The Easy Life

This article doesn't quite match what I do all day, but it still might be of interest.

He who lasts laughs, wins

Scene: airline lounge; The view out the bountiful windows showing the setting sun as planes move silently around the tarmac.
Inside: 90% men mull about in ties and jackets; a few use the cell-phone self-importantly; The occasional family barges in. Alcohol is self-serve as are little bits of sandwiches.

I don't like jackets and I hate ties. I like to consider myself a graduate student even though those days are long gone. I'm still a sucker for free food and I prefer not to be on the phone. These folks here dress better than I, but perhaps none have as expensive a laptop nor as much time with family as I. They surely make more money than I. A very good wife, healthy if not always happy kids, and I research what has fascinated me since I was a little boy. At times, I very happy, even proud, of what I have (what I have earned).

But many physicists make more money than I, get invited to more workshops, produce more interesting research and they have families as well. I see a good talk and I want to be doing that research...to be the first to understand some cool new feature. I want people to assault me at the coffee breaks asking this or that about my research.

I don't think any of this is unhealthy, but it takes some work stabilizing these competing influences. Putting a check on any jealousy, figuring out which is more important, getting an important paper out before someone else, or seeing my child in some micro-achievement at a crowded, loud, and boring even at school...Being happy and content but yet with the drive it takes to find and answer interesting questions. They'll be calling my flight soon...anxious to return home, if only to hold my family for a few days until the next meeting.

To enter the Ivory Tower or not

I really like the ``Talking Points Memo" blog...though it's moved way beyond blog to a full-fledged news/analysis outlet. And so I'm happy to link to a discussion of academics and to what extent they do or should influence the real world. The discussion was kicked-off by a Kristoff column in the NYT and isn't really about the sciences. Nevertheless, folks here might find it interesting in terms of established people looking back on the paths they chose and their chosen paths (not always the same). I'm not providing much in the way of links, but things shouldn't be too hard to find.

As for Svik's request for more anger, I'll keep it in mind. The anger is surely there, but it can be hard to disguise the players appropriately.

Measurement Uncertainty in the Real World (of Olympics)

The NYT covers the first tie in an Alpine Olympic event. The times are reported to the hundredths place, but the times are actually recorded with two more digits that were not identical for the two contestants. The tone of the article is almost like it's some conspiracy to cover up the last two digits...taking it on faith that a device which is ostensibly accurate to the ten-thousandths of a second will yield a measurement with that same accuracy despite all that is involved. It would have been nice to have a more informed discussion of why measurement uncertainty isn't so simple...perhaps elsewhere such a discussion occurs. I need to remind my students of this example.

The Multiverse

Max Tegmark has an opinion piece in the Huffington Post arguing that the universe is not just described by mathematics, but is in fact purely mathematical. As such, it exists within some huge ensemble of other universes.

I find it rather light...in other words, not terribly convincing but giving us so little in the way of actual argument that there's little to say. I do wonder what it would take for one to construct some new, mathematical universe...can one just have a set of numbers? Do you need an operator?

Apparently, he's got a book to sell, but this piece doesn't prod me to look at it.

Academic Acknowledgments

When I pointed out a strange acknowledgments section previously, I hadn't been aware that apparently such strangeness is common, according to an article in Slate.

Big physis

Photos of large physics experiments.

Doh!

Singh is coming out with a book on the math in "Simpsons." Did Homer find a counter-example to Fermat's Last Theorem? Does 3987 raised to the twelth power added to 4365 raised to the twelth power = 4472 raised to the twelth?

Bonus: I forgot to include a link to this interesting article in the NYT a few days ago about a tenured professor who got fired and arrested after Georgia Tech apparently got offended by his high-flying ways.

Fascination with Physics

• In this interesting interview with George Clooney there's mention that his dog is named "Einstein."
  
• Laurie Anderson says farewell to Lou Reed in Rolling Stone and mentions regretting that she "never studied physics."
  
• A variety of business folk apparently studied physics in undergrad. Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Elon Musk of Tesla (among other ventures), and a third...but I can't place him. Maybe a reader can trigger my memory?
  

Outside academia

The NYT has an article on "The Repurposed Ph.D.: Finding Life After Academia — and Not Feeling Bad About It." I didn't see anything too insightful to quote, but there were some links to blogs that might be worthwhile. Are there really lots of people entering PhD programs who are not aware of the meager job prospects?

Looking a gift horse in the mouth

I'm all for the questioning of authority, but this seems strange...check-out the "Acknowledgments" of this paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.6052v1.pdf. I'm not sure what "caps" they're talking about...the limit of three-months of summer salary in total (from all agencies) per summer? The NSF's cap at two months? And they question the "lack of support of basic research in general"? Are they suggesting that this paper is applied, not basic? Very strange, even for Willy.

Update: Peter Woit explains at least part of the issue...NSF's salary caps on summer salary. I was thinking things were so tight for Willy that he needed a second job as an EMT, but apparently his EMT gig is as a volunteer. Also note, that there's a new version with a much more politically correct ack.

Breaking News

I know that I'm everyone's source for late-breaking physics-news, and so I've rushed to the terminal (neh, laptop) to update you all.

Everyone's favorite Star Trek-related author and physicist Lawrence Krauss is talking about The Higgs Boson Hangover. It's pretty mild compared to what Peter Woit might say, but then again this is in Slate and probably reaches a wider audience. The older I get, the more I realize that I continually overestimate the understanding of science and how it proceeds by the general public. And so it's good to publicize that scientists tend to want to be surprised instead of proven right.

Doug is discussing some fraud in the biomedical community about which I was completely unaware. This is, of course, part-in-parcel of how science corrects itself. Teaching the scientific method in school is all well-and-good, but I think it would behoove us to teach how science-the-enterprise corrects for the faults of those who practice it.

Slashdot today mentions a Forbes article about how I've got such a low-stress job. The link isn't working for me and so I've not read it, but apparently there's a big stink about it, and Slashdot has a number of links to some arguments against.

Finally, unrelated to physics, I wanted to link to a couple pieces by, and with, the person who turned-in Bradley Manning for allegedly leaking all those documents to Wikileaks: a very difficult piece by Adrian Lamo and a chat with him and someone else. Whatever one thinks of Manning's actions, the torture he's been put-through is awful and inexcusable.

This is a long read, but I found it pretty interesting. A guy who abandoned his goal of entering the academic linguistics world, but still had the drive to contribute bycreating a new language. But at one point he's quoted as:

I was surrounded by all these people hanging on my every word. It was intoxicating-especially for a loner like me. For one day, I got to play as an academic. I got to live this fantasy where I took the other path in the garden. I got to see what it would have been like if I had gone to graduate school and become a professional linguist. The fates of the universe tore open a window to show me what my life could have been. That night, I went back to my room, took a shower, and burst into tears.

Umm, where are these people hanging on to my every word? Am I doing this wrong?

Naughty, Naughty Boy

This guy's no physicist (but did major in math as an undergrad), but he is an academic who got in trouble with financial reimbursements from his University: Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia of whom you may have heard via the best-seller Freakonomics which features his work prominently.

This type of financial ''discrepancy'' doesn't seem terribly uncommon, but I don't see how this happens as much as it seems, given how tight and controlled most university's systems are. It's probably just that my mind isn't built to see the ways to abuse the system (that's not supposed to sound as immodest as it does).

His story and rise to academic stardom though is quite emblematic of how the academic world deviates from a pure meritocracy. Not to take anything away from the guy, but he clearly knows how to work the system and it's hard to believe there aren't many others who have gained far less with work just as significant.

A bit more can be found at the Freakonomics blog.

I've had a number of things to share over the past few months, but none significant enough to merit a blog posting (as if that were a high hurdle!). It even crossed my mind for the first time that Twitter might be appropriate for communication.

My physics life, as opposed to family/friends/etc, has been up-and-down recently. I was riding high, feeling confident for a while...invitations to talk or visit, emails about recent papers, new projects with interesting collaborators, a phone interview with an interesting university.

Now, not so much.  No response to my latest from some folks interested in a paper. Not even a "thank you but..." from the search committee. One collaborator has gone completely AWOL, hopefully just because he's too busy. A big snafu with some refereeing has left me pissed at some editors. A bunch of grant proposals are submitted, but given the current financial situation (e.g. "fiscal cliff") facing the U.S. right now, it's hard to be optimistic.

I know things go up and down and I've got enough experience and job security to ride it out. But it's not fun.

Great Titles

Peter will appreciate this very well-titled paper The Top 10^{500} Reasons Not to Believe in the Landscape.

Introversion

Chad links to this piece at the CHE, from which I quote:

But academe is a profession of opposites. Long periods of social isolation—research and writing—are punctuated by brief periods of intense social engagement: job interviews, teaching, conferences, and meetings. One reason that completion rates for graduate programs are so low—and unhappiness levels so high—is, I suspect, because students are not selected for the full range of aptitudes they will need to be successful in graduate school. And there are few if any supports in place for those students who struggle with the extremes of introversion and extroversion that academe demands.

I've often mentioned to students that being outgoing and social is a huge asset in academe, and I often get confusion. People don't think of physicists as social or outgoing. I've long struggled with these aspects, though not as much as some. I'm easily in the introverted category, but I don't obviously lack social skills (those who know me well often laugh at my lapses, but among physicists I can blend it rather well). In any case, I never quite thought of it as above...as a contrast. But of course it is. Even in the comfort of one's own institution, there are encounters with colleagues, students, etc. These are generally pretty manageable...if I feel overwhelmed, I can always retreat to my office with a closed door. However, one day during a vacation, I had to run into the office to get something. While walking across an empty campus, a woman walks towards me whom I completely ignore, until, up close, she says "hi." I look up, completely baffled and mute. It must have been fifteen seconds till my mind could bring up my database and realize I knew her. But it was too late. Unsure of what to do, not wanting to insult her, I emailed her saying I was spaced out and didn't mean to ignore her. More accurately I just wasn't prepared. I imagine an extrovert simply doesn't need to mentally prepare for an encounter. They naturally make the most of such an encounter. But seconds matter and one can get better at this stuff. It takes more than reading tips in blogs. It takes practice.

Everyday physics questions

Some of these are better than others. Feel free to discuss in the comments. I doubt I'll post my answers unless some sort of argument breaks out. At best, these might be interesting, and at worst, they should give non-physicists some idea of what's going through the physicists head when the conversation turns boring:

• when one goes to return the shampoo bottle to its place, its moment of inertia is generally much larger than when you picked it up. The moment of inertia is essentially a measure of a rigid body's resistance to rotation, and therefore one might naively think it would be more stable after use. However, that's clearly not the case. So the first question is why? The second is: is there some limit in which the increase to the moment of inertia would be the dominant effect so that one could construct a shampoo bottle that is unconditionally stable about its bottom?
  
• Walking down the street, one observes someone who is otherwise well covered and obscured by clothing, but who has some cleavage apparent. As this person walks towards you, you observe the limited cleavage heaving up and down a bit. The question is: can one legitimately estimate the endowment by the time-scale of the heaving or instead does one just instinctively increase ones estimate (given there's so little else to go on) simply because there is motion at all? In other words, are the variables too many...speed, type of walking motion, type of support clothing etc...to provide any real estimate? [Sorry for the crassness...]
  
• Seeing a Smart car, I am struck by the fact that it is so small but yet the fuel economy isn't particular good, compared to other micro-cars. If one considers good economy cars and then considers mopeds, the fuel economy roughly increases by a factor of two. What is the ultimate (ie physical) limit of fuel economy? Clearly certain assumptions have to go into such a limit, but how many?
  

Refereeing...

So I've got this paper to referee, this horribly written mess. Among its author list are esteemed people I know who clearly didn't even read the full text. It's a silly paper just to pad the CVs of some listed. I know I'm supposed to just sign-off on it, but I can't. I know I'm supposed to point out the most atrocious of the comments and be done with things. Indeed I've already gone through and mentioned most of them. But now I'm thinking of deleting them all and telling the editors that they should publish as is! Right away! Maybe with footnotes next to the most ridiculous stuff saying explicitly that all the authors agree on these points. What do you think?

In any case, I just worry a bit about anonymity...the editors know who is doing the refereeing, and the editors can be pretty chummy with certain folks. Indeed, when one does email reviews of NSF proposals, the panel *sees* who wrote the review! Maybe something similar happens here...someone on the editorial board finds out, and lets the authors know how obnoxious and insulting I was to these people.

But here's the kicker...I'm pissed off that I've probably spent more time "editing" this paper than some of the established authors!

AGW

I'm somewhat sympathetic to those reluctant to accept anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Indeed, it seems that for many their reluctance is in large part a reaction to the force with which "they" try to force it on people. So instead of trying to argue the science, let me try respond gently to certain fair, but likely misguided points, that some of these "deniers" make:

• they don't reject science, but instead choose which scientists to accept: I think what many people fail to realize is that one can find scientists who say the craziest things. Even Nobel-winning physicists have some crazy ideas. Sure, science isn't a democracy, but when just a small minority of scientists take a certain opinion, the odds are against their being correct. And so one could choose to accept that relativity is wrong, that the mechanics even of the very small is truly deterministic, that evolution is wrong, that the big bang never happened. Heck, moving beyond science, one could choose to believe those who are sure mankind never visited the moon, that six million people didn't die in the Holocaust, etc.
  
• climate scientists are motivated to scare the public to maintain their jobs: Ok, fair enough. But aren't we all motivated out of self-preservation?  However, it wouldn't occur to me to publish something I didn't think was true for some professional gain. Besides the dishonesty, I would fear the inevitable refutation by other scientists. Academic scientists are no saints, but I think it fair to say that the motivations are more likely to have them steal the ideas and credit of others rather than to attempt to steer a research program along some particular agenda. And could they even pull such a global conspiracy off? But even if you dispute this, surely one so misanthropically inclined would have even greater suspicion of the intents and effectiveness of huge multi-national companies supporting the denier community.
  
• there are many instances of mistakes or disputed claims. The science is either wrong or not well established: Deniers have often referred me to read the denier blogs. However, what these blogs generally have are fine-scale critiques of certain small claims, but with titles suggesting a larger scale of the critiques. I think what many scientists are good at is reading a paper and assessing weakness and strengths. Just because there may be some valid criticism of some aspect of some certain research, that's not necessarily an indictment of the entire field. Right now, I'm trying to figure out how critical to be in my paper which basically says that a competitor is wrong. But at the same time, the competitor is wrong in degree because he's over simplifying. As such, his overall position isn't even as "wrong" as the deniers claim about AGW. This isn't a court of justice with a final verdict. It's a messy, complicated system that we need to understand.