movie possibilities -- my hope is to try to inspire a sort of modern version of Real Genius.

You know what city's publications are missing from the above discussion? Pasadena! Go figure. (Actually, it would also make sense for Beverly Hils Weekly to cover this because I'm an alum, and maybe they'll do that after they see the stuff in the LA Times and LA Magazine. Hell, I know the editor of that paper and I'm pretty sure I told him about the book.)

I don't expect to go beyond California publications (and Caltech's stuff), but we'll see. There were blurbs about my college football ranking stuff all over the world (including by Nature), and it's sometimes surprising who cares about what.

Legends of Caltech III briefly covered in LA Times

A brief article in today's Los Angeles Times covers the new Legends book that Autumn Looijen and I wrote. It is only mentioned very briefly and our names aren't included, but it's better than nothing.

I've made some other venues before (such as The Washington Post and ESPN: The Magazine) via my research, and maybe I'll eventually make the New York Times.

I haven't seen Legends III mentioned anywhere else, though I wasn't actually looking either. I could the Pasadena Weekly would be the most likely place I should check? (Of course, my brother is the one who told me about this one because it's not like I read the LA Times, so maybe other people can be my eyes and ears.)