Statistical Mechanics on the BBC

On my blog for my statistical mechanics course I have posted links to two new BBC popular documentaries on statistical mechanics. I have not watched them, so let me know what you think of them.

(Tip of the cap to Mark Wilkinson, who is my TA for the course.)

The Science of Joy Division

Well here's something really cool: the cover of Joy Division's album Unknown Pleasures has visualization of astronomical data has its inspiration. That is just way cool!

(Tip of the cap to Mariano Beguerisse Díaz.)

Biological Sweets

Trust the biologically minded to design desserts like this. Make sure to enjoy it while cuddling up to your favorite plush microbe, although these desserts (though awesome) are still not as cool as my student's geeky Karate Cake.

(Tip of the cap to Iain Macmillan.)

Imprisoning Them with Science?

I've heard of being blinded with science, but this verdict in Italy that has ruled guilt and calls for associated imprisonment of scientists for their failure to predict an earthquake is just absurd.

Alright, follow scientists. You better choose things like your ensemble of initial conditions really well from now on! Otherwise you might be in big trouble...

(Tip of the cap to DJ Patil.)

Physics and Baseball

Well, those are certainly two of my favorite subjects! Check out these 5000 frame-per-second videos highlighting some fantastic physics (with accompanying explanations) of contact between bats and balls.

(Tip of the cap to Michael Woods.)

Update (10/23/12): And on that note, take a look at the video in this article. The bat and ball contacted each other 3 times!

"Kitiporn" and Strange Fruit

The scientist discussed in this entry at the Improbable Research blog has the last name "Kitiporn" (which you want to pronounce without fully enunciating the 't').

Diffusion of Swear Words in Japan

An article published last year in Physical Review E analyzes the diffusion of swear words in Japan. (This is not obvious from the abstract, so take a look at the .pdf file if you have institutional access to the journal.)

Here is a brief excerpt: The most beautiful example of Yanagita’s theory is the distribution of swear words. The Japanese are not known for their frequent use of swear words, but if you nevertheless are cursed at by someone with baka (∼stupid person), the one you are having trouble with is probably from Tokyo. If you instead hear aho (∼dumb), he or she is most likely from the Kyoto-Osaka area. The confrontation between these two swear words is so clear that it is considered by the people as a part of the competition between the two major cultural centers.

(Tip of the cap to Sang Hoon Lee.)

Baseball's Comeback Players of the Year

Buster Posey and Fernando Rodney have been named Major League Baseball's comeback players of the year. Posey won in the National League, and Rodney won in the American League. Both are good choices, though I think Adam Dunn would have been a better choice in the AL (as he returned to a level reasonably close to his previous heights after a historically bad 2011 season).

Punk Music and a Mathematics Seminar

My knowledge of early new wave and late punk music in the UK finally helped me understand a slide in a mathematics seminar!

(This actually happened last week, but I forgot to post it.)

Powers of Ten

Here is Steve Strogatz's latest article in the New York Times, and it's one of the best newspaper articles he's ever written (which is saying a lot).

The article concerns attempting to make sense of scales, and it includes an awesome old video (which I had either never seen before or had forgotten --- most likely, the latter, because in retrospect it does seem a bit familiar) about scaling up many powers of 10 and then down many powers of 10. The total span is 40 orders of magnitude, and this video is really excellent at conveying intuition about them. Truly fantastic. (I also noticed that the video includes what appears to be an inter-racial couple, which is also notable given when that the video was produced in 1977.)

One thing of which this video reminded me is the old Disneyland ride Adventure Thru Inner Space, which was my favorite ride at Disneyland. That ride tried to convey the idea of progressively smaller scales by "shrinking" the riders more and more as they go inside a snowflake. (It was one of the major things from my past that inspired me towards my career path.) The narration in the "Powers of Ten" video has a similar style as what I remember from "Adventures Thru Inner Space". I didn't like it when Disneyland dumped that ride and didn't ever want to go back after that. (I guess both my enjoyment of that particular ride and my reaction at its being dumped shows that I haven't changed much in two very important respects since 1985!)

"Influence of Network Topology on Sound Propagation in Granular Materials"

One of my papers just came out today. Here are the details.


Title: Influence of Network Topology on Sound Propagation in Granular Materials

Authors: Danielle S. Bassett, Eli T. Owens, Karen E. Daniels, and Mason A. Porter

Abstract: Granular media, whose features range from the particle scale to the force-chain scale and the bulk scale, are usually modeled as either particulate or continuum materials. In contrast with each of these approaches, network representations are natural for the simultaneous examination of microscopic, mesoscopic, and macroscopic features. In this paper, we treat granular materials as spatially embedded networks in which the nodes (particles) are connected by weighted edges obtained from contact forces.We test a variety of network measures to determine their utility in helping to describe sound propagation in granular networks and find that network diagnostics can be used to probe particle-, curve-, domain-, and system-scale structures in granular media. In particular, diagnostics of mesoscale network structure are reproducible across experiments, are correlated with sound propagation in this medium, and can be used to identify potentially interesting size scales. We also demonstrate that the sensitivity of network diagnostics depends on the phase of sound propagation. In the injection phase, the signal propagates systemically, as indicated by correlations with the network diagnostic of global efficiency. In the scattering phase, however, the signal is better predicted by mesoscale community structure, suggesting that the acoustic signal scatters over local geographic neighborhoods. Collectively, our results demonstrate how the force network of a granular system is imprinted on transmitted waves.



As a side note, my friend and coauthor Karen Daniels and I have talked about various scientific things on and off for over a decade since we were grad students together at Cornell. This is the first paper we've published together.

What Happens in Manchester Stays in Manchester (Take 2)

I am in Manchester to give a talk in the physics department tomorrow. Sorry, but this post isn't going to be terribly exciting. :)

It's the second time I have spoken to a group in physics here.

Fastest E-Mailer in the West

I received an e-mail at "Mon, 15 Oct 2012 22:00:53 +0100"

I responded at "Mon, 15 Oct 2012 22:01:13 +0100" [20 seconds later]

31 seconds later, I received a reply of "No one should reply to emails that fast."

Drugs and Self-Portraits

I don't recommend trying this at home, but I have to say that this art project is damn clever (though also damn stupid). Bryan Lewis Saunder would take some sort of drug and then draw a portrait of himself while under its influence. It is very interesting to compare the different pictures.

(Tip of the cap to Alexander Morisse.)

Gibbsian Botching

I just saw my favorite botched reference of all time: "[21] Mason A. Porter, Jukka-pekka Onnela, Peter J Mucha, and Josiah Willard Gibbs. Communities in Networks. Notices of the AMS, 56(9), 2009."

As I wrote to the author: So, while I appreciate having an eminent scientist like Josiah as a coauthor, he died almost 73 years before I was born, so I'm afraid this reference has a slight bug in it.

Politicians Versus Hedgehogs

Clearly, you want to vote for hedgehogs. I know I do!

(Tip of the cap to Dave Fallon.)

Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Measurements on Individual Quantum Systems

I should have written a brief blog entry yesterday when the announcement was made, but here it is now.

Serge Haroche and Dave Wineland have won the physics Nobel Prize in 2012 for pioneering experiments that measure single quantum systems. This is important for quantum computing, among other things. John Preskill has described some of their work in this blog entry.

On my end, I'm happy to see a Nobel Prize for this topic (go quantum mechanics!) instead of particle physics and other things of that ilk. :)

"Dangerous Intersections"

Steve Strogatz's latest article in the New York Times concerns the fold catastrophe and its manifestation---quantitatively in some cases and in toy models in others---in various phenomena. (By the way, the example in footnote 10 is something that occurs in many of the threshold models of social influence that have become increasingly popular since a paper Duncan Watts published in 2002.)

(Tip of the cap to Mariano Beguerisse Díaz.)

Ohio State Marching Band Plays Video Games

In a recent halftime show, the marching band from The Ohio State University---notice the 'The'!---had a video-game-themed performance. The video is a bit long (about 9 minutes), but it's pretty awesome.

(Tip of the cap to Prista Charuworn.)

"Generalized Master Equations for Non-Poisson Dynamics on Networks"

Here is one of my papers that has just appeared in final form today:

Title: Generalized Master Equations for Non-Poisson Dynamics on Networks

Authors: Till Hoffmann, Mason A. Porter, and Renaud Lambiotte

Abstract: The traditional way of studying temporal networks is to aggregate the dynamics of the edges to create a static weighted network. This implicitly assumes that the edges are governed by Poisson processes, which is not typically the case in empirical temporal networks. Accordingly, we examine the effects of non-Poisson inter-event statistics on the dynamics of edges, and we apply the concept of a generalized master equation to the study of continuous-time random walks on networks. We show that this equation reduces to the standard rate equations when the underlying process is Poissonian and that its stationary solution is determined by an effective transition matrix whose leading eigenvector is easy to calculate. We conduct numerical simulations and also derive analytical results for the stationary solution under the assumption that all edges have the same waiting-time distribution. We discuss the implications of our work for dynamical processes on temporal networks and for the construction of network diagnostics that take into account their nontrivial stochastic nature.