Main quest: officially successful

I got a job offer from Oxford today.

I have more to write about various things (like the soliton stuff), but for now let me quote one of the professors who was in on the interview. (This is the one I met in 04 who I believe was my main supporter there, although I don't know the latter for sure.) Anyway, here is a line I want to excerpt from our phone conversation earlier today:

"What really struck the committee about you was how little you knew about Oxford."


All I can really say to that is that I can be really endearing in my naivete.


Among the lessons I learned is the following: I guess this whole strategy of witty one-liners works really well when interviewing for faculty jobs. Well, maybe not. :) (Obviously, it matters potentially a great deal that the comment right before mine was a facetious one.) Besides, Europeans really dig it when somebody from the US insults their own leaders.

I'm back (a bit now; more later)

I've been back for about 3.5 hours now. I've been going through some e-mail (to make my life easier for tomorrow in the work catch-up department) and baseball articles (that I basically didn't have time to read because my e-mail access ijn Oxford was suboptimal and I needed to use my time online for other things).

In returning and going to espn.com, I found out that the Cardinals won the 5th and final game of the World Series. I missed almost all of this series, which hadn't happened in over 20 years. Between friends visiting and the trip to Oxford (which killed things because of time zones and the fact I had no way to get the games anyway), it just wasn't possible to catch anything more than about 6 innings of game 2. The other thing I noted was that Joe Niekro died of a brain aneurysm between this time online and the last one (Friday morning, as measured on the Pacific Coast). He was a knuckleballer and another player I watched (towards the end of his career). I'm glad Peter Gammons is still with us---he also had a brain aneurysm---and am still missing Kirby Puckett (who was afflicted with something similar).

Main quest: I did the best I could. I think I did very well in my interview, but that doesn't mean I'll get the job. I've learned not to take this stuff personally because once you get to the interview, all you can do is prepare, do the best job you can, and let the stuff out of your hands take care of itself. We'll see what happens. Highlights: I knew 2 of the other three candidates---the competition is stiff and includes established people as well as junior people like me. The senior person I know started a conversation with me by letting me know that his department (one of my other top choices, actually) got my application. Weird. I have never seen that on an interview before and probably won't ever again. Anyway, there are going to be some interesting dynamics as far as this particular position goes. Kylie Minoghue was briefly discussed at the dinner, so I was in my element occasionally. I was not nervous during the parts of the interview that counted -- the dinner actually didn't -- and there were some amusing exchanges during the formal "interview" part of the interview. I mentioned one (I'm "awesome"!), and there was also the blunt question from one person that made the others in the room cringe/shudder, though I think I answered it successfully.

Side quest: Very enjoyable. Continuing explorations of Oxford with my friend were very fun (I did some of my own exploring earlier in the week). A couple brief things: I couldn't make a successful mug shot of myself in Oxford castle/gaol no matter how hard I tried. Also, while walking along the Thames River, we saw a docked boat called "Soliton". I'll explain later just how awesome this is, as it involves not only what I study (which includes solitons) but deep connections with the original observation of a soliton. (I saw this and immediately went into childlike-fascination mode! I hope one of my pictures comes out well, because I want to include it in my presentations.) Pictures of "The Hat" were taken (ick...passive voice---I'm tired so it's staying), in fulfillment of my promise (though I'm afraid my face is in them as well---sorry!).

I also have some extra British coinage (which the banks won't exchange for US currency) to pass along. Based on current exchange rates, 52.7 pence per person seems about right.

And I'm really tired and (again!) made an entry that turned out to be much longer than what I had in mind. I really ought not to do that when it's in my best interests to go to bed.

Cthulhu loves children

Courtesy Justin, check out this license plate.

I'll write more about Oxford later---including my answer to the tongue-in-cheek interview question "How would you change the U.S. constitution?" (This was asked by the department head after other interviewees brought up my work on Congress.) OK, fine. I'll give you this answer now. The direct quote is something along the lines of "Hmmmm... [I briefly ponder the question] I would probably put freedom of speech back into it." (This was done in deadpan, of course. Then the entire room burst into laughter. It's a good thing this interview was not in the U.S.)

Anyway, more in England later. (The location of the double quotation marks on the British keyboard is annoying me... I'm not used to it and I keep making typos.)

Fled to England

I'm here; I'm tired; I need more adaptors. (My international kit for Macs allows me to put the piece into the right hole but not to actually get any juice, so I'm juggling one adaptor instead of using that for the Mac.)

I'm wandering a bit tonight (and I found a cheap place to connect to the internet) because I'm restless and I need to tire this aspect of things out a bit to get to sleep. The young kids next to me are cussing up a storm.

The place I'm staying has no pay phone but apparently there is one "just around the corner." I'm having visions of climbing up a big poll to use a phone (to touch base with my friend and arrange specific timing for Saturday) a la Green Acres but it will be worth it. I also have "the hat" with me to help find me in a crowd.

Further adventures in googling

Oh my....

Today, I got a hit on my website via a google search for is it safe to masturbate after you've had a testicle removed?.

While I can see the logic in trying to find the answer to masturbation questions at a Caltech website, I don't think a force or momentum balance (or something else that physics can provide) is what the querier had in mind here...

Subtitles: the real reason they hate us

Don't believe me? Just take a look here.

Line of the night (10/21/06)

I think I was the big winner this time. My line (aka, Housequote) was my urgent declaration of "Can somebody save my sausage?!"

Just to give you some idea of the context, it was (literally) on fire at the time. :)

Overheard at Peet's

I meant to write this post yesterday.

I was at Peet's yesterday early evening (no surprise) and I caught a comment from the table next to me (which had a couple people with bibles talking about religious stuff) along the following lines:

"If I get a Ferrari, then I'll be able to talk to a higher class of people and spread the gospel to them."

While as a neutral statement, I would agree that this is a logical strategy, the way the guy was speaking (and my own cynicism) made me think he was stating this as a justification of the Ferrari rather than the other perspective of the Ferrari being the means to the other end. Accordingly, I felt like puking when I heard that comment (which I have paraphrased due to my hazy memory).

A Plea for help from the editors of PRL

If you go to the manuscript submission page of Physical Review Letters, you can see the following comment (in appealing red letters):

Do you use Microsoft Internet Explorer? MSIE seems to work when we test it, but some MSIE users have had trouble here. While we try to figure this out, for reliable service, please try using Netscape. If you have some ideas on what the MSIE problem might be, please send us email at esub-adm@aps.org.


OK, so the e-mail address is hyperlinked and has a different color. Maybe I should have hyperlinked it here so you can help out the editors just a little bit faster?

I just love the last sentence...

Count me in!

One can now get MLB team-themed caskets and urns. I am totally going to do this with the Dodgers.

I'm also going to stipulate in my will that my funeral should be as offensive as possible. And we're going to pass out the soundtrack on CDs (or the appropriate medium of the day)! I already know a few songs that definitely have to be on it, and it starts with a certain one from Queen (and, no, it's not "Fat Bottomed Girls").

I'm going to revolutionize funerals.

SURF Seminar Day: Saturday 10/21

Now it's time to advertise my students' talks.

They are speaking in Session Q ("No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!" OK, so maybe it should be called Session Goldfinger), which includes mostly talks from nonlinear dynamics (aka, my students) and condensed matter physics. It takes place in 301 Thomas, and you should definitely come to cheer my students on (by which I mean heckle them and pelt them with rotten fruit).

Actually, they have some very cool things to say about their work, so hopefully some of you will show up. My students took over the morning part of the session; they speak from 10:00 am until 11:40 am.

Here are their names and titles (in order of talk):

Austin Webb, "A Computational Study of the Quantization of Billiards With Mixed Dynamics"

Kris Kazlowski, "Periodic Orbits in Generalized Mushroom Billiards"

Tom Mainiero, "Quantization of a Free Particle Interacting Linearly With a Harmonic Oscillator"

Tatjana Wiese, "Faraday Patterns in Bose-Einstein Condensates"

Yan Zhang, "Community Finding in the Legislation Cosponsorship Network of the Members of Congress"



Yan has finished the final version of his SURF report and the others will be finishing theirs very soon (especially as they're due on 11/1). Yan's research fits into this session because it is an example of what I like to called "applied statistical mechanics" (but which is generally called "complex systems" or "complex adaptive systems").

I'll include blurbs about my students' work a little later when all the SURF reports are online.

2006 Random-Walker Rankings

We are now posting our college football rankings for 2006. (We got a bit lazy. There were already enough games to have started several weeks ago.)

By the way, the reason the random walkers (aka monkeys) rank USC and Michigan ranked ahead of Ohio State is because of the strengths of their schedules.

"Okay, we're going back."

Harpies are kind of like monkeys---everybody likes them. You don't believe me? Just go here.

By the way, the word of the day is "sisyphean." It always is.

(Thanks to Lemming for passing this along.)

Tuesday Hornetblogging

Tuesday Hornetblogging: An idea whose time has come!

Gazebo hasn't done any catblogging for a while, so I'm here to fill the gap with some hornetblogging. I don't know if this is a one-time deal or if anything will justify future editions of this feature, but (in any event) this is the first of at least one blog entry on the topic.

If you want some pictures of hornets, google pictures provides quite a few of them. However, I feel compelled to highlight one particular hornet in this inaugural entry: Georgia Tech's mascot, Buzz.

Some of you may recall one of my earliest blog entries which has remained one of my most popular entries of all time. Titled simply Angry Hornets, it set the stage for a lot of great things to come. (OK, OK. It set the stage for a lot of things to come.)

It's fall at Caltech, so you know what that means: hornet season. I saw them sporadically during the summer, but things weren't so bad until recently. But then school starts and the glomming begins. This even happened when I went to my conference in Seattle, but I'm guessing they were just trying to make me feel at home.

Anyway, because it's glomming season, things have really been picking up lately. For example, yesterday I had lunch with a prospective student, and he was suitably impressed by my mad hornet-attracting skillz. (I need to change the sign of this potential...) The hornets were even more into me today, and I was having a great deal of difficulty eating my food.

During today's trials, Lemming told me an amusing story that just about sums it up. He and Cat were having lunch while I had a prior commitment (either Monday, or on Friday during the Tech staff meeting) and they mentioned me briefly during their conversation. A couple hornets immediately flew to their table, reconnoitered for a minute or two to see if I was around (I told you it was glomming...), and left.

I don't know if any hornetblogging will happen while in England, but to steal (I mean borrow) a very nice pun from Lemming, I think some WASPblogging is extremely realistic.

"Vague convergence"

In my random matrix theory course today, the professor gave a rigorous definition of the concept of the "vague convergence" of a sequence to what is known as a "vague limit."

This is an amazing coincidence, as I used a heuristic version of this concept in many of my math classes (especially on exams).

Cue the ZZ Top

Yesterday, we had our make-over party. (And "preppy" was the word of the day.) We went over to Macy's to buy some clothes for my Oxford interview. I should have gotten some better clothes for my interviews in past years, but I figured Oxford will care about this more than most and I really want this job, so this basically served as the impetus. Lemming, Zifnab, and (Mike)^2 were there to provide style advice (because I have a great sense of style for ironic t-shirts but not for much of anything else), moral support, and verbal abuse. You can tell that we had a lot of fun, and I managed not to break the bank too much. (There is a dent in my wallet now, but not too large a dent.)

I haven't purchased my plane tickets yet, though I am planning to do that tonight before prices jump. (There are fewer configurations available at reasonable prices than there were a couple days ago, so I'm going to buy this tonight and get that settled.) The plan is to arrive a couple days before my interview (so I should be leaving either a week from Monday or Tuesday) and to return on Sunday. I have dinner at Somerville College on Thursday night---the tenure-track position includes a tutorship at that college (which is named after 19th century applied mathematician Mary Somerville)---and then my talk (which is only 20 minutes) and the other parts of my interview are on Friday. The current plan on Saturday is to explore Oxford with a friend of mine who is temporarily living in London.

I haven't yet explained the title of this entry. I'm not going to, but let me just mention that if you don't understand the reference, you need to be educated. (Given that I have a job interview in mind, I'm actually twisting the meaning somewhat, but Fox used Culture Club's "Do You Want to Hurt Me?" for a medical report, so I'm far closer to the correct theme then they were.)

Family Planning

Take a look at this picture, which doesn't really need a caption.

How does one embed a picture directly here because I don't see how to upload a picture into blogger. (Instead, I put this in my GT account and linked to the URL.) A real solution would be to use something like flickr, but then contour integrals would no longer work.

Employee of the Month

Last night, Lemming and I saw slacker comedy Employee of the Month. It was very funny with several great one-liners. I recommend it highly.

The film includes several familiar faces (such as the guy who starred as "Pedro" in Napoleon Dynamite, who apparently will also be in the remake of Revenge of the Nerds... it seems like he's getting typecast a bit), although I know few of their names.

The Spaceballs reference was also greatly appreciated... (I also appreciated the line quoted from "Piano Man.")

Here are a couple of the great lines:

"... forgotten just like the drummer from REO Speedwagon."

"...You employees of the month are all the same."



A couple weeks ago, Lemming and I saw Jet Li's Fearless. I enjoyed that movie as well, though it was somewhat heavier than I thought it would be. (I wasn't expecting a comedy or anything, but it was still more serious than what I was expecting.) This is not a criticism, but just a comment about my own thoughts before and after the film.

Fox fires Steve ("Psycho") Lyons for making stupid comments

Steve ("Psycho") Lyons has been fired by Fox for making stupid comments that were deemed racially insensitive.

Lyons has a history of making lame comments. He's a really bad announcer. Of course, he was fired for the insensitivity rather than the lameness. (The particular comments in question were also really lame.) I'll cross my fingers that Tim McCarver follows this path as well.

I think I should use this title for my job applications.

I am filling out the online job application for University of Bristol. One of the choices for current title is "Professor the Reverend." Dude, that just sounds impressive. :) Or maybe I should use "Viscountess," which was another one of the choices.

OK, so I'm being ridiculously goofy, but life's small amusements are simply precioussssssss.