A secret admirer?

Based on the picture that one of my former postdoc advisors just forwarded to me, I wonder if I have some secret admirer who wishes to remain anonymous (and also wishes that there were more of me)?

Just so you know, my mentors and postdoc advisors (including this one) also do more useful things other than sending me expletive-ridden pictures.

Classic "Awesome" Spam

Courtesy Felicia Gottmann, here is an oldie-but-goodie --- a list of "awesome" (and occasionally awesome) sentences by some future Bulwer-Lyton laureates. (A few of these actually are legitimately good, though most of them are just "awesome." Make sure you get all the way down to #56. I approve!) I can't remember precisely when in my life these sentences (or many of them) arrived in my e-mail box back in the day, but I definitely saw at least many of these sentences at some point many years ago.

A Baseball History Lesson

We interrupt this dissertation-reading (yuck!) to bring you a lesson in baseball history. Fellow local baseball fanatic Eduardo Lopez just e-mailed me this BBC article exposing baseball's early UK history. However, I actually found out earlier today, as my friend Felicia Gottmann e-mailed me an audio version of this earlier today. In fact, she seems to be trying to break the hearts of all her local American friends (she sent the e-mail to all of us), given how she phrased her e-mail early this afternoon:

"Heard this on radio4 today and just couldn't resist sending it to you guys ?
since I know how much you're looking forward to having a benign grandfather
and a pitbull with lipstick for your next presidents, I thought this would
cheer you up even more. Enjoy! ;o)"


The main part of my response got to the point pretty quickly:

"You're trying to break my heart, aren't you?

Well it won't work because (i) my team now has a 3.5 game lead and (ii) the
Yankees will be staying home this year (finally)!"


I replied to all just in case some of those other folks are Yankee fans. :)

By the way, here are the main lines of the article:

Local historians in Surrey have confirmed evidence that baseball was played
in the UK more than 20 years before American independence.

Major League Baseball, the governing body of the game in the US, has been
informed of the discovery.


I should also point out that the second sentence I quote above is awesome!

Finally, I am presently dealing with a 'slam dunk' grant proposal that just got bounced (I'm pretty pissed off about this, actually), so I really need the Dodgers to be in first place right now. Ah, priorities...

Life imitates Civilization?

The title of this article is making me think of the game Civilization (and its sequels). Maybe Bush II thinks he's playing a live-action version of this game? (Can we just stick to trying for the cultural victory? Pretty please!)

I can no longer take your vile provocations. Prepare for WAR!

Amazing Waterfall

Jaideep Singh posted a link to the following video of an amazing made-made waterfall on Facebook. The video is a bit long, but this is seriously impressive. I want one. :)

Ben Williamson's first published article

Congratulations to Ben Williamson (a friend of mine from Caltech, for those of you who don't know) on his first published article, which just appeared in Florida Law Review.

In certain ways, one's first published article is the one that is the most special. I know that my first article is nowhere near as good as most of my other articles, but I do remember being giddy when it finally appeared in print. There is a feeling of 'I actually contributed to scientific knowledge' that simply can't be beat when one gets it for the first time. (It still feels good, but the giddier feelings now tend to come only for my best articles.)

I only browsed through Ben's article because law is ridiculously far from my expertise. However, I am pleased to report that Ben's sense of humor shines through even in an academic article such as this one (rather than being the dry affair one normally expects). You can see some of his verve in the article and section titles, but the true masterpiece is the first paragraph of the conclusions. It is (1) really funny and (2) makes his point extremely well. (Also, this paragraph is vintage Ben. I especially love the last footnote.) Awesome!

Spyspace

Here's the straight line (you provide the joke).

As reported in this article:

Later this month, intelligence community analysts will begin using A-Space, an online collaboration environment that officials hope will improve analysts’ abilities to share information, form communities and collaborate.... Like many social-networking sites, each analyst will create an online personal profile, and colleagues can see what others are working on and the A-Space workspaces that they are using.... A-Space analysts will have access to all information at the highest classification level that is accessible through the collaboration environment.

I would really love to apply community-detection techniques to that data set...

(Tip of the cap to Ben Williamson for pointing me to this article.)

WTF of the Day

Professors have nightmares sometimes---thoughts and dreams that infect our souls, curve our spines, and keep our country from winning the war. There are a few of them, but for many of us, one of them is when we walk along a street like Cornmarket in Oxford and see one of our former students playing a guitar while people toss coins into his guitar case. Oh wait... that actually happened today!

The student in question (whose name I won't reveal, though I know he's read my blog occasionally, so I'll wave a brief 'hello') is quite clever. He is part of OCIAM's Masters program in applied mathematics and computational science. Actually, he just turned in his dissertation on Friday and will be formally defending it in an oral exam (a so-called "viva") in a couple of weeks. He sings in an a capella group (which performed at the Edinborough fringe festival, for example), needs to practice his guitar, and figured he might as well earn some money while doing so. That's pretty sharp and amusing, and I wouldn't be telling this story on a public web page anyway if it weren't innocent. I was a bit surprised to see him, and I asked two of the obvious questions: (1) What are you doing? and (2) Does our program really cost that much money? (Apparently it does.)

Now I wonder how many of the other street performers I see on Cornmarket Street are actually Oxford graduate students. Also, my student probably saw several other people he knows. Oxford is a small place and you pretty much always run into people you know when you're walking around. This student spent some time as a high school teacher, and if any of his former students saw him, they would have a field day! (For the sake of optimizing this story, I very much hope this happened.) My student is well on his way to having a fantastically successful career in whatever scientific field (academia or industry) he chooses, but I'm not going to ever let him forget about this incident, which with this blog entry should become part of the MSc's official lore. (On Friday, we actually had a celebration of the program's 30th birthday. I wish I could have told this story two days ago, but alas it only occurred today.)

Did I mention that I like good stories?

Did I run away and join the circus?

I walked outside of Somerville this morning and noticed lots of rides (and various other booths one would associated with a circus or county fair) being set up right outside and as far south as the eye could see. (Note that I wasn't actually entirely surprised, as I saw a notice on the Ashmoleum Museum a few days ago that it would be closed from today until the 9th because of this.) My first reaction was that this would be really annoying because the density of children in this area would probably increase. Bloody Hell! My second reaction came after I looked at some of the themes of the various rides---the only ones with "regional" themes seemed to be US-centric: American football, Disneyland, the Kentucky Derby, etc. I guess this is part of some sort of world tour? I can't see British children being into some of those themes---wouldn't polo have made more sense than the Kentucky Derby?

Annoying movie subtitle

I was at the theatre today to see Hellboy 2 (which I'll review briefly when I go through lots of media in a subsequent post that I swear I will write eventually). While there, I noticed a poster for the new Bond film, which will come out here on October 31st. I'm obviously very interested in seeing it, but its subtitle ("Quantum of Solace") really annoys me and (less relevantly) seems to break from the Bond subtitle formula. Maybe the subtitle of the 2010 Bond film will be "Strangled Perturbations"?

T-shirt of the day

I just received my new J!NX newsletter in which they advertised a new t-shirt that combines two of my obsessions and is so awesome (not to mention "awesome") that I'm simply going to have to buy one: Rock Me, Asmodeus!.

Update:: I guess I'm not going to buy one immediately given that the shipping would cost me more than 50% of the price of the full item. While in the big picture that doesn't matter, it annoys me sufficiently that buying this through J!NX isn't going to happen. I suppose I'll do it when I'm imminently visiting Southern California. Ah well. It's a really nice shirt, though.

A Tribute to Vin Scully

Courtesy Rob Neyer's blog, here is a fantastic tribute to Vin Scully by Richard Hoffer.

Like many other Dodger fanatics, when I think of the Dodgers, I actually start with Vin rather than any of our current or former players or managers. I've been listening to him call baseball games for almost 30 years, and he's the best announcer I've ever heard.

RIP Phil Saffman (1931-2008)

I just saw on the Physics Today obituary notices that Phil Saffman, one of my Caltech professors, died on August 17th. Here is the Los Angeles Times obituary.

As some of you probably know, AMa 95 was essentially created by Phil Saffman. (In fact, I have my copy of the Saffman lecture notes in my office and I still refer to them on occasion when teaching relevant material.) So in this way, he impacted a lot of Caltech undergrads (though given the level of popularity of that class, I suppose many wished he hadn't). I had Saffman for AMa 101 during my junior year (1996-97). This was the last class he taught at Tech, and he specifically decided he wanted to end his classroom lecturing career with that course (which he had previously taught 20 years ago). So he was the first person who showed me things like steepest descents, WKB theory, multiple scales, hypergeometric functions, etc. On the last day of class, he very quietly said he was retiring and had specifically decided to end with that class. (I had been wondering why his TAs and random people---including his daughter---were in the audience.) That remains the one time I have ever seen champaign in a classroom, and I remember we all had a laugh after one of his TAs accidently fell backwards into her chair after taking her first sip. (There were comments about how little alcohol she could handle.)

Anyway, so while I didn't know Saffman that well, I do have some memories of him and definitely was influenced by him to some degree academically through AMa 95 (intro methods in applied math, for non-Techers; this was a one-year course) and AMa 101 (methods in applied math; this was also a one-year course).

Tales from the arXiv: Narcissistic Edition

My collaborators and I finally submitted our paper on Facebook networks last night. I normally post blog entries about my papers after the official journal version comes out, but this one was a royal pain in the ass ('particularly arduous' in more official language) to write, so I'm going to make an exception. Besides, this article is 38 journal-pages of sheer joy and community detection, so how can I not post about it now. (This is the longest article I've ever written, and it's longer than many doctoral theses. As I said, writing it was a pain in the ass, but I'm quite proud of the article and I hope it has a nice impact.)

First, here is the link to the arXiv posting.

Before I give the abstract, let me also shout out to my coauthors Mandi Traud (UNC student), Eric Kelsic (my 2005 Caltech SURF student, which is where this project all started), and Peter Mucha (UNC applied mathematician). Let me also give a shout out to Aaron Clauset and James Fowler, whose thorough commentary on an older version of the manuscript were inordinately valuable and way above and beyond the call of duty. (I can overstate my thanks for your help!) Without further ado...

Article title: Community Structure in Online Collegiate Social Networks

Article abstract: We apply the tools of network analysis to study the roles of university organizations and affiliations in structuring the social networks of students by examining the graphs of Facebook "friendships" at five American universities at a single point in time. In particular, we investigate each single-institution network's community structure, which we obtain by partitioning the graphs using an eigenvector method. We employ both graphical and quantitative tools, including pair-counting methods that we interpret through statistical analysis and permutation tests, to measure the correlations between the network communities and a set of self-identified user characteristics (residence, class year, major, and high school). We additionally investigate single-gender subsets of the university networks and also examine the impact of incomplete demographic information in the data. Our study across five universities allows one to make comparative observations about the online social lives at the different institutions, which can in turn be used to infer differences in offline lives. It also illustrates how to examine different instances of social networks constructed in similar environments, while emphasizing the array of social forces that combine to form simplified "communities" obtainable by the consideration of the friendship links. In an appendix, we review the basic properties and statistics of the employed pair-counting similarity coefficients and recall, in simplified notation, a useful analytical formula for the z-score of the Rand coefficient.

Best baseball slide ever

Courtesy Rob Neyer's blog, here is the best baseball slide ever! Wow!

Quote of the Day

Courtesy Rob Neyer's chat on ESPN today, we have this wonderful line from Mark Twain as today's quote of the day: "Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time, and your government when it deserves it."

Comment: Amen!

Tales from the arXiv: OK, that's just wrong

I had forgotten about this particular mathematical object, but I was poignantly reminded by the following paper that was just posted to the arXiv:

\\
arXiv:0809.0262 (*cross-listing*)
Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2008 15:06:04 GMT (12kb)

Title: Replica overlap and covering time for the Wiener sausages among
Poissonian obstacles
Authors: Ryoki Fukushima
Categories: math.PR math-ph math.MP
Comments: 14 pages
MSC-class: 60K37; 60G17; 82D30
Journal-ref: Journal of Mathematics of Kyoto University 2008, Vol. 48 No. 2,
455-470
\\
We study two objects concerning the Wiener sausage among Poissonian
obstacles. The first is the asymptotics for the \textit{replica overlap}, which
is the intersection of two independent Wiener sausages. We show that it is
asymptotically equal to their union. This result confirms that the localizing
effect of the media is so strong as to completely determine the motional range
of particles. The second is an estimate on the \textit{covering time}. It is
known that the Wiener sausage avoiding Poissonian obstacles up to time $t$ is
confined in some `clearing' ball near the origin and almost fills it. We prove
here that the time needed to fill the confinement ball has the same order as
its volume.
\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.0262 , 12kb)


Comment: That's just so wrong! (And I don't mean wrong scientifically; I mean wrong on humanistic grounds.)

Scary Dodger thought

I am reading Peter Gammons' blog on ESPN.com and he points out that "There isn't anyone who doesn't laugh at the Los Angeles Times' T.J. Simers' suggestion that they put up a statue of Jose Lima outside Dodger Stadium in honor of his being the only Dodger pitcher to win a postseason game since the Reagan Administration."

Holy shit, that is scary!

(I obviously remember very poignantly that we only have the one win. What I forgot was that Jose Lima of all people got it! Also, as depressing as it is, I have to admit that Simers' suggestion is pretty damn funny. Ah well, I have to laugh at my team sometimes I suppose even though my heart is breaking all the while.)

Handouts in the Quad

I had just finished lunch and was walking back to my flat through the quad when I passed by a guy who was giving handouts to people who were passing by him.

I didn't think Somerville allowed that in the quad, but anyway I passed by this guy, heard him mumble something and then automatically said 'No thanks' and passed him by. I have many years of experience in just filtering that stuff out and assuming I don't want whatever is in the handout.

Then it occurred to me that I thought the guy is 'quantum field theory problems.' I figured that was my usual overactive imagination until I found a sign in the quad that we're apparently hosting an "HEP" (i.e., high energy physics) summer school. Now I am actually tempted to go and see what problems are being assigned, but then again maybe this is all some elaborate hoax to give me a leaflet about the Jesus degrees-of-freedom we have all been ignoring in our Hamiltonians.

(Also, the handout method doesn't seem like the most efficient way to do this...)

McCain picks Sarah Palin as running mate

I just saw on cnn.com that John McCain has picked Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate for his presidential campaign.

My immediate reactions came in the following order:

(1) First came the cynical reaction: This is a brilliant choice because now Obama loses some of the political-correctness advantage of his attempt to become the first African American in the White House and because of this choice the Republicans are now more likely to win than they were before. Fuck!

(2) Next came the positive reaction: No matter what happens, some history will be made because we'll either get an African American president or a woman vice president. Each of these could---and should---have enormously positive long-term ramifications no matter which party gets into office. Hell, it's already extremely positive (and historical) that they're running for these offices in the first place.

(3) Then came the debate of (1) versus (2): No matter how much I care about point (2)---which actually is quite a bit---I care a lot more about point (1) because I don't want anything to happen that increases the chances of the next president being a Republican, and this includes things like this one with extremely positive long-term ramifications.

(4) Then came a question: Who is Sarah Palin?