Author Name of the Day

This demotivational poster compelled me to find a famous psychologist by the name of Edwin Boring.

The Irony of Mensa

I think I might have realized this before, but I only got reminded of it today. There is an adjective in Spanish called "mensa" (the feminine form of menso) that means stupid. (If you say things correctly, it can actually be used in an affectionate manner.)

The reason that this is so bloody awesome is that Mensa is the "International High IQ Society". Nice!

Are tensors more romantic than cows?

I link, you decide.

(Hey, I almost went a full week without a blog entry! I haven't checked, but I think it's been a pretty long time since I had a gap that long.)

Cows are apparently sexier than tensors.

As you know, I am the coauthor on a new paper on community structure in multislice networks, which has just appeared in Science and which I genuinely believe makes a very big advance.

I am also the coauthor of a recently submitted paper entitled A Mathematical Model for the Dynamics and Synchronization of Cows that has been posted on the arXiv, as is normal procedure in mathematics and physics (and, increasingly, other fields). Nevertheless, this paper has not yet been peer-reviewed, and I can't stress this enough.

Guess which paper is getting more attention?

I will readily admit that I have some fun when I get media attention, and that it's pretty damned cool to be see articles in places like Technology Review, Boing Boing, and Marginal Revolution about my work. I'm flattered, and some of what is written is entertaining (and some of the accompanying pictures are entertaining). This has been a fun project with some interesting scientific results (on which I believe we can build with a lot of additional hard work), and we included a couple of jokes in the paper because frankly it makes it nicer to read. Also, I am happy to see a lighthearted tone in some of the places that have discussed our work, but I am a bit disturbed by a couple of things:

(1) Some of the venues that have discussed our work used figures without asking for our permission. That's just not cool. I would gladly give permission, but you really ought to ask.

(2) I'm not surprised by the media attention on something that hasn't been peer-reviewed and indeed have experienced this before, but can we please make a distinction between something that is published and something that is on a preprint server and has not yet undergone peer review? Some (but not all) of the articles that I have seen are ignoring this crucial distinction, and it's a bit annoying to see increasingly inaccurate statements from people who are playing a sort of "whispering game" and making incorrect approximations of what other people wrote (and writing unsubstantiated things as if they were facts). I know that's the nature of things, but it's frustrating, and when I see a post that is not lighthearted but instead tries to use our work to advocate some cause that has absolutely nothing to do with what we studied (which is a biologically-inspired mathematical model, and I feel a very interesting one), I feel just a little bit worse about the world than I did before.


If you are reading this and are a journalist, please note that my coauthors and I wish to wait until after the peer review process runs its course (and the paper is accepted to a scientific journal---ideally the one to which we have already submitted it) before we grant any interviews. We are very excited about our work, but please let's not be premature about things! Now if you want to talk to me about multislice networks, then I would be extremely pleased to talk to you now.

Thank you.

Community Structure in Time-Dependent, Multiscale, and Multiplex Networks

Guess what? I now have a paper in Science. And it's a mathematics article. And it even has tensors in it. You can find the abstract here. Science's editorial policy prevents me from putting the published .pdf file on my website, but I can put the version that was accepted there. Here are some more details about the paper:

Title: Community Structure in Time-Dependent, Multiscale, and Multiplex Networks

Authors: Peter J. Mucha, Thomas Richardson, Kevin Macon, Mason A. Porter, Jukka-Pekka Onnela

Abstract: Network science is an interdisciplinary endeavor, with methods and applications drawn from across the natural, social, and information sciences. A prominent problem in network science is the algorithmic detection of tightly connected groups of nodes known as communities. We developed a generalized framework of network quality functions that allowed us to study the community structure of arbitrary multislice networks, which are combinations of individual networks coupled through links that connect each node in one network slice to itself in other slices. This framework allows studies of community structure in a general setting encompassing networks that evolve over time, have multiple types of links (multiplexity), and have multiple scales.


Notes:

(1) One of my coauthors is named Kevin Macon. How cool is that for a networks paper?

(2) The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill press release can be found here.

(3) I'll post the Oxford press release later (after it's available). Some venues are planning to pick up the story, and I'll pass relevant links along once I have them.

(4) On an entirely separate note, my cow sync paper---which I just posted on the arXiv---has been invading the blogosphere (especially the nerdy corners of it), so I'll write something about that later.

(5) I really need to grade papers right now. Sigh...

Game: "Frigate Bird"

I haven't tried this game yet, but Aaron Clauset has blogged about a game called Frigate Bird that uses Scrabble tiles.

It sounds pretty cool, so maybe I'll try it at my next games night (which is in 10 days).

Dallas is Perfect

Oakland Athletics pitcher Dallas Braden pitched a perfect game against the Tampa Bay Rays today. His perfect game was the 19th one in Major League history.

Infinity

In the final installment of his series of articles in the New York Times, mathematician Steve Strogatz discusses infinity. Unsurprisingly, these articles (as well as many additional ones) will be collected into a book, which is scheduled to be published in 2012.

Slip of the Tongue

On Mother's Day, Major League Baseball has for several years arranged it so that many players use pink bats as part of the whole "Breast Cancer Awareness Day" part of the deal. Unfortunately, one of the Giants' announcers accidently called it "Breast Awareness Day". Oops.

Coming To America

Female Japanese knuckleballer Eri Yoshida has signed a contract with an independent minor league team in the United States. The name of the team is the Chico Outlaws.

This is Yoshida's first stop in the US, and I hope she gets very far in her career, and I hope to somebody get a chance to see her pitch in a game. We'll see how things go, but this is an important foundational step.

Somerville-Jesus Ball

Somerville College is having a ball jointly with Jesus College tonight. (They do this every 2 or 3 years. I guess it's supposed to be every 2 years, but last year's ball got punted to this year.) Apparently, something like 2000 people will show up, and Somerville is the only one of the two colleges that can possibly accommodate something of this size. The College is going into lock-down at 5pm, and my choices are basically to go to the party (which is so not happening!), being stuck in my apartment starting at 5pm and having to deal with the shit going on around me, or being stuck outside from 5pm until something like 4am. Thankfully, my friend Felicia has offered me a couch futon to sleep on tonight, so I have somewhere else to be---and a place where I will actually be able to get work done and sleep, which certainly won't be the case tonight in my apartment in Somerville. And I'll have the spare key, so I'll actually have the freedom to go out and do stuff if I want. (Maybe I'll go see "Hot Tub Time Machine" or something?) Yeah! The couch futon isn't necessarily the most comfortable one in the world, but I don't care, because this is infinitely better than the alternatives of being stuck either in my apartment or in my Dartington House office!

I get by with a little help from my friends...

Update: An awesome moment related to this occurred today. I was in Somerville's SCR having some coffee and a pastry, and more people were around than usual for a Saturday. The wife of a Governing Body member asked several of us collectively if were going to go to the ball, and I immediately answered "Fuck no!" before I could stop myself. I am just a picture of propriety.

Parliament well hung?

Not that I was paying much attention to the UK elections (because I wasn't), but of course that was a big deal to lots of the people I know around here. A colleague of mine just walked by the door and said the result was interesting, so I decided to look it up---the BBC is apparently predicting a hung parliament.

Last night, I was talking about this a bit with a friend and a colleague (I'm referring to 2 separate people), although I headed off to do my own thing when dinner was winding down and the discussion got a bit more "technical" [not necessarily the best term, but it seems good enough]. They were mentioning about watching it no matter how painful the results were. Naturally, this made me compare it to watching the Dodgers year after year no matter how much they keep breaking my heart, though they didn't see it as the same thing. :) I do understand that, but when one lives in a bubble the way I do, it sure seems that way.

There were two main things I followed with respect to the election: (1) I was pretty glad that my article in a fancy journal got delayed a week to the 14th because otherwise there'd basically be no chance of getting any UK publicity. It's not quite like when the PS 3 was announced right when my PNAS paper came out (I think it was the PS 3 and not some other system...), but it still conflicted with my self-interest; (2) I saw a survey, with results divided primarily by self-identified party affiliation, regarding statistics for people not wanting people like me immigrating into the UK.

Interesting times, I suppose. Now when will they give me the data so that I can write a paper on it... ;)

Oh, and the article includes the awesome sentence beginning "Education secretary Ed Balls hung on in Morley and Outwood..."

Unwritten Rules in Baseball

I just read a fascinating article by Jerry Crasnick about unwritten rules in baseball. In each case, Crasnick gives a scenario, and Goose Gossage (Hall-of-Fame relief pitcher), Jim Palmer (HOF starting pitcher), and Bert Blyleven (will soon be, and should already be, an HOF starting pitcher) gave their opinions and possibly some anecdotes in each case. It was interesting to contrast the reaction of Palmer with those of the other two. Anybody want to guess where I would like along this spectrum? ;)

RIP Ernie Harwell (1918-2010)

Once again, the baseball mike has fallen silent, as legendary Detroit Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell has died. You can read about him on wikipedia.

I had a chance to listen to Harwell a bit later in his career, and his poem "Baseball, A Game For All America" to me is very meaningful (and, of course, I am listening to it now on iTunes). Here is a YouTube clip of that poem.

Origin of the Term "Phase Space"

I just read a fascinating article in the April issue of Physics Today on the origin of the term "phase space". Highly recommended.

Advice for Giving Talks

In a blog post, Aaron Clauset enumerates some excellent advice for giving talks. If you are a student of mine---or, in fact, a scientist or academic of any kind---please read this blog post.

And while I essentially agree with every point on this list, of course it's not like I actually follow all of the points of advice, but I do follow many---or at least several---of them.

Anyway, I am far from a perfect speaker (though I don't think that I am horrible at it), but in my position as advisor, co-advisor, and mentor of various kinds, I think the most important thing is to pass along good advice no matter the extent to which I actually follow it. :)

Enjoy!

Group Theory in the Bedroom

But it's not what you think (and anyway I blatantly stole that title from Brian Hayes)...

Instead, it's just that group theory is the subject of Steve Strogatz's latest article in the New York Times. And group theory in the bedroom plays an important role in that article. (However, group actions were not mentioned.)

Multislicing the War

I'll be telling you more about "multislice networks" soon enough, but in the meantime, in this New York Times article, you can see an example of a multislice network. There is also a priceless of hopelessly naive quote from General Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of the American effort in Afghanistan: When we understand this slide, we’ll have won the war.

Comment: Um, no. But this is excellent fodder for the seminar that I am giving on multislice networks tomorrow!


If you are curious and want to see how my collaborators and I use the term "multislice network", you can look at the paper that we posted on the arXiv. I postpone further details until the published version comes out.

(Tip of the cap to Philip Maini.)

Research Buzzword Cloud

Here is a research buzzword cloud that I constructed using the text from my research synopsis page. Naturally, the non-research words all occur on that page---and usually even for good reason.

I got this idea from Aaron Clauset's blog, and I followed his link to the tool wordle.net.

Super Mario Brothers crossover

As Kotaku reports, there is a new flash game that allows one to play Super Mario Brothers as not only Mario but also characters from other games (e.g., as Link from Zelda or as Simon Belmont from Castlevania). I approve! (It's hard to control the character, but this is still pretty damn awesome.)

(Tip of the cap to Louis Wang.)

Demotivational Poster of the Day: Retort!

I love the retort even more than I love the original poster. I approve!

Mmmm.... Sugar

According to this study, there is a correlation between chocolate consumption and experiencing depression. Well, duh. I'm not exactly shocked by this conclusion.

(And as a remark, I have several times purposely consumed sugar when feeling depressed---but not necessarily chocolate in particular.)

I'm still waiting for quantum music.

In the meantime, there is semiclassical music, a listing that I first encountered in a radio directory in a hotel in Montreal.

Justice Scalia learns about orthogonality.

This excerpt from a recent U.S. Supreme Court deliberations transcript is pretty damn funny.

(Tip of the cap to the 'Found Math' column in MAA Focus. This was in the Feb/March 2010 issue.)

Probability and O.J.

Here is Steve Strogatz's latest column in the New York Times. This one is on probability.

Who says baseball players aren't athletes?

As this video shows, baseball players can be extremely athletic. I approve!

(Tip of the cap to Liam Pomponi, one of my Somerville students.)

Boobquake

Apparently, one person's response to a Iranian cleric's asinine assertion that scantily clad women cause earthquakes is to test the theory, and the movement is gaining a lot of steam. Here is the Facebook page for boobquake, and here is the original post (which Somerville's web filter is blocking, by the way) by Purdue senior Jen McCreight.

(Tip of the cap to my Ph.D. student Puck Rombach.)

Update (4/26/10): Today is the day, and it's Richter's birthday. Win!

My Interview with Princeton University Press blog for Mathematics Awareness Month 2010

I was interviewed by e-mail for the Princeton University Press blog in honor of Mathematics Awareness Month 2010 (on "Mathematics and Sports"). You can find that question and answer session on this page.

Airport security people sure do pay attention

Here is a recent exchange with security (TSA) people at Burbank airport:

Security person: "Are you going to Austin, too?"

Me: "No"

Him: "But you look like a musician."

Me: "I do my best." (other security person laughs)

Him: "Enjoy your time in Texas." (Hopefully, that will only be to change planes! Also note that they never bothered to check that I have a second ticket that takes me from Dallas to London.)


Yes, I can assure you that airport security people in the US really are focused on doing their job. The person right before me was going to Austin, and she was having a conversation with the security people. It didn't take much time, but I'd really rather have these people focusing on what they should be focusing on.

Calling London (The Volcano Song)

Calling London (The Volcano Song)

by Mason A. Porter

(University Lecturer, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford)

[sung to the tune of "London Calling" by The Clash]


Calling London, since there's no hope to fly there
The volcano is spewing, and the ash won't come down
Calling London from the underworld
Let's have a bitch session, all you boys and girls
Calling London, we're all just stuck
All of our flights have been grounded by dust
Calling London, see we ain't got no flights
Though apparently airlines give us 'travelers' rights'


CHORUS

The ice age is coming, the ash is blowing in
Engines stop running and the air is growing thin
A nuclear error, but I have no fear
The volcano is spewing-and Iceland's too near


Calling London through the no-fly zone
Forget it, brother, an' go it alone
Calling London upon the volcano of death
I want my plane to fly-but I won't hold my breath
Calling London-though I just wanna get back
And when we were talking-you cut me no slack
Calling London, since we won't fly that high
Unless we want to say goodbye


CHORUS


Now get this
Calling London, I wasn't there, too
An' you know what I say? At least it's not swine flu!
Calling London at the top of the dial
And I hope soon I'll be traveling miles

I never felt so trapped, so trapped

RIP Jack Hale (1928-2009)

Somehow I managed to miss this, but Jack Hale---one of the pioneers in the theory of dynamical systems---died last December. I didn't know Jack very well, but I met him during my time at Georgia Tech, and he was just a really nice man. He still showed up to the dynamical systems seminar every week. When I visited Georgia Tech in August 2005 (a few months after I left), he showed up on campus an extra day for my physics seminar---basically my talk was the reason he went to campus that day, and he hardly ever walked into the physics building at all. I appreciated his gesture very much.

If you're interested in Hale's mathematics, you can read the obituary and the references therein. I think those articles also mention the fact that Jack, through his leadership as department chair, helped build up Georgia Tech's mathematics department from a service department into a research powerhouse.

Ashtastic Magazine

When opportunity knocks...

As Boing Boing reports, there is now a magazine by and for the volcano-stranded.

I might actually try to contribute something.

(Tip of the cap to Justin.)

Congratulations to Tim and Christina!

Tim and Christina got hitched on Saturday! Congrats!

Here are some pictures.

'Volcano Anger'

One of my Ph.D. students has coined the term 'volcano anger' to describe my state.

Volcano leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

(Man, I am seriously stressed out over this, and it's been making it hard to get myself to eat at times.)

Or maybe: Volcano leads to stress. Stress leads to anger. Stress also leads to not eating.

Mathematical Integration

Steve Strogatz's latest column in the New York Times is on integral calculus.

Cool Baseball Story

Here is a very nice baseball story (which is really a human interest story) about a 58-year-old college baseball player. I highly recommend this article.

A Holy War is Brewing

Apparently, another holy war is brewing.

(Tip of the cap to Zifnab.)

U.K. airspace is now closed.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

It looks like I might be in the U.S. just a little bit longer than I intended.

Anyway, we shall see... Hopefully the ash plume from the volcano in Iceland won't alter my travel plans too much.

Also: Why is it always Iceland? (Damn you, Iceland!)

Update (4/17/10): My 4/18 flight is no longer happening, and I am now going to try a 4/25 flight (that's the earliest I could get) and see if I can arrive on 4/26. Wish me luck. And check out how I have decided to rail against the gods.

Best. Spoiler. Ever.

I can't help it---this demotivational poster is just too funny. Does that make me a bad person?

(This, by the way, is blog post number 2000. I produce a lot of text.)

BO at MIT

Here's the straight line (you provide the joke): "The student council has gotten money allocated to provide free sample sized toothpaste, soap, and deodorant [to combat student body odor] ..."



Also take a look at CNN's video report.

Comment: snicker

(Tip of the cap to Julius Su.)

(Note: This is blog post 1999.)

The Calculus of Change

Here is Steve Strogatz's latest column in the New York Times. In it, he discusses differential calculus (after he discussed differential geometry... go figure). Integral calculus is supposedly coming next week.

(By the way, this is blog post 1998. Soon we're going to party like it's 1999.)

Analogy between Research and The Oregon Trail

I don't actually agree with what I am about to say---in fact, I think that for most researchers it wouldn't be a good idea at all---but at the recent networks conference, a couple of us came up with an analogy between research and The Oregon Trail that I really dig and which has a bit of truth to it: When hunting, we learned that one should ignore the rabbits and go after the buffalo. (Remember that the rabbits provided so little meat that it wasn't worth the time it took to catch them.)

Blackouts and Origins of Team Names

The Biz of Baseball has a nice picture of the retarded and confusing blackout map for Major League Baseball. This shows the regions in the US in which, e.g., I cannot use my MLB.tv subscription to get a given team's games. The picture is cool; the policy is lame.


Mental Floss provides nice synopses of the origins of the team names for all Major League Baseball teams.

Effect of the Count on Umpire Strike Zones

Wow. This is pretty damned cool: The Hardball Times has done some analysis (and produced some very striking figures) that demonstrate that umpires have different strike zones for different counts.

Not that I'm surprised or anything, but it's really nice to see conclusive evidence from the data (so that I can do something other than rely on eyeballing and cynicism).

(Tip of the cap to Rob Neyer.)

Some Movies with Mathematics in Them

Here is a brief compilation of some movies with mathematical references in them. It's far from comprehensive and doesn't include Meet Dave (well, it doesn't have it yet; I wrote to the compiler) and presumably is missing tons of others. However, it's still an interesting list and worth blogging about, and the guy who did the compiling was my Math 2c prof at Caltech back in the day.

(Tip of the cap to the Mathematical Association of America, who posted this link on Facebook and presumably on their web page.)

I love the English language.

Jürgen Kurths said something like "We make a network of networks to try to build a 'supermodel'."

I then immediately responded with "There was a movie about that."

(Then a couple of us spent several minutes explaining the pun to him.)

Sign of the Day

I love the fact that the folks at the University of Michigan felt the need to post this sign.

Update: This demotivational poster is also amusing.

Play Ball!

The 2010 Major League Baseball season has just started! Go Dodgers!

Rectangling the Circle

In Steve Strogatz's latest article in The New York Times, he discusses limits and presents a nice proof that the area of a circle is π*r^2, where r is the radius of the circle. (The proof that I saw in calculus was with an integral, but this one in Strogatz's article is much more clever and insightful.)

What happens in College Park stays in College Park

I have a red-eye flight at 12:45 am to Baltimore (via Minneapolis), from which I will take ground transportation to College Park in order to participate in a workshop on dynamics of and on networks. The workshop goes from Monday to Friday, and it takes place on the University of Maryland campus.

I'm really looking forward to this workshop, as it's small, has a lot of interesting people, and has no parallel sessions so everybody will get to see everybody speak (modulo flight schedules and all that).

My talk---on community structure in multislice networks---is the second talk on Monday morning, and I look forward to all of the ensuing discussions that I'll be having over the week. Naturally, I plan to wear my power-law t-shirt on Monday. :)

Mike Leake to Skip Minor Leagues (at least for now)

As Rob Neyer reports in his blog, Mike Leake has been named the Reds 5th starter. He becomes the first pitcher since Darren Dreifort in 1994 and the first starting pitcher since Jim Abbot in 1989 to make his professional debut in the Major Leagues.

The story with Jim Abbot is, of course, especially nice---given that he was born without a right hand. Abbot was amazing to watch play.

Fearless Forecast: 2010 Baseball Season

Here are the predictions for the 2010 baseball season from various folks who work for ESPN. And here are mine:

American League:

AL East champion: New York Yankees
AL Central champion: Minnesota Twins
AL West champion: Texas Rangers
Wild Card: Boston Red Sox

Champion: New York Yankees (sigh...)

Most Valuable Player: Joe Mauer, Twins
Cy Young Award: Felix Hernandez, Mariners
Rookie of the Year: Brian Matusz, Orioles

Time on the rise: Cleveland Indians
Team on the decline: The The Angels Angels of Anaheim


National League:

NL East champion: Atlanta Braves
NL Central champion: St. Louis Cardinals
NL West champion: Los Angeles Dodgers
Wild Card: Philadelphia Phillies

Champion: Atlanta Braves

Most Valuable Player: Albert Pujols, Cardinals
Cy Young Award: Roy Halladay, Phillies
Rookie of the Year: Jason Heyward, Braves

Time on the rise: Washington Nationals (you heard it here first; jump on the bandwagon while you still can)
Team on the decline: Chicago Cubs


World Series: Braves over Yankees in 7 games


Update (4/03/10): Here is ESPN's collective wisdom about the prospective 2010 award winners in baseball.

Some Baseball-Related April Fools Stories

Rob Neyer has collected them and generally phrased things pretty well on his blog. The reference to Sidd Finch, a fictional baseball player in one of the best April Fools jokes ever, is much appreciated.

Way too many blog entries for me the last couple of days...

Whose idea was this?

As you can see in my latest photoblog entry, I come from a town that has placed a sculpture that is literally a steaming pile of crap in front of city hall. What the fuck?

(This has been there a couple of years, so I am a bit delayed in making this a photoblog entry.)

Tales from the arXiv: April 1st Edition (Part II)

There is at least one more fake arXiv paper.

Title: Orthographic Correlations in Astrophysics

Authors: Joe Zuntz, Thomas G. Zlosnik, Caroline Zunckel, Jonathan T. L. Zwart

Abstract: We analyze correlations between the first letter of the name of an author and the number of citations their papers receive. We look at simple mean counts, numbers of highly-cited papers, and normalized h-indices, by letter. To our surprise, we conclude that orthographically senior authors produce a better body of work than their colleagues, despite some evidence of discrimination against them.

Note: I very much appreciate the author names on this one.

Choice quote from the article: "We also follow usual practice and use a number of different estimators, continuing until we find one that can demonstrate the correct hypothesis to be true."

Another one: "Unlike real doctors, scientists are forgiven their worst work and judged on their best."

(Tip of the cap to Joe Antognini.)

Google is now called "Topeka"

In honor of the city of Topeka, Kansas temporarily naming themselves "Google", Google has decided to rename themselves "Topeka". I approve!

(In other news, Google.uk is offering animal translation capabilities. Now I wonder if past April Fools pranks by Google have differed in different countries. They must have, but it was only the obviously US-centric version of today's prank on google.com that compelled to think about this and look up what google.uk did.)

Update (4/01/10): There is a vowel outage on Gmail, but people writing in Hebrew thankfully aren't affected by it.

Update (4/01/10): Google is expressing its search times in (pseudo)randomly-chosen units for each search.

Tales from the arXiv: April 1st Edition

I saw Zombieland last night (I hadn't cried so much since Titanic), and I have zombies on my mind. So let's talk about zombies.

Like in this new article just posted on the arXiv that was co-authored by George Romero (well, not really):

Title: "How many zombies do you know?" Using indirect survey methods to measure alien attacks and outbreaks of the undead

Author: Andrew Gelman (and possibly George Romero)

Abstract: The zombie menace has so far been studied only qualitatively or through the use of mathematical models without empirical content. We propose to use a new tool in survey research to allow zombies to be studied indirectly without risk to the interviewers.

I love April 1st...

2010 SIAM Fellows

Here are the new fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. There are quite a few familiar names on this list...

RIP Jaime Escalante (1930-2010)

I just noticed that Jaime Escalante died last night. Escalante was a teacher at Garfield High School in Los Angeles, and the movie Stand and Deliver (which I really ought to see at some point) was about him. One of my friends from grad school had him as a teacher---she's quoted in the wikipedia article---and I assume that one math major from Tech who went there had him as well. (I am using the latter phrasing because I don't know for sure.)

Double Dog Dares

I was recently having a discussion with my friend Danny Schwarzblatt, and I was wondering about the origin of the phrase "double dog dare", which didn't make any sense to me. Apparently, it takes bat to the 19th century (at least), and (based on this link) it seems like there might be some negative connotations associated with it that have long since left the phrase. You can find other details at this site. Still, the origin of this phrase is far from definitive, and I'm curious whether any other juicy details are known.

By the way, is the term "etymology" still correct if one is thinking about the origin of a phrase and not just a single word?

Quote of the Day: Passover Seder Edition

Today's quote is awesome: "The Jews were not pussies." (My father, quoting from the bible at Passover Seder)

I've got the power!

Steve Strogatz's latest opinion piece in the New York Times is about powers, exponentials, and logarithms.

Quote of the Day: Tempe Festival of the Arts Edition

I spent 3 hours or so at the Tempe Festival of the Arts today. I saw lots of cool stuff, and I bought a couple of things: a t-shirt with the Chinese symbol for "chaos", a hand-crafted dragon mug (the tail is the handle, for example, and its eyes make the face cute), and a print of a gecko practicing karate. I hope the print survives my trip back to Oxford (and the travelling between now and then) so that I can frame it and hang it in my apartment in Oxford.

I bought the dragon from a guy who had tons of cool dragon-themed and wizard-themed clay items. (I especially liked a couple of the lamps and the piece that had the small dragon familiar holding up the wizard's laptop so that he could use it.) Lots of stuff was reasonably large and expensive, and it unfortunately just wasn't practical for me to buy a more expensive item from him---though I totally would have if it weren't impractical. I think he doesn't ship his larger items, but I'm going to check his website anyway.

Anyway, I was wearing my "flirt harder, I'm a physicist" t-shirt today, and while I was buying my dragon mug, another customer said: "Nice shirt. [pause] Good luck." I'm amused.

Best combination of book title and author name ever!

Today I found the best combination of book title and author name ever: Apparently, an anthropologist named Barbara B. Smuts has written a book called Sex and Friendship in Baboons. Nice!

The book is obviously on a legitimate topic, but combining the title with the author's last name just makes me giggle.

Most insane. CV. Ever.

That honor goes to Gene Stanley. Crazy.

Cornell versus Kentucky

It's amazing that Cornell unexpectedly earned a birth in the "Sweet 16" of men's college basketball. Unsurprisingly, #1 seeded Kentucky beat us. Nevertheless, here is a fun comparison between Cornell and Kentucky. Tonight at dinner, we actually had an all-Cornell table, and we watched the beginning of the game together. The game started with a 10-2 Cornell lead, but then reality quickly set in (and watching the game made it obvious even to me---and I know nothing about basketball---that Cornell was simply outmatched) and we ended up losing 62-45. In one streak, Kentucky got 30 points to Cornell's 6.

The people at dinner included me (obviously), 3 fellow CAMsters (2 of whom overlapped with me), a former Cornell postdoc who overlapped with one of the people who overlapped with me (but not with me), a former Cornell professor who overlapped with us, and a former Cornell grad student from the biometry department. We were all present in one of my 2 seminars today, 3 of the people are faculty at ASU (main campus, which I was visiting), 2 of the people are faculty at ASU West Campus, and 1 person is a visitor from Purdue. And then there's me.

I don't normally care about basketball, but this was pretty cool. I guess that's what it's like to go to a "real" school, although the fact that we were severe underdogs was a big part of the fun for me.

Fashion Meets Topology

You don't believe me? Just take a look at this blurb (and links therein). Dude!

What happens in Tempe stays in Tempe

I am heading off to Arizona State for a whirlwind tour: 2 days on campus, 3 talks, 3 different topics. And do you know how I'm going to prepare for this? By going to tonight's Dodger game, of course!

I didn't see any baseball game in person in 2009 (for the first time in maybe 25 years), and I am going to make up for this!

Behind the Water Curtain

Check out this picture! I love cool, water-induced visual effects.

Maybe they'll call it the Virtual Boy 2?

Isn't this the same kind of promise we heard back in the day with the Virtual Boy? I know the world is a little more ready for 3D gaming nowadays, and Nintendo has certainly done a lot better on the market than it was doing for many years, but it does admittedly feel like I've heard this before.

Level 1 Human

I wholeheartedly approve of this demotivational poster.

Network science research provokes terror alert

A run-of-the-mill network science paper about cascading failures via targeted attacks (based on nodes with high degree or betweenness) has caused a bit of a panic in the United States. The work is rather theoretical and there are tons of other papers like it. This one did appear in a journal called Safety Science, and I wonder if that made a difference here? (By the way, I very much appreciate that the New York Times piece uses the term "network science".)

Maybe I ought to be careful about my research on cascading failures in networks?

(Tip of the cap to James Gleeson, my coauthor on this paper on network cascades.)

Think Globally

The latest New York Times article by Steve Strogatz is called "Think Globally", which is pretty ironic (despite the applications to earth's geodesics) given that the article is about differential geometry, which is inherently local. Maybe that's the "act locally" part? And it just warms my heart to see an article about differential geometry in the New York Times. Where are the wedge products, though? :)

More Blogs by Baseball Players (and Former Players)

I might look at the blog of former Astro Morgan Ensberg a bit more at some point. His tone is sometimes snarky, and he seems like he's being more forthright than most former players, but the color combination and typesetting hurts my eyes. He also responds to reader comments, which is always appealing.

On the other hand, current pitcher Pat Neshek's blog is a wall of text and doesn't appear to have the usual feedback mechanisms (though there was a message board that I didn't check out). On the other hand, I very much like the up-front information for autograph-seekers.

I have previously mentioned Curt Schilling's blog, whose format is more readable than I remember. Schilling also has a tendency to be pretty forthright. I'm going to see if I can find some e-mail contact information to send him a copy of my article in ranking baseball players. I think it would be awesome if he wrote snarkily about that.

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

Here is a Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.

(Tip of the cap to Mark Rogers.)

Clay Millenium Prize Awarded to Perelman

It's official: Grigoriy Perelman has been awarded a $1 million Clay Millennium Prize for his resolution of the Poincaré conjecture.

How much do you want to bet that he declines the award?

(Tip of the cap to Mariano Beguerisse Díaz.)

"Can Baseball Be Used to Teach Statistics?"

This is the title of my new book review of a book that attempts to teach statistics using baseball (I bet you didn't guess that...) that just appeared in Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

Pick-Up Line of the Day

I just heard "Do you work in oxides?" used as a pick-up line. It appeared to be successful. :)

You know what 'they' say: What happens at the March Meeting stays at the March Meeting...

'Saturday Catblogging' and 'Cheerleaders at a Physics Conference?'

As promised, here is some Saturday Catblogging (which I am only posting 3 days late). Also, registration for the March Meeting opened on Sunday---while a conference for (way too) young cheerleaders was still going on. I'm pretty sure that they were just as afraid of us as we were of them.

Square Dancing

Here is Steve Strogatz's latest article in the New York Times. It concerns the Pythagorean Theorem and the different levels of elegance of different proofs of it.

Quote of the Day: March Meeting Edition

Sometimes, I even amuse myself. Today's quote come from me:

"I think I'll take one piece of candy for each paper of mine that you've rejected." (Me, to the people manning the Physical Review booth)

Early contender for best talk title: Accelerated Evolution in the Death Galaxy

Here is my opening contender for best talk title at the APS March Meeting: "A27.00002: Accelerated Evolution in the Death Galaxy"

Note that this talk is not in the psychoceramics session. I'm not going to see it, as it conflicts with a 'human mobility' session (which is a complex systems session), and I'll also need to use part of that session to set up my posters.

Oh, and here is a poster on psychoceramics. And another one. Um, do you think this person is generating these abstracts algorithmically? Why were these abstracts accepted? Does anybody read the submissions? (By the way, check out the first authors for these three posters---they include variants of familiar names---of at least one person who has been dead for several years---and allusions to mathematical formulas.)

P.S. Happy Pi Day!

Sometimes, I'm very easy to please.

After a bit of an arduous journey---especially the last leg, which had me get lost and turn a 2-block walk to my hotel (complete with lots of luggage) into a 25+ block trek, I was ecstatic to see a location of Peet's right next to my hotel. Woot!

During my "epic" journey, I managed to accidently leave my posters at a bus stop. (I needed a place to sit to look at the .pdf maps I had saved in order to orient myself and see what I was doing with my chaotic spiral around my hotel.) Somebody opened the poster tube while I was gone, and apparently just left it and the posters therein where he/she found it after not seeing anything of apparent value. It's a good thing that whoever this was evidently isn't into either community detection or granular crystals.

Anyway, hello from Portland. I need sleep!

Even more "awesomeness"

I made a brief pitstop at Tim and Christina's place to pick up my laptop (and other stuff in my laptop bag) for my meeting at Peet's Coffee at 4pm (so, imminently).

I wanted to make sure to put my computer to sleep. I noticed that it was asleep, so in order to put it to sleep, logic dictated that it would be necessary to wake up my computer.

And, therefore, I woke up my computer in order to put it to sleep... because I wanted to make sure to put it to sleep before putting it away to bring with me to my meeting.

I am awesome.

(Technically, my logic was impeccable, though I did manage to inadvertently rediscover the inverse operator in the process...)

Another Reason That I Am "Awesome"

I find myself in the middle of what I thought was about 34 hours in Pasadena. (I had to really squeeze things tightly with flying from the UK to LA and then flying from LA to Portland for the APS March Meeting.)

As it turns out, it will actually be about 33 hours, because the clocks get sprung forward tonight due to the whole Daylight Savings Time business. (I only found out because I found a blurb about this on the APS website in the context of not being late for the Sunday tutorials. I am currently trying to figure out my plans for Sunday and Monday in terms of registration, the events I want to attend, etc.) Great; just great. I wonder if Supershuttle will screw up my 4:15 pick-up?

Thankfully, I'm flying out of Burbank airport. I have previously been to LAX the day after the clocks change, and it's significantly more of a nightmare than usual (which is saying a lot, because it's usually pretty nightmarish even at its best).

In sum, I am "awesome". (Oh, and what happens at the March Meeting stays at the March Meeting.)

Demonstrating the Emergency Bra

Tonight I went to the Oxford show of the 2010 Ig Nobel UK tour, and I took this picture of the demonstration of the emergency bra.

I love the look on the guy's face...

Quote of the Day: Oxford Don Edition

Today's quote is just priceless: "The verb in the sentence is the equal sign."

(To get the proper ambience, you have to imagine these words coming from an old Oxford professor with a stuffy British accent. I won't say who uttered this beauty, and the context---arguing grammatical structure on the wording of an exam---makes the whole thing even more awesome.)

Monkeying Around with Investments

Apparently, monkeys can do more than just rank football teams. Money quote: It shows that financial knowledge does not play a great role in giving forecasts to how the market will change. It is usually a matter of more or less successful guessing. And the monkey got lucky.

(Tip of the cap to Martin Gould.)

Monday Catblogging

Gazebo isn't doing this anymore, so I feel like I need to pick up the slack.

Actually, I think that today's catblogging photo (once again featuring Pogo) is actually quite nice. (And I am using "quite" in the American sense rather than in the British sense.)

I think that maybe I'll have a Catblogging picture on Saturday. ;) Stay tuned.

Like ping pong injuries, except even more manly

Sadly, my hands have been horribly savaged by the British winter this time.

The cold has lingered a bit longer than usual, and at many times, the winter has actually been quite dry, so the skin on my hands has nicely cracked, become rough, and developed a couple of open sores. It's rather unpleasant, actually.

I realized today that one of the things that has been exacerbating the problem is that I have been lecturing this term with chalk rather than with whiteboard markers. I forgot to make my usual request in advance to get a room with a whiteboard, and I am paying the price. Giving my lecture was literally physically painful today. (I warned by students at the beginning of lecture that my writing would be worse than usual, which is unfortunate given that my writing is messy anyway, and I indicated the reason why; upon hearing that, one of them actually sneered. That's pretty insensitive, Dude!)

Lifting the boards, which are very stiff and require some effort, was unpleasant, and it turns out that chalk dust and open sores really don't mix.

It's now gotten to the point that I can barely lifting my cutlery to eat, carry my plate to the table to start eating, etc. (And it hurts a lot to do all of these things.) Ugh. I have one more lecture tomorrow, and then maybe I can start recovering.

Update: After I pressed the button to publish the post, blogger gave me an advertisement for whiteboard markers. Now that's service! :)

Update 2 (3/11/10): I just noticed (because the website was still up) that after the update, I received an advertisement for Vaseline for chapped skin. I guess I can sometimes rely on responses to my blog entry not just from my readers but also from automatic advertisement. I'm amused. :)

Finding Your Roots

Here is Steve Strogatz's latest opinionator article on mathematics. My old "buddy" John Hubbard gets a nod in this one.

I think I'll try to solve the classical problem first.

In the latest tales from the arXiv, I present quantum dating.

Title: Quantum Dating Market

Authors: O.G. Zabaleta and C.M. Arizmendi

Abstract: We consider the dating market decision problem under the quantum mechanics point of view. Quantum states whose associated amplitudes are modified by men strategies are used to represent women. Grover quantum search algorithm is used as a playing strategy. Success is more frequently obtained by playing quantum than playing classic.


Comment: Um, I think that there is a quantum cuteness paper that really ought to have been cited. :)

Hmmm...

I think that what is possibly one of my greatest strengths professionally is certainly one of my worst weaknesses personally---namely, that I seem to be incapable of feeling content and focus way too much on what I don't have even in cases where the things I do have are arbitrarily good.

I am capable of feeling happy---just not content, and I sometimes drive myself nuts as a result.

On the academic side, this can of course drive me to bigger (and ideally better) things. On the personal side, for example, I have a tendency to feel down when I don't get to hang out with my closest friends as much as I want (which of course is going to be the case a lot because I'm busy and they're busy, and only a very small number of them live close to me anyway). My best friends basically are who I consider to be my true family, and I would rather focus on the excellent times I have with them. Those times are my fondest moments in life, yet I have an annoying tendency to spend too much time thinking about the fact that I wish there were more of them when I think it would be much healthier for me to think happily about the good times themselves. And so I can drive myself nuts sometimes with this. (The flaw aspect of this also can come into play academically---by not being satisfied with certain things in a similar fashion---but I think it's the personal one where I can truly drive myself nuts much more than I'd like.)

There are various bits of subtext above---such as why my best friends are my real family and my genetic family really isn't---but I might have written about that before and in any event, I am planning on getting to work rather than on writing volumes now. There is also a reason that I am thinking about it this morning, but I will save that for another time as well.

In the meantime, I have some solution sets to correct, and I hope to go through a draft of a paper today that has taken way too long to revise.

Jewish Wazzup Commericial

This video is supposedly a banned Budweiser 'Wazzup' commericial. It has a Jewish theme, and I think it's pretty damned funny. (Note: Some people thought that entire thread of commercials was really stupid, and the first few commercials in it were. But then it started getting incredibly self-referential, so that later commercials in the series became pretty bloody funny. Being amused by this video is probably predicated on knowing the thread.)

(Tip of the cap to my cousin Leydah Evers.)

Quote of the Day

Today´s quote comes from me: "Four years at Cornell made me a man."

Toto, I don't think we're in Topeka anymore.

Topeka has temporarily renamed itself "Google" in a rather shameless ploy. Unfortunately for them, they're still located in Kansas.

What happens in Sevilla stays in Sevilla (Take 2)

Tomorrow I take my second trip to Sevilla. In July, I went there for a nonlinear waves workshop, and this time I am visiting a collaborator. Thankfully, the weather should be much cooler than it was in July.

I have a way with words.

During tonight's after-dinner conversation, I accidently confused the term "on the menu" with the term "on the list of people going to lunch" (well, it might technically have been dinner). Um, oops.

I'm "awesome".

Traffic Shock Waves

Here is an experimental recreation of the traffic shock waves that uses one of the main idealized conditions (circular tracks, with cars attempting to travel at constant speed) that has been studied. My professor Gerald Whitham at Caltech was one of the pioneers in early, idealized models of such things.

(Tip of the cap to Wendell Misch.)

The Joy of $x$

Here is Steve Strogatz's latest opinion piece on mathematics in The New York Times.

This one wasn't as engaging for me as the previous ones.