Tales from the arXiv: strong (and likely false) claim edition

One of my students (Mariano Beguerisse Diaz) just sent me a link to the following paper, which was recently posted on the arxiv:

A proof of the Riemann hypothesis

Xian-Jin Li

(Submitted on 1 Jul 2008 (v1), last revised 2 Jul 2008 (this version, v2))

By using Fourier analysis on number fields, we prove in this paper E. Bombieri's refinement of A. Weil's positivity condition, which implies the Riemann hypothesis for the Riemann zeta function in the spirit of A. Connes' approach to the Riemann hypothesis.


If this paper actually does what it claims to do, then this is obviously quite a big deal. This is ridiculously far from my area, but I'll take the safe attitude of being skeptical of the author's claims unless acknowledged experts on the topic come to a consensus that this paper accomplishes the trick. I did some googling to try to find reactions, but it came up empty (though I did find articles about a 2004 attempt). The wikipedia article to which I link above has a small section that briefly discusses false claims of a successful proof.

Anyway, it will be very exciting news if this new claim turns out to be well-founded, but I'm not about to start holding my breath.

Kickin' it old school

I found this webpage just now. It's a blog entry from a physicist (who presumably found me by some sort of googling) and has a link to a certain to a certain facetious article I wrote a few years ago. (It also has a link to my Caltech writing page, which mostly has the same stuff as my Oxford writing page.) I actually don't keep the link for this particular article on my Oxford writing page, but finding someone else linking to it makes me want to point to that blog entry.

For all I know, maybe this is my most-read paper. (Actually, my pieces in the AMS Notices are likely my most-read paper, followed by my BCS ranking system article in the American Mathematical Monthly, followed by my PNAS Congress article and my introduction to LaTeX in some order. (I went to give a seminar in Durham last fall, and one of the grad students informed me that she first saw my name a few years ago when she used my latex intro to help her write her report. At least one of the papers I wrote was useful, though I never bothered trying to polish that one to publish it anywhere official. It does appear on random resource pages in various corners [both public and private] of the web.

Dodgers get no-hit (but still win...)

On occasion, there are some especially interesting baseball games. For example, yesterday the Dodgers won even though they didn't get a single hit. This is pretty rare, but it has happened a few times before.

What happens at ECMI stays at ECMI

I just got back from NetSci at 12:30 am this morning and I will head off tomorrow for another conference. (A quick piece of advice: Attempting to go to back-to-back conferences is a very bad idea. I already feel quite exhausted...) This time the conference is in the ECMI series. By the way, there is no truth to the rumor that ECMI, which stands for "The European Consortium For Mathematics In Industry", has Wile E. Coyote as its mascot. (Also, I'm not sure whether or not there will be any super geniuses at the conference...)

For this conference, I was asked to organize a session on mathematics and social networks. The main message I want to send is that this is an exciting frontier for the mathematical scientists. For this particular meeting, I will also be stressing as part of my message the increasing important and prevalence of this stuff in industrial problems (such as for online recommendation systems), though I'll concentrate on my own research for the bulk of my talk. I will also give a talk about my work on wave propagation in granular lattices as part of a session on asymptotic analysis.

By the way, NetSci was a very good conference. (I gave a talk on my Congressional research there.) I acquired some awesome new data on political cabinet networks and will be collaborating with Brian Uzzi from Northwestern's business school (in addition to some of the usual math/physics crowd) in studying it. (Brian was already working with some Oxford folks, so I got to meet with him and talk with him a couple of times at the meeting. He gave a great invited presentation that included references to both Wang Chung and the Traveling Wilburys. Dude!) I'm not as well-known in networks as in the applied math/nonlinear dynamics community, but things seem to be on the upswing here as well. (FYI: More important is that those who do know me respect my work...)

On the way back from NetSci, a delay for one train, cause me to miss the last connection at Birmingham New Street. I then walked 5 minutes to a nearby station so that I could visit a couple of extra nodes in Britain's train network and finally get home. I made it to my apartment at 12:30 --- about 2 hours later than planned, but at least I made it and could sleep in my own bed. During this ordeal, it occurred to me that my knowledge of British geography is almost entirely network-based. I basically think of how I can get from one city to another almost entirely based on how I how between different nodes of the network. I have figured out a little bit about how this network is embedded in two-dimensional space, but I know far more about travel in Britain along the network. This can occasionally cause mistakes on my part because the embeddedness in two-dimensional space of the network is quite important (as Mark Newman and Michael Gastner have stressed in several papers over the last couple of years).

RIP George Carlin (1937-2008)

George Carlin died yesterday, apparently of heart failure. Here is the New York Times obituary.

George Carlin was one of my favorite comedians (if not my favorite), and I thankfully had the chance to once see him perform live. Many consider him quite offensive, but I love his stuff. I highly recommend googling to find his 'Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television' skit. It's awesome.

Here is an excellent quote from George Carlin that appears in the article: "Scratch any cynic and you’ll find a disappointed idealist."

What happens at NetSci stays at NetSci

Tomorrow I am heading back on the train (for the third time in the last few days) to go to the scintillating city of Norwich to attend NetSci, a networks conference I've never had the chance to attend before. It's been in the US in the past, but it's conveniently nearby this year.

Oxford's complex systems group will be well-represented at the conference, so it should be both fun and scientifically interesting. (Not that there's much to do in Norwich, but I'm sure we'll find something...)

4th Edition D & D: I'll have time to read it eventually

I picked up my core rule books of 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons from my mailbox today. It arrived yesterday while I was away giving a seminar (or possibly today earlier than I checked my mailbox). I am about to finish Dune (I only have the appendices left) and then in early July two Dragonlance books I really want to read will be shipped to me. I'll read some of the new Player's Handbook between now and then, but I'm mostly planning to go through those books first before I really delve into the new edition.

I haven't made any effort to find a gaming group for the summer (and ideally beyond), but maybe I'll get around to it at some point. There is some sort of game day on Saturday, but I'm going to have to miss it because I am visiting Bristol tomorrow and going to the first of two back-to-back conferences on Sunday, so I really need to do work on Saturday. In particular, I have some papers nearing the finish line and others making reasonable progress that would be nice to advance further (and, ideally, one I want to advance enough to be comfortable showing it to people at the upcoming conference!).

I might post some thoughts on Dune later, though that's likely to wait for my year-end review of books. I'm definitely planning to discuss some 4th edition stuff after I go through it in detail. (I only glanced at it for a minute because I want to read some baseball articles, work a bit on a paper [perhaps], and play some Super Mario Galaxy.

In other news, congratulations to all my Somerville students who finished their exams today! (I don't think any of them read this blog, but congratulations to them anyway.)

Petition to prevent mathematics cutbacks at USQ in Australia

I just got an e-mail on the Project NExT list about upcoming cutbacks (that would basically decimate the entire mathematics program) at University of Southern Queensland in Australia.

Please sign the petition on Terry Tao's website.

Here is the text of the petition (you can find out more information on Terry's website):

I believe that the proposed severe cuts to mathematics, statistics, and computing at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) will do severe and permanent damage to the quality of education in maths and the sciences for USQ students, at a time when the need to support such education is both urgent and widely accepted in Australia at all levels. Service teaching alone, especially at reduced staff levels, cannot deliver the level of mathematics education that the students of USQ deserve. I urge the university administration to negotiate with the Department of Mathematics and Computing to find a compromise solution that will preserve the proven capability of this department to train students and teachers in the maths and sciences at the highest levels of quality.


I hope that you'll take a look at the petition and sign it.

Depressing baseball stat of the day

I was just reading an unsurprising article confirming the fact (that was essentially already known) that Dodger shortstop Rafael Furcal won't return until after the All-Star break. This article includes the following sentence:

Furcal is tied for the team lead in runs scored -- even though he has not played since May 5 because of a bulging disk in his back.

Holy shit. That about sums up the way the season has gone thus far.

What happens in Loughborough stays in Loughborough

This afternoon, I'll be heading on a train to Loughborough to give a seminar to Loughborough University's nonlinear waves group tomorrow. Is there anything else to do in that town? (I have no idea how large a city it is, as I've only heard of it because of the university.)

Which Superhero and Supervillain are you?

(Hmmm... my copy-and-paste job gives html that looks horrible. I really don't have the patience to do anything about it beyond acknowledging that it's crap. Anyway, you'll just have to scroll a little more for this entry.)


I'm a sucker for quizzes like this, and I decided that I was curious what superhero I'd be. While I was at it, I saw the supervillain quiz and decided to take that one too. There are unsurprisingly many more superhero and supervillain quizzes available from all corners of the Web. (I know, I know: Those sites probably aren't true corners, though one can actually define a rigorous notion of a corner in a graph---just consider nodes whose edges all have low betweenness centrality.) Let me know if you find any betters ones.

Anyway, here is my result for superheroes:


You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 70% Hulk 70% Batman 60% Green Lantern 55% Robin 50% Supergirl 35% Superman 25% Iron Man 25% Wonder Woman 20% The Flash 20% Catwoman 20%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Comment: 35% Supergirl? What the fuck? The combination of Spider-Man and Hulk is kind of odd, but I can see it to some degree. I don't follow comics, so I'm sure there are characters out there who would fit better.


Here are my results for supervillain:


You are Mr. Freeze

Mr. Freeze 57% Riddler 53% Dr. Doom 48% Apocalypse 46% The Joker 44% Green Goblin 44% Two-Face 40% Magneto 37% Venom 36% Poison Ivy 36% Lex Luthor 33% Dark Phoenix 31% Catwoman 20% Mystique 20% Juggernaut 12% Kingpin 0%

You are cold and you think everyone else should be also, literally.

Comment: I didn't match particularly well with any of the supervillains, but the choice probably makes reasonable sense. I'm apparently not at all like Kingpin. :)

Quote of the Day

Today's quote comes from a deadpan statement meant to succinctly describe the results a student in my extended research group saw with some network analysis:

"The US is isolated with Israel and some remote island nations."

The Geometry of Music

Here is a really neat article about applying geometric analysis to music that appeared in Time Magazine in January 2007. Orbifolds show up a lot. :) (Thanks to Jaideep Singh for bringing this to my attention.)

"The Rise of Coffee"

Continuing further into the backlog of popular and/or expository science articles I want to highlight is this gem on the origins of coffee. Mmmmm... coffee. (Click on the cover of the magazine for the article's abstract. If you or your institution have appropriate subscriptions, you should be able to access the full text as well.)

According to the article, the first coffeehouse in Europe opened in Venice in 1645 and the second opened in Oxford in 1650. I believe that Queen's Road Cafe is supposed to be in the location of the first one in Oxford (at least according to the claim on their menu... ), though I don't know for sure if there has been one continuously in that location. (Queen's Road's menu seems to claim that this is the case.)

There is no known truth to the rumors that they had iced lattes and wi fi access back in the day. (Actually, I have no idea if they have wi fi access now!).

I'll end this entry with a question: Do you turn coffee into theorems or theorems into coffee?

Travelling Waves in Guinness

That was what the applied math colloquium was about today. (Can you believe we get paid to study and discuss stuff like this?) Actually, there is (unsurprisingly) some very serious and important science involved. The official name of the subject is "two-phase flows." I'd include an abstract or link to the speaker's webpage, but I couldn't find either. So this will have to do... (For what it's worth, the "practical session" is going on now. The standard procedure is to go to the pub after the applied math seminar, but I have an event to attend at 6pm, so I won't be able to hang out with the gang today.)

Quote of the Day

Today's quote comes from the opening lines of States of Matter, David Goodstein's book on statistical physics. He writes:

"Ludwig Boltzman, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously."

Maybe things will be safer for those of us who apply statistical mechanics tools to complex systems? Anyway, this is a word of caution for those who want to join my research group...

Ken Griffey Jr. hits 600th career homerun

Ken Griffey Jr. hit his 600th career homerun today. The fan who seemingly caught the ball did something very slick. (The balls are specially marked, so we'll see if this guy has the actual ball.) Try to catch the video on YouTube if you get a chance.

I haven't mentioned it in this spot before, but the Lords of Baseball have pissed me off with how they've advertised the now-obtained 500th homerun for Manny (about which I didn't end up blogging earlier) and 600th homerun for Griffey. The advertisement for Manny was ok, as it showed some other players getting their 500th homer and advertised watching to see when Manny would do it. The similar advertisement for Griffey's 600th showed Babe Ruth's and Hank Aaron's 600th homers. In their eternal attempt at whitewashing history, Major League Baseball's advertisement never mentioned Mark McGwire Barry Bonds or Sammy Sosa. I fucking hate that. Hey, Dudes: Trying to pretend steroids never happened neither works nor helps!

Update: Of course, I managed to inadvertently mention McGwire instead of Barry Bonds, so maybe I'm wrong about the whitewashing not working!

A Mathematician on Mathematical Research

The famous mathematician G. H. Hardy, who liked to brag that all of his mathematics was useless (even though the notion of a Hardy-Weinberg equilibrum happens to be quite a simple and useful application of mathematics to genetics). For him, the most beautiful mathematics was that which had no application at all. [Of course, he was a Cambridge professor, so we have to consider the source of such comments. :) Go team!]

Here is something Hardy wrote in A Mathematician's Apology about mathematics research, but he could easily have been talking about the vast majority of scientific research (except for some landmark discoveries, etc.) and he had a more general context in mind anyway. He wrote:

"What we do may be small, but it has a certain character of permanence; and to have produced anything of the slightest permanent interest, whether it be a copy of verses or a geometrical theorem, is to have done something utterly beyond the powers of the vast majority of men."


I am not arrogant enough to wake up every day and always agree with this quote, but I am arrogant enough to believe it during specific moments on specific days. The times when I see it in a positive light (feeling like I've produced something lasting and not actually thinking of anything comparative with anyone else) are some of my favorite moments. However, those when I view it from a more negative perspective (which suggests a cynical attitudes of others being lower than me), then it is extremely arrogant and it pretty much just means I need a boot to the head. Quite the dichotomy, eh?

I must admit that there is something about, e.g., going into the Caltech bookstore and seeing my book being sold in it that gives me a warm fuzzy feeling---and at least part of that definitely jives with Hardy's quote.

Tales from the arXiv: Best abstract ever

Here's a new paper that just got posted on the arXiv:



Remarks On A Nicolas Inequality
Authors: B. A. Kupershmidt
(Submitted on 5 Jun 2008 (v1), last revised 5 Jun 2008 (this version, v2))

Abstract: The Nicolas Conjecture appears to be true.



You can find this paper here.

Short and sweet! Now I just need to see a paper in which the title is longer than the abstract...

Quote of the Day

Today, Rob Neyer ended his chat with the following awesome quote: "When all is said and done, there's nothing left to say or do."

I googled it and found that it was supposedly attributed to former NBA player Darryl Dawkins. I'm not convinced that that is the original source of the quote, so if anybody knows the right attribution, please let me know.

(By the way: Wherever you go, there you are.)

Cell Phone Networks and Privacy Issues

Here is a new networks paper that just came out in Nature. It is by one of the usual suspects (Barabasi), an up-and-coming postdoc (Marta Gonzalez), and somebody else (of whom I've never heard). One of my networks buddies at Oxford has done some related work in the past and is in fact involved on the follow-up work to this paper. (One of the new postdocs here was hired for this project as well.) There are some pretty dicey ethical issues involved in this one, and the author with the unfamiliar name has seemingly shot himself in the foot with one of his comments in which he mentioned basically that there are nefarious things one could do with that data so that it's a good thing that it's scientists who are using it and not someone else---that was really not a smart thing to say. (Unsurprisingly, by the way, this paper is getting a ton of press.) Here are the title and abstract:

Title: Understanding individual human mobility patterns

Authors: Marta C. González, César A. Hidalgo, & Albert-László Barabási

Abstract: Despite their importance for urban planning1, traffic forecasting2 and the spread of biological3, 4, 5 and mobile viruses6, our understanding of the basic laws governing human motion remains limited owing to the lack of tools to monitor the time-resolved location of individuals. Here we study the trajectory of 100,000 anonymized mobile phone users whose position is tracked for a six-month period. We find that, in contrast with the random trajectories predicted by the prevailing Lévy flight and random walk models7, human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity, each individual being characterized by a time-independent characteristic travel distance and a significant probability to return to a few highly frequented locations. After correcting for differences in travel distances and the inherent anisotropy of each trajectory, the individual travel patterns collapse into a single spatial probability distribution, indicating that, despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns. This inherent similarity in travel patterns could impact all phenomena driven by human mobility, from epidemic prevention to emergency response, urban planning and agent-based modelling.


The overall result (about how predictable we are) isn't surprising at all, but what is really nice is more specific quantitative information about such regularity--probability distributions, etc.--that could be really helpful for things like designing vaccination strategies.

I'm not planning to give my thoughts on the ethics of the study in the entry itself (though I'll consider doing so in the comments if an interesting discussion arises (as I hope it will). This is certainly one of those studies that ought to provoke such a discussion.

A Mathematical Hermit

Here's a brief article from Science News about Alexandre Grothendieck, who celebrated his 80th birthday in self-imposed isolation in the Pyrenees.

A lot of Grothendieck's work was in a subject known as "category theory." As my Cornell abstract algebra professor once said, he wanted us to learn what a category is the same way we learned what an animal was: by seeing examples of them. (A student then immediately asked the professor what a category was, and he went completely berserk. It was awesome.)

80s music pun

I saw a listing of upcoming shows at one of the local venues. The one that struck my eye immediately was the show by Glenn Tillbrook & The Fluffers. You might say that I'm tempted to go.

RaysGeek

Courtesy Rob Neyer's blog, here is a link to a blog entry called Welcome to RaysGeek on the blog formerly called "MetsGeek" but now apparently called "RaysGeek" (with the tagline "Because the Mets suck.").

This is very likely a gag, and it's quite a hilarious one!

Chaos's nonlinear science gallery on YouTube

Sometimes one can actually get somewhere with requests to journals.

I was reading an issue of SIAM News a few months back and notice that a video of Doug Arnold (from University of Minnesota) on Moebius transformations had achieved an astounding level of popularity on YouTube. (I had also heard at undergraduate research conferences about various math professors who used YouTube for teaching purposes.)

This is a great way to get more science out to the public, so I e-mailed David Campbell, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Chaos, which publishes the Nonlinear Science Gallery every year. This gallery includes video entries, which would be absolutely perfect for YouTube. I have also known David for a few years, and in fact am writing an expository article on the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem with him and a couple of other people, and I figured he would be receptive to the idea. The key hurdle would be the thoughts of the publisher (American Institute of Physics).

David got back to me while I was visiting Caltech last week to give me the news that AIP supported the endeavor, and now I'm writing this entry to announce that Chaos's YouTube page has gone live.

Among the videos is one that I coauthored with Caltech undergrad Tom Mainiero. It's currently the 2nd most watched video among the Chaos collection and perhaps with your help it can become #1. It even has a catchy tune in the background. (Though I am a bit perplexed that YouTube lists an Adolf Hitler speech as a related video.)

Equation of the Day

6 hours of teaching today + 2 weeks of consecutive jet lag + 4 hours of sleep each of the last two nights = a slow, painful death.


(OK, OK... I'm double counting just a bit---but that's why it's a "slow, painful death" on the right-hand side and not just "death".)

New Word of the Day

Sometimes, a new word is coined whose name has clearly come. Today's (ok, last week's) new word is jeterate, which was defined last week by baseball writer and blogger Joe Posnanski as follows:

jeterate (verb) meaning “to praise someone for something of which he or she is entirely unworthy of praise.”

Here are a couple of Posnanski's examples:

Example: “The father could not but jeterate his daughter for coloring on the wall because she looked so cute.”

Example: “The doctor jeterated his patient for not actually gaining any more weight since the visit four days earlier.”


This word, of course, is named after Yankee shortstop (and future Hall of Famer) Derek Jeter, who has been an excellent player for many years and will obtain his first-ballot election to Cooperstown (and deservedly so!) after he retires. The thing is if you listen to Yankee fans, broadcasters, writers, and other fetishists, you get the impression that he can't do anything wrong, is the best thing since sliced bread (this is an odd expression, don't you think?), etc. It just gets on lots of people's nerves---especially, for example, when people praise his defense even when he has been one of the worst-fielding shortstops in the Majors for years! The argument one typically hears after questioning this is typically along the lines of "If you saw him play every day, you'd see that he deserves a Gold Glove for his stellar defense." I quite obviously hate that argument rather passionately. Every single bloody person can make the exact same argument about their shortstop or anything else---it's just impossible to refute and is basically another way of saying "I want to bear Derek Jeter's child and I really don't give a flying fuck how good a shortstop he actually is." It just pisses me off sometimes, so I very much appreciate this new terminology!

In sum, I approve! (Tip of the cap once again to Rob Neyer, who linked to Posnanski on his blog.)

An Insider's View of Baseball Brawls

Courtesy Rob Neyer's blog, here is an insightful opinion piece on baseball's bench-clearing brawls written by former Major Leaguer Doug Glanville.

Glanville, who is one of the most articulate (and presumably intelligent) Major Leagers I have ever seen---ESPN writer Jayson Stark has made a habit of quoting over the years, so I've had a chance to read Glanville's comments a decent amount---has been writing a bunch of guest Op-Ed columns in the New York Times this year.

Idea for new television series

With the occasionally interminable discussions of minutiae and various other important matters that occur in Governing Body meetings (and similar venues), it occurs to me that a "dramedy" about Oxford life called "High Table" would make a potentially extremely amusing television series. Of course, it would have to be cast correctly. For example, the head/principal of the College would have to be played by Judi Dench. And Keanu Reaves would clearly have to be one of the prominent tutors. I'm not sure who else I'll cast in my new tv show, but I'm sure I can come up with some good ideas.

And, yes, I consider this idea to be both "awesome" and awesome. :)

Omar Vizquel sets record for most Major League games at shortstop

Omar Vizquel passed Luis Aparicio today to set the Major League record for most games at shortstop. You can see Vizquel's career statistics on this webpage.

I remember when I bought a ton of packs of 1989 Upper Deck baseball cards that included cards from the extended set. This particular baseball card set wasn't known for being well-collated, and there were in fact significant, noticeable correlations. In one box of 36 packs (which had about 15 cards each, with something like 2-3 cards from the 100-card extended part of the set), I got over 20 rookie cards of Omar Vizquel. I was really annoyed at the time because there were a lot more interesting cards in the set, and here I was getting a shitload of cards of a defensive whiz who couldn't hit water if he fell out of a boat. Vizquel's card right now is either the most valuable card of the set (the extended part; it's not even close to true for the entire set, given that the base set contained rookie cards of Ken Griffey Jr., Craig Biggio, and several other luminaries) or close to it. He's certainly had the best career of any of the players whose rookie cards appeared in the extended set. (The set also included cards of people who changed teams.) I never would have called this one back in the day.

Vizquel will get some Hall of Fame votes, though I don't think he quite deserves it. He has a chance of getting in, so let's see what happens.

In other news, I am again having trouble sleeping. Damned jet lag. I won't get up at 2:30 pm again tomorrow, however, as I have set my alarm so that I can actually make my morning meeting. My body hasn't been in the correct time zone in close to two weeks. Maybe in a few days?

Two More Brief Tidbits from Caltech

(1) From the "it's a small world" department comes the following fact: I found out at my reunion that the son of 1970s alum I know (who is heavily involved in the Alumni Association) audited my perturbation methods class last fall. Too bad he came to Oxford and didn't get a true Oxford experience in my course... :)

(2) For what it's worth, the two Peet's I've gone to most frequently (the one on South Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills and, especially, the one on Lake Avenue in Pasadena) are each now open two hours later every day. (I think they open earlier as well, but that wouldn't help me as much.) This change happened quite recently (some time in 2008, and I think possibly as recently as a couple of weeks ago), though of course I'm rarely around to take advantage of it. At least it will be nice for the times I visit.

Simile of the Day

Today's simile comes from Dune: "The thought hung like a sine wave in Leto's mind"

Reaction 1: Ummm... what?

After a slight delay, I had Reaction 2: What function would make this simile work?

Several movies (plus a musical and a concert)

Here are some belated comments about several movies that I've seen over the last couple of months:


Lars and the Real Girl: This was quite a charming film, and deals with certain types of social awkwardness quite well. (The lead actor did a good job in this one.)

The Spiderwick Chronicles: This film is decent, but there's been much better stuff in this genre the past several years.

The Other Boleyn Girl: This film was a nice piece of historical fiction. It was good but not great. The character that Natalie Portman played was quite a bitch.

Horton Hears a Who!: I really liked this cartoon! (Highly recommended!) It captures the spirit of Dr. Seuss quite well, and Steve Carrell and Jim Carrey were both extremely well cast. I also got to see a teaser for the third Ice Age film during the trailers. I approve!

Son of Rambow: This film has been advertised as a "British comedy," which is a bit misleading. It does have some comedic moments, but it is better described as a dramedy. It is a great film. I recommend it highly.

Persepolis: This film was excellent and incredibly well done! The animation style was awesome. The thing I like best is that even in the most serious scenes, one can see something ridiculous in a small part in the background. (For example, in one such scene--which I believe focused on the tattered remnants of a city after lots of violence--one can briefly see a dog peeing in the background.) I was consistently laughing at that stuff (sometimes the only person in the theatre doing so). After seeing this film, I'll never be able to think of "Eye of the Tiger" in quite the same way again. The main quibble I have with this flick is that characters from culturally similar (or, really, the same) backgrounds are voiced by people with completely different accents, and that hurt my suspension of disbelief a bit. On a similar note, the casting of Iggy Pop as a voice actor was odd (to put it mildly). What the Hell? That notwithstanding, this is one of my favorite films of the year so far.

Iron Man: I saw this film on Tuesday, and it is also one of my favorite films so far this year. This flick is outstanding. In fact, in my mind this is one of the best comic book films ever! (Note: I am not classifying these films according to how faithful they are to the original sources, but merely according to how much I enjoyed the movie versions.) After seeing the film, I was thinking it might be my favorite comic book film ever, but this morning I remembered V for Vendetta (which is from a comic book, right?) and I'm probably forgetting others. Robert Downey Jr. is awesome, as usual, and I love the witty repartee he has with his character's inventions. (Downey Jr. is one of my favorite actors.)


I also saw a musical and a concert during the past couple of months (with two more musicals coming up in the next couple of weeks):

Buena Vista Social Club: This show was basically a linear combination of Jazz and various types of Latin music. The highlight for me was their souped-up rendition of "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps." Of the Caltech crowd, I think Lemming in particular would have enjoyed this.

Fiddler on the Roof: I've wanted to see this for several years, so I'm glad I finally had the chance to do so. The performance was very good (especially that of the lead actor), but everybody except for the lead had a considerable amount of trouble maintaining their accent (and even the lead slipped once or twice). Somehow, hearing a bunch of different British Isles accents hurts the suspension of disbelief quite a bit for this particular musical, which is usually done by a bunch of people who are supposed to speak English like Woody Allen, Jackie Mason, Fyvush Finkel, etc. (Finkel has actually played several different roles in this musical in the past.)

Adventures in Security X-Rays

Today I saw something "awesome" during the carry-on luggage security at LAX. There was a guy trying to get flowers and balloons into the x-ray machine, and the balloons were causing all sorts of misadventures as they were lifting into the air when he and a security (TSA) person were trying to get them into the x-ray. It was delaying that entire line and taking so long that they needed to open an additional x-ray machine. (Everybody in line was filing towards the second x-ray machine because of the balloon ordeal, so they opened up the third one to usher people through faster. A bit of a pile-up was starting to occur and the TSA folks wanted to nip it in the bud.) I can't say I've seen this one before, but a couple of minutes viewing futile attempts to get the balloons into the x-ray machine was pretty damn amusing.

In other news, the UK customs people once again let me through immediately, even though the US ones gave me some grief. Thanks for the hometown loyalty, guys. (Though I didn't have a repeat of last time when after saying I had a faculty job at Oxford, one customs person asked something along the lines about my not having been able to get a job in the US. Naturally, I answered "No. I couldn't." --- with a complete deadpan, of course. What kind of retarded question is that? It's Oxford! I wouldn't have moved to the UK to have a job at a pissy university.)

In one last bit of news, I preordered the core 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks today. It actually only cost about $10 more in total buying it through the UK rather than picking them up in the US, and I'm willing to live with that premium. (The mark-up is of a different order-of-magnitude when it comes to video games, however.)

Finally, I will eventually be blogging about several movies I've seen in the last couple of months. I'll make it one big entry, and maybe I'll even be able to get myself to write it tomorrow. I've been promising this for a while, so we shall see.

Mike Piazza officially retires

Former Dodger catcher (and future Hall of Famer) Mike Piazza officially retired today. Here are his career stats. Next stop: Cooperstown.

(Approximate) Quote of the Day

Today's quote of the day was uttered at breakfast this morning by an old alum. I'm going to need to be slightly approximate on the phrasing (because I can't remember everything precisely), but the point will come across loud and clear. The line I'm going to give you is the straight line. You provide the joke.

"The only news service I trust now is Fox News because they're the only ones who give it to you straight."

Wow. I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out how the rest of us (both of us) at the table reacted.

Manny Being Manny

Courtesy Rob Neyer's blog, here is a video of Manny Ramirez high-fiving a fan in the middle of a double play. I'm amused.

What happens at Caltech stays at Caltech

I flew to California yesterday, and I am writing this entry from a couple of friends' apartment near the Caltech campus in Pasadena. I am here mainly for my 10-year reunion, though I have been sneaking in some work as well. I am attempting to remain in touch via e-mail and I am also having discussions with local collaborators (tomorrow especially will involve a bunch of research).

The reunion officially starts tomorrow. I will have a continental breakfast and (non-continental) dinner associated with it. On Saturday, I'll be going to an alumni bar-b-que and also giving a presentation on Caltech pranks (along with my Legends III coauthor and two of our contributors). While on campus today, I went to the campus bookstore to buy a copy of my own book. The person behind the desk managed not to notice. :)

One of my goals on this trip was to eat good beef, because that's a bit harder to come by in the UK. We were going to go to Gyu Kaku tonight, but we were late in the game getting our reservations in order, so we're going to Robin's instead. We're also going to be playing some Mario Kart for the Wii tonight, and I may sneak in some Rock Band as well. On Sunday, I'll be running a one-shot D & D game, and on Monday I will transfer over to Beverly Hills to spend some time with family and pre-college friends. On Monday night, I am going to the Dodger game against the Reds. (This will probably be the only baseball game I attend this year. Sigh...) I will fly back on Wednesday and arrive Thursday afternoon. I'll sadly have to almost certainly miss a talk I really wanted to see, but sacrifices had to be made. (I had to miss yesterday's Governing Body meeting, for example, which was such a shame.)

I still have some movies and mathematics articles to write about. I'll plan on trying to catch up on some of that when I get back. I also just had a BEC paper accepted today, so I'll blog on that one when the reprint is out.

Taking one for the team

Courtesy baseball executive Paul DePodesta's new blog, here is an instructional video ("Hardball Made Easy") about taking one for the team. I approve!

I watched the one with Matt Kemp, and it was ok. The one with Zambrano, however, is pure genius. There are a few others as well, though I didn't watch them.

Greg Maddux gets 350th career win

Yesterday, Greg Maddux became the 9th Major League baseball player to get his 350th career win. Here are his career stats (not yet including last night's game, as I write this).

Maddux is something special, so enjoy him while you can! I can't wait for him to pass Clemens on the all-time list!

By the way, in case you haven't noticed, a lot more of the NL position players have been having really good seasons than AL position players. Right now, there are about 20 everyday players in the NL who have an OPS of over .900 and only about 5 or 6 of them in the AL. It's still early and things will balance out some more, but some writers have discussed whether the balance between leagues is starting to tilt again. The AL has been stronger for several seasons now, and it will be interesting to see if we see some signs of a reversal during interleague play.

Some time in the park

I went to a friend's birthday party today. It started out in the evening in the park and then moved on to his place.

The part I want to mention is the park. These days, it's light outside until 9pm or so and spring seems to have finally arrived on a somewhat "permanent" basis (well, permanent on an appropriate time scale --- just think of my applying a philosphical form of multiple scale perturbation theory with this comment). One thing this means is that when I look at the part of the quad outside my window, some group of students is invariably playing croquet there. (This would be one of the accurate parts of the Oxford stereotype. I haven't played croquet since I was about 7 or 8... I need to join them for a game at some point. I want to play.) Another thing this means is that it has put me very much in the mood to play frisbee. It is frisbee weather, after all. Naturally, today was the perfect opportunity to do so, and I indeed got the chance to toss around a frisbee for the first time since I moved here in October. (People back home: I'd really like to play some frisbee while I'm visiting!)

There are a couple of other things worth mentioning:

(1) The park is only 5 minutes from home, and it's really nice! There are tons of great places to play frisbee, it is bordered by a river, etc. I could live without the tons of insects, but that isn't exactly avoidable. I hadn't actually gone there before, but I wandered about for a bit and it's really great. Maybe I'll be able to find people who are interested in weekly frisbee games? That would be awesome!

(2) There were a couple of "awesome" incidents at the park: In one, some random teenager came up to us and asked us for food. This wasn't somebody who was destitute and needed food but rather someone who thought it would be cool to try to get some freebees. We declined his kind offer and apparent need to eat food so that he can grow. In the other, a couple of teenage girls who were seriously drunk and/or stoned kindly offered us the burnt tampon that they were using to smoke stuff with. (The stated reason was that they weren't able to put it out entirely.) What the fuck? We kindly refused this offer as well. I hope they don't get themselves in serious trouble, because if they go up to the wrong person in that kind of state, there's a major danger of that.

Advice for people trapped in libraries

An article in this week's issue of Oxford Student (one of two competing local student newspapers) ended with the following paragraph:

"The library advises any student who finds themself trapped in the Social Sciences Library in future to try to return to the main reception, follow signs to the fire exits or, in very drastic situations, set off the fire alarm."

I have just one question: What should people do if they get caught in the Mathematics library? (Maybe give up hope because they were there in the first place?)


OK, so I technically shouldn't make fun of things in light of the serious situation (people got trapped inside the library during a suspected gas leak that thankfully turned out not to be an actual leak), but there are parts of that specific phrasing that strike me as a bit absurd (especially when used as the ending paragraph of an article rather than directly as the public service announcement that this presumably started off as) and consequently amuse me (independent of the gravity of the situation described in the article). And, yes, I am the type of person who would laugh at my own funeral.

Fun with Equation Names

I looked at a very interesting paper today (that I need to read carefully) that refers to a paper called the "modified MKdV" equation, which is called the MMKdV equation for short. Let's unpack this name:

The KdV equation stands for the Korteweg-de Vries equation. In other words, it's named after two people.

The MKdV equation stands for the "modified KdV" equation, which means that the MMKdV is in fact the "modified modified KdV" equation, which I would prefer to called the (modified)^2 KdV equation, although I'd really prefer a different adjective entirely be applied to KdV.

It's not close to as bad as "The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim" (which means "The The Angels Angels of Anaheim" or (The)^2 (Angels)^2 of Anaheim), but it's not exactly great. I have started to get a little bit of personal experience in how equation names arise. Namely, I wrote a paper and found myself in a paper constantly citing the book of a guy who formulated an equation that showed up in what we were doing, so my collaborators and I decided to name the bloody thing after the guy just so we wouldn't have to awkwardly cite the equation from his book so many damned times. He can thank us later.

Julio Franco factoids

After considering and deciding not to blog about Julio Franco's official retirement from baseball at the ripe old age of 49, I just read this very cool article with some cool factoids and decided to post a link to it here. You can find his statistics here.

I think my favorite factoid from the article is the following: In 1982, Franco was traded by the Phillies with Jay Baller, Manny Trillo, George Vukovich and Jerry Willard to the Indians for Von Hayes. The last player in that deal to retire (other than Franco) was Jerry Willard … 14 years ago.

By the way, I remember for years there were rumors that Franco is actually older than his listed age. These were never officially put to rest, though eventually his listed age got high enough that nobody bothered to mention this anymore.

Finally, Franco is ripped. If you've ever seen him up-close, it's kind of ridiculous. His arms look like solid muscle.

No more splinters!

I just got back from giving a talk at Southampton today (it was my first talk on quantum chaos in about 5.5 years). As promised by the maintenance people at Somerville, the wooden planks in the "hallway" (more like a very small corridor) within my apartment were covered with another surface today (the type of surface I have in my kitchen and bathroom). I had been getting tons of splinters from walking barefoot at home (wearing socks never actually helped because they would catch on the wood). Occasionally, enough of these would occur in a sufficiently short period of time that I would have some trouble walking, so I am quite pleased that this has now been rectified. (This could have been done earlier, but I was my typical stubborn self when it came to actually bringing this problem to the attention of others.) I think this will also have the benefit of reducing the number of bugs that make their way in here, but the main thing was to get rid of the splinter problem. Excellent!

Tales from the arXiv: Ising model edition

Here is an abstract for a paper that just got posted to the arXiv:

\\
arXiv:0805.0225
Date: Fri, 2 May 2008 13:00:53 GMT (55kb)

Title: 500-th solution of 2D Ising model
Authors: S.N. Vergeles
Categories: cond-mat.stat-mech
Comments: 14 pages, 4 figures
\\
One more solution of 2D Ising model is found
\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0805.0225 , 55kb)


Comment: Do I detect some sarcasm in the title of this paper? I approve!

New strategy for seminar speakers

Here's one I hadn't seen before until today.

I have often seen seminar speakers say that they encourage everyone to interrupt them during the talk with questions, etc. Today, however, one speaker (who is local and who knows me) good-naturedly started a talk with an alternative version of this statement that everybody except for me was encouraged to interrupt him with questions, etc. Everybody in the audience who knew me was naturally extremely amused by this. The moratorium was later lifted in the middle of the talk (at an appropriate point in which he discussed stuff I know pretty well), at which point I felt obligated to make some useful comment.

Oh, and the official reason that I was not allowed to ask questions was that there was apparently a risk that I wouldn't stop talking if I started.

In any event, this is one way to preempt potential bad behavior on my part. I'm also pretty sure I'm not going to be allowed to forget this...

OCIAM to fund research on camel-spitting distance

Update (6/26/08): Enough time has passed, so I put the correct 2008 posting year back in.

Note (added 4/30/08): This is actually a blog entry from 4/29/08, and I am burying it elsewhere on this page by request.



Remember that a few weeks ago I wrote this blog entry, which I then relegated to a "2007" post with a date change until it was safe to announce things officially. (I'm sneaky that way.) Well, I have now been given word that the news can be made public. So here goes.

I'll start with the official words from our research facilitator:

I'm delighted to announce that the department has just been awarded $25M
by the Global Research Partnership of the King Abdullah University of
Science and Technology to set up the Oxford Centre for Collaborative
Applied Mathematics (OCCAM), to be run in the first instance by John
Ockendon and 6 collegues drawn from OCIAM, CMB, Numerical Analysis and the
Computational Biology Group.

The Centre will be based in the Gibson Building and will have 4 new
faculty, 4 research fellows, 16 PDRAs and 14 graduate students. It will be
formally launched on 1 Oct 08.

We will be making a presentation on 16 May in the Industrial and
Interdisciplinary workshop slot to describe what'll be happening with
OCCAM and how you can get involved. I hope everyone will be able to come
along.


Now that we're getting funding from Saudi Arabia, there are going to be a few changes around here. For example, here are just a few of the new topics from which the newly-hired researchers will be allowed to choose:

1. Optimization of camel dynamics (including the kinematics of spitting).

2. Modelling oil extraction.

3. Optimal design of chadors.

4. Community detection in terrorist networks


Now let me be a bit more serious for a second. I have mixed feelings about this whole thing. While it's really exciting to be in a research group (especially one in mathematics) that is getting a grant of this magnitude and it will be "intellectually awesome" (to borrow some old phrasing from the efforts to get the grant and twist it slightly) to have lots of new faculty, postdocs, and graduate students around, there are some very serious ramifications. One of Oxford's student newspapers had an article last term about various programs here that have gotten money from sources that could be construed as dirty. Presumably, we will be henceforth be included on this list, so I expect that there will be at least some political backlash to this funding that the Powers That Be in our group will just have to deal with however they see fit. This new grant also has the potential to have ramifications on the politics within the group (and I have seen some signs of this already), so we're all going to have to work hard to make sure things remain pleasant in this respect. (One of the things that I like best about OCIAM is how much everybody seems to like each other.) I am not one of the central players on this grant, and right now my plans are to remain on the periphery. I will certainly interact with the new people we hire (and people already here, of course), but I currently don't feel comfortable accepting any money that percolates from this grant. I haven't decided for sure if I won't ever accept any, but I am definitely leaning against it. At the very least, I would have to think very seriously about the decision. Part of my discomfort certainly comes from my Jewish ancestry, and while my religious beliefs (obviously) differ greatly from what is "expected" of me, I have enough of a connection to my background that I wouldn't be able to accept funding from the source in question without serious thought/soul-searching. To be fair in my discussion, I should also mention that the grant has the potential to do a lot of good---and not just for the research group I'm in. With this grant, Oxford has been selected to help found a Western-style applied mathematics group in Saudi Arabia, so my colleagues have the chance to play a leading role in bringing something potentially very important to that country.

In closing this entry, let me recall for some of you that Arcane Gazebo jokingly phrased his decision to go into finance as "selling out". I hereby raise my plastic cup (with the remnants of this morning's iced latte, of course) in the fervent hope that we haven't done just that. I plan to be a passive observer in this whole thing (with a slight amount of "mo' money" attitude with respect to what OCIAM is getting) and look forward to the significant side scientific benefits from the additional academics that will be buzzing around the place. But it's also worth mentioning that I'm extremely glad that I'm not a central player in this grant and most definitely plan to remain that way. Maybe I'll change my mind later, but right now I feel like I can't accept any of the money that comes through this grant (which means, in practice, that I will make no attempt to fund any of my grad students or postdocs through this mechanism).

Now, in which direction am I supposed to bow? I can never get that straight.

Did I mention that most parties around here are costume parties?

Lemming just e-mailed me about the following article on BoingBoing:

"Citizens observed a masked individual wielding a running chainsaw walking around Bicester, Oxfordshire, England. Turns out he was on his way to a costume party."

I think I might have mentioned this before at some point, but nearly all of the student parties around here are (de facto) costume parties. This is a bit different from what I was used to before I moved to Oxford. Of course, most of the costumes I've seen aren't particularly creative... (Part of me is a bit disturbed by the choice of costume, but a larger part of me is amused by it. I suppose that's in poor taste, but I'm not going to lie to myself and pretend I'm not amused.)

Mathematical Genealogy WebApp

Courtesy Tim Chartier, I just found out about a WebApp that creates a tree with one's mathematical genealogy on the fly. I approve!

Here is my mathematical genealogy.

That about sums it up.

In honor of Travis's move to New York ("That really chaps my hide!"), here is an old New Yorker cartoon that summarizes the superiority complex of New Yorkers (pronounced along the lines of "New Yawwwwkaahs") quite nicely.

I never actually saw this cartoon before (it was used in a Shysterball blog entry to which Rob Neyer linked today), but it is a thing of absolute beauty.

Some classic baseball tirades

I was reminiscing about some classic baseball tirades (especially several courtesy of former Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda), so I went to YouTube to find links to some of them.

For your listening pleasured, here is an audio medley of Lasorda going berzerk. There are a few classics missing, but his opinion of Kingman's performance and his comments about Kurt Bevacqua (and a few other famous clips) are all there. The pictures that accompany the medley are occasionally apropos.

Here is also a famous tirade by Lee Elia that starts in the middle, but has the best parts. For a complete description of this tired (and the unbleeped text) see the first book by Jay Johnstone (a former baseball player). This book had some problems with censorship because it included this...

I also tried to find a video of the famous battle of Carlos Perez versus the dugout watercooler on YouTube, but I wasn't successful. I remember seeing this live, and this is one is a beauty. If any of you ever find it posted online, please send me the link.

Update (4/29/08): Today is actually the 25th anniversary of Elia's tirade. This anniversary hadn't registered when I wrote this blog entry.

A Quick Summary of Oxford

The weather has gotten really nice the past few days, so now when I walk by the Somerville quad to get back to my apartment, I see lots of students hanging out outside. At Caltech, I would expect to see some of them playing frisbee (which is what this type of weather puts me in the mood to do... let's play when I visit in a couple of weeks!), and admittedly I have seen them toss a frisbee on the quad before. The last couple of days, however, I have seen people playing croquet in one of the side lawns of the quad. Somehow this corresponds quite closely to my stereotypical vision of Oxford.

(I actually played croquet a couple of times when I was really young, and I would definitely be up for doing that again--even if I have to use a mallet rather than a local flamingo.)

In other news, there seems to be something rather hornet-like in my apartment at the moment. Sigh... I opened my window in the hope that it will leave, but that could easily backfire.

Anyway, back to work... (Oh, and the rant is still coming.)

Proverb of the Day

Today's proverb comes from Frank Herbert's Dune (which I have finally gotten around to reading... it's certainly taken long enough), although I assume variants of it have appeared forever.

The quote is: "Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere."

Comment: Amen!



P.S. The rant is still coming. I've been busy and haven't wanted to write long blog entries.

Things that don't make sense

I can't understand the strange fascination the people of this country have with mayonnaise. What the fuck?

P.S. The rant is coming. I've just worked too many hours today to want to type this up at the moment, but it's coming. (And the Dodger game will be on soon anyway, and I'm not going to choose ranting over watching the Dodgers when it would probably serve me well to calm down anyway.)

Update: The Dodgers are not playing on the east coast tonight, so the game is too late for me to watch. I'm still not in the mood to type up a rant. My MLB video service is crapping out at the moment (which I think has something to do with the Realplayer update I downloaded earlier today), but am I am inclined to play some Smash Brothers anyway. I tried fighting this for a while, but I need to get up early tomorrow, so I think I'll just read some baseball articles and crash. I'll try fighting this tomorrow.

Tales from the arXiv: Impact factor edition

Here is an abstract, just posted on the arXiv, that attempts to analyze the inflation in journal impact factors over the years:

arXiv:0804.3116
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:17:22 GMT (995kb,D)

Title: Differences in Impact Factor Across Fields and Over Time
Authors: Benjamin M. Althouse, Jevin D. West, Theodore Bergstrom, Carl T.
Bergstrom
Categories: physics.soc-ph
Comments: 9 pages, 3 figures
License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
\\
The bibliometric measure impact factor is a leading indicator of journal
influence, and impact factors are routinely used in making decisions ranging
from selecting journal subscriptions to allocating research funding to deciding
tenure cases. Yet journal impact factors have increased gradually over time,
and moreover impact factors vary widely across academic disciplines. Here we
quantify inflation over time and differences across fields in impact factor
scores and determine the sources of these differences. We find that the average
number of citations in reference lists has increased gradually, and this is the
predominant factor responsible for the inflation of impact factor scores over
time. Field-specific variation in the fraction of citations to literature
indexed by Thomson Scientific's Journal Citation Reports is the single greatest
contributor to differences among the impact factors of journals in different
fields. The growth rate of the scientific literature as a whole, and
cross-field differences in net size and growth rate of individual fields, have
had very little influence on impact factor inflation or on cross-field
differences in impact factor.
\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.3116 , 995kb)


If I am interpreting this abstract correctly, the authors of this paper seem to be concluding that the differences one sees between fields is predominantly the result of which journals reporting venues (in this case, Thomson Scientific's Journal Citation Reports) choose to index. In other words, they conclude that the dominant factor is basically noise at best and corruptible choices at worst. That's just lovely. (I haven't read the paper, so I am offering no opinion as to whether I agree with the authors' conclusion. I'm just saying that this is an extremely disturbing conclusion.)

Turning Cheese into Steak

You know how you hear or read about various amusing incidents about people like Richard Feynman or other famous scientists that become an integral part of their legendary status? Some of these incidents arise from things they do on purpose, and others arise completely by accident. I've occasionally done things that could potential be construed to be in both of these categories, though I unfortunately (fortunately?) don't have the scientific reputation for them to propagate that far. (That said, one of my practical jokes did get brought up by a faculty member during my University of Maryland interview in 2006... The scientific world is a rather small one...) Also, I think it's often true that the unintentional incidents are often the ones that make the best stories. Sometimes you just need the right mix of personality and circumstance for magic to happen, and that brings me to Wednesday night. But first, a long precursor is in order:


Back in the day (late February 2006), we had a discussion on Arcane Gazebo's blog about the notion of entanglement and food perhaps being in a superposition of a salad and a steak. The particular blog entry that I have in mind included a link to this particular post on Cosmic Variance.

This is a rather long aside, but let me quote the relevant passage from Cosmic Variance:

Fortunately, we are not only very considerate, we are also excellent experimental physicists with a keen grasp of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, according to the conventional interpretations that are good enough for our purposes here, says three crucial and amazing things.

First, objects can exist in “superpositions” of the characteristics we can measure about them. For example, if we have an item of food, according to old-fashioned classical mechanics it could perhaps be “salad” or “steak.” But according to quantum mechanics, the true state of the food could be a combination, known as a wavefunction, which takes the form (food) = a(salad) + b(steak), where a and b are some numerical coefficients. That is not to say (as you might get the impression) that we are not sure whether the food is salad or steak; rather, it really is a simultaneous superposition of both possibilities.

The second amazing thing is that we can never observe the food to be in such a superposition; whenever we (or sleeping puppies) observe the food, we always find that it appears to be either salad or steak. (Eigenstates of the food operator, for you experts.) The numerical coefficients a and b tell us the probability of measuring either alternative; the chance we will observe salad is a2, while the chance we will observe steak is b2. (Obviously, then, we must have a2 + b2 = 1, since the total probability must add up to one [at least, in a world in which the only kinds of food are salad and steak, which we are assuming for simplicity].)

Third and finally, the act of observing the food changes its state once and for all, to be purely whatever we have observed it to be. If we look and it’s salad, the state of the food item is henceforth (food) = (salad), while if we saw that it was steak we would have (food) = (steak). That’s the “collapse of the wavefunction.”


Now let's revisit Wednesday night, which was the special dinner at a really fancy restaurant for a workshop that CABDyN (Oxford's complex systems group) was hosting. Because of emergency grant proposals, other things that cropped up last week, and the need to spend at least one day (Friday) revising a draft of a paper before the term officially started, I was unable to go to the workshop as well. I was asked to go to the dinner anyway (even though I felt guilty), so I went---although I was in quite a lousy and antisocial mood that night. Some of the attendees didn't seem to like the fact that I was at the conference dinner even though I wasn't going to the rest of the workshop (and, as I mentioned, I did feel somewhat guilty about it), but that's not the story I want to tell.

The main course was some cheese thing-- a cheese souffle, I think. I don't like cheese. I will typically entirely avoid food that has any cheese on it (except for cream cheese, which has a rather misleading name anyway--it's not the same thing) and when there is some, I will scrape it off as best as I can before I eat the rest of the food. Some people reading this have seen me in action with a slice of cheese inadvertently ends up on a hamburger, etc. I had already declined the previous course because it didn't look appealing, and as those who know me even moderately well are aware, I am a very picky eater and simply won't eat something that looks completely unappealing to me (or that has things in it I don't like, etc.). OK, so then the main course comes and it turns out to be the cheese souffle; we're all supposed to eat vegetarian or something. I found out what was inside the object and--knowing that I wasn't going to eat it at all--I asked a waiter to take it back because I didn't want to waste it.

When the waiter came back, without my asking he told me about a couple of items that could be made on short notice. He then brought back a menu (well, he told me first without the menu, but I asked to take a look at the menu anyway) and pointed out those items again. Note that I did NOT ask any of the waiters to do this... I was just planning on getting food on my own later, but given the offer and because one of the items that could be made was a steak, I went for it. They said they would just charge it to the account being used to pay the bill, so I memorized the price so that I could e-mail the dinner's organizer when I got home to offer to pay for my food because I simply wouldn't have been comfortable not doing that. (The organizers refused to accept my money.) But anyway, I had a really good steak (the best I've had in the UK, actually) while everybody else (maybe 60 or so people) had to eat vegetarian--and it was purely by accident. In short, I figured out how to turn cheese into steak (but without the entanglement).

A couple of the people at my table seemed kind of annoyed at this, and the whole thing was apparently a hot topic at the workshop the next day.

I think it's safe to say that I have added to my legendary status. As I mentioned, all it takes is a combination of personality and circumstance. One doesn't need to actually try to do anything. As Lemming mentioned by IM, "You're going to have a beautiful eulogy."

RIP Edward Lorenz (1917-2008)

Lemming just let me know that Edward Lorenz, whose pioneering paper on chaos (although that term had to wait a few years for Li and Yorke to invent it) in weather prediction led to coining the term "the butterfly effect", died on April 16th. Among other things, this led to a lot of work on what is called the Lorenz attractor (one of the most famous examples of a chaotic attractor).

One thing that's worth noting is that the obituaries are incorrectly crediting Lorenz with having discovered chaos. Henri Poincare' had already discovered it--without the benefit of computers!--quite a few years before.

Vortex Lattice Locking in Two-Component Bose-Einstein Condensates

This is the title of my new paper that just came out. You can find a link here.

Unlike most of my papers, this one is very condensed-mattery (to invent a new word... think of it the way you would use the word "buttery") and doesn't have much mathematics at all. I do spend a lot of time working on condensed matter physics problems, but the style of my papers ordinarily reveals my nonlinear heart (or, rather, my nonlinear science/applied math heart). This particular paper was written jointly with my fellow scientists in Caltech's theoretical condensed matter group, and the flavor of the paper is correspondingly different---it's most definitely a physics paper rather than an applied math paper.

The first author is Caltech postdoc Ryan Barnett. Also on the list are Caltech faculty member Gil Refael and non-Caltech condensed matter theorist Hanspeter buchler (who goes by Hans Peter in publications).

Here is the abstract:

The vortex density of a rotating superfluid, divided by its particle
mass, dictates the superfluid’s angular velocity through the Feynman relation. To
find how the Feynman relation applies to superfluid mixtures, we investigate a
rotating two-component Bose–Einstein condensate, composed of bosons with
different masses. We find that in the case of sufficiently strong interspecies
attraction, the vortex lattices of the two condensates lock and rotate at the drive
frequency, while the superfluids themselves rotate at two different velocities,
whose ratio equals the ratio between the particle masses of the two species.
In this paper, we characterize the vortex-locked state, establish its regime of
stability, and find that it survives within a disk smaller than a critical radius,
beyond which vortices become unbound and the two Bose-gas rings rotate
together at the frequency of the external drive.


I view this as a form of synchronization, but instead of the better-studied frequency-locking, one actually needs to take the different masses of the species into account (it's a momentum-locking). One of the very important points we make is that if you look at a lot of papers, you'll see that they assume that two different masses are the same "without loss of generality" (and the literature on multiple-component Bose-Einstein condensates is absolutely riddled with that assumption). Of course, as we show in this paper, that's just not true, as there are very interesting phenomena that you'll simply miss if you always make that assumption.

Reversing the Curse of the David Ortiz Jersey

The Onion recently published this article about the Yankees' attempt to reverse the recent curse of the buried David Ortiz jersey.

How did they do it? Simple. They buried former Yankee Bernie Williams for good luck. The article describing the details is absolutely hilarious.

(I found out about this article from Rob Neyer's blog.)

Caltech pitcher sets hitting record

As described in The California Tech, a Caltech pitcher recently set an NCAA hitting record.

How did he do this? Simple... he hit 13 batters in a 6-inning performance. I approve! :)

RIP John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008)

I found out from a colleague at dinner tonight that John Archibald Wheeler died on Sunday. Here is a link to an obituary published by the New York Times.

Among other things, Wheeler coined the term 'black hole' and coauthored the monstrosity of a book called Gravitation that has been used as the Physics 236 textbook at Caltech for years and which really needs to be updated. (He did a lot of pretty good science too...) He also co-wrote an elementary special relativity textbook that I used as a frosh. The explanations in that book were generally good, but the presentation of the problems was often rather long-winded (it was sometimes difficult to find the question amidst all the text) and he and his coauthor used made the absolutely retarded choice of called the "momentum-energy 4-vector" (which would be more accurately called a "tensor" anyway) as the 'momenergy' 4-vector. WTF! That remains one of the most retarded terms I have ever seen applied to a scientific object, so I guess he was just trying to make up for black hole. (Given that Ben Miller was a fellow Lloyd frosh from my year, this naturally led to lots of comments involving 'mom' and 'energy.')

Math license

Courtesy Justin, here is an XKCD comic about revoking one's math license. I approve!

Giants band together to score run

On his blog today, Rob Neyer linked to a hilarious article in The Onion entitled San Francisco Giants Band Together To Score Run.

It's a short article, so I'll just reproduce the text below:

MILWAUKEE—The San Francisco Giants put aside their differences Sunday night, working together as a team in a common effort to score a run in a baseball game. The scrappy nine-man crew overcame daunting odds to cobble together the run, as each player used his individual strengths and skills to help string together an unlikely series of events—including a walk, advancement on a wild pitch, an infield single, and perhaps most selfless of all, a ground into double play—that ultimately resulted in a Giant crossing home plate. "This just shows you what a team can do when they put their mind to it," said Giants first-baseman Dan Ortmier, who was swarmed by his celebrating teammates at home plate after scoring the run. The Giants lost to the Brewers 12-1.


(Granted, we're not exactly doing better at the moment, but the article is nonetheless awesome.)

Digging for Jerseys

Here's a really neat story.

Apparently, one of the construction workers who worked on the new Yankee stadium is a Red Sox fan and buried a David Ortiz Red Sox jersey amidst the concrete foundation of the stadium in order to curse the Yankees. The jersey was recently excavated.

Anyway, I approve! It's the type of vignette that would be great to see in a baseball movie.

Another Bulwer-Lytton entry

Inspired by a failed analogy in an expository article I'm currently writing about the FPU problem, I devised (and have since submitted) another entry for the Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest:

As predictable as the regular dynamics of a periodic trajectory in a completely integrable system, James Bond had ferocious, passionate sex with the seductive, evil temptress repeatedly (although one major difference is that inverse scattering theory can be used to understand the former situation but not the latter).

This sentence is actually completely accurate mathematically!

(By the way, my failed analogy is that I tried to give my readers intuition about regular dynamics by comparing their predictability to James Bond movies. One of my coauthors pointed out that analogies only help when they actually increase understanding, though he phrased things much more tactfully than that. My attempt to explain why the standard superposition principle doesn't work for nonlinear problems using the double suicide in Romeo and Juliet was even worse.)

RIP Boris Chirikov (1928-2008)

Here's another death I missed, and in this particular case I am very surprised that it escaped my notice. On February 12th, Boris Chirikov, one of the founding fathers of both Hamiltonian chaos and quantum chaos, died. I got my Ph.D. thesis in quantum chaos, and of course this blog is named after that field. I continue to do research in both of these subjects, which are near and dear to my heart. Among Chirikov's contributions to these fields are his development of his eponymous Chirikov overlap criterion (which played an important role in the investigation of chaos in the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem and describes the transition from locally chaotic dynamics to globally chaotic dynamics) and equally eponymous Chirikov-Taylor map (aka, the "standard map").

Update: Here is a link to the obituary in the online version of Physics Today.

RIP Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)

With all the attention I've been paying to research, baseball, and Super Smash Brothers Brawl, a few things have flown under my radar---like the fact that Arthur C. Clarke died on March 19th. I actually founded out about his death from the notices listed in the online edition of Physics Today.

For many years, I have frequently tried to find times to interject variants of "I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." into conversations.

Tales from the arXiv: Even more baseball

The following abstract got posted to the arxiv this morning:

Can one understand the statistics of wins and losses of baseball teams? Are their consecutive-game winning and losing streaks self-reinforcing or can they be described statistically? We apply the Bradley-Terry model, which incorporates the heterogeneity of team strengths in a simple way, to quantify the rank dependence of the average number team wins and losses in major-league baseball over the past century, and also to argue that long winning and losing streaks have a purely statistical origin. The data further show that the past half-century of baseball has been more competitive than the preceding half-century.

The authors are C. Sire and S. Redner.

You can find the paper here.

Corridors and Fingernails

I have spent a decent bit of time wandering the corridors of Heriot Watt buildings trying to find cafeterias, bathrooms, exits, and the like. Why do they design their buildings like mazes? They make Sloan Annex and even Dartington House seem easy to navigate. (Yes, the last two buildings in which I have offices are both rat mazes. That says something about my lot in life, doesn't it?)

Also, I am the early leader in our brand-new Study Group injury pool. I managed to savage one of my fingernails trying to lift an empty lunch tray (in fact, two empty lunch trays). Ouch!

This conference also has its version of Housequotes, which are apparently supposed to be collected for a final presentation on Friday. These objects are described in this article. I already uttered a comment about the well-known "vegetable kingdom" that may or may not have any staying power.

Oh, and I found out a paper on which I played an ancillary role as a grad student apparently just got published in a collection---only 6 years after I ceased to have any involvement in it. I always just thought it was going to just remain a preprint, but I think the book ended up being partly a conference proceedings for a conference from back then where one of my coauthors presented the paper. I got an e-mail about it today, and this was a paper that had been out of my radar for so long and to such an extent that I hadn't even included it in my CV since before my first postdoc.

Well I just started the trip off right...

I really needed to use the bathroom and searched all around both my floor and the bottom floor of the building in which my room (a dorm room) is located and tried to find a single bathroom without success. This building is a maze, though I did manage to find a key to indicate what rooms corresponded to bathrooms. Unfortunately, all of them were unlabeled and there didn't seem to be any rooms at all in the physical locations that were supposed to correspond to bathrooms. I did find a couple of random things, but none of them were the bathroom I was seeking.

As it turns out, I missed the bathroom that was located in my room. (The entryway to the room covers it when one opens the door.) Oops.

I can tell already that I'm going to be extremely helpful for the mathematical modeling problems this week---especially when it comes to finding efficient (or, day I say, optimal) solutions.

Once again I have proven that I am a theorist...

What happens in Edinburgh stays in Edinburgh

In about an hour and a half, I will be boarding a train to Edinburgh to attend a study group with industry at Heriot-Watt University. There are direct trains from Oxford to Edinburgh, and my choice of the 1:36 train is so that I can have a route with 0 layovers. Then I can just chill in the train for a while and not have to pay attention at all if I don't want to.

This trip will include several firsts for me:

(1) It will be my first time in Edinburgh, which is where solitons were first observed. It's supposed to be a really nice city, and I bought new film and a new battery for my camera in preparation for it. (Note that I will finally get off my ass and buy a digital camera, which I've been intending to do for several years. I can be really lazy about things sometimes... I'm waiting until I'm in the States in May because it will cost me half as much if I buy it while I'm back home.)

(2) This will be my first time in Scotland. I am gradually visiting new countries. I'll also knock off Italy later this summer.

(3) This will be my first study group. On the first day, six industry groups will present their problems, and the attendees will spend the rest of the week seeing how far they can get on them. It should be very cool. I never got a chance to participate in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling, and this has that kind of flavor. Besides working on interesting problems, this has the chance to lead to data sets and longer-term projects and collaborations. It's an excellent opportunity and it gives me the chance to spend a few days away from home during the break (which in general is quite revitalizing). The problem that interests me the most based on the online descriptions is one involving recommendations for items with few reviews---essentially, it's difficult to deal with those kinds of tails because of small sample sizes, so the plan is to try to come up with clever ways of dealing with that. From my perspective, this is a networks problem and, in fact, I believe several of these issues have been studied in past papers that use, for example, data sets from Amazon's recommendation system. Plus I can see how the various Netflix prize solutions have dealt with similar issues.

This can't be good.

In my bathroom I just noticed what appears to be a hornet. I can't believe those bloody bastards followed me to England! I probably brought those fuckers into the country with me.

For the locals who don't know, I have a bit of a history with hornets.

Shit.

Pitchers in the Outfield

As Zifnab mentioned via IM and Rob Neyer discussed in his blog, Braves manager Bobby Cox pulled some interesting shenanigans in last night's game against the Pirates.

As described on a blog called Baseball Toaster, "With runners on first and third and one out in the top of 10th in Atlanta, Bobby Cox replaced pitcher Chris Resop with Royce Ring to pitch to Adam LaRoche. Resop moved to left field to replace Matt Diaz. After Ring struck out LaRoche, Resop moved back to the hill to face Xavier Nady. Gregor Blanco then entered the game as the new left fielder."

As discussed on Baseball Toaster, moves like this actually have a long history. I vaguely recall the 1986 Mets example that Baseball Toaster mentions. Pitchers have also shown up in outfields or other positions for different reasons. Eric Gagne played a little center field a couple of days ago, and I'm guessing that the Brewers are probably carrying 12 pitchers and ran out of position players. In games with many extra innings, one will occasionally see some really cool stuff like that. Here's one of my favorites: Years ago, in an extra inning game, the Cardinals had Jose DeLeon switching repeatedly with Tom Brunansky over who was in right field and who was in left field. Basically, the manager wanted Brunansky (a natural outfielder) to be the more likely guy to field the ball, so he was in right whenever a lefty was up and in left whenever a righty was up. They ended up switching every batter, so the announcers were like "Brunansky to left, DeLeon to right." And then one batter later it was "Brunansky to right, DeLeon to left."

There are some other classy ones. The Dodgers lost a game in inning 21 (I think it was 21) in 1989 (I think it was 89). The losing pitcher was third baseman Jeff Hamilton. First baseman Eddie Murray was at third base when the game ended, and pitcher Fernando Valenzuela finished the game at third. (Now we just need an extra inning game where Chin-Lung Hu moves around the field a lot...) More recently, Rockies catcher Brent Mayne actually earned a victory when he finished the game on the mound.

More on Smash Brothers

I've continued to play lots of Super Smash Brothers Brawl. In many respects, it's more of the same from Super Smash Brothers Melee, but in part that means more fun, though there are lots of new things too---such as new characters, an adventure game that reminds me of things like the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, and a very cool way to do unlockables by hinting what else one might get based on doing certain things. And, as I mentioned, more of a good thing is extremely welcome as well! I've only played on my own so far, but I've had a ton of fun with the game so far.

I'll discuss possible spoilers in the comments if there is any interest. In particular, I locked a very cool character today although I actually knew earlier that he was in the game. I still haven't locked Jigglypuff. They apparently made her much harder to unlock this time around. (Cue Lemming?)

I just had a particular character join me in the adventure game, so I think I can unlock him now. I'm going to go do that...

Stay tuned...

This is just to let you know that there is some stuff that I am not supposed to blog about. But stay tuned and watch this spot... because eventually I will be allowed to blog about these things.

But don't worry. The world isn't coming to an end or anything.

See you later!

Erdos-Schroder numbers?

Courtesy Lemming, here is a fantastic networks comic on XKCD. To fully understand the Erdos-Schroder number deal (at least if you're a Lloydie from a certain era), take a look at the tooltip.

Lego ballparks

Take a look at these sweet pictures of ballparks made out of Lego! That is just awesome.

(And for a blast from the past, you can go here to check out the stories from the bible as told using Lego. The site even includes warnings so that you know which stories it's safe to show to your kids.)

Tales from the ArXiv: Steroids and Power Laws edition

Here is the abstract of a paper that just got posted on the arxiv:

\\
arXiv:0804.0061
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 03:59:08 GMT (41kb)

Title: Statistical evidence consistent with performance-enhancing drugs in
professional baseball
Authors: Alexander Petersen, Woo-Sung Jung, and H. Eugene Stanley
Categories: physics.pop-ph physics.soc-ph
Comments: 9 pages, 4 figures
License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
\\
Statistical analysis is a major aspect of baseball, from player averages to
historical benchmarks and records. Much of baseball fanfare is based around
players exceeding the norm, some in a single game and others over a long
career. Career statistics serve as a metric for classifying players and
establishing their historical legacy. However, the concept of records and
benchmarks assumes that that level of competition in baseball is stationary in
time. Here we show that power-law probability density functions, a hallmark of
many complex systems that are driven by competition, govern career longevity in
baseball. We also find universal power laws in the distributions of all major
performance metrics for pitchers and batters. The use of performance-enhancing
drugs has a dark history, emerging as a problem for both amateur and
professional sports. We find statistical evidence of performance enhancement in
the analysis of home runs hit by players in the last 25 years. This is
consistent with the findings of the Mitchell Report [1], a two-year
investigation into the use of illegal steroids in major league baseball, which
revealed that over 5 percent of major league baseball players tested positive
for performance-enhancing drugs in an anonymous 2003 survey.
\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.0061 , 41kb)

Life on Mars

It's not just for David Bowie anymore, and Google and Virgin can help you realize any dreams you might have of going to Mars.

Or perhaps you'd prefer to send e-mails back in time?

New streetprices.com product

Courtesy Autumn Looijen, you can go here to read about an new, innovative, environmentally-friendly product that streetprices.com announced today.

Tales from the ArXiv: Paradoxical Popup edition

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

arXiv:0803.4357
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:24:19 GMT (733kb)

Title: Paradoxical popups: Why are they hard to catch?
Authors: Michael K. McBeath, Alan M. Nathan, A. Terry Bahill, David G. Baldwin
Categories: physics.pop-ph
Comments: 28 pages, 10 figures, sumitted to American Journal of Physics
License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
\\
Even professional baseball players occasionally find it difficult to
gracefully approach seemingly routine pop-ups. This paper describes a set of
towering pop-ups with trajectories that exhibit cusps and loops near the apex.
For a normal fly ball, the horizontal velocity is continuously decreasing due
to drag caused by air resistance. But for pop-ups, the Magnus force (the force
due to the ball spinning in a moving airflow) is larger than the drag force. In
these cases the horizontal velocity decreases in the beginning, like a normal
fly ball, but after the apex, the Magnus force accelerates the horizontal
motion. We refer to this class of pop-ups as paradoxical because they appear to
misinform the typically robust optical control strategies used by fielders and
lead to systematic vacillation in running paths, especially when a trajectory
terminates near the fielder. In short, some of the dancing around when
infielders pursue pop-ups can be well explained as a combination of bizarre
trajectories and misguidance by the normally reliable optical control strategy,
rather than apparent fielder error. Former major league infielders confirm that
our model agrees with their experiences.
\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.4357 , 733kb)


Comment: The Magnus force seems to be rearing its ugly head again. It was giving me all sorts of trouble in a research project on vortex lattice locking in rotating Bose-Einstein condensates (the paper has now been accepted, and I'll write a post about it when it appears in print), and I was messing up stuff conceptually that I ought to have known. Then I became doubly embarrassed when I realized that the Magnus effect is essentially exactly why I can put so much spin on ping pong balls (the effect becomes rather significant for light balls like that). I apparently can't escape it...