Math license

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

Giants band together to score run

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

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

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


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

Digging for Jerseys

Here's a really neat story.

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

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

Another Bulwer-Lytton entry

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

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

This sentence is actually completely accurate mathematically!

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

RIP Boris Chirikov (1928-2008)

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

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

RIP Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)

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

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

Tales from the arXiv: Even more baseball

The following abstract got posted to the arxiv this morning:

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

The authors are C. Sire and S. Redner.

You can find the paper here.

Corridors and Fingernails

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

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

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

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

Well I just started the trip off right...

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

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

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

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

What happens in Edinburgh stays in Edinburgh

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

This trip will include several firsts for me:

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

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

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

This can't be good.

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

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

Shit.

Pitchers in the Outfield

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

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

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

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

More on Smash Brothers

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

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

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

Stay tuned...

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

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

See you later!

Erdos-Schroder numbers?

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

Lego ballparks

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

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

Tales from the ArXiv: Steroids and Power Laws edition

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

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

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

Life on Mars

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

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

New streetprices.com product

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

Tales from the ArXiv: Paradoxical Popup edition

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

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

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


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