They ran, they ran so far away

In one of last week's baseball games, the Cleveland Indians got a 4-3 walk-off win against the Kansas City Royals with the assistance of a flock of Seagulls. Thankfully, some of the articles include the obvious joke. Where is Dave Winfield when you need him? (Actually, I would love to have watched a Baseball Tonight episode discussing this incident when Dave Winfield is one of the hosts just to hear the inevitable snarky comments. If that doesn't ring a bell, take a look at item #6 on this list.)

Shiny New Principal!

Starting on September 1, 2010, Somerville will have a shiny new Principal. (Note that the current one is quite good, but she is set to retire at that time.) The Somerville Fellows elected her (and she accepted the position) a little while ago, but the official public announcement was today. Hence, I can finally write this blog entry. The election process is best described as "interesting".

(In the press release to which I linked above, a number of Somerville researchers were (correctly) described as "world class". Here's to hoping that I'll accomplish enough to be worth mentioning in that light the next time we elect a new Principal.)

(Approximate) Quote of the Day: Overheard in the Clarendon Building

This afternoon, I was in the reception hall for the big lecture theatre in the Clarendon Building just before Michael Berry's talk. One physics professor asked another if he was done with grading exams, and here was his approximate response: "I finished a few days ago. Since then, I've been working on bloody papers and acting smug."

Comment: Here, here!

Making Friends in Oxford

I've been going through another one of my thoughtful phases recently, and I've been pondering the fact that the places in which I have been able to most easily make close friends are first Caltech and now Oxford. I have made a few pretty good friends here, and there is one local with whom I'm especially close who I would put up there with just about anybody I've ever met and as far as I'm concerned is a friend for life. It's also particularly nice for my mental state when I am slaving at work and I get an unexpected knock on my door. The gentle nudging to try to convince me to eat and sleep a little more properly are also much appreciated, and I occasionally even follow that advice. (Our first interaction was kind of interesting, so I certainly wouldn't have predicted this at the time we first met in fall 07. In retrospect, I probably should have, but it's easy to say that.) I know I've been here for about a year and a half now, but Caltech is the only other place where I've met such people on this kind of time scale. (And it's not like I haven't made close friends in other places---my best friend is someone with whom I've been friends for 29 years, and I obviously met him in a different place.)

So then part of the question becomes 'why' have these two places been so good to me in this respect. Obviously, friendships are constrained by opportunity, and I think that's the main key. It probably is true that Caltech and Oxford have more (as a ratio of total people) of the types I like, but it's not like those people don't exist at other places (and I have clearly met several of them in the past). Most of my close friends from Caltech were in Lloyd House and similarly most of my better friends from Oxford are people I know via Somerville. I don't know anybody in the Mathematical Institute that well (it's more of a colleague thing there, though I certainly like my colleagues very much), and I only know one person from the complex systems group at any reasonable level.

The number of good friends I've made here is admittedly smaller than after the same amount of time at Caltech, but I believe that the difference is that back then we were basically all thrown into close living quarters and that is different from my living arrangements here. But here I have excellent opportunities to meet wonderful, interesting people with whom I enjoy spending time. At Cornell and Georgia Tech, I really struggled to do that, and I would literally sometimes go multiple months between going out with other people. (At Berkeley, I just hung out with people I knew from before.) Here I am hanging out with my friends all the time (though, of course, Upper and Lower Crotch haven't been duplicated), so life is good.

I still get moody and even depressed at times, but that's who I am. But a couple of the locals are really looking out for me, so this entry is for you.

(Well, I'm not sure if I phrased my feelings eloquently, but I hope I got the point across.)

Congratulations to Caltech's Class of 2009

Today is Caltech's 115th commencement ceremony, which is honoring the class of 2009. Several of my former research students are among those who are graduating, and Nobel Laureate Stephen Chu is the speaker (that's a pretty good choice, actually). Congratulations!

A Unified Quantum Theory of the Sexual Interaction

Justin e-mailed me a recent blog post (on a blog called "In the Dark") that posits A Unified Quantum Theory of the Sexual Interaction.

Reaction: Um, shouldn't my article on Quantum Cuteness have been cited? :) I posted that on my website over 5 years ago. Granted, my work was purely theoretical.

Dodgers earn 10000th franchise victory

Last night, the Dodgers won the 10000th game in franchise history. Nice!

(Tip of the cap to Rob Neyer.)

Tales from the arXiv: Sexed Coagulation edition

I'll just post the title and abstract. I don't think any additional comments are necessary.

arXiv:0906.1773
Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2009 16:18:58 GMT (28kb)

Title: A model for sexed coagulation
Authors: Raoul Normand
Categories: math-ph math.MP math.PR
Comments: 33 pages
MSC-class: 34A34; 60K35
\\
We consider in this work a model for aggregation, where the coalescing
particles initially have a certain number of potential links (called arms)
which are used to perform coagulations. This model is sexed, is the sense that
there are male and female arms: two particles may coagulate only if one has an
available male arm, and the other has an available female arm. After a
coagulation, the used arms are no longer available. We are interested in the
concentrations of the different types of particles, which are governed by a
modification of Smoluchowski's coagulation equation -- that is, an infinite
system of nonlinear differential equations. Using generating functions and
solving a nonlinear PDE, we show that, up to some critical time, there is a
unique solution to this equation. The Lagrange Inversion Formula allows in some
cases to obtain explicit solutions, and to relate our model to two recent
models for limited aggregation. We also show that, whenever the critical time
is infinite, the concentrations converge to a state where all arms have
disappeared, and the distribution of the masses is related to the law of the
size of some two-type Galton-Watson tree. Finally, we consider a microscopic
model for coagulation: we construct a sequence of Marcus-Luschnikov processes,
and show that it converges, before the critical time, to the solution of our
modified Smoluchowski's equation.
\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.1773 , 28kb)

Best. Scouting Report. Ever.

Here is an accurate scouting report of Mariner shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt that only uses sentences from dictionary.com. I approve!

(Tip of the cap to Rob Neyer.)

Quote of the Day: Ponti's Dinner Edition

Tonight we had our Ponti's dinner in Somerville, which this year is doubling up as part of our campaign (launched this weekend) to get lots of money from our alums and other sponsors.

The pre-dinner speech was given by Chris Patten (Baron Patten of Barnes). He announced in this speech that he was going to "do the West Coast" of the United States. Clearly, he has no clue whatsoever about how that would be interpreted back home---in particular when "do" is applied to the West Coast . (Let's just say that he is evidently going to have a very exhaustive trip---especially if he plans to visit Hollywood.) Wow.

In another bit of "awesomemess" (and in this case I definitely mean this term in a derogatory fashion), one of the fans at Dodger Stadium today (I turned on the game when I got back to my apartment) was wearing a t-shirt that had the terms "the man" and below that "the legend". Above "the man" was an arrow pointing up. Below "the legend" was an arrow pointing down. I think the word of the day for this one is probably "overcompensation". Or perhaps just "awesome".

Comic Strip of the Day

This recent xkcd comic strip holds way too much meaning for me.

(Tip of the cap to Ravi Montenegro.)

Happy 25th Birthday, Tetris!

Today is the 25th anniversary of the invention of Tetris, and Google is celebrating it in a simply awesome fashion! I love that game.

I think the number they really mean is 5000

The FAIL blog has a great picture of an epic fire alarm failure.

(Tip of the hat to Mariano Beguerisse-Diaz.)

Randy Johnson wins 300th career game

Randy Johnson just won his 300th career game. Just take a look at his awesome career stats. Wow!

Tales from the arXiv: Prepare to Fight!

Here is a new abstract that I just saw on the arXiv:

\\
arXiv:0906.0599
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 20:54:33 GMT (8kb)

Title: The Ultimate Solution to the Quantum Battle of the Sexes game
Authors: Piotr Fr\c{a}ckiewicz
Categories: quant-ph
Comments: 8 pages
\\
We present the unique solution to the Quantum Battle of the Sexes game. We
show the best result which can be reached when the game is played according to
Marinatto and Weber's scheme. The result which we put forward does not
surrender the criticism of previous works on the same topic.
\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.0599 , 8kb)


I'm not sure if this one requires any commentary.

Steve Strogatz on Networks and the Phillips Machine

I had never heard of the Phillips Machine, but there is a refurbished one at Cambridge that "works". As Steve Strogatz explains in his latest guest column in the New York Times, it's basically a miniature hydraulic caricature of the economy. The article then relates this briefly to some modern work in networks and complex systems, more generally bringing up the point that one of the really exciting and challenging things of these subjects is the attempt to move beyond reductionism.

From the archives (or, how I once almost made it into Time Magazine)

When I was in grad school, I saw an article in Time Magazine about mathematics and mathematicians suddenly becoming sexy, so I decided to send a letter to the editor. My letter almost got printed.

It's worth noting that I wrote this letter before I started studying granular chains, for which one of the most important elements is the stiffness of one's balls. (Acoustic waves travel faster in stiffer materials.) Also, Techers will recognize a bit of this from back in the day...

Jamie Moyer wins 250th career game

Jamie Moyer was a late bloomer. I remember him when he was just trying to establish himself in the Major Leagues in the late 80s and early 90s (he made his big league debut in 1986). If you had asked me back in the day to provide a rank ordering of which Major League pitchers would get at least 250 wins, I would have placed Jamie Moyer near the bottom of the list. Once he got to the Mariners, though, Moyer learned how to win and he just kept on doing it long after just about all of his more highly-lauded contemporaries had left the game. Well, today 46-year-old Jamie Moyer won his 250th career Major League game. Congratulations! Moyer appears to finally be nearing the end of the line, but people have said that numerous times before, so let's see how long he can last. He's certainly an unusual player.

Sportscenter's Top 10 Baseball Meltdowns of All Time

Here is a video clip of Sportscenter's Top 10 Baseball Meltdowns of All Time. I don't completely agree with their choices, but they definitely included some classics. The funniest one---and one of the main reasons I am blogging about this---is Carlos Perez versus the dugout watercooler at number 7. I've been wanting to post a link to that video for years, so I'll have to settle for the small part of it here. (They don't show the entire thing, but what they do show is bloody awesome.) Priceless.

A Differential Equation in the New York Times

Here is Steve Strogatz's second guest article in Olivia Judson's New York Times blog. He lifted some of his discussion from his textbook, but it just warms my heart to see differential equations discussed in a venue like the New York Times and even more to see one (even a simple one) actually appear there.

My guess is that Strogatz's third guest article will be about synchronization and networks.

(Tip of the hat to Samuel Lee.)

"Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass"

Here is an extremely funny fake research report called Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass. I approve!

(Tip of the hat to Jing Xu.)

"I shot an arrow in the air / It fell to earth I know not where..."

There a couple of big wins in the new issue of Mini-AIR. For example, here is an article called Can a Falling Bullet Be Lethal at Terminal Velocity? Cardiac Injury Caused by a Celebratory Bullet. The abstract is also excellent:

This is a case report of rare cardiac and abdominal organ injuries sustained by an innocent bystander from a New Year’s Eve celebratory gun shooting. The force and velocity of a projectile fired into the air as it ascends and returns to earth, along with its potential for bodily injury will be reviewed.


Another paper, called Transcranial Arrow Injury: A Case Report, thinks about the problem a little bit more literally. Here is a portion of its abstract and conclusion:

In this report, a 37 year-old male patient, who was shot by an 'arrow' accidentally, was evaluated regarding clinical
presentation, treatment and clinical progress.... CONCLUSION: Management of such cases are still beyond the textbooks and
guidelines and it is depending on the surgeon's skill and experience in general neurosurgery.


I think what amuses me most are the quotations around the word 'arrow'.



On a complete separate note, this issue of Mini-AIR mentioned a paper that had something to say about the Apple versus IBM logos. Here is a blurb (which I assume is the abstract, though I didn't check):

This manuscript first examines whether brand exposure elicits automatic behavioral effects as does exposure to social primes. Results support the translation of these effects: Participants primed with Apple logos behave more creatively than IBM-primed and controls; Disney-primed participants behave more honestly than E!-primed and controls.


I am extremely amused.

Math and the City

Here is a guest article by Steve Strogatz that appears in the New York Times. Strogatz is guest-blogging for Olivia Judson in the next three weeks. The first article is called "Math in the City" and it discusses Zipf's Law and the work by Geoff West and collaborators. (However, unlike West in his seminar yesterday, Strogatz does not discuss what I have come to call The Power Law OF DOOM.)

(Tip of the hat to Hilary Ockendon.)

Today I am ashamed to be from California.

Come on, people. This is lame. Let people live their lives as they see fit when it does no harm to anyone else.

New Supreme Court Justice Nominee

Barrack Obama has nominated federal appellate Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court.. If confirmed, she would become the first Hispanic and third woman to take a place at the Supreme Court bench. I wouldn't usually blog about this, but her name is actually a familiar one to me, as it was her ruling that led to the end of the 232-day baseball strike in 1995. If she can help bring baseball back after a cancelled World Series, then surely she can do well on the highest court in the land (even though she's a Yankees fan). :)

A Rags-to-Riches Baseball Story

One never knows how these things will end, but here's a very cool rags-to-riches baseball story starring Diamondbacks pitcher Clay Zavada and his handlebar mustache (dude!).

(Tip of the cap to Rob Neyer.)

Weirdness of the Day

I just took a look at an interesting author solicitation for a "Visions of the Future" issue of Philosophical Transactions A. I am considering writing such an article on granular crystals. Additionally, I am rather intrigued by the following sentence: All authors will receive a print copy of the issue as well as 50 electronic reprints.

Reaction: Um, I'm not so sure I want 50 electronic reprints. I assume the numbers in the two options were (pretty amusingly) flipped. And if this is purposeful, then that's just bloody weird.

Overview of the 2009 Snowbird Meeting

I just completed my network survey of the meeting and once the data is available, I am curious how much my experience as a 'tree' in this conference coupled with network science methods (which study the 'forest') such as community detection will break some of the theoretical anonymity in the survey. (This will be an interesting test of some of the methods and give some insight into how much network methods alone might be able to do in such contexts. Let's see if I actually end up having the time to take a look at the data once it's ready.)

I'm not really going to write a proper overview here. Rather (and, as usual), I'm just going to give a few thoughts.

1. The Snowbird meeting is still perhaps the best one at following my career trajectory. Not only did I know tons of people at the meeting (well over 100 and possibly over 200) but most parts of my career path since I started Caltech as an undergrad in Fall 1994 were covered. Including me, there were 4 people who were all undergrads at Tech at the same time (3 Lloydies + 1 Mole + 0 Flems) and there was at least two more who was a grad turkey then (including one with whom I took a class). There were also near-misses among the grad turkeys, which is one reason I wrote 'at least' (I'm not sure in all cases). There were a couple of people with whom I went to grad school, though not as many as there used to be at this conference. (Some people have left academia, others have different academic interests then before, and some of them are at small universities and simply don't have the travel money.) There were a ton of fellow postdocs from Georgia Tech, a small number of overlaps from my second tour of duty at Tech, and a few others currently at Oxford. From my pre-faculty era, I have not included any faculty in the above summary. There are quite a few of those at the conference with whom I overlapped as well.

2. Within the dynamical systems community, I might be known as much for my t-shirts and personality as for my science. (Some people have been known to make it a point to find out what shirt I am wearing on a given day.) That said, I did notice the audience in my session increase in number by a reasonably substantial amount when it was my turn to speak. That's kind of nice for the ego, though I do wonder about the audience's tastes. :)

3. Cooking bacon was used as an example of mechanical buckling in one of the plenary talks. Sweet! I celebrated the next morning by eating lots of bacon. (Proper bacon is definitely one of the culinary things I miss when living in England. I also miss really crispy friend chicken, so I got some food from Popeye's at the Dallas airport on the way back.)

4. As usual, there were a ton of current and recent CAMsters at the conference. (Cornell has been quite well-represented in dynamical systems for many years.) I don't think any of them knew that I used to be one of them, but then again several of them went to my talk, so maybe they have heard some whispers on the wind.

5. In another fine Snowbird tradition, I once again got a nosebleed. I have yet to succeed at going to this conference without getting one. Maybe in 2011...

6. Number of people at the conference who I had not previously met who told me they read my blog: 1 (I should check and see how large the readership actually is. Maybe I should start a somewhat more benign---by which I mean rated G---blog about dynamical systems to complement this one?)

7. Number of people at the conference who told me they read my papers: 0 (I know that some of them do, but the point is nobody told me that they do.)

Dodgers stretch lead to 8.5 games!

The Dodgers now have an 8.5 game lead in the National League West. We have the best record in baseball, the largest lead in baseball (the second largest is 3 games---Texas over the Angels in the American League West), the best run differential in baseball, and all sorts of other excellent qualities. I can't expect us to maintain this pace, but I'm sure as Hell enjoying it!

What happens in Snowbird stays in Snowbird

My friends just left, and I feel much more decompressed after having had the chance to hang out with them. Tomorrow morning, I am heading to Heathrow to fly to the Snowbird dynamical systems conference (that's not the official title), which is my favorite conference. I'll be bloody exhausted when I get there and I am pretty tired now, but that's alright. In addition to all the great talks, I'll see several collaborators and also some old friends that I haven't seen in a while. (That's one of the best parts about conferences, actually. It's nice to see old friends.)

Postscript (5/16/09): Wow, I just realized that if one reads the above paragraph quickly, then "decompressed" might come out as "depressed" and give entirely the wrong meaning as a result. English language, oh how I love thee. (Granted, 'more decompressed' isn't exactly textbook English...)

Mistaken Identities on Cardboard

Here are some mistaken identities that have been immortalized on baseball cards, as compiled by the blog Home Run Derby. A couple of these are absolutely awesome.

(Tip of the cap to Rob Neyer.)

Congratulations to Ben Williamson!

On occasion, when something special warrants it, I put the blog spotlight on one of my friends. In this case, my old friend Ben Williamson (who actually turned 29 yesterday, though I naturally still remember his days as a 14-year-old Caltech freshman) graduates from Law School with High Honors today. He has a 2-year gig waiting for him as a judicial law clerk in his home town of Pensacola, Florida. Excellent!

Good Friends + Good Desserts = Big Win

I'm having a party tomorrow, some close friends will be coming, I've already bought some very good but expensive desserts, and there should be some gaming on the docket. That's about all I have to say.

That's creepy.

I was walking back from our networks journal club meeting just over an hour ago, and I noticed as I was crossing the St. Giles graveyard that two people were sunbathing among the tombstones. That's a bit much for me, and I find the constant picnics that the locals have among the tombstones when the weather is nice to be creepy enough as it is. Of course, the latter did lead to one of the most priceless comments that I have ever heard from one of my students when them informed me that she had lost her notes "either in Somerville or in the St. Giles graveyard". Brits are strange.

I think I want this on my tombstone.

Today I'd like to blog about the editorial by American Scientist Editor-in-Chief David Schoonmaker in the May-June issue of that magazine. This is the issue in which my article on the origin of the FPU problem appears, and David spent a lot of his editorial writing about our memorable in-person editing incident when I was visiting Peter Mucha, a collaborator at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I had spent the entire day working on network science research with Peter and then we started our marathon meeting at 6pm. As David writes:

... Still, as someone who has lived through the advent of television and dial phones and the invention of fax and the Internet, I recognize that there also have been losses. A recent evening spent with the first author of "Fermi, Pasta, Ulam and the Birth of Experimental Mathematics" (pages 214--221) really brought that home (he visited here, much as I would have enjoyed visiting him in Oxford, England).

Mason Porter, contributing editor David Schneider and I sat for almost four hours fussing over the details of the text, captions and figures for the article. Refreshingly, Mason is a young scientists---indeed the recipient of the 2008 Sigma Xi Young Investigator Award---who cares deeply about language. He felt no compunction about challenging our choices in wording, yet was perfectly willing to be reasoned out of his own preferences. (Thank goodness there were two of us editors!)

The result could not have happened in an e-mail exchange. Together, the three of us found solutions that wouldn't have arisen without the spontaneity of human contact. It was not lost on me that Enrico Fermi, John Pasta and Stanislaw Ulam made their "little discovery" at a time (1955) when personal communications were rarely more electronically enhanced than the telephone. Would they have found what they did using e-mail?

In the aftermath of that stimulating but exhausting evening, I have reflected on my working relationship with other American Scientist authors. ...

After we were done, it was too late to get dinner and I had some other urgent work to do (and a talk to prepare from scratch for the next day). I spent about 3 more hours on various bits of urgent work that night before I needed to crash because my body was starting to shake somewhat uncontrollably. I didn't even have time to start preparing my slides, so I did that the next morning. (I somehow managed to give a really good talk on some results that I had never presented before, so I guess I am able to do a reasonable job under that kind of time crunch---though I don't want to do it again!)

In some ways, David's editorial would be appropriate for my tombstone---though there are other things I would actually prefer there; for example, I really like the one that says, "I told you I was sick."---though it's perhaps more accurate to say that I want to be remembered as someone who is really, really anal. Since this article came out, I have received a small number of compliments by e-mail both from people I know and from those I don't, and one of the ones I know even mentioned especially enjoying the editorial comments about that incident. I won't be surprised if others who know me bring it up as will, because I think it will ring rather familiar to them.

In closing, I must admit that I am pondering at the moment whether I should e-mail David to let him know that his editorial doesn't have any Oxford commas. Sadly, however, it is American Scientist policy not to include them.

The Magic of Google Calculator

I probably should have known about this trick a long time ago. Nice!

(Tip of the cap to Thomas Woolley.)

Nine Famous Baseball Vendors

Mental Floss has posted brief descriptions of nine famous baseball vendors. Eccentric vendors are, in fact, quite an important part of the ballpark experience. ("Nuts! Nuts! Nuts!")

(Tip of the cap to Rob Neyer.)

Say it ain't so!

Um, apparently Manny has been getting some help to be Manny just a little bit better. Major League Baseball is expected to announce that he is being suspended for 50 games for testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs. I guess this means that the honeymoon in LA is over? We have him through 2010 based on his current contract (which I admittedly suddenly have an urge to wish didn't exist), so it's really good that we didn't give him the longer-term deal he wanted. You know what else really sucks about this: Juan Pierre is probably going to be playing every day again. Fuck. At least we have a very large cushion that should be able to hold up while he's out of the lineup. I can't say I'm surprised, though I wasn't predicting in advance that he was doing this stuff. Part of the reason that I am not surprised is that it's hard to be surprised by anybody getting caught, and part of the reason is that he was never exactly considered angelic in the first place.

(Tip of the hat to Scott Porter.)

Update: Officially, Manny was apparently caught because of the use of a female fertility drug. (There's more to the story than that, as you can see in the various articles that have appeared in the last couple of days.) I suppose he was just having trouble ovulating?

Dodgers set home win record

With last night's win (or this morning's win, for those of us in the UK) against the Nationals, the Dodgers are now 13-0 at home this year. These 13 consecutive wins at home to start the season have set a new modern (post-1900) Major League record. With last night's win, the Dodgers are now have a 6.5 game lead in the National League West. Hell yes! We have never had a season start so well during my lifetime, so while admin and bureaucracy might be causing problems in my life, at least Dodger baseball is working out the way I want. Go Dodgers!

Pitchers who can't hit

Well, most pitchers this side of Micah Owings can't hit, but Jerry Crasnick wrote a very nice article about nine pitchers who really can't hit. Highly recommended.

Stay Tuned

Many years from now, when I am no longer employed by Oxford, I swear I should write a fucking tell-all book about how Examinations and assessment really seem to work. In the meantime, I hope you can be patient. (And maybe by the time I leave, I'll even figure things out enough to make my descriptions coherent.) Not that the book would be interesting, mind you, but at least it would satisfy my deeply-seeded need to rant when things infuriate me.

Unwanted People

The UK Home Office has created a "Least Wanted List" of people who are apparently not moral enough to enter the country. I have a couple of comments:

1) It does seem that the people discussed in the article hold views that I find abhorrent. But see (2) for my far more important point.

2) I am exceptionally uncomfortable (to put it mildly) with the idea of not allowing people into the country on the grounds that they have ideas that I find abhorrent. In fact, several of the things that they apparently do are quite disgusting, but in my opinion, the things described in the article are not grounds for banning them from visiting a country. That sets a horrible precedent and, in my opinion, is quite a disgusting act itself.

3) Whenever I see the term 'Home Office', I always think of Angel.

(Tip of the cap to CNN.)

Starting the day off well

I set my alarm for 8:30 am this morning, so that I could get up, take a bath, get coffee, and go through e-mail in plenty of time for my 10:00 am Examiners meeting. I walked over to the Mathematical Institute and went to the room in which we were having our meeting. I needed to kick out the random old math faculty member who was in there. Nobody showed up for 10 minutes and I finally lost patience, wondering if I had the wrong room or perhaps the wrong day. Yup. (Also note that I went to the MI common room to check the e-mail message quickly, and of course the guy who I kicked out of the other room is now in this one. Maybe he didn't notice me?) The meeting is actually 10:00 am on Thursday in that room. I have a long day ahead of me---with the need to probably skip lunch because of a meeting that somebody really wanted to have today that I was convinced I couldn't schedule at any other time---and it turns out that I didn't need to set my alarm this morning. Bloody Hell! I'm such a champ. (I do stuff like this way too often.) Oy vey.

25 Rickey Henderson stories

Here are 25 Rickey Henderson stories. I've heard almost all of these before (maybe even all of them), but they are awesome nonetheless. It's just a big win. (Tip of the cap to Rob Neyer.)

Go Dodgers!

The Dodgers now have 10-0 record at home and have tied the National League record for most consecutive home victories to start the season:

According to the Elias Sports Bureau, this streak is the longest by any NL team since 1983, when Torre's Atlanta Braves won their first 10 games at Fulton County Stadium to tie the modern league record shared by the 1918 New York Giants and 1970 Chicago Cubs.

The Dodgers record now stands at 18-8, which is the best in the Majors and gives them a 4.5 lead over the Giants. This is the biggest lead among all of the division leaders, and the Dodgers +41 run differential (runs scored - runs allowed) is also the best in the Majors. Hell yes!

Some perspective on our place in the universe...

...is contained in this picture. (Click on it to make it bigger.)

(Tip of the hat to Rob Neyer. Also, I don't vouch for any accuracy or inaccuracy in the picture on the other side of the link.)

Journal Authorship Policies

As some of you might realize, I have been in a pretty shitty mood for most of the last week (though there were a few spurts of happiness as well, so at least I've had my moments). It's been more of a general feeling of being down rather than, say, rantiness (that ought to be a word, even though it appears not to be one) or something more extreme like bitterness. However, a small bout of mild depression (without any specific cause, by the way, so it's likely that I just need to do better with sleeping, eating, and getting people to distract me to get back to my version of normal) doesn't mean that I am not going to try to satisfy my deep-seeded desire (need?) to rant:

Today my collaborator Peter Mucha e-mailed me to pass along Nature's new authorship policies.

Previously, Nature "strongly encouraged" statements of what each author did. Now they are following the practice of other journals---an increasing number of them, I think?---and requiring the listing of such contribution statements. I object to this rather strongly for a very simple reason: One of its big effects is to increase the potential for bad blood between people. There can be a ton of intra-group strife in science as it stands, and as far as I can tell, enforcing things like this exacerbates the problem. When I submit to a journal that requires such statements, I grudgingly include them, but whenever it is optional, I have a very strong preference for not including them. People's understanding of their own papers (and knowledge of the contents therein) will be judged when they give a talk on the bloody thing (or otherwise demonstrate it firsthand)!

To be fair to Nature---though since when was I ever fair to nature?---I should mention that there are other things in the new policies that I support. Those do take the form of box-checking, but the ideas behind what checking the box is supposed to represent are ones I support. I just have major problems with the enforcement of policies with so much potential to add to jealousy and intra-group strife. What is supposed to be gained by doing this? I know my opinion on this matter is far from universal and is reasonably likely to be in the minority (maybe even a rather small one?), but frankly I just don't get it. Nature wants to make author contributions more explicit, but to what end? If somebody is out to screw a coauthor, one can just game that anyway, so I don't see how it can discourage those kinds of hideous practices. Oh, one other thing I should mention on Nature's behalf: They do seem to be more flexible than some of the other journals in the format of contribution listing. (Some of the biology journals, for example, seem to be so experimentally oriented that they do not include any fields that allow one to give author contributions for things like "designed algorithms" or "wrote code". One is only allowed to use the categories they provide, and at least in some cases, this misses some very fundamental ways in which authors might have contributed!)

It's not realistic for things to be changed in the various scientific fields, but when it comes to paper coauthorship, there is one thing that I think the pure mathematician got exactly right: Always make it alphabetical. (And then one's knowledge can be judged when giving presentations, etc.)

Grumpily Yours,

Mason

Inaugural Class of SIAM Fellows

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics has announced its inaugural class of 183 Fellow in its brand new Fellows program. (The American Physical Society has had such a program for a long time, and the American Mathematical Society membership has voted down at least a couple of attempts to institute such a program.) Among this initial group are 3 of my colleagues at Oxford, 1 person (the expected one) currently at Caltech, and a whopping 8 people currently at Cornell. The last list includes two members of my thesis committee. As discussed in the press release, the initial list was chosen using very specific criteria (people who had won certain major awards, etc.), so this class of Fellows was perhaps a little more predictable than perhaps some of the future classes will be.

One Less Non-Evil Republican

Arlen Specter, one of the few remaining reasonable Republicans, has now defected to the Democrats. Part of me says 'Welcome!' and part of me feels a bit bittersweet that that party has one less beacon of hope in it. (Of course, one can easily see where Specter was in practice based on the voting and legislation cosponsorship records. In fact, my collaborators and I have a couple of plots in our papers that convey it reasonably well.) On the other hand, there is something to be said for being filibuster-proof...

Life imitates "Pandemic"

Unless you're living in a vacuum, you've probably heard about the recent swine flu outbreak. I was playing the board game Pandemic when I was visiting Pasadena, and I can't help thinking about the various abstractions in that game as I read some of the current CNN articles. There is also an xkcd comic strip about it, and I think somehow that making light of such things is necessary as a mechanism for some people (like me) to cope with serious things like this. I am traveling to Salt Lake City in about 3 weeks, so we'll see where things stand then.

Sometimes I wish the world were less "interesting". At least there's escapism.

Making my mark in Somerville

I think I might have added another incident to the Legend of Mason today. (Actually, there is another recent addition as well, but I want to use the exact quote from the magazine's editorial before I discuss it fully here.)

I got to lunch in Somerville a little later than usual today because of a seminar. I was in a really crappy mood, but I recognized that I was in such a state (I still am, to some extent, though I am feeling slightly better now), so I tried to avoid people and use lunch for nourishment only. Unfortunately, my efforts to sit on my own were foiled for various reasons (one time, I was about to sit off on my own when a couple of people sat near there, so I needed to go somewhere else), and I ended up just taking the next seat on High Table and sitting near people. (I also didn't want any of the staff to set up an extra table setting somewhere for me. They shouldn't have to do extra work for this.) I put my plate down after my brief random walking in the dining hall, and the garlic bread on my plate bounced off onto my chair---spreading tons of crumbs to the chair. Some people were already amused by this. I was rather annoyed by what I had done to my seat, so I put the bread on the plate but I was sufficiently frustrated that I mildly slammed it on there. Unfortunately, this caused garlic bread shrapnel to hit the old lady sitting next to me. (I think this was an Emeritus Fellow of Somerville.) She quietly, casually wiped it off and gave me a look of mild dismissal. The other people nearby tried to give me disdainful looks, but they weren't able to keep the straight faces necessary to do so. I think I was too ashamed to apologize, and my mood definitely didn't help turn my thoughts in such sensible directions. (As you can tell, I feel a bit guilty for not giving the apology and I hope I get a chance to do this reasonably soon.)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Legendary status is a combination of personality and circumstance. It's rarely a matter of setting out to achieve such things.

Three Fascinating Articles

I just read three fascinating articles on CNN.com.

The first one discusses tweeting directly using one's brain to form the letters.

The second discusses differences between men and women with respect to sexual orientation being continuous versus discrete. (There are other things in the article too, but this is what I found most interesting.) Apparently, a bunch of studies are suggesting that it seems to be much more of a continuum in women than in men (and also perhaps that it is more common for a woman to experience a change in location over time).

The third discusses the new Star Trek film. (If you haven't gotten the allusion yet, let's just say that this article is fascinating in a somewhat different manner than the other two.)

The Continuing Saga of Lenny Dykstra

Here is another very long (though fascinating) article about how much of a tool Lenny Dykstra is. The picture being painted certainly isn't a pretty one. For reference, here is Dykstra's wikipedia page. I haven't read it, but it has been flagged as the neutrality being in dispute.

The article to which I link also has my quotes of the day. Here is the relevant snippet:

"He thought he could keep my $500,000 and nobody would have the resources to go after him," Dada says. "But in this case, I am going after him. General surgeons are not intimidated by professional athletes.

"Like I told him, if I can cut somebody from the neck all the way down to the pubis with a scalpel, then I cannot be intimidated.

Great Falls Little League to pay fine on behalf of Elijah Dukes

Nationals outfielder Elijah Dukes, known for a long history of miscreant behavior, was recently fined $500 and benched for a day for being late 5 minutes for whatever time players were supposed to show up for Saturday's game. Now it turns out that he was late because of volunteer work at the Great Falls Little League, who have now announced that they are going to pay his fine for him. Their official reasoning is as follows:

"The point is, this guy gave back to our community, and now he's in a hard spot. We need to help him," said Jim Mraz, the Great Falls LL president, according to the Post. "It's not a question of whether this guy can afford the 500 bucks. We're just trying to send a message to our kids: He was here for us. Now we've got to be there for him."

You know, I'm with the Little League on this one. Now if Dukes really wants to set the right tone, he should pay the fine for himself anyway and not let the Little League do it. Nevertheless, I think the gesture by the Little League was the appropriate one, as they are sending the right message by saying that they have some accountability too. Amen!

2009 Mathematical Art Exhibition

The American Mathematical Society's website is hosting a 2009 Mathematical Art Exhibition. Take a look at it, as some of the pictures are really cool!

The Force is apparently strong in Scotland

According to BBC News, The Force is apparently strong among police officers in Strathclyde, Scotland.

As reported in the article's tagline, Eight police officers serving with Scotland's largest force listed their official religion as Jedi in voluntary diversity forms, it has emerged. (Apparently, Jedi are officially classified as atheists, but I hope I see the day when Jedi is officially considered to be its own religious designation. I also hope to see pastafarianism given such official standing.)

My favorite line in the article comes from Jane's Police Review editor Chris Herbert, who said: "The Force appears to be strong in Strathclyde Police with their Jedi police officers and staff.

I approve!

(Tip of the cap to Jaideep Singh.)

Particle collisions for fun and proft

Mini-AIR points out the following awesome article.

Title: The expected frequency of collisions of small meteorites with cars and aircraft

Abstract: The cumulative distribution cf2>Ncf1>(cf2>dcf1>) of diameters of Earth-Crossing Asteroids (ECAs) derived by Poveda et al. (Poveda et al., 1998, submitted) is used to estimate the frequency of collisions of meteoroids with cars and with aircraft. The expected frequency of collisions of a car with a meteorite larger than 10 cm in diameter turns out to be one impact every 16 years. This frequency is consistent with the known incidence of such events (Lewis, 1996).The expected frequency of collisions of a cruising airplane with a meteorite larger than 1 cm in diameter turns out to be one impact every 30 years. Such an impactor hitting an airplane at a velocity of several hundreds of meters per second could cause a serious accident.


Comment: Wow! Now that's what I call "awesome".

Life (and apparently an old schoolmate) imitates Wedding Crashers

One of my old schoolmates from Hawthorne Elementary School and Beverly Hills High School has apparently become very good at crashing Hollywood parties. He is apparently considered a blagger among blaggers.

I suppose I shouldn't reveal his name here, but the name being used in the article above is close enough. I'm sure there's a wikipedia entry in his future, which would make him the 3rd (to my knowledge) member of my Beverly High graduating class to have such an entry.

(Tip of the hat to the subject of the article linked above.)

RIP Harry Kalas (1936-2009) and Mark ("The Bird") Fidrych (1954-2009)

Major League Baseball lost two more members of its family yesterday: long-time Phillies broadcaster Harry Kalas and famous one-year wonder Mark ("The Bird") Fidrych.

I listened to Kalas broadcast a few games, and he was quite good. In particular, he was very articulate, which is something that few other broadcasters can claim.

Mark Fidrych is one of those legendary figures that I often heard about as a kid, but I never got to see him pitch during his magical 1976 season. Rob Neyer and Joe Posnanski wax poetic about him. One thing that was particularly notable about The Bird was how much fun he was obviously having on the pitching mound. There have been a number of baseball players who reached amazing heights and burned out, but Fidrych seems to have stayed more prominently in the hearts and minds of many fans.

I didn't blog about it, but of course course there was also last week's car accident that claimed the life of Angel rookie pitcher Nick Adenhart. The Angels seem to be terribly unlucky when it comes to such tragedies.

Non-chaotic cycling

New Dodger 2nd baseman Orlando ("O-Dog") Hudson hit for the cycle in today's game, becoming the second LA Dodger (and the first since Wed Parker in 1970) to hit for the cycle. A player is said to "hit for the cycle" in a game when he gets a single, double, triple, and homerun (in any order). There are fewer cycles in Major League history than no hitters, though this achievement is a bit of a curiosity, as of course one would rather have a second double instead of the single that would complete a cycle, etc.

By the way, you should read this book if you want to find out about chaotic cycling.

Extreme Sheepherding

Wow, this video with LED art created by herding sheep is pretty insane. (Tip of the cap to Steve Van Hooser.)

One of the weirdest baseball plays ever

One of the best things about baseball is that no matter how often one follows the game, one can always see something that is fundamentally new. This happened today, as today's Dodger game had one of the weirdest baseball plays I had ever seen. Unless my memory is failing me, I have never seen this in 30 years of following baseball closely.

Here is how it is described in the recap:

The Dodgers tied it at 1 on an unusual play in the second.

Los Angeles had Andre Ethier on third base and Pierre on second with one out when Wolf hit a line drive that was caught by Haren (0-2). He wheeled and threw to Lopez, who tagged Pierre for an apparent inning-ending double play.

Ethier was running on contact, and he crossed the plate before Pierre was tagged out. The Diamondbacks left the field, apparently thinking the run didn't count.

But the umpires said it did -- and by then it was too late for Arizona to appeal that Ethier had failed to tag up.

Wolf was credited with an RBI on the play, which was recorded as a 1-4 double play.

Adding to the confusion, the correct score -- Arizona 1, Los Angeles 1 -- wasn't posted on the scoreboard until the Diamondbacks came to bat in the bottom of the inning.


Note that Ethier did not tag up. Two things had to occur for this scenario to happen: (1) Lopez had to tag Juan Pierre after Ethier crossed the plate, and this happened because he went over to tag Pierre rather than tagging the 2nd base bag; and (2) Arizona was not allowed to appeal the play (namely, Ethier not having properly tagged up before crossing the play) because they had already left the field. Weird.

I'm sure ESPN writer Jayson Stark will have a lot more to say about this play, which Vin Scully (who has been broadcasting baseball games for 60 years) apparently has never seen before either.

By the way, we won.

Update (4/13/09): As Vin Scully mentioned last night and this article reminds me, the mechanism by which the Dodgers got their run is apparently known as "the fourth-out rule" (which is a new term for me). (Tip of the hat to Rob Neyer.)

Woody Harrelson mistakes person for zombie

Let's start this report with an "awesome" quote of the day: With my daughter at the airport I was startled by a paparazzo, who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie. (It is the "quite understandably" bit that makes this line priceless.)

Basically, as described in a CNN.com article Harrelson had a small tousle with a guy with a camera. So there's not much to the story, except for the fact that Harrelson was apparently still "in character" from a movie (in which he's pursued by zombies) that he had just finished filming.

Um, can I use this excuse if I assault somebody after playing certain video games? For example: Your Honor, I mistook him for a walking turtle, so I jumped on him and then kicked him into his friends.

Pulling Out (from) All the Stops

Here is a really awesome new Mathematical Moment from the American Mathematical Society about a pair of New Yorkers (who are implied to be math students, based on the vignette) who used some graph theory to help them set a new world record (by over 2 hours) for the fastest time to visit all of the stops in New York City's subway system. The thing that I really liked about this was something with which all Techers (and, in a different sense, most scientists) are familiar: The idea of doing something really cool in a collaborative fashion while using some technical expertise as a vital component. It's not just about breaking an old record; it's about how one goes about doing it!

I approve!

RIP Dave Arneson (1947-2009)

Once again the dice are silent, as D & D co-creator Dave Arneson has died of cancer. Co-creator Gary Gygax died in March 2008.

Every time I see a news story like this, I feel like a part of my childhood has died as well.

(Tip of the hat to Vincent Kong.)

Fermi, Pasta, Ulam, and the Birth of Experimental Mathematics

The May-June 2009 issue of the magazine American Scientist will include the article, Fermi, Pasta, Ulam and the Birth of Experimental Mathematics, which I coauthored with Norm Zabusky, Bambi Hu, and David Campbell. (I added an extra comma in the title of the blog entry, as I prefer that style. I was not allowed to use it in the article because of the magazine's official style policy.

This article is basically "FPU for Dummies", as it attempts to discuss the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem (and the massive amount of exciting work it has spawned; this includes multiple subdisciplines of math and physics!) without using mathematical equations. This is really hard for a subject like this...

Dial-a-Prayer

Arcane Gazebo recently blogged about a new automated praying service to which one can subscribe. That's what I call "awesome". As AG points out, doesn't this kind of miss the point?

2009 Baseball Predictions

The 2009 baseball season started yesterday with a 4-1 Braves victory over the Phillies. Derek Lowe turned in a stellar performance as the starter, and closer Mike Gonzalez was a little bit less stellar. Also, Brett Myers has the early lead in homeruns allowed. :)

Here are my fearless predictions for 2009:

National League:

East: Mets
Central: Cubs
West: Dodgers
Wild Card: Giants
NL winner: Mets

Of the above predictions, only my Wild Card one departs from most of the pundits. The Giants have an excellent starting staff, and I think that position players Travis Ishikawa and Pablo Sandoval are going to get really good really fast to make up for much of the weakness in the rest of the offense.

MVP: David Wright
Cy Young: Johan Santana
Rookie of the Year: I'm not sure, but I'll say Ishikawa. (Is Sandoval eligible? Doesn't he have too many plate appearances? At least one web site thinks he's a rookie.) I'll mention Cameron Maybin as well, but I'm not convinced he'll be the best rookie, even though he might well have the best career among the rookies.

Manager of the Year: Bruce Bochy (the manager of the surprise team)
Team on the rise: Giants
Team on the decline: Phillies
First manager fired: Dusty Baker

American League:

East: Yankees
Central: Indians
West: Athletics (after a fierce battle with The The Angels Angels of Anaheim)
Wild Card: Rays
AL winner: Yankees

These predictions are pretty consistent with those of the pundits, though I think most of them have the Angels over the Athletics.

MVP: Evan Longoria
Cy Young: CC Sabathia
Rookie of the Year: Matt Wieters (even though he's starting the year in the minors)

Manager of the Year: Bob Geren (the manager of the surprise team)
Team on the rise: Oakland (check out their young starting pitching); honorable mention to Texas because of their young offense (though I just can't trust them to develop any pitching)
Team on the decline: Angels
First manager fired: Ozzie Guillen

World Series: Mets over Yankees in 5 games


One final prediction: As usual, most of my predictions will turn out to be completely wrong by the end of the year.

Play Ball!

Today is opening day for the 2009 baseball season. As has become usual practice, there will only be one game tonight and then things will really get going tomorrow. Tonight's game is between the Braves and the Phillies.

Play ball!

Quote of the Day

Today's quote comes from my father: "The internet is amazing."

By itself, this quote wouldn't be very interesting, but let's consider the context: First, my father is a luddite and is only just discovering the internet. Second, he doesn't go online himself. We were talking about the book "The Ascent of Man" and he wanted me to see how the author's name was spelled so that I'd be more likely to remember the guy's name. (I've heard of the book, of course, but not the author.) He had one of his office secretaries print out a page with the name---I was expecting to see the wikipedia page for the author, but it was actually the IMDB page---and that was when he uttered his comment. Maybe there is some hope after all, but there's another decade or so left to catch up... Anyway, the comment amused me greatly, given the context.

Google's 2009 April Fools joke (and other, much better, ones)

While I appreciate the subject matter of Google's April Fools joke this year, I just don't think their implementation is particularly amusing. Sorry, Google, but you've let me down this year. The idea was good, but this just didn't do it for me.

This year, I was lame and didn't do anything, so it's not like I have any foundation to back up the above comments. :)

Update: On the other hand, Expedia's $99 flights to Mars are a big win. Here is CNN's summary of April Fools jokes. (It would be really awesome if some of the ones they are reporting aren't actually jokes that anyone has pulled.) The Guardian has some fake stories on their website. The one I like best is about their impending conversion to Twitter format. Now that is awesome!

Update 2: Ah yes, and Rob Neyer in his blog has reminded me about the best. April Fools. joke. ever.

RIP Caltech Bookstore (Unknown--2009)

The economy has apparently claimed another victim.

I heard today from a friend that the Caltech bookstore will be defunct as of May 1st. I wonder what plans Caltech has for textbooks and ordinary supplies that it's especially convenient to buy on campus? My best guess is that simple supplies will be available at Caltech's convenience store, but I'm less clear about the textbooks. Maybe the nearby Borders will carry them?

On a more selfish note, how will people buy my book?

Anyway, the closing of Caltech's bookstore makes me a little sad.

De-Anonymizing Social Networks

Here is interesting but scary study on how to de-anonymize social network data. It's cool, powerful, and frightening.

Note additionally that there are multiple sides to the implications of such methods: Besides pure privacy issues, there are also the privacy issues that are conjoined with the increasing number of anonymized data sets that are being analyzed by scientists like me.

Big in Japan

Eri Yoshida, age 17 and Japan's first female professional baseball player, made her debut on Friday in the newly-formed Kansai Independent League (which is basically a minor league). A knuckleball pitcher who grew up wanting to emulate Tim Wakefield, she picked up a strikeout. As Rob Neyer points out, her small size is probably going to be her largest hurdle, but this is still awesome and I hope she gets very far.

Debriefing on the NSF 'Future of Network Science' workshop

I got back late last night from a military-run, NSF-sponsored workshop on the future of network science. The goal of the workshop was to brainstorm and try to develop a roadmap for developing 'network science' as a discipline in its own right.

Sadly, the workshop failed. ("I don't think your plan was very well thought-out... Master.") The organizers' method of doing this was ill-conceived, because they seem to think that this can be done in a physics framework and were hoping that there might be some sort of 'periodic table' of networks. I think that's too narrow-minded and tries to put a square peg in a round hole. Also, almost none of the leaders in the fields (from any of the various groups going on---in physics, CS, social science, engineering, etc.) were there. Hell, originally the workshop was going to conflict either with Sunbelt (so that none of the social scientists would be able to go) or the APS March Meeting (so that none of the physicists would be able to go). As it turns out, almost none went anyway. The organizers should have gotten around 10-15 leaders from these various fields, made sure they could come to the workshop, and then organized it around their schedule. (The 10-15 might have come from a list of, say, 30 stalwarts.) Then whoever among the rank and file (i.e., people like me) could make it then would come up to the numbers they wanted. (The size of the workshop was about right.) Also, based on the introductory comments and buzzwords, the organizers' knowledge seemed to be circa 2003.

We had lots of arguments about what a network is, and some people annoyingly insisted that it must have some sort of "flow", which would have the unfortunate side effect that things traditionally studied by bio networks people and many of the situations in the social sciences that are rather hard (that people still struggle with, as most of the research in practice deals with gross simplifications of these things) for which many of the important concepts were developed to get a handle on would a priori not be considered networks. So is the stuff for which a lot of the stuff was traditionally invented supposed to be outside of the scope of what we want to develop? That didn't seem to bother them, but I call bullshit on that one! This wasn't adopted, but some people kept bringing this up over and over again and really impeded progress. Personally, I think the suggestion of following the the Supreme Court's definition of defining pornography would have been a good way to go. :) Hence, one of my take-home messages of the workshop: "Network science is like pornography. We'll know it when we see it."

There were a few "awesome" comments during the workshop (both about the science and about other things):

"Monies will get exchanged between your government organization and our government organization."

"I can say some things that will make it sound like a network."

"If you're going to dress me up with Barabasi-type stuff, I'm going to walk out." (This was stated by a very annoying person. I was extremely tempted to pretend to believe that stuff just to see if he'd leave.)

"I know there are neurons. I know there's a lot of them." (says the medical scientist sarcastically)

"Some parts of some things have some properties of networks [I think "some of the time" then followed, though I forgot to type that here originally]." (This was particularly well-phrased, and this is pretty much exactly how I'd characterize things.)

Larry Leibovich really kicked butt as one of the voices of reason at the workshop.

"This led to an interesting and long discussion, which did not resolve anything." (This could be used to describe most of the discussions at the conference, though only some of the discussions were actually interesting.)

The random well-dressed guy was here (and actually I expected him to be here after seeing him show up as a military person in the 'How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer' video).

Hmmm....

Hmmm... This post makes me wonder if the person who runs the blog Sad Guys on Trading Floors is a Techer (and a Lloydie)... Then again, maybe there is some other thing that that was originally referencing and I just need to catch up on a cultural tidbit...

Remixes of Terrorism Paranoia Signs

Courtesy Justin, here are the entries in BoingBoing's challenge to mock the UK's new signs encouraging people to be paranoid about terrorism. Some of these signs are pretty funny!

(The only sign missing is one that says that long-haired, freaky people need not apply...)

Logo of the Day

So I'm staying in the FDIC building... and in the lobby, every time I use the elevator, I pass by a sign celebrating their 75th anniversary that contains the motto "confidence and stability".

I don't think any additional comments are necessary, but here is a link where you can see for yourself.

Social Networking Sites (and related phenomena) for protests and reactions to them

CNN.com has an interest article about the upcoming G-20 protest and the roll of technology like Facebook and Twitter for organizing both protesting and reactions to them.

What happens in Arlington stays in Arlington (Virginia edition)

I just arrived in Arlington, VA for a 'Future of Network Science' workshop, in which part of the US military has used NSF funds to fly a bunch of us in with what I believe is the purpose of getting them up to speed on the state of the art in network science. The next couple of days should be filled with a bunch of interesting big-picture discussions. I am rooming with this guy, and I am wondering if we should do some sort of dueling blogging?

Comforting incident of the day: I just got into my seat in the plane when I see a guy in an LAX uniform with a big roll of duct tape. He headed to the back of the plane and came back several minutes later with a much smaller roll of duct tape...

One other thing: I am staying in the FDIC building.

Quote of the Day (it's all our fault)

Today's quote comes from Representative Maxine Waters [D-CA], who uttered the following comment about the financial crisis on the February 20th edition of Real Time with Bill Maher:

"But we're not going to change that until we put some people in jail. [Applause. Cheers.] We have got to take the schemers who have conspired by hiring these mathematicians and others to come up with these exotic products that rip people off and put them in homes that they could not afford ..."

Yeah, hiring mathematicians is a conspiracy. For thoughts on similar topics, see a blog entry by Arcane Gazebo.

Tip of the hat to the AMS Math in the Media webpage.

Now I better get back to working on my paper on community detection in currency exchange networks (with a focus on data from the current credit crisis)...

Grassroots CD Recording

Jill Sobule is officially awesome.

(If the name isn't familiar, two of her best-known songs are I Kissed Girl, which is one of the best songs of the 90s, and Bitter.)

Curt Schilling retires from baseball

Curt Schilling has announced his retirement from baseball. He did it with a post on his blog. I think Schilling belongs in the Hall of Fame, but he's an interesting borderline candidate.

Faces of Oxford

You can find my quick video interview for Faces of Oxford on this web page. When we did it, I thought it didn't come out well, but it's actually pretty decent. I said 'um' way too many times, but let me just use the usual excuse that I'm an American and don't know any better/can't be expected to use proper English/etc. (I have a similar track that starts with "I'm a mathematician.")

40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes

Here is a pretty cool YouTube video showing 40 inspirational speeches in 2 minutes. It doesn't have all of the ones I wanted to see (there's nothing about lollygagging, for instance), but it's pretty cool nonetheless.

(Tip of the hat to Rob Neyer.)

Best. Journal. Ever.

Courtesy Mariano Beguerisse Diaz, here is the best scientific journal ever.

It's called Rejecta Mathematica, and it only publishes papers that have been rejected by another journal. (Granted, one can already post the paper on the arXiv, but this is still bloody awesome!)

I think it's worth giving some of the content of their home page here. The aims of the journal are:

"Rejecta Mathematica is a new, open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the mathematical sciences. We are currently seeking submissions for our inaugural issue."

Here is the first part of their 'about' section:

At Rejecta Mathematica, we believe that many previously rejected papers can nonetheless have a very real value to the academic community. This value may take many forms:

"mapping the blind alleys of science": papers containing negative results can warn others against futile directions;

"reinventing the wheel": papers accidentally rederiving a known result may contain new insight or ideas;

"squaring the circle": papers discovered to contain a serious technical flaw may nevertheless contain information or ideas of interest;

"applications of cold fusion": papers based on a controversial premise may contain ideas applicable in more traditional settings;

"misunderstood genius": other papers may simply have no natural home among existing journals.


Finally, the 'General Physics' section of the March Meeting will lead to some publications! Just don't get rejected from this journal... (I wonder if the authors of the web site buried the official revelation of the joke anywhere. I still can't find it and can only thank them for putting the time to create this web site. I approve!)

American Mathematical Society graduate student blog

I just read an American Mathematical Society (AMS) press release about an excellent idea: the AMS grad student blog.

I am not part of the intended audience, so I don't plan to add it to the blogroll. However, I wanted to highlight it because I think it's an excellent idea that will enhance communication among grad students at different institutions in a manner that nicely complements what already happens at conferences. I approve!

What happens in the Research Triangle stays in the Research triangle

I am now in the airport at San Diego, waiting for my red-eye flight to New Jersey, which will then go to Raleigh-Durham. I will be visiting my collaborator Peter Mucha at UNC, though I will also be stopping off at Duke on Tuesday (to give a math/physics seminar) and Wednesday (to give a social networks seminar, although that's more of an informal group meeting type deal). In fact, I will also be visiting a friend's lab at NC State on Saturday morning before she drops me off at the airport. I also have plans to see one friend from grad school who is now a postdoc at Duke as well as two friends from Caltech. Additionally, my collaborator JP Onnela will be flying down on Thursday for a bit of a synchronized visit and some additional work. It's definitely going to be both a fun and productive week.

Peter Mucha and I have numerous joint projects, though the one on which we'll probably spend the most time are our series of projects on Facebook networks. The American Physical Society press conference (held at the March Meeting) about our Facebook work is tomorrow morning (I think at 11am), and there will also be an APS press release (which I assume will come out tomorrow). They highlighted our student Mandi Traud's Tuesday talk at the conference, and she will be the one doing the press conference. We also have a poster in the GSNP Gallery at the meeting, and hopefully we'll have one of the winning entries. Stay tuned for more information about the media blitz...

Sunbelt Debriefing

Today was the last day of my first Sunbelt social networks conference.

There were a ton of statisticians (though they mostly consisted of ERGMers) a lot more CS people than I was expecting (though I figured there would be a decent number there), and a metric fuck ton of sociologists of all shapes, sizes, and stripes. Of the more than 500 people present, I was one of what was perhaps literally less than a handful of mathematicians + physicists. I have said this before and I will say it again: If the people from my side of the community want to maximize their impact on problems in the social sciences, then we need to publish in their journals, go to their conferences, and participate on their SOCnet mailing list. The number of individual collaborations is much larger than it used to be---this has really improved in the last couple of years---and I am not the only math/physics person who participates in SOCnet discussions, but we can't just be inbred and only publish in our own journals. It's not good enough.

I had a good time at the conference (though I think I would have had a lot more fun if I knew more than a couple of people), and several of the talks were excellent. Barabasi had to cancel, and I was really looking forward to the fireworks that were going to follow his talk. I got along quite well with the social scientists, and I felt accepted at the conference even though my background was so different from everybody else (even though some of the talks were quite quantitative). Carter Butts gave an excellent plenary talk, and Phil Bonacich gave the other non-cancelled plenary. (You can ask me offline about that talk.) I also found out that apparently Stan Wasserman---who seems to be addicted to Facebook, by the way, given how often he was logging in during talks---is buds with Vespignani and (to a lesser extent) Barabasi, with whom he apparently just likes to have fun arguing. One of the nice things about this conference was being able to match some names to faces (it was like 1999 again, when I went to the Snowbird dynamics conference for the first time, except that I am 10 years older), though of course I recognized only a small subset of the names of the well-known people. The only one of them I met was Barry Wellman, who is one of the main people from the origins of Sunbelt, and I got along quite well with him. One thing that I already pretty much knew but got confirmed was that the math/physics networks folks from Cornell-and-friends (the Strogatz-Newman-etc. crowd) are very well-respected in this community, whereas certain other prominent members of our community are not. (As many of you know, my origin in networks is exactly the Cornell-and-friends group.)

The conference was held in the Bahia Hotel on Mission Bay, so I got a chance to walk along the beach and to feel the breeze as I used my laptop or read. That's always good, though I did find that when I was walking along the beach I felt a bit lonely not having any friends around to walk with me. (I definitely felt out of place during those times because everyone on the beach was so different from me.)

Happy Pi Day!

Happy Pi Day! Don't forget to celebrate at 3:14 pm. I hope you already had an appropriate celebration at 3:14 am...

Highly Nonlinear Solitary Waves in Heterogeneous Periodic Granular Media

I have finally realized one of my life-long dreams: I now have a published paper that starts on page 666. (Who could ask for anything more?) And it's especially appropriate in this case, too, as the revisions for this particular paper were painful and entirely author-inflicted. Basically, the two referees (both of whom told us who they were during the process) asked only for trivial changes that took up about 0.25 % or less of the revision effort. We, on the other hand, had to deal with the fact that (among other things) the Caltech machine shop labeled "brass" as "bronze", which required us to rerun all of the numerical simulations with new (and correct!) parameter values. There were other issues as well, such as quadruple-checking the analytics and an extremely annoying factor of \sqrt{2}. So this paper really deserves to start on page 666, given all of the self-inflicted pain. It now has volume, issue, and page numbers, which means we're officially done, done, DONE with it! On to the next papers (which includes several follow-up papers to this article)!

Oh, and here are the title, authors, and abstract.

Title: Highly nonlinear solitary waves in heterogeneous periodic granular media

Authors: Mason A. Porter, Chiara Daraio, Ivan Szelengowicz, Eric B. Herbold, and P.G. Kevrekidis

Abstract: We use experiments, numerical simulations, and theoretical analysis to investigate the propagation of highly nonlinear solitary waves in periodic arrangements of dimer (two-mass) and trimer (three-mass) cell structures in one-dimensional granular lattices. To vary the composition of the fundamental periodic units in the granular chains, we utilize beads of different materials (stainless steel, brass, glass, nylon, polytetrafluoroethylene, and rubber). This selection allows us to tailor the response of the system based on the masses, Poisson ratios, and elastic moduli of the components. For example, we examine dimer configurations with two types of heavy particles, two types of light particles, and alternating light and heavy particles. Employing a model with Hertzian interactions between adjacent beads, we find good agreement between experiments and numerical simulations. We also find good agreement between these results and a theoretical analysis of the model in the long-wavelength regime that we derive for heterogeneous environments (dimer chains) and general bead interactions. Our analysis encompasses previously-studied examples as special cases and also provides key insights on the influence of heterogeneous lattices on the properties (width and propagation speed) of the nonlinear wave solutions of this system.

What happens at Sunbelt stays at Sunbelt

I am writing this entry from San Diego, where I am attending my first Sunbelt social networks conference. Based on early estimations, I seem to be one of about 5 math/physics types in a conference with over 500 social scientists. (Let the festivities begin!) All of tomorrow's talks are workshops, and I didn't pay to participate in any of them, so my plans are just to mill around, get some work done, and soak up the atmosphere.

One of the things I have told some of you before is that if people studying network science are going to influence the social scientists, we need to not just go to our venues (the March Meeting, NetSci, etc.) but also to theirs. The social scientists who know me seem to be pretty happy with the work I am doing, so I think I'm doing reasonably well in trying to establish some local connections. This has become much more common over the last couple of years, and hopefully there will continue to be more of it.

I'll try to confirm the rumor that social scientists dress much better at their conferences than mathematicians and physicists do at theirs. Stay tuned.

Correlation Versus Causation

Courtesy Aaron Clauset, here is a a big win by the comic strip XKCD about correlation versus causation.

I approve!

What happens in the United States stays in the United States

I flew from Heathrow to LA yesterday and had a layover in the Twin Cities. As has become a tradition, I added a bit of a small incident with Customs Security to my resume. (Will somebody explain to me why so many of these people insist of being sarcastic without any provocation?) Part of it is that those people just can't handle the fact that I would choose to have a job somewhere outside of the US. (I am asked how long I've been gone, and I have to then explain that I live in the UK, which always leads to several subsequent questions.) When I say I am a professor, I am always asked what kind. (Note that yesterday I actually tried saying "mathematics professor" for that answer, and there was a brief bit of confusion when the guy didn't notice that I had said mathematics. I thought for a bit that he actually wanted me to say what kind of math I studied. I was like "Do you really want me to describe that?") This guy sarcastically asked "What do you profess?" I told him I was a math professor, though my heart screamed to give any one of a number of sarcastic responses at that point (unlike Roxette, I did not listen to my heart on that particular occasion), I just answered. His response was to ask me what the square root of 237 was, and he seemed a bit perturbed that I then paused to figure it out in my head. How else was I supposed to react? Anyway, he seemed convinced because of that and then let me through. All of this, of course, was after he told me he didn't want me puking on him (the whole motion sickness deal).

I'm on Caltech's campus right now, and I saw someone walk by with a t-shirt that said "Don't be a d^3s/dt^3" (I'm using latex notation here) on the back. (Yes, people at Caltech wear shirts like this! So do I, obviously...) I feel like I should get this, but I'm not. I was thinking of 's' as arclength, but I'm not sure. Does anybody have any ideas here? I must be missing something obvious...

RIP Milton Rowen (age 91)

Dr. Rowen was the principal of Hawthorne School (my elementary school) during my first few years there. (I am listing him only by age because I don't know whether he was born in 1917 or 1918.) The main thing I remember about him is that we were all scared shitless of him because he would come into the cafeteria where we were having lunch, and if he saw something he didn't like he would scream at all of us. I think a couple of times he even screamed right in the face of some young kid. (Unsurprisingly, he had a military background.) He's treated rather kindly in the brief obituary in Beverly Hills Weekly, but for me this was a guy to fear, not to respect. I speak as a tree rather than as a forest, but at the time, I was quite pleased when he stepped down.

Quote of the Day

"I'm so happy I could strangle a mountain ox."

That was the response I got to an e-mail to a student accepting her to do a Ph.D. with me. My response: "I take it this is a 'yes'? ;)" Though of course I can't take the above as an official yes, though I think it's reasonable for me to expect to get that answer. I guess there is something to be said after all for delivering such news rather than it being done by departmental staff. (Granted, I have to deliver bad news more often than good news.)

Happy late Square Root Day!

Somehow, I needed to read this article after the fact to realize that yesterday was Square Root Day!

Please send me a reminder in 2016...

Chance Meetings

I was taking the train today for the first time in a couple of months so that I could go to Stoke-on-Trent to take a cab and head over to Keele University for a talk. The train was running late---shock!---so I ended up on a differently-configured itinerary that was leaving 30 minutes later. I was trying to find two consecutive empty seats so that I could have some space and I noticed while passing by lots of situations without such empty seats that one person seemed to look vaguely like someone I know. I didn't think much about it, though, because she has a postdoc at Brown and it was not reason it would be her. Except that it was, as she had flown in this morning for a job interview at Warwick. (Some of my readers may know who this, but I am withholding the name from a public web page for obvious reasons.) That was pretty cool! This is among my least-expected random encounters ever. (I have occasionally run into friends unexpectedly at random airports before---e.g., once in Dallas when I was making a connection---but at least they were in the right country!)

Anyway, this is my cool story for today.

Manny is staying in LA.

This was inevitable: Manny Ramirez will remain a Dodger in 2009. Thankfully, we mostly resisted the urge to bid against ourselves (which is a Scott Boras specialty).

Tales from the arXiv: It's Not Easy Being Green edition

Here is a new abstract from the arXiv:

arXiv:0903.0110 (*cross-listing*)
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2009 21:20:21 GMT (1127kb,D)

Title: Kermit's What-Happens-Next-Machine Reloaded
Authors: Ursula Schroeter
Categories: physics.ed-ph physics.class-ph physics.pop-ph
Comments: tricky, but feasible. 13 pages, 11 figures, + 7 pages attachments
with FORTRAN program
\\
If Kermit's What-Happens-Next-Machine had functioned, you would not have seen
much, because it would have gone too quickly. In this article it is shown that
putting up and solving the equations of motion of a seemingly simple mechanical
apparatus presents a challenging problem. The simulation can, however, be quite
instructive and also entertaining.
\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.0110 , 1127kb)