X-Ray Images of a Python Digesting an Alligator

These images are pretty cool.

New Prescription-Strength Nature

The sad thing is that I assumed that this video about prescription-strength nature was referring to the journal Nature rather than to actual nature. I think I need to get out more.

(I was also wondering if the prescription-level version had less bullshit than the off-the-counter version.)

Clearly, a parody of this parody video is in order.

Some Awesome Detention Notes

A few of the detention notes compiled here are spectacular --- like the one with a reason that was first listed as 'flying' but was then switched to 'leaping w/ intent to fly'.

The one from 1994 is depressing. Apparently, one should just accept what others say without questioning. (I remember getting into some trouble with teachers in first grade when the answer to subtraction problems like '3 - 5' was officially that there was no answer because one wasn't allowed to do it, but I would insist rather emphatically* that it was '-2'.)

* I.e., I haven't changed.

(Tip of the cap to Maria Satterwhite and George Takei.)

Sociomath Workshop: Best. Google Search. Ever.

I am going to be a plenary speaker at a workshop on "Socio-mathematics" at Imperial College in November. I was curious to see if there is a website, but Google seems to think that other words might be more appropriate.

Thank you, Google.

XKCD's Entertainment Scenery Cheatsheet

I really like today's XKCD. I approve! (Also, it is highly appropriate for the film I saw on Monday.)

Will There Be a Mass Editorial Resignation at Scientific Reports?

Will There Be a Mass Editorial Resignation at Scientific Reports?

There might be.

(And a "Way to go!" and a "Huzzah!" to my colleagues from the complex-systems community for taking this action!)

Stuck in the Middle

IFLS has published a video in a post with the title "How Does The Order In Which You're Born Affect Your Personality?"

The article includes the following line: "Those of us with siblings will have heard it all before - the oldest is the bossiest, the middle child is the most co-operative and laid back, and the youngest is spoilt."

Given that, I am sure that you will be shocked to learn that I was born in the middle. Yup, "most co-operative and laid back"... Describes me exactly. ;)

I thought the tradition was: the oldest one inherits the kingdom/business/etc., the middle one joins the priesthood (or, in modern times, academia), and then you lose count.

By the way, I don't actually care about the video; I just want to be snarky.

Update: After watching the video, let me encourage you not to actually watch it: it's painful. The whole point of my post was the IFLS blurb was good (or at least convenient) excuse for me to be snarky.

Traveling Waves, the Royal Thai Navy, and "The Final Countdown"

The video below shows members of the Royal Thai Navy demonstrating traveling waves (and other wave phenomena) to the glorious sounds of "The Final Countdown" being played by a band!

I think my head just exploded.

amazing parademuhteşem bir geçit töreni

Posted by Mavi Kocaeli on Monday, April 6, 2015

(Tip of the cap to Improbable Research.)

My New Grading Scheme

Hummingbirds in a Wind Tunnel

IFLS has posted an article about hummingbird flight, that includes a really cool video---including of how they adapt to being in a wind tunnel. Very cool!

New Article: "The Tongue as an Excitable Medium"

Yes, really: an article called "The Tongue as an Excitable Medium" was published a few days ago in New Journal of Physics. This title is fantastic on so many levels! The article is about a condition known as "geographic tongue", which the authors of the paper model as an excitable medium, in which they (of course) examine pattern formation. But that's not what you were thinking, is it?

I have written a blurb about the paper for the Improbable Research blog. I'll post a link to it when it's available.

(Tip of the cap to IFLS.)

Update: Here is the published version of my blurb.

"Infinite Moments of Incredible Delight"

I just got a spam e-mail with the title of "Infinite Moments of Incredible Delight" (or something like that), and naturally the first thing I wondered about was which was the first moment that was no longer finite. Of course, it then struck me that that would make a great title for a paper (or section thereof) involving probability theory or power laws.

30th Anniversary of the "Sidd Finch" Prank

This snuck up on me.

Baseball Tonight's Facebook post, which links to this article, brings up (and reminds me of) the Sidd Finch prank from 1 April 1985. It's amazing that that prank is now 30 years old. Sidd Finch had his 168 mile per hour fastball (and various other oddities), and the New York Mets played along with the hoax. So awesome!

April Fool's Day!

I am sure that there will be many gems for April 1st this year, just as there was last year and in previous years. Here is a link to some pranks from 2011 and to April-Foolish arXiv papers from 2010 (here and here). I have more April-Foolish blog entries around here somewhere...

This year, Google got into the act early by letting people play Pac-Man on Google Maps.

Now, CERN has demonstrated that The Force exists. (Now that is a truly fundamental force!) [Tip of the cap to Josie Messa for the "news" from CERN.] And in other news out of CERN, apparently rainbow universes are for real.. [Tip of the cap to Kevin Hickerson.]

And now we have an article in Nature by Bob May and collaborators indicating that dragons might be real after all. The article has been published in Nature, so we know that we can count on its scientific accuracy. [Tip of the cap to Catarina Amorim and another source that I can't recall.]

The journal Science has also gotten into the act, indicate that NASA has found strong evidence at least one Hell (the many-Hells theory is more plausible than the existence of just a single Hell), and it appears to be located on Mercury. Considering the planet's namesake, it kind of makes sense that one might find a Hell there. I really love the article's culminating quote: "Congress told NASA to go to hell, and, by Jove, they made it." [Tip of the cap to Physics Today.]

The BBC has summarized some of the pranks from "Tech sites", and of course technology sites tend to take the lead when it comes to April Foolishness. :) [Tip of the cap to Carlos Castillo Chavez.]

Also, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum unveiled a "limited exhibition" of Wonder Woman’s invisible jet. [Tip of the cap to Foster McLane.]

And the American Physics Society, in their popular blurb, reported on killer app for graphene. It was published in a strange journal called Physical Review Graphene. Choice quote: Markus Merk of the Max Planck Institute for Topological Physics in Dingenskirchen, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the research, said the finding is “Refreshing—and potentially very important.” But he thinks other materials could outperform graphene. “Graphene, unfortunately, has no spin-orbit coupling. But topological insulators do. Using these novel materials could increase the plaque-prevention efficiency of toothpastes by at least 35% at liquid helium temperatures.” I love it!

And the world apparently went backwards over at Google. [Tip of the cap to Jimmy Lin.]

The "Association for Computational Heresy" at Carnegie Mellon University produced an entire conference proceedings with serious realizations of joke ideas and joke realizations of serious ideas. [Tip of the cap to Juegren Pfeffer.]

Meanwhile, in a new paper on the arXiv, some scholars have proposed that we give up not only on Falsifiability (as others have suggested) but also on other 'F' words, such as Fidelity, Factuality, and Frugality. [Tip of the cap to Vinko Zlatić.]

Even DARPA got into the act. They advertised new programs that simultaneously test the limits of technology and credulity. [Tip of the cap to Heather Dean.]

Play Pac-Man on Google Maps

Yes, really: You can now use maps in Google Maps to play Pac-Man. I approve!

In case you're interested, you can try a map near Somerville College in Oxford (and also necessarily near the Mathematical Institute). Or perhaps catching Pokémon is more aligned with your tastes?

Or, if you prefer, you can play a live-action version with smartphones.

(Tip of the cap to Jimmy Lin.)

Update: Here is the post from Google's product manager about the new feature. (Tip of the cap to Mary Radcliffe for this link. Apparently, her husband is the person at Google who created this particular gem.) Ah, I love it when April 1st comes along. :)

Update (4/01/15): the article on CNN.com shows several example mazes from different parts of the world.

Update (4/08/15): Wired.com now has an article about this, which is affectionately called "Pac-Maps". Also, here are the "top" places (which are isolated to just a few cities) to play Pac-Maps. Harvard Square is insane.

Financial Resources and Publishing in Scientific Reports?

As some of you know, I am not exactly the biggest fan of the journal Scientific Reports, which is brought to us by the Nature Publishing Group.

I won't get into my specific grievances here, though the journal now appears to have hit a new low with their pay-to-play peer-review activities (e.g., with authors allowed to pay for a fast-track peer review that uses a different and third party peer-review service rather than normal peer review). As discussed here and here, one editor has already resigned. Good! I hope many other Scientific Reports editors follow suit, and some of my peeps from the complex-systems community are also fighting back: they have sent a letter to the Powers That Be at Scientific Reports. I am sharing this letter with permission.

I hope more editors from Scientific Reports resign and that that forces them to either go under or, better yet, to change to have more reasonable policies on such things. (Ideally, they would also improve other epically bad aspects of their venue, but that is a story for another day.)

Ant Fight Club

In my latest post for the Improbable Research blog, I discuss modeling of combat in ants.

One of the reasons I chose to write about this paper is that it also allowed me to introduce modeling issues (e.g., the choice of a differential-equation model versus an agent-based model).

Next time, maybe I'll even use a Mortal Kombat reference. Finish him!

Interactive Twitter Network from NetSci 2014

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

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

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

"Gerrymandering Mishap Leaves Nation Without Any Borders Whatsoever"

Yup, The Onion wins again! I approve!

John Nash and Louis Nirenberg Share 2015 Abel Prize

John Nash and Louis Nirenberg have been jointly awarded the 2015 Abel Prize for their work on partial differential equations.

(Tip of the cap to Physics Today for their post on Facebook.)

Learn Anatomy from Dissected Knit Creatures

Here's another really cool thing: knitted versions of dissected creatures.

Now that is sweet!

(Tip of the cap to Leslie Porter.)

Update: Of course, for several years, people have been able to experience the joys of plush microbes (these are especially awesome), plush subatomic particles, and even plush statistical distributions.

Update (3/31/15): I now have a post about this on the Improbable Research blog.

Turning Coffee Into Art

Yes, really. So awesome!

(Tip of the cap to Yves van Gennip.)

How Long Would It Take to Fall Through the Earth?

There is a new paper on estimating how long it would take to fall through the Earth that does better than the standard crude approximation. I think this is very cool, and I definitely suggest taking a look at the other side of the link.

And I am again reminded that I should have found a way to take the course "Order of Magnitude Physics" at Caltech when I had a chance. (But, thankfully, I often get to think that way for my research.) I just did some googling, and I found the material from the 1995 and 1997 versions of the class.

But I still have one question: How can I make sure that I take the correct turn at Albuquerque?

(Tip of the cap to Physics Today for their post on Facebook.)

Skin-Texture-Changing Frogs

This blurb from IFLS describes frogs whose skin can change texture --- not just color! --- based on their surroundings. Now that is damn cool!

The title of the article claims that this is a "shape-shifting" frog, which to me seems like a highly misleading characterization.

Pronouncing Words in the United Kingdom

This poem from a 1906 anthology says it all.

(Tip of the cap to Jonathan Adams.)

Update: Here is another poem on pronunciation in the English language. (Tip of the cap to Martin Gould.)

Google Celebrates Emmy Noether's 133rd Birthday

Mathematician Emmy Noether is the subject of today's Google doodle. I approve!

(Tip of the cap to several people.)

Post-Punk Icons Reimagined as Marvel Superheroes

Several post-punk icons have been reimagined as Marvel superheroes. This is pretty damn cool!

(Tip of the cap to Leslie Porter.)

A Fine-Scale, Historically Awesome, Genetic Map of the U.K.

A new genetic map of the U.K., which is the product of several-years-long collaboration between geneticists, historians, and others. This looks really neat, and I recommend looking at the map at the other end of the link.

The first line of the news article articulates how cool this is: A remarkable new map of Britain shows how the nation was forged by successive waves of immigration from continental Europe over 10,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age.

Again quoting the article: Geneticists and historians collaborated closely on the 10-years project and have been astonished to find that patterns in the DNA of Britons living today reflect historical events going back centuries, and in some cases millennia. Take a look in the news article for some specific examples.

I am sure that there is a ton more than one can do with the data---and of course, I wonder how much one can improve on the analysis (and, without having looked with seriousness at the Nature article, naturally I have no scientific opinion on its correctness). Many of the coauthors are my colleagues at Oxford, so maybe I will eventually have a chance to play with the data? :)

Update: Taking a quick look at the paper, one could certainly try to use more sophisticated clustering methods. Whether that would have any effect on the qualitative conclusions remains to be seen.

NFL Offensive Lineman by Day, Spectral Graph Theorist by Night

John Urschel is not your ordinary professional football player.

He may be an NFL offensive lineman by day, but by night he is a spectral graph theorist (and numerical linear algebraist). His most recent paper, called "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians", has now been accepted for publication in Journal of Computational Mathematics. Urschel announced via Twitter that it had been officially accepted for publication. (Based on my googling, the published version of the paper hasn't yet appeared in the journal.)

You can read a draft of Urschel's paper on the arXiv preprint server. I just wish that he used his current affiliation on the paper. That would have been fantastic.

(Tip of the cap to Francis Su.)

Update: Looking at Urschel's academic website, I see that he has prior publications. His website gives the reference for a paper on celestial mechanics. I also checked Mathematical Reviews (to find an upper bound on his Erdős Number, of course), and I see that he also has at least one more paper on spectral graph theory. (This paper isn't listed on Urschel's Penn State website, which I suppose he is no longer updating.)

Update (3/21/15): I wrote a blurb on Urschel for the Improbable Research blog.

Some Awesome Passive-Aggressive Notes

Here are some awesome passive-aggressive notes.

There is, naturally, an entire web page dedicated to such things.

We also do passive-aggressive notes pretty well in Oxford applied math. For example, take a look here, here, and here.

(Tip of the cap to George Takei.)

Upcoming Movie: "Pixels"

I just saw a trailer for the movie Pixels, in which "real life" video game characters attack the Earth.

The movie looks cheesy and probably deserves its own drinking game (and I could easily see this being horrible), but am I am so going to geek out and watch this! Bring it on!

The movie has a chance to be awesome, but if nothing else it will at least be "awesome".

Star Trekkin' Across the Journal Publications

That's write: The Firm's song "Star Trekkin'" may well be the most quoted song in scholarly journals. I certainly hope it is, because that would be awesome!

And if you are unfamiliar with this song, then you owe it to yourself to watch the music video on the other side of the link.

Over on the blog entry to which I linked above, reader JimBob points to Spock's quote about Organians: "Fascinating. Pure energy. Pure thought. Totally incorporeal. Not life as we know it at all."

And that is really awesome! Because that brings us back to music: "pure energy" is sampled in the song "What's on Your Mind" by Information Society. I didn't realize that that came from the same line as the modified version in "Star Trekkin'".

Visualizations of π

Several of these visualizations of π are absolutely stunning.

Happy epic Pi Day! It is epic because the year is 2015 (so 3/14/15 in US reckoning), so there are two particular times to celebrate: in the morning and evening at 9:26:535....

(Tip of the cap to Andy Sudol for the website with the visualizations.)

Turning Urine to Electricity Using Microbes

Yes, really.

(Tip of the cap to IFLS.)

Ferrell on the Diamond

Will Ferrell played all nine different positions and for ten different teams in spring training yesterday. Although this is a pretty cheesy and is a publicity stunt, I still think it's highly amusing --- and if the publicity stunt is amusing and entertaining, I'll take it. Plus, being traded 9 times in one day is quite an accomplishment. :)

Anyway, the point is to have fun, and I appreciate creative ways to do it. (And if I were given this opportunity, I would do it too!)

Most posterity, I think it's also worth to linking to yesterday's set of box scores.

Update: You can find more details here.

Update: Baseball-reference.com has now posted a highly amusing player page for Ferrell. I approve! Notice the quotations around how he "bats" and also the list of transactions. I approve! (Also see the ESPN.com article about Ferrell's page at Baseball-reference.com page.)

"Network Literacy: Essential Concepts and Core Ideas"

I am happy to announce the availability of a booklet, Network Literacy: Essential Concepts and Core Ideas, that represents the distillation of thoughts, comments, and writings from more than 30 network science researchers, educators, teachers, and students.

We live in a connected age, and the ideas in the network literacy booklet are what we collectively think that every person should know about networks.

Start spreading the news!

Decaf Coffee Only: Fresh Out of One of My Nightmares

This is like something out of one of my nightmares*: I went to our Senior Common Room, and every single one of the espresso pods was decaf (including all of the ones in the stash in the drawer).

* Naturally, only I would have nightmares like this. [#firstworldproblems]

Another Great Baseball Name: Forrestt Allday

Browsing through Spring Training box scores, I have found another great name: Red Sox outfield prospect Forrestt Allday.

I could do this... well... all day. :)

The 'T' in the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam(-Tsingou) Problem

Today is International Women's Day, and today some venues (e.g., IFLS) are posting articles with the theme 'women you should have heard of' (‪#‎womenyoushouldhaveheardof‬), and I would like to contribute one who was intimately involved in introducing (and conducting subsequent studies of) one of my favorite mathematics/physics problems.

The lady in question is Mary Tsingou, and the problem is the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam(-Tsingou) problem.

Seven years ago, Thierry Dauxois wrote an opinion piece in Physics Today about the decades of omission of credit that Tsingou had experience. To quote his abstract, "The computations for the first-ever numerical experiment were performed by a young woman named Mary Tsingou. After decades of omission, it is time to recognize her contribution."

If you look at the original technical report, you'll notice typed text that indicates that the report was "written by" Fermi, Pasta, and Ulam but that "Work done by" credits Fermi, Pasta, Ulam, and Tsingou. Dauxois's paper discusses Mary Tsingou's contribution to the original technical report and advocates renaming the problem as the "FPUT" problem. Tsingou also worked on the FPU(T) problem later---e.g., on "superecurrences" that occur in very long-time calculations. For more information about the FPU(T) problem, see the Scholarpedia article devoted to it, a Scholarpedia article devoted to its mathematical aspects, and an expository article that I coauthored.

Excursion to Bletchley Park: 2015 Edition

Every few years, we take a bunch of mathematics and computer students from Somerville on an excursion to Bletchley Park (home of the U.K. codebreaking during World War II). Today was another one of those treks.

As usual, I took some pictures from today's trip.

And here are my photos from our 2012 excursion.

A Collection of Awesome Historical Snark (and Insults)

This collection of insults of other snark from both the modern era and long ago is awesome. Many of these are awesome (including quite a few that I hadn't seen before), and there are only a few duds. Highly amusing!

(Tip of the cap to George Takei.)

Cartoonifying Instagram Photos

These cartoonified Instagram photos are amazing! (Some of the them are also really funny, and most of the them twist the original scene in an interesting way.)

(Tip of the cap to George Takei.)

Awesome Audi Commerical: 'Battle of the Spocks'

Another of the awesome things that has been circulated amidst Leonard Nimoy's passing is this fantastic Audi commercial from 2013 (or at least the io9 article is from 2013, so I am assuming that the commercial is as well) featuring both Nimoy and Zachary Quinto (who plays Spock in the Star Strek reboot) in a 'Battle of the Spocks'.

There are quite a few great allusions in this commercial.

(Tip of the cap to somebody, but I forgot to scribble down whom.)

Baseball Name of the Day: David Goforth

I saw the last name "Goforth" in the box score from the Brewers' spring training game yesterday, so I felt compelled to figure out the identity of this mystery hurler. It is David Goforth. I can already imagine amusing headlines along the lines of "Goforth and Multiply".

"Bank of Canada Urges 'Star Trek' Fans to Stop 'Spocking' Their Fivers"

This story is absolutely fantastic. As a tribute to the late, great Leonard Nimoy, an apparently large number of Canadian Trekkies (or Trekkers, as I suppose they would prefer) have been 'Spocking' their five-dollar bills. Take a look at the story for some pictures that show examples of Spocking, which I think are rather well done. I think this is an excellent tribute. I approve!

(Tip of the cap to several people.)

You Know What They Say About the Size of a Team's Pitching Staff...

Well, possibly what "they" (i.e., generic unnamed people) are saying is that the teams must be crazy.

As a case in point, consider the following comment (from this blurb): "Citing a need to have more roster flexibility and a desire to not be stuck with only three bench players to start the season, new Minnesota Twins manager Paul Molitor is planning to start the season with only a dozen pitchers on his staff."

"Only" a dozen pitchers on a 25-man roster ... groan

I didn't mind the 10->11 change too much (though 10 is how things started when I was growing up), but --- really? --- the norm is now even 13 instead of 12?

Movie Science Versus Real Science: Vol. 13

Here is the 13th installment of movie science versus real life. It is so, so true. (Also, this comic strip hits way too close to home.)

(Tip of the cap to Vinko Zlatić.)

Flaccid Mechanics: A Systematic Study of Penis Sizes

Scholars from King's College and other UK institutions have just published a new study with the scintillating title of Am I normal? A systematic review and construction of nomograms for flaccid and erect penis length and circumference in up to 15521 men.

The first sentence of the paper's introduction sums things up rather nicely: "The measurement of penis size may be important either in the assessment of men complaining of a small penis or for academic interest."

My first thought about the article was: But did they also measure elastic constants (to determine stiffness, under the assumption that the object is elastic) and other Lamé parameters?

My second thought was: Up to 15521 men? Where is the uncertainty? Despite the odd article title, this item turns out to have a simple explanation: there were multiple studies and that is the number of men involved in the largest one.

In the authors' own words, their objective was "To systematically review and create nomograms of flaccid and erect penile size measurements." Among other things, their methods included a simulation of 20000 observations of penis size from a normal distribution, though it may also have been interesting to consider a heavy-tailed distribution in case of extreme events.

(Tip of the cap to IFLS.)

Update (3/10/15): Here is the modified version of this entry that I wrote for the Improbable Research blog.

Update (3/10/15): Here is a snarky comment that I wish I had thought of earlier: Remember that "soft matter" is an important subject in condensed-matter physics.

New to the Blogroll: Improbable Research

I probably should have added the Improbable Research blog to my blogroll years ago, but I have a special impetus to do it now: I'm now going to be writing some blog entries for that site.

The people behind that blog, by the way, are the ones who award the Ig Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, I don't (yet) have an Ig Nobel Prize. On the bright side, I am a proud member of Luxuriantly Flowing Hair Club for Scientists.

Additionally, a couple of my papers --- this one and this one --- have been covered by the Improbable Research blog, and Marc Abrahams wrote about them in The Guardian. (I included the links to the Guardian articles above rather than to the associated blog entries.)

I have also performed in a cover of the Improbable Research shows. You can take a look at one of my blog entries from last year for details.

I'm not sure how often I'll write blog entries for Improbable Research --- it essentially depends on my own business and desire to avoid the work I am supposed to be doing --- but I'm certainly looking forward to it! I really like quirky scientific and mathematical (and scientific-ish and mathematical-ish) things, and it will be great to have a wider circulation for my particular brand of snark.

Sierpinski Hamentaschen!

Well, this recipe for Sierpinski hamentaschen is clearly a big win.

This solves the ages-old "hamentaschen problem" of a hamentasch consisting of too much dough and not enough cherries --- here I am assuming sensibility and that one has chosen to make the cherry variety. (Apricot and, to a lesser extent, chocolate are acceptable, as well. If there is a cherry hamentasch available, that is the one I am going for. I think they are best with somewhat sour fruits, although I don't tend to like them with raspberries.)

While you are here, you should clearly also look up the Sierpinski triangle.

Tip of the cap to Karen Daniels.

Update: You may also recall that our very own Mathematical Institute held a mathematical bake-off last fall. You can follow the links therein to pictures from the bake-off and to other mathematical baking awesomeness.

Update (3/05/15): My first post for the Improbable Research blog is about this story. Very timely, too.

Famous Last Words

In a post on Facebook, George Takei took inspiration from Leonard Nimoy's last public words (a Tweet on the 23rd) to post some famous last words by several famous people. There's some really good snark in there, and many of them are rather fitting of the people who spoke them.

RIP Leonard Nimoy (1931–2015)

In terms of famous people with whom I feel a connection (to them and/or their portayed characters), today's news really hurts: Leonard Nimoy died today. I am sure many of my fellow nerds/geeks feel the same way. Nimoy is best known, of course, for playing---and often reprising---the character Spock as part of the original "Star Trek" crew. The character of Spock, and several aspects of that iconic character that originated with Nimoy (see the obituaries to which I linked to see the origin of a couple of the things that Nimoy brought to Spock) has had a huge impact on popular culture. But as you can from his Wikipedia entry, he had a very long, successful, and varied career.

The CNN article about his death has some nice pictures and nice tidbits.

In addition to Spock, another more recent way in which I will remember Leonard Nimoy is through his voice acting in Civilization IV when one discovers a technology. (Tip of the cap to Travis Hime for the URL with the clips from Civ IV.)

I would also like to include a very nice quote from Nimoy (which appears in the CNN.com article) in which he describes a visit to Caltech: "I had an embarrassing experience once, many years ago," he told The New York Times in 2009. "I was invited to go to Caltech and was introduced to a number of very brilliant young people who were working on interesting projects. ... And they'd say to me, 'What do you think?' Expecting me to have some very sound advice. And I would nod very quietly and very sagely I would say, 'You're on the right track.' "

(Tip of the cap to a large number of people.)

New Article in Physical Review E: "Flow and Clogging of a Sheep Herd Passing Through a Bottleneck"

Yes, really.

The first person who told me about this granular sheep project, which has finally appeared in published form, is Karen Daniels, who points out that there are all sorts of wonderful (baaaaaaaad?) puns that one can make about shearing forces, sheared sheep, and so on.

Tales from the ArXiv: "Addressing the Underrepresentation of Women in Mathematics Conferences"

I am passing along this paper concerning addressing the underrepresentation of women in mathematics conferences, given my very strong agreement with the following sentence from the abstract: We describe in detail the biases against women in mathematics, knowing that greater awareness of them leads to a better ability to mitigate them.

It's a long road, and "awareness" at least ought to be one of the easier parts that can help in tackling these challenges.

Here are some more details about the paper (which, from the text, apparently will be appearing in Notices of the AMS):

Title: Addressing the Underrepresentation of Women in Mathematics Conferences

Author: Greg Martin

Abstract: Despite significant improvements over the last few generations, the discipline of mathematics still counts a disproportionately small number of women among its practitioners. These women are underrepresented as conference speakers, even more so than the underrepresentation of women among PhD-earners as a whole. This underrepresentation is the result of implicit biases present within all of us, which cause us (on average) to perceive and treat women and men differently and unfairly. These mutually reinforcing biases begin in primary school, remain active through university study, and continue to oppose women's careers through their effects on hiring, evaluation, awarding of prizes, and inclusion in journal editorial boards and conference organization committees. Underrepresentation of women as conference speakers is a symptom of these biases, but it also serves to perpetuate them; therefore, addressing the inequity at conferences is valuable and necessary for countering this underrepresentation. We describe in detail the biases against women in mathematics, knowing that greater awareness of them leads to a better ability to mitigate them. Finally, we make explicit suggestions for organizing conferences in ways that are equitable for female mathematicians.


(Tip of the cap to Oxford Mathematics Good Practice​. Why do only 20 people 'like' their Facebook page? The last I checked, our department has many more than 20 people in it.)

Apology Cards Sorted by Discipline

Today's SMBC, which shows some apology cards sorted by discipline, is a big win! The psychology apology is the best one.

John Guckenheimer to Give 2015 Moser Lecture

John Guckenheimer has been awarded the 2015 Moser Lecture, and it is richly deserved! It is awarded for lifetime achievement in nonlinear science (especially in the context of dynamical systems and applications, as very broadly defined).

The Big, the Rich, and the Good (Data)

Nate Silver has written a fascinating article about the stellar success and rapid progress of baseball analytics versus the less-than-rapid progress of data analytics in other areas (e.g., economic and earthquake forecasts).

Putting the baseball angle aside (and of course I like that angle very much), one thing I really like is the very concise comments about "big data" versus what Silver calls "rich data" and why sports analytics have genuinely improved answers to many important-for-it questions, whereas other situations still struggle immensely to use their data for genuinely large increases in understanding.

Note that I have sometimes used the term "good data" before as a contrast to "big data", though importantly good data can be either big or small, and I think that Silver is thinking of Rich Data strictly as a subset of Big Data. See this blog entry of mine as well as additional blog entries referenced therein.

One could also, I suppose, ask whether these other systems are "more complex" than sports competitions, but I'm not sure (a) whether that's actually true and (b) how to quantify it in a way that goes beyond "Ooh, it's complex." Of course, we have measures of information content, but I expect there would be a lot of assumptions involved in crunching such numbers in these cases. Anyway, it's a thought I had, so I figured that I should at least bring it up.

DJ Patil Goes to Washington

Wow, now that's impressive: DJ Patil has been named the First US Chief Data Scientist!

That is a long way from Snowbird and the Maryland–Penn State semi-annual workshop on dynamical systems and related topics.

Update: The Wired article drew heavily from the official announcement on the White House blog.

XKCD on Flowchorts

I don't find the new xkcd funny per se, but several parts of it do amuse me. Make sure to follow the flow in this chart.

Rigged Hilbert Spaces

I love the term rigged Hilbert space, which I just encountered from a paper on the arXiv. I was hoping that thinking about probabilities in there would appropriately motivate the name (and maybe that's true in the applications to quantum mechanics), but it isn't immediately obvious to me that this should be the case. I want it to be true, though!

What Happens in Manchester Stays in Manchester (2015 Edition)

I am on the train to Manchester, where I will be giving a talk to the sociologists in the Mitchell Centre for Social Network Analysis.

They were stressing the importance of multiplexity several decades ago (take a look at a couple of the classical references in a certain review article), so it's an especially appropriate that I am giving a talk on multilayer networks there.

Update: On the way from the train station to my hotel, I passed "Back Action Street". I have no further comment.

Bill Murray's Summer in Baseball

Rob Neyer has written a very nice article with descriptions and reminiscences of Bill Murray's summer hanging out (with occasional spots coaching and even playing once or twice) with minor league baseball team Grays Harbor Loggers in 1978. It's a fun read.

The Physics of Popcorn

Here is a new paper on the physics of popcorn. In particular, the authors propose that "the familiar 'pop' sound of the popcorn is caused by the release of water vapour."

(Tip of the cap to Mariano Beguerisse Díaz.)

Ada Lovelace Bicentenary: Celebrating Women in Computer Science

On 16 October 2015 (Friday, week 1, next Michaelmas term), we're going to have a symposium to celebrate women in computer science in honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Ada Lovelace.

We've got some awesome speakers and potentially other surprises, so go take a look at the website! (And also say that you want to come, of course.)

Headline: "Mathematicians Discover How Many Licks It Takes to Get to the Center of a Tootsie Pop"

Well, people have been wondering how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, and now some applied mathematicians at New York University have estimated that it takes about 1000 licks. The main reason behind the study is in fact a rather serious one:

The study was done to explore the effects of dissolving materials within a fluid flow, such as rocks in geological environments and pills for pharmaceutical applications. The lollipop angle was just a fun side effect.

(Tip of the cap to whoever posts on Facebook for SIAM .)

Tales from the ArXiv: Rodents in Hyperbolic Spaces

This morning, I noticed the new paper Can Rodents Conceive Hyperbolic Spaces? With a title like that, clearly the paper deserved a closer look.

The abstract also includes a great line: We show that, according to self-organizing models, if raised in a non-Euclidean hyperbolic cage rats should be able to form hyperbolic grids.

I know I have obvious biases as a mathematician, but the idea in the paper seems really cool to me.

Caltech's Basketball Team Wins Back-to-Back Conference Games!

For the first time in more than 60 years, Caltech's basketball team has won back-to-back conference games. Yup, we don't win very often. :)

It's somewhat more common that we have losing streaks that last a decade or so. :)

Upset Triangular Matrices

I just saw a delightful typo in an e-mail that I received a few minutes ago: Apparently, there is something called an "upset triangular matrix". I better go and console it.

I think that that typo just made my day.

Julio Franco: Still Playing Baseball

That's right: Julio Franco, at the tender young age of 56, is still playing baseball. He is currently a player-manager (though it looks like he doesn't play in that many games in practice) on a semi-pro team in Japan.

Now that is a man who loves the game!

P.S. Franco's team really needs to sign Jamie Moyer.

Update (2/11/15): I just noticed this news item about Franco signing with a Japanese independent-league team as a player-manager.

"Graph-Theoretic" and "Graphical" Language in the Description of Marriages

This Onion article makes me realize that one can describe marriage laws very precisely using graph theory: allowing non-bipartite graphs, allowing hypergraphs, etc.

Clearly, the outcomes of the court cases ought to be written using graph-theoretic (or, to use a perhaps unfortunate pun, "graphical") language.

Note: I have no comment about self-edges.

Tales from the ArXiv: Microorganism Billiards

Yes, really. The idea is very interesting, and I am also amused. :)

This paper is a theoretical and computational one, but here is the first sentence of the abstract to tantalize you: Recent experiments and numerical simulations have shown that certain types of microorganisms "reflect" off of a flat surface at a critical angle of departure, independent of the angle of incidence.

A More General Set of Branching Processes Now Give Realistic Processes

Sometimes the outcome of important legislation has unintended consequences---like the fact that a more general set of branching processes than before now give realistic models of genetic transmission.

Really, all governments should determine the outcome of legislation based on what makes more mathematical models into realistic models. :)

(More seriously, I'm glad to see this approved for nonmathematical reasons.)

"Oxford Don or James Bond Villain?"

It's a game. Sometimes people play it. (Or at least I do.)

You can think of it as a variant of Prof or Hobo?

Möbius Strips: Now Apparently Three-Dimensional

Today I found out about a new paper that reports the generation of Möbius strips of optical polarization, which is very exciting. Unfortunately, the paper's abstract starts out in a very depressing manner that makes me cringe: "Möbius strips are three-dimensional geometrical structures, fascinating for their peculiar property..." Nooooooo!

Although does need three dimensions embed a Möbius strip in an ambient (extrinsic) space, a Möbius strip is a two-dimensional manifold.

(Tip of the cap to Physics Today for their Facebook post of a popular article about the new discovery. Notice the comment about the number of dimensions in the correction. In this case, the popular piece has done better than the paper's abstract.)

Fargo VHS = Treasure Map?

I just found out about the movie Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter via an advertisement for the Phoenix Picturehouse in Oxford. (It's playing on 14 April.) It has a very appealing tagline: "A jaded Japanese woman discovers a hidden copy of Fargo (1996) on VHS, believing it to be a treasure map indicating the location of a large case of money."

I so need to see this! It sounds awesome.

Update (3/19/15): Here is a trailer for the film. It looks amazing and really appealing to somebody like me who lives in a strange land. Sadly, the 14 April day seems to not be happening, but a different theatre in Oxford is showing the film on 6 April and 8 April. I can't wait to see it!

SMBC and Statistical Averages

As Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal reminds us, one needs to be very careful about only report a statistical average.

Awesome Maps!

This webpage has some really sweet maps. The US fails (epically) on the map showing which countries have not adopted the metric system and on the map of paid maternal leave. Another depressing US map is the one that depicts the highest paid public employees in each state.

My favorites include the 22 countries that Great Britain has not invaded and the most common surnames in Europe by country. The map of timezones in Antarctica is also pretty amusing. :) And the map of all earthquakes since 1898 is simply fascinating. And perhaps my #1 favorite in this collection is the map of the flow of rubber duckies, which I suppose we're allowed to assume are passive scalars? The map of the literal translation of Chinese names for places is also highly amusing.

Naturally, this collection of maps reminds me of Katy Börner's science maps.

(Tip of the cap to Maria Satterwhite.)

"Think Locally, Act Locally: Detection of Small, Medium-Sized, and Large Communities in Large Networks"

It's been a very long and stressful (and, at times, emotionally trying) day, but at least one of my papers came out in final form today. This paper is a beast. Here are the details.

Title: Think Locally, Act Locally: Detection of Small, Medium-Sized, and Large Communities in Large Networks

Authors: Lucas G. S. Jeub, Prakash Balachandran, Mason A. Porter, Peter J. Mucha, and Michael W. Mahoney

Abstract: It is common in the study of networks to investigate intermediate-sized (or "meso-scale") features to try to gain an understanding of network structure and function. For example, numerous algorithms have been developed to try to identify "communities," which are typically construed as sets of nodes with denser connections internally than with the remainder of a network. In this paper, we adopt a complementary perspective that communities are associated with bottlenecks of locally biased dynamical processes that begin at seed sets of nodes, and we employ several different community-identification procedures (using diffusion-based and geodesic-based dynamics) to investigate community quality as a function of community size. Using several empirical and synthetic networks, we identify several distinct scenarios for "size-resolved community structure" that can arise in real (and realistic) networks: (1) the best small groups of nodes can be better than the best large groups (for a given formulation of the idea of a good community); (2) the best small groups can have a quality that is comparable to the best medium-sized and large groups; and (3) the best small groups of nodes can be worse than the best large groups. As we discuss in detail, which of these three cases holds for a given network can make an enormous difference when investigating and making claims about network community structure, and it is important to take this into account to obtain reliable downstream conclusions. Depending on which scenario holds, one may or may not be able to successfully identify "good" communities in a given network (and good communities might not even exist for a given community quality measure), the manner in which different small communities fit together to form meso-scale network structures can be very different, and processes such as viral propagation and information diffusion can exhibit very different dynamics. In addition, our results suggest that, for many large realistic networks, the output of locally biased methods that focus on communities that are centered around a given seed node (or set of seed nodes) might have better conceptual grounding and greater practical utility than the output of global community-detection methods. They also illustrate structural properties that are important to consider in the development of better benchmark networks to test methods for community detection.

Unofficial subtitle: "Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Expander Graphs"

XKCD on P-Values

This new xkcd should be required reading for our new 'introduction to data analysis' module that will be available for the second-year students starting next year.

RIP Ernie Banks (1931–2015)

Baseball lost one of its all-time greats yesterday: Ernie Banks died at the age of 83. Banks, who was given the monicker "Mr. Cub", was of course also known for the phrase "Let's play two!"

Here is Banks' wikipedia page.

(I first noted the news this morning via my friend Greg Fricke's use of "#letsplaytwo" in a short post on Facebook, and I figured that that probably meant that Banks had died.)

Video of My Seminar: "Cascades and Social Influence on Networks"

Here is a video of a seminar on cascades and social influence on networks that I presented at UNAM last October.

The associated slides (or at least a set of slides that are almost exactly the same) are available on Slideshare.

Thanks to my UNAM host Carlos Gershenson for posting the video.

The Data Fairy

I greatly prefer terms like "Data Science" and "Data Analytics" to the ubiquitous "Big Data".

"Big Data" makes me feel like you put the data under your pillow in the hope that the Data Fairy comes during the night and leaves an answer there.

The point is that there is supposed to be actual science along with the data.

(See also an older blog entry of mine as well as one to which it links.)

"The Tale of a Post Doc": A Parody of "Bohemian Rhapsody"

This parody of "Bohemian Rhapsody" waxes poetic about the life of a postdoc. It's funny because it's true. :)

PacMap Fever

PacMap, a live-action, smartphone implementation of Pac-Man, sounds so cool (simply because it appeals to my inner geek)!

Hopefully they have the 'exits' (what would that correspond to in real life?), and they damned well better have preserved the trick of being able to go through the ghosts without dying when they ever-so-briefly turn their eyes away from you. (Not that I am a snob when it comes to features of the Pac-Man games...)

(Tip of the cap to The Physics Arxiv Blog.)

Update: I just noticed that the article in Technology Review and the arXiv paper both spell "Pac-Man" incorrectly.

Mathematical Modeling Problem: Just How Many Suckers Are There Right Now?

The phrase "There's a sucker born every minute." was allegedly uttered by a famous person during the 19th century. Assuming it was true and estimating the year based on the possible people to whom the phrase has been attributed, and birth and death rates at appropriate times, estimate how many suckers occupied Earth on 1 January 2015. Be sure to state all of your assumptions explicitly and clearly.

Note: Considerations could include, e.g., whether the rate of births resulting in suckers has changed over time, whether somebody who was born a sucker must necessarily remain so, etc.

Extra credit: Derive from physical principles how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop.

If you look at the Wikipedia entry, you'll see that the quote is of unknown origin and that the attribution to P. T. Barnum is apparently almost certainly wrong.

My Network Course: 2015 Edition

You can follow the escapades of my networks course on this website. Well, technically you possibly can follow only a subset of its escapades (such as what I write on the course blog and the review articles to which I link) unless you have an Oxford account, as some of the links probably want you to have an Oxford account. But this will give you some idea of what is going on.

Origin of the Word "Jam"

University of Oxford has asked a pressing question in Oxford Today. Just what is the origin of the word "jam"?

And why is this so important? (Or at least I am imagining that you are asking this question.) Well, obviously it's because of the movie Spaceballs. With the word "jam", we wouldn't have memorable quotes like the following ones:

Raspberry. There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry: Lone Star!

Radar about to be "jammed."

Urban Bacon Network: Can I Publish my Study in an OUP Journal?

Really, Oxford University Press? What a horrifying and depressing type of censorship. (Tip of the cap to Katy Remy.) Then again, it seems that pigs are not actually banned from OUP publications, though they might not make the cut in, for example, the choice of what animals to put in a background picture sometimes. (I am bothered by that statement in the explanation in the Guardian article, though I'm glad to hear that the reported censorship was exaggerated rather than factual.)

OK, now my collaborators and I really need to analyze the shopping data set (the "Stanford Basket Data") with the urban bacon network (and also a suburban bacon network) so that we can find something scientifically interesting enough to publish. And clearly we need to submit this paper to an Oxford University Press journal.

Also, you might not want to work on topics like Graham Higman's PORC conjecture. (Thanks to Ursula Martin for passing that link along.)

Meanwhile, for your viewing pleasure, here is a visualization of the "Urban Bacon Network" from the Stanford Basket Data.

Lt. Morgan Freeman?

Today I received a spam e-mail from "Morgan Freeman", so I opened it and read the first couple of lines:

"Pardon my intrusion; my name is Lieutenant Morgan Freeman, presently I'm on active duty in Iraq. Please, I have an obscured business proposal that will be of mutual benefit to both of us."

The correct response is, of course, no response. But the second best response is "You were great in Bruce Almighty."

I didn't bother reading the rest of the long e-mail.

Momentum Sharing

I agree with xkcd: one shouldn't reveal his/her momentum to a website if one has already revealed location.

What Happens at the Joint Mathematics Meetings Stays at the Joint Mathematics Meetings

After a longer-than-expected journey, I made it to the 2015 Joint Mathematics Meetings today. I am here to cheer on our Mathematics Research Community participants for the session they've organized on network science. (Network science is the subject of the MRC.) To find details of the two-part session, go to this website and search for 'network science'.

And to use a pun that I have been waiting to use for years, the AMS is gonna' be the witness to the ultimate test of cerebral fitness.

Quote of the Day: Sweatpants Edition

Today's quote was apparently uttered about half a year ago by Christine Klymko (just after I left a room), who repeated the line today for my benefit: "On a scale from Mason Porter to Kanye West, what kind of sweatpants were they?"

Airport Liveblogging: 2015 Edition

Friday, 1/09/15, 14:30 pacific: Well, you know things aren't going well when you feel the need to liveblog from the airport.

Well, Supershuttle picked me up from my "home" in Palo Alto before the beginning of their 15 minute window (which started at 1pm). They had previously mistakenly called me a full 15 minutes before the start of the window to express annoyance that I wasn't outside, and it turns out that they meant to call somebody else.

Once I was picked up only a couple of minutes before the beginning of the window, things went smoothly on the way to SFO airport and I arrived. There was no line, which is good. Unfortunately, my 3:50 pm flight to Phoenix, from which I would head to San Antonio, was cancelled and the earliest flight I could be put on was a 12:30 am one that goes through Dallas (which is my favorite airport). I tried to do something about this, but unfortunately I was shit out of luck. I am slated to arrive in Dallas at 5:39 am and then to leave there at 9:00 am. That makes about 14 hours of airport time for me today and tomorrow, in case you're counting. I'll now miss some talks from the first day of the Joint Math Meetings that I wanted to see (especially Carl Dettmann's talk at 8am). Given that I now have an all-nighter in store, I will be in no shape for any talks tomorrow, so I think I will punt all of the talks tomorrow, except possibly for Dan Spielman's plenary at 8:30 pm (if I can stay awake that long). Maybe I'll go through the exhibition room a bit and see if I can find people I know and pick up my Project NExT dot.

Now, the 12:30 am flight is from American Airlines, and I was going to be on US Airways. I thus dragged my (overweight) luggage from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2 (which wasn't so bad, to be honest). Also, there seems to also be some issue with my outbound flight on the 14th. (Times changed, and the airlines booked me on two different flights. Like with today's flight, they had not informed me of any change by e-mail. I was booked on two different flights for the same leg of the journey. I think I have now dealt with this, based on my interactions with AA customer service.) By the way, one of the people at AA customer service was an obnoxious bitch. She scoffed at my notion of the airlines informing me by e-mail with the following comment (which was stated with utter derision and was dripping with sarcasm): "What, do you expect to be able to read your e-mail on the way to work?" Why, yes, yes I do. It's 2015, for fuck's sake. This bitch was surprised by the notion that people read e-mail all the fucking time. No, both US Airways and AA need a phone number to be able to contact me if something changes on the same day because apparently it is beyond their capabilities to send automatic e-mails for such things.

I got through security without a problem. While getting coffee at Peet's, I saw somebody waiting for a flight who looked like one of my friends. I suspect it was not her, and in any event I wasn't sure and I had enough doubt that I really didn't want to be going up to a total stranger whose flight was about to board to say 'hello'. At some point, I'll ping my friend to find out whether it was her, and presumably she'll confirm that it wasn't. (Or alternatively I'll be wrong that it wasn't her and will feel stupid for missing my chance to say 'hi'.)

So now I have my iced latte, and I guess I'll be getting much more work done today than I thought I would. And tomorrow I will be in no shape to do anything. (I am currently near Peet's next to gates 54B and 55.)

So, if you happen to be going through Terminal 1 at SFO airport today, stop by so we can hang out. I'm having a party!


Friday, 1/09/15, 14:53 pacific: PARTY IN TERMINAL 1!!!


Friday, 1/09/15, 16:07 pacific: Did I say "Terminal 1"? Oops, that was an error on my part. I did in fact start my internship here in Terminal 1, but then I walked over to Terminal 2. So... PARTY IN TERMINAL 2!!!.

Also, I unfortunately packed my camera in my check-in luggage. Terminal 2 has some cool "wormhole" sculpture-like objects that I have been meaning to photograph during my last couple of times here. Unfortunately, in those cases, I either didn't have time or had other things I wanted to do or was in a rush to get home. Now I don't have my camera handy, and I think I might get some very strange looks if I do a selfie with my laptop to snap the photograph.


Friday, 1/09/15, 17:35 pacific: Well, I have certainly gotten a lot farther on the second round of page proofs for this paper than I was anticipating today. I'll still need to iterate with my coauthors (especially the first author), but it looks like I will be able to get through my pass and circulate things to them. It was probably going to be very hard for me to get very far on this while at the JMM, so at least my current escapade should accelerate our sending this round of corrections to the journal. I am running out of steam right now, so I should probably get some dinner soon.


Friday, 1/09/15, 17:46 pacific: From the PA system a couple of minutes ago, some guy was paged with the message "Your friends are totally leaving without you if you don't get there soon."


Friday, 1/09/15, 17:49 pacific: Well, my 12:30 am flight appears to be on time at the moment. (I have no confidence in these people anymore.)


Friday, 1/09/15, 18:31 pacific: I finally tried the Japanese sushi and noodle place in this terminal. The person behind the counter was very nice. I got some beef udon soup. During my meal, I realized that I needed to call my hotel to let them know that I was arriving tomorrow instead of today because of my ordeal. I didn't want to lose my room. They are overbooked, so it's a good thing that I did this. In order to check in when I arrive instead of waiting another 5 hours before I can get a room (check-in is normally at 4pm), I may end up in the hotel around the corner. (The hotels are connected to each other and are owned by the same company.)


Friday, 1/09/15, 20:04 pacific: Well, I got through my page proofs and sent them to the lead author so that we can iterate. I thought I would have to work on this a bunch while at the JMM, but the extra time in airports has accelerated the process. Granted, once I hear back from him, I will be going over them again.


Friday, 1/09/15, 20:41 pacific: I just got some Pinkberry frozen yogurt. The flavor is white chocolate raspberry, which is better than the yogurt I have had from them before. (I tried it once or twice over the years but didn't like it.) The person behind the counter asked if I wanted a cover in case I didn't have time to finish it. Oh, I have time. Believe me.


Friday, 1/09/15, 20:55 pacific: Well, I've managed to get a few brain freezes from the frozen yogurt.


Friday, 1/09/15, 21:46 pacific: I sent some comments on trying to clarify the final points of a paper draft back to my collaborators. Being stuck at the airport is causing me to be superproductive. I suppose that means I'll be able to focus more on the JMM once I actually manage to get there and become vertical again after crashing.


Friday, 1/09/15, 21:49 pacific: I just looked over some of the comments in my Dallas airport liveblogging, and those look a lot more amusing than this one. Maybe because I am less loopy now than I was then? Or I am a much busier person and lamer than I was before? Today I am mostly just being productive. What happened to me? Or maybe it's that I am on my own and none of my friends are suffering with me this time? Terminal 2 is actually not that crowded a terminal, which is good. There have been some times when things have seemed positively desolate, though there was just a bit more activity as some people entered the terminal as they departed from an airplane.


Friday, 1/09/15, 22:10 pacific: I am now starting to feel significantly tired and grumpy. The energetic effects of the yogurt appear to have worn off, and some of the things that have occasionally bothered me during the past couple of weeks are annoying me now as the grumpiness sets in. It's funny how that works. (I'm not sure if it's ominous that the live bongo version of the song 'Psychokiller' started playing as I was finishing typing this blurb.)


Friday, 1/09/15, 22:14 pacific: The person sitting across from me seems like a douchebag.


Friday, 1/09/15, 23:35 pacific: After sitting near plugs for a while (especially one near gate 58B), it is finally close enough to the boarding time that I am sitting at my gate. I could plug my computer in, but I want to be able to put things away slightly more quickly when we finally start boarding. In the other place that I sat for a while, for a good period of time there was also a lady who seemed to be a friend of the douchebag. Even when he left, she sometimes was not paying enough attention to her surroundings, so until he came back or she started paying more attention I figured I should stay to make sure that nobody took her stuff.


Friday, 1/09/15, 23:51 pacific: We just got a chance to check in our carry-on luggage for free at the gate. I will see it again at the luggage carousel in San Antonio. It's great that I don't have to take it with me for the rest of the time my journey is in progress. Meanwhile, the guy three seats to the left of me smiled at me very creepily. Not good.


Friday, 1/09/15, 23:57 pacific: We're starting to board! Yay! (I have a 'priority' ticket, so I am guessing that I'll be boarding soon even though I have not yet been invited to board.


Saturday, 1/10/15, 06:16 central: Well, I have made it to DFW airport (about 30 min late), and now there are a couple of hours before I board the next plane. The person next to me on the SFO->DFW flight kept invading my personal space throughout the entire flight, so now I am really read to chew off heads. The bastard did things like flicking off his seatbelt such that it landed on me (twice) and was easily more than 2 inches over the armrest into my seat. His jacket was sometimes 6 full inches into my seat. Bloody Hell.


Saturday, 1/10/15, 06:35 central: Walking past certain places (like Chili's, which I think is where we ate) in this airport brings back painful memories of getting stuck overnight here in 2007. I am now sitting at my gate, because where else would I go? I'm too tired to eat much, though I got an iced latte from a Starbucks. (I passed 2 of them on the way here.) Maybe I'll get some soup from Au Bon Pain before the flight if I get a bit hungry. I also passed a couple of ads from Baylor's medical school (associated clinic?) about doing something about scoliosis if one has that. I haven't seen such advertisements before.


Saturday, 1/10/15, 06:45 central: At times like these, I sometimes notice how the volume level of my music increases as a function of time. (This is to keep the pressure low... and also to keep me awake.)


Saturday, 1/10/15, 07:22 central: I am going through some notes from one of my doctoral students. There are many ambiguities in it that make it hard to follow.


Saturday, 1/10/15, 07:25 central: It's time to listen to my disco remix of "Rubber Ducky"! (iTunes chose this song for me, but clearly that is appropriate listening fare when one is in DFW after an all-nighter.)


Saturday, 1/10/15, 08:11 central: At the entrance to the nearest men's bathroom, there is a small sign with the words "severe weather area" and a cartoon of a tornado. Clearly, it is turbulent in there...


Saturday, 1/10/15, 08:13 central: I just saw a pair of people (a couple?) wearing matching Minion shirts. Minions!


Saturday, 1/10/15, 08:30 central: My flight to San Antonio has just started boarding.


Saturday, 1/10/15, 10:10 central: I have finally made it to San Antonio. I am currently waiting for my luggage and am looking forward to getting to my hotel room and crashing for a bit.


Saturday, 1/10/15, 10:41 central: I made it to my hotel room. It is in the backup hotel, which is around the corner from the original one and is operated by the same people. (It is kind of like an overflow hotel.) This is what I was told last night would likely be necessary for me to be able to get a room before the standard 4pm check-in time at the original hotel. I'm tired and I need to rest, so that's fine. Now I just need to settle myself a bit and rest for a few hours before heading to the conference.

A Magical Land Called the 70s

Tonight, at dinner, I accidentally invented a new euphemism for death: "He went to a magical land called the 70s."

(I needed to think quickly when a child asked me a question following something I was discussing with another adult, and that was what I came up with. A couple of us had been talking about our grandfathers.)

Oxford: Beyond Limits

Yup, Oxford is lost in time and space.

Indeed.

Baseball Hall of Fame: Class of 2015

Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz, and Craig Biggio are in!!!

Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez are "inner circle" Hall of Famers and got huge numbers of votes and deservedly so. They both cleared 90%, and Johnson cleared 97%. (They both ought to be unanimous, but that is not how things work.) Biggio and Smoltz both got more than 80% of the vote --- at least 75% is what is required and made it easily as well. Smoltz deserves to be in the Hall of Fame but until I saw the early pre-announcement returns I didn't expect him to make it in his first year of eligibility. Biggio was in his third year of eligibility (and missed by 2 measly votes last year) and should have made it two years ago. (I am wearing my Plunk Biggio shirt today, of course.) Mike Pizza made major gains (garnering just under 70% of the vote), so I expect that he'll make it in 2016 along with Ken Griffey Jr. and maybe Trevor Hoffman. (The latter two make their debuts on the ballot next year.) Hopefully, Curt Schilling, Mike Mussina, et al will continue to make some gains. Now with Smoltz in, things should bode well for Schilling and Mussina. Jeff Bagwell and Tim Raines will likely have a more difficult time, but we'll see how things go.

You can find a couple of 2015 pre-announce ballot-counting efforts here and here.

ESPN now has a soon-to-be-expanded article on the results.

Update: The vote percentages for each player have now been posted. Surprisingly, Sammy Sosa got enough votes to stay on the ballot for 2016. I thought he was going to drop off. Nomar Garciaparra also surprisingly got enough votes to stay on next year's ballot. (Garciaparra had a superb career peak but not close to enough other good seasons to be a Hall of Famer.) Unfortunately, Tim Raines, Jeff Bagwell, Curt Schilling, and Mike Mussina didn't gain as much as the early ballot polling suggested that they might. Schilling did make a big jump, but it was smaller than it at first seemed like it would be. Raines also had a nice jump, but again it was not as large as I was hoping.

A Book on Data Culture in Industry

Snowbird alum (and data scientist galore, and a major player in such things) DJ Patil has coauthored a free online book about data culture in industry. Go take a look at it!

Tales from the ArXiv: A Poetic Opening

This paper's topic isn't my cup of tea (or, rather, coffee), so to speak, but its abstract has among the best opening sentences that I have ever seen in a scientific paper: When drinking a cup of coffee under the morning sunshine, you may notice white membranes of steam floating on the surface of the hot water.

I approve!

Update: I do actually find fluid mechanics fascinating --- and this was true even before I joined the applied math group at Oxford --- even though it is not a topic on which I have (yet) published. However, the 'cup of tea' pun still applies and absolutely had to be part of this blog entry. (Also, in general, I am fond of papers that just start with some everyday phenomenon and try to figure out what's up.)

"The Ability To Play As Bowser Has Made Our Society More Evil"

Yes, yes it has!

(Anybody who has played as Toad while somebody else was playing Bowser in the N64 version version of Mario Kart most certainly knows this very well.)

And there are some choice quotes in this article. One example is the following: "Just consider for a moment that young people under 22 years old today have lived their entire lives with Bowser as a playable character. They have known nothing else."

Where is My Damn Hoverboard!!!???!!!

Seriously, where is my damn hoverboard???!!!???.

Update: Also see this article. (Tip of the cap to Jonathan Adams for the article.)