Me, Elsewhere

I'm back from my trip. Here are some things that prevented me from more substantial blogging:

• I wrote an article for Aeon, "The superfluid Universe," which just appeared. For a somewhat more technical summary, see this earlier blogpost.
• I did a Q&A with John The-End-of-Science Horgan, which was fun. I disagree with him on many things, but I admire his writing. He is infallibly skeptic and unashamedly opinionated -- qualities I find lacking in much of today's science writing, including, sometimes, my own.
• I spoke with Davide Castelvecchi about Stephen Hawking's recent attempt to solve the black hole information loss problem, which I previously wrote about here.
• And I had some words to spare for Zeeya Merali, probably more words than she wanted, on the issue with the arXiv moderation, which we discussed here.
• Finally, I had the opportunity to give some input for this video on the PhysicsGirl's YouTube channel:
  
  
  
  I previously explained in this blogpost that Hawking radiation is not produced at the black hole horizon, a correction to the commonly used popular science explanation that caught much more attention than I anticipated.
  
  There are of course still some things in the above video I'd like to complain about. To begin with, anti-particles don't normally have negative energy (no they don't). And the vacuum is the same for two observers who are moving relative to each other with constant velocity - it's the acceleration that makes the difference between the vacua. In any case, I applaud the Physics Girl team for taking on what is admittedly a rather technical and difficult topic. If anyone can come up with a better illustration for Hawking-radiation than Hawking's own idea with the pairs that are being ripped apart (which is far too localized to fit well with the math), please leave a suggestion in the comments.

Happy New Year!

We wish all our readers a good start into the year 2012! We hope that you find the insight you have been looking for, get the job you want or the grant you need. May it be a delightful year for you.

I'll use the opportunity to dump a few interesting links I've come across lately:

• I enjoyed very much the NYT technology future timeline, where readers have proposed upcoming innovations and guessed when they would become reality.
  
  In 2014 for example, "Scott Aaronson predicts, scientific publishing will move away from the current journal-and-conference model to a model that takes better advantage of online tools." I have now tried three times with different groups of colleages to make use of an online wiki or at least Google docs to avoid sending emails with updates and files or links around. I have failed three times, afaics for no reason other than that it was apparently too much of a new thing to try. Taking into account that physics is allegedly quick with adapting new tools, I think Scott is off by at least a decade. Scientific publishing will move when more than half of all tenured faculty will have been born past 1980.
  
  In 2015 "Voting by phone" is on the timeline. Given that in Sweden you can make your tax reimbursement by phone (yes, I did!), and text messages are about to replace stamps, I wouldn't be surprised if the Swedes will be the first to make this reality.
  
  Should mankind still exist in 2100, NYT readers believe that "physical sciences produce abundance so great that wealth becomes meaningless as a difference between people" and we'll be living in a post-scarcity world. This estimate seems to be ignoring reality. My personal estimate would be some thousand years later, maybe even longer, and that only under the condition that progress continues sufficiently long for us to find a sustainable way to meet our energy requirements.
• Something entirely different, a while ago I went to a workshop under the COST initiative "Black Holes in a violent Universe." This initiative has now produced a video with a brief introduction about what different types of black holes there are. I could have lived without a reminder of the earth-swallowing tiny black holes, but besides that it's a nice summary. (Thanks to Xavier for the link!)
• Mount Everest has now a webcam.
• A few months ago, I wrote a post about citation-loops that can be created by citing Wikipedia without noting the date of retrieval. xkcd dubbed this process citogenesis.
• And finally some good news: The budget of the German ministry for education and research (BMBF) will raise in 2012 by 11% to a total of 12.9 billion Euro.

This and That

Some well-written and interesting paragraphs that I came across recently.

• Steve Mirsky in Scientific American reports this amusing anecdote:
  
  

  I was reminded of preposterously precocious utterances by tiny tykes during a brief talk that string theorist Brian Greene gave at the opening of the 2011 World Science Festival in New York City on June 1. Greene said he sometimes wondered about how much information small children pick up from standard dinner-table conversation in a given home. He revealed that he got some data to mull over when he hugged his three-year-old daughter and told her he loved her more than anything in the universe, to which she replied, “The universe or the multiverse?”



• Mark Slouka's article Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school leads a fundamentally flawed argument (which I might make content of a longer post), but is one of the most beautifully written texts I've come across lately. I particularly liked this part:
  

  Consider the ritual of addressing our periodic “crises in education.” Typically, the call to arms comes from the business community. We’re losing our competitive edge, sounds the cry. Singapore is pulling ahead. The president swings into action. He orders up a blue-chip commission of high-ranking business executives (the 2006 Commission on the Future of Higher Education, led by business executive Charles Miller, for example) to study the problem and come up with “real world” solutions.
  
  Thus empowered, the commission crunches the numbers, notes the depths to which we’ve sunk, and emerges into the light to underscore the need for more accountability. To whom? Well, to business, naturally. To whom else would you account? And that’s it, more or less. Cue the curtain.



• And David Eagleman's article The Brain on Trial that argues for "a scientific approach to sentencing" gives the reader a lot to think about.
  

  Who you even have the possibility to be starts at conception. If you think genes don’t affect how people behave, consider this fact: if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes. You’re three times as likely to commit robbery, five times as likely to commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to be arrested for murder, and 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offense. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1 percent of death-row inmates do. These statistics alone indicate that we cannot presume that everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behaviors.
  
  And this feeds into a larger lesson of biology: we are not the ones steering the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe. Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access, and the details reach back in time to before our birth, when the meeting of a sperm and an egg granted us certain attributes and not others. Who we can be starts with our molecular blueprints—a series of alien codes written in invisibly small strings of acids—well before we have anything to do with it. Each of us is, in part, a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history. By the way, as regards that dangerous set of genes, you’ve probably heard of them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome. If you’re a carrier, we call you a male.

This and That

Some random things that caught my attention recently:

• If you like PhD comics, they're working on a movie: Trailer here.


• The Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf set a new world record for magnetic fields with 91.4 teslas.


• You have 1 week left to work out some detail of the 100 year spaceship and send in an abstract for the public symposium Sep 30 - Oct 2nd in Orlando "intended to seed creative energy to “kick-start” the long term research goals." It's for sentences like this that you hire PR people.


• Partly related, I learned the other day from SciAm that the new buzzword after "synergy" and "horizontal integration" is now "convergence." So let's converge on something then.


• Also, the new-name creationists have switched from iIng everything from iKnow to iDontcare and are now replacing spaces with dots, following the ICANN's decision to allow customizable URL suffixes. Ironically though, Google seems to replace the dot with a space if you search for a tag. Anyway, I see huge potential for the arXiv. No more SUSY or MSSM, it's now mond.4u and beyond.higgs. Leave your physics-themed suggestions in the comments!


• Something to look at: Camouflage art.


• And something else to look at: Dear Photograph


• If you like the comic series Asterix and Obelix, you'll love this Study of traumatic brain injuries. To quote from the conclusions "Roman nationality, hypoglossal paresis, lost helmet, and ingestion of the magic potion were significantly correlated with severe initial impairment of consciousness (p ≤ 0.05)."

This and That

• APS's newest journal is Physical Review X (PRX). It's online-only, open access and accepted articles will be published upon payment of an article-processing charge of $1500. The website says the journal is "global." There's countries on this globe where $1500 makes an acceptable annual income. Just saying.


• Two years ago, we discussed Craig Hogan's papers on Holographic noise, and the shortcomings of his model. Hogan successfully postdicted the GEO600 mystery noise. After the noise turned out to be due to a readout error, Hogan found a missing factor in his calculation. According to the new calculation, the noise would not be seen at GEO600. Fermilab now funds a new experiment, called the Holometer, to test Hogan's model. The two papers listed on the website as reference are unpublished. Just saying.


• Am I the only one thinking "Frisch, Fromm, Fröhlich, Frei" when looking at the Fermilab logo?


• Zeitgeist: The US Air Force invites a professor of metaphysics to learn about the philosophy behind the nature of causality. Just saying...

This and That

• These are hard times for physicists working on supersymmetry. The LHC constrains the parameter space with so far no evidence for what has been the most popular model of physics beyond the standard model for decades. For details, check Peter's post on "Implications of Initial LHC Searches for Supersymmetry", Tommaso on "LHC Excludes SUSY Theories, Theorists Clinch Hands", and Resonaances on "More SUSY limits". Geoff Brumfield in Nature News titles "Beautiful theory collides with smashing particle data." Brumfield quotes Chris Lester, from the ATLAS collaboration: "We're painting supersymmetry into a corner," and Alessandro Strumia, a theorist at the University of Pisa in Italy:
  

  "Privately, a lot of people think that the situation is not good for SUSY. This is a big political issue in our field. For some great physicists, it is the difference between getting a Nobel prize and admitting they spent their lives on the wrong track."

  
  This week's Nature issue also has an editorial titled Dark Rumblings, comparing the LHC SUSY search to Michelson & Morley's search for the ether, arguing that "the negative results now coming out of the LHC should be just as stimulating as any positive findings." So if you've wasted 30 years of your life, don't forget negative results should be stimulating.


• The International Loop Quantum Gravity Seminar (ILQGS), a seminar series by telephone conference, now has a blog. Maintained by Jorge Pullin, it offers summaries of the talks in the seminar series.


• The Max Planck Society has a YouTube channel with short video clips about their research fields. While parts are only available in German, some videos are in English and worth checking out. The topics are as diverse as the Max Planck Society's institutes and of equally diverse quality. Interesting for example: GERDA, The Germanium Detector Array (on the search for neutrinoless double-β-decay), a bat catching a fly, or Honey, I shrunk Brad Pitt (on a video software for changing your waist and bra size.)

This and That

• Katy Börner from the project "Places & Spaces: Mapping Science," who came with her poster exhibition to our 2008 conference on Science, Society and Information Technology, has written a book called "Atlas of Science: Visualizing what we know." I haven't read it, but there's a review in a recent issue of Nature which most of you probably can't access, and another review in Seed Magazine which will give you an impression of what the book is about. If you have an interest in visualizing data and/or the structure of scientific communities and the process of knowledge discovery, this might be interesting for you.


• A PS to my post on Cosmic Strings that summarized a recent study on the gravitational wave emmission from Cosmic Superstrings' cusps. According to the study's results, the presence of extra dimensions would suppresses the signal, possibly too much to be observable. In a new paper, O'Callaghan and Gregory have now studied the signal from kinks, claiming that the suppression is not as pronounced as the one from cusps.


• Some months ago, during one of my hospital stays, I received another inquiry seeking permission to use one of my figures for what I thought would be an illustration of some essay on gravitons. My reply was essentially "yeah, whatever," just in some more words. I now was sent a link to the result, a digital book, in French, called "Du LIVRE de Mallarmé au livre mal armé." The website is here, and you can download the ebook here. It looks to me like a collection of sciency philosophy essays. My figure appears in section "14.59°" - whatever that might mean. If your French is better than mine, please let me know in the comments what this compilation is all about!


• Here's an article I filed in the category "Complete Bullshit:" Daniel Sarewitz in Slate claiming, in a nutshell, that it's a problem Republicans are represented among US scientists in a smaller percentage than among the US population: "No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science," he writes and goes on to make a case that "the scientific community should be willing to investigate and discuss the issue" because this situation is clearly politically incorrect. I had the intention to get upset about this article, but it's so completely bullshit it's not even worth the effort, so I just let you read it. Don't miss the comments.


• Something to laugh: And the state of the union is... salmon!

This and That

• In partnership with CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American, Google is introducing the first global online science competition: the Google Science Fair. It is open to students around the world who are between the ages of 13-18. More info at the Google Blog.


• If you haven't yet played around with Google's Ngram Viewer, you've missed a great opportunity to waste time. Ngram allows you to search Google Books for words or expressions and display the results, normalized to the total number of books, as a function of the year. You find some great examples here. Also interesting is "absolute" vs "relative" ("relative" took off in 1900 but has dropped sharply since 1980, while "absolute" is constantly in fashion since 1800), "abortion" vs "adoption" ("adoption" is almost constant since 1900, while "abortion" rises in the mid 60s, but interestingly falls again since the mid 90s.), "love" vs "war" ("war" surpassed "love" around 1920 and peaks during the two world wars. Since then, it's been on the decline but still ahead of "love"), "God" vs "science" ("God" has on the average been decreasing since the early 18-hundreds, though it's slighly increasing again since 1980. Science has constantly been on the rise, but still hasn't caught up with "God"), and nobody wrote "hello world" before the first programming languages came up.


• Have a look at our night sky in different wavelengths with the Chromoscope. See here for a video tour. [Thanks to Steven!]


• Wiley's journal on Environmental Microbiology annually publishes some amusing referee's comments. Some examples: "This paper is desperate. Please reject it completely and then block the author’s email ID so they can’t use the online system in future.", "I started to review this but could not get much past the abstract.", "I agreed to review this Ms whilst answering e-mails in the golden glow of a balmy evening on the terrace of our holiday hotel on Lake Como. Back in the harsh light of reality in Belfast I realize that it’s just on the limit of my comfort zone and that it would probably have been better not to have volunteered." Makes me wonder if the prospect of one's comment getting published encourages referees to write such things?


• Something to laugh about: The customer is not always right. [Thanks to Andreas!] Example:
  
  
  Bank employee: “And how would you like that $500?”
  Customer: “In one bill.”
  Bank employee: *trying to be nice* “Would five hundreds do?”
  Customer: “No! One bill!”
  (Employee gives her five hundreds, and she throws them back. Supervisor comes over.)
  Supervisor: “Problem?”
  Customer: “Yes, he refuses to give me what I want.”
  Supervisor: “There is no $500 bill.”
  Customer: “Yes there is!”
  Supervisor: “Not since the late 1800′s ma’am.”
  Customer: “I remember seeing it!”
  Supervisor: “Then might I say you look great for your age!”

This and That

• In my post It comes soon enough I speculated on some future developments, among them:
  
  “I've been thinking... that... it would be possible to grow meat suitable for consumption without having to bother with the whole animal. [A] century from now, we'll have factories with organ bags that resemble nothing like animals at all.”
  
  In an interview of Time Magazine with Ray Kurzweil I read last week:
  
  “We'll grow in vitro cloned meats in factories that are computerized and run by artificial intelligence. You can just grow the part of the animal that you're eating."
  
  For the complete interview, see 10 Questions for Ray Kurzweil


• If you want more evidence that I have my thumb on the pulse of time: In my post Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated? I remarked on the the predictability of complex systems:
  
  “You don't need to predict the dynamics of the system. You just need to know what parameter space it will smoothly operate in so optimization works.”
  
  A recent article by Seed Magazine quotes Tom Fiddaman who, in collaboration with MIT and the Sustainability Institute, examines the policy implications of dynamic complexity in climate and economic models:
  
  “You are in a sort of dance with this complicated mess,” he says, explaining that it is impossible to determine the individual steps of this “dance”—and this is in some sense the error of current thinking. Instead, we need to be able to construct robust solutions that provide general guidelines for what style of dance we should be doing. They need to be flexible and capable of withstanding the inevitable unpredictable behaviors of complex systems.
  
  The whole article, titled Knowing sooner, is a very recommendable read.


• I just learned that since July 1st, fast internet access is a legal right in Finland. Don't have much to say about it, just find it noteworthy.


• Most concise paper ever: Unsuccessful treatment of writer's block.


• I spoke to a science writer about What's at the center of black holes - and then forgot about it.
  
  “From a theoretical point of view, the singularity is something where something becomes infinitely large,” said physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics. [That's not what she wrote, but what I actually said.]
  
  No one can be sure that their singularity doesn't describe a physical reality, Hoss[en]felder told Life's Little Mysteries. But most physicists would say that the singularity, as theorized by equations, doesn't really exist. If the singularity was “really real,” then it would mean that “energy density was infinitely large at one point,” exactly the center of the black hole, she said.
  
  However, no one can know for sure, because no complete quantum theory of gravity exists, and the insides of black holes are impossible to observe.


• My recent paper with Xavier Calmet and Roberto Percacci just got published.

I wish you all a nice weekend and don't forget to light the 3rd candle.

This and That

• We discussed several times on this blog the question how plausible metrics for scientific success are, see for example my posts Science Metrics and Against Measure. This week, the NYT reports an amusing fact from the recent Times Higher Education university ranking in the article Questionable Science Behind Academic Rankings: Alexandria University in Egypt made it on the list on rank 147 (together with Uppsala) as the only Arab university. Just that, upon closer inspection, this success goes back to the enormous productivity of one researcher... and that is no other than Mohamed El Naschie. If you recall, two years ago we mentioned El Naschie's amazing publication record of more than 300 papers within a few years, published in a journal of which he also was editor-in-chief. He retired from his position a few weeks later. The NYT reports:
  

  “But the news that Alexandria University in Egypt had placed 147th on the list — just below the University of Birmingham and ahead of such academic powerhouses as Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands (151st) or Georgetown in the United States (164th) — was cause for both celebration and puzzlement. Alexandria’s Web site was quick to boast of its newfound status as the only Arab university among the top 200...
  
  Like most university rankings, the list is made up of several different indicators, which are given weighted scores and combined to produce a final number or ranking...
  
  Phil Baty, deputy editor of Times Higher Education, acknowledged that Alexandria’s surprising prominence was actually due to “the high output from one scholar in one journal” — soon identified on various blogs as Mohamed El Naschie, an Egyptian academic who published over 320 of his own articles in a scientific journal of which he was also the editor. In November 2009, Dr. El Naschie sued the British journal Nature for libel over an article alleging his “apparent misuse of editorial privileges.” The case is still in court.”


El Naschie commented the following on the university ranking:


“I do not believe at all in this ranking business and do not consider it anyway indicatory of any merit of the corresponding university.”



• Somehow scary:
  

  “In this edition, we have added, for the first time, annotated references in the text to provide the beginning of an evidence based approach to clinical methods.”

  
  From the preface of “Clinical Examination,” by Nicholas J Talley & Simon O'Connor, 4th Edition, 2001.


• The results from our recent poll: Is the scientific process one of discovery or invention? A total of 167 people took the poll. To my surprise, most them shared my opinion. The replies were: Both - 52.1%, Discovery - 33.7%, Invention -10.4%, Neither - 1.8%, Don't know - 1.8%.


• Chad Orzel discusses the statistic on the initial employment of new PhDs in physics from 1979 to 2008 in his post Physics Job Market: Same As It Ever Was. Slightly more than 50% of new PhDs presently go on to make a postdoc...
  
  You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack... and you may find yourself in another part of the world... You may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"... Same as it ever was... Same as it ever was... (Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime).


• And if you think that statistic doesn't look so bad, you may want to watch this:
  
  
  [Via Dynamics of Cats]
  
  You may ask yourself... How do I work this?
  

This and That

With the weekend approaching, here's some distractions to kill your remaining working hours till 5pm:

• A very nice applet that zooms you through the scales of the universe, all the way down to the Planck length.


• An interesting recollection by Robert Weisbrot of Edward Witten's way to physics:
  
  "I am reminded of a friend from the early 1970s, Edward Witten. I liked Ed, but felt sorry for him, too, because, for all his potential, he lacked focus. He had been a history major in college, and a linguistics minor. On graduating, though, he concluded that, as rewarding as these fields had been, he was not really cut out to make a living at them. He decided that what he was really meant to do was study economics. And so, he applied to graduate school, and was accepted at the University of Wisconsin. And, after only a semester, he dropped out of the program. Not for him. So, history was out; linguistics, out; economics, out. What to do? This was a time of widespread political activism, and Ed became an aide to Senator George McGovern, then running for the presidency on an anti-war platform. He also wrote articles for political journals like the Nation and the New Republic. After some months, Ed realized that politics was not for him, because, in his words, it demanded qualities he did not have, foremost among them common sense. All right, then: history, linguistics, economics, politics, were all out as career choices. What to do? Ed suddenly realized that he was really suited to study mathematics. So he applied to graduate school, and was accepted at Princeton. I met him midway through his first year there--just after he had dropped out of the mathematics department. He realized, he said, that what he was really meant to do was study physics; he applied to the physics department, and was accepted.
  
  I was happy for him. But I lamented all the false starts he had made, and how his career opportunities appeared to be passing him by. Many years later, in 1987, I was reading the New York Times magazine and saw a full-page picture akin to a mug shot, of a thin man with a large head staring out of thick glasses. It was Ed Witten! I was stunned. What was he doing in the Times magazine? Well, he was being profiled as the Einstein of his age, a pioneer of a revolution in physics called "String Theory." Colleagues at Harvard and Princeton, who marvelled at his use of bizarre mathematics to solve physics problems, claimed that his ideas, popularly called a "theory of everything," might at last explain the origins and nature of the cosmos. Ed said modestly of his theories that it was really much easier to solve problems when you analyzed them in at least ten dimensions. Perhaps. Much clearer to me was an observation Ed made that appeared near the end of this article: every one of us has talent; the great challenge in life is finding an outlet to express it. I thought, he has truly earned the right to say that. And I realized that, for all my earlier concerns that he had squandered his time, in fact his entire career path--the ventures in history, linguistics, economics, politics, math, as well as physics--had been rewarding: a time of hard work, self-discovery, and new insight into his potential based on growing experience."
  
  [Via Michael Nielsen, via Hacker News. Read the full speech here.]


• You might already have read it on Nature News: Astronomers have found the to date most massive neutron star with about 2 solar masses. When I read this, a bell was ringing faintly in the dusty back of my head. Meanwhile I've figured out what was ringing: Smolin's Cosmological Natural Selection predicts an upper mass limit for neutron stars of 1.6 solar masses. (See hep-th/0612185, section 3.2).


• Some months ago I was sent a link to an April fools day paper, funny-haha, physicists style. That paper has now resurfaced on my desk: Schrödinger's Cat is not Alone. It's a humorous take on the interpretation of quantum mechanics and cat dynamics. Not the sort of humor that deepens my laugh wrinkles, but I thought some of you might find it amusing.


• Here's something that did give me a good laugh. Real life absurdity:
  Nurses find the weirdest stuff. [Via Bora].

I wish you all a nice weekend!

This and That

Some things that entered my sphere of thought recently:

• Dorothy Bishop, Prof. of developmental neuropsychology at Oxford, is offering an "Orwellian Prize for Journalistic Misrepresentation" for any article in an English-language national newspaper that has the most inaccurate report of a piece of academic work. Judgement will be based on a points scoring system, as follows:
  
  
  • Factual error in the title: 3 points
  • Factual error in a subtitle: 2 points
  • Factual error in the body of the article: 1 point
  
  
  You can find details on the nomination on Prof Bishop's blog.
  


• The recent issue of New Scientist features an article about Internet addiction. We discussed this topic a few months back in my post Addicted, where I argued one should be careful to distinguish between substance abuse and compulsive disorder, and that "addiction" is a rather sloppy expression. The New Scientist article doesn't really say anything new but offers a summary of the present status of discussion:
  

  "For almost as long as there's been information technology, there have been arguments over whether it is possible to become addicted to it.
  
  One definition of behavioural addiction is a recurring compulsion to act in specific ways which may have detrimental impacts on the person's well-being - there are well catalogued examples of people's internet activity fitting that pattern.
  
  The idea of behavioural addiction is not universally accepted, however. Psychiatry's bible - the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) - prefers the classification "impulse control disorder", differentiating the conditions from physical addictions, such as cocaine or alcohol addiction.
  
  The question of whether internet addiction should be included as a diagnosed condition in the next edition, DSM-V, is a hot debate right now.
  
  Some people, such as psychiatrist Jerald Block, based in Portland, Oregon, argue that internet addicts show behaviour consistent with other addictive disorders, such as excessive use, withdrawal and negative social impacts.
  
  Others, including Ronald Pies, at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts, argue there have been insufficient controlled studies of internet addiction to show that withdrawal symptoms are genuinely physiological. They suspect that the negative social effects attributed to excessive internet use may have other underlying causes, such as depression or obsessive compulsive disorder.



• Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is inviting applications for Postdoctoral Research positions. For more information please visit this website, and good luck :-)


• Something to first make you laugh and then make you think: What exactly is a doctorate? A graphic representation by Matt Might. By the time you've finished your 3rd postdoc, you might have made it to a few pimples on the body of knowledge ;-) [Thanks to Christine]


• Just because it's one of the more absurd stories I've read recently: A 75 year old German psychiatrist attempted to kiss his patient and claimed later it was supposed to be a "therapeutic kiss" meant as "shock therapy." The woman turned away fast enough so the attempt aimed at her lips landed on her cheek instead. Then she sued the doctor for sexual harassment. The psychiatrist had to pay a fine of EUR 3,500.


• If you don't know how to arrange your marathon training with your 80 hours/week office job, what you need is a treadputer. Zeitgeist!

This and That

• You might have heard that according to the result of a new measurement the proton is some percent smaller than previously thought. Chad Orzel has an excellent post explaining what this means and doesn't mean.


• Spiegel Online has an interesting article on Norway's experience with compulsory women quotas on company boards. My experience with compulsory women quotas as been very unconvincing. What happened is exactly what you can read in the article what Norwegians were afraid would happen before the law was introduced in 2004: you were forced to take women who were either unqualified or incompetent or both. Amazingly enough it seems the Norwegian's experience has been mostly positive and, despite the outcries before the introduction of the law, after it became a matter of fact there haven't been complaints about it. I think the relevant difference to the cases I have witnessed is the availability of qualified women in the pool. In the situations I saw, there were simply way to many (we're talking a factor 10 below the quota that had to be achieved). As it seems from the article, Norwegian companies however had no problems finding qualified female board members. In any case, this outcome was unexpected to me and gave me something to think about.


• The Globe and Mail reports on a forum banning anonymity and forcing users to use real names instead. That in itself isn't so interesting, more interesting is that they dubbed it "the latest sign that online anonymity is falling out of favour with many companies." I'm not at all sure it's really necessary to force people to use their real names, I think pseudonymes will do as well as long as they have a value for the user, but I am happy to hear that the anonymity disease on the internet seems to have been recognized for what it is: sickening. I'm thus wondering what change we'll see coming in the soon future.

This and That

• The Nobel Foundation goes YouTube.

  Have you ever wanted to ask a Nobel Laureate a question? Now, here's your chance! Ask a Nobel Laureate is offering you a unique opportunity to communicate with some of the world´s most brilliant minds. The current participating Nobel Laureate is Albert Fert, Nobel Prize in Physics 2007 "for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance", which forms the basis of the memory storage system found in your computer.
  
  Albert Fert will answer a selection of your uploaded video questions [...] Upload your video question no later than March, 19, 2010.



• Online Colleges has put together a list with "100 Amazing Videos for Teaching and Studying Physics," that might be worth having a look.


• Definitely worth a look is this totally amazing music video to OK Go's song "This Too Shall Pass."
  


• The Louisiana State University has two openings for faculty positions in loop quantum gravity. Details are here. [Thanks to Christine].

This and That

I'm presently stuck with what I've been working on lately. It's the really, really frustrating phase. Once you start looking into the details of an idea, problems occur to you that you previously weren't aware of. So then you have to rethink, read more papers, try differently. Sometimes it just doesn't work no matter what you try. One day it seems to work, the next day you figure out a mistake, then you find a better way, and that doesn't work either, and so on. Sigh.

But there's also good news from my work life: two of my recent papers "A model for non-singular black hole collapse and evaporation" with Leonardo Modesto and Isabeau Prémont-Schwarz, and "Conservative solutions to the black hole information problem" with Lee Smolin were just accepted for publication in PRD. So now we have to read the proofs. I like that part.

Besides that, I learned recently that the Royal Society has their 350th anniversary this year. They are celebrating the occasion with some open access special issues of the Philosophical Transactions, and they have an interactive timeline marking important papers, eg 1891 the proof that fingerprints are unique. One never stops learning. If you have an interest in the history of science, check this out.

Another news item is that the American Physical Society is giving blogging a try. They've called it "Physics Frontline" and according to their description cover "the latest scientific news, analysis and commentary on the intersection of physics with science policy issues, including innovation, education, energy, climate change, and nuclear policy." Despite presently 7 contributors, blogging is somewhat scarce there. Anyway, I think it's a good idea to provide commentary on science policy from people who actually know what they're talking about, and I thus hope to see somewhat more activity over there in the future.

This and That

Some bits of information that crossed my way recently:

• The upcoming deadline for applications to Perimeter Institute's master course, Perimeter Scholars International, is February 1st, 2010. Details are available at www.perimeterscholars.org.


• Planck 2010, the Thirteenth European Meeting "From the Planck scale to
  the electroweak scale", will take place at CERN from May 31 to June
  4, 2010. The conference website is here.


• The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) is conducting a global survey to study the situation of physicists. The aim is to assess conditions of education and research and family support in international comparison. This is the third time this survey is made. It is available in 8 different languages on this website. (Thanks to Achim.)


• Things seen: The Kärnkraftsäkerhet och Utbildning (KSU) explains what ionizing radiation is in some well-done videos (via Hamish Johnston), The Uncanny Valley of computer-simulated lifeforms (via William Lu, if you like this you might also like Rob Cook's colloquium on Cartoon Physics), and if you love fractals you have to see this.


• Humor: Peanuts quantum cartoons at the Quantum Pontiff, No Snow Sign Fail (Thanks to Thomas), It has been a pleasure attempting to scam you (Thanks to Kelly).

This and That + Interna

I recently learned there's no W in the Swedish language. How eird is that? More generally, living in a country where I don't understand the language has taught me how tiny the actual information content of spoken language is. Like, there's the woman behind me who waves my glove around "Blablablablabla," she says. What I hear is "Did you lose your glove?" Then there's the women at the register looking at my bakery bag. "Blablablablabla," she says. "How many rolls are that?" Is what I hear. I always buy eight, because that's the only number I know how to pronounce. And then there's the guy in the mall "Blablablabla Systembolaget," upon which I point towards the liquor store.

Yes, I learned one or the other word in the past two months, one of which is "Systembolaget," the only place one can buy alcoholic beverages in Sweden and basically the equivalent to Ontario's LCBO. One difference though is that in Sweden the wines are not ordered by country, but by price. More eirdness.

That I've found the closest liquor store however, I should point out, is not the reason for my blogging being a little sparse lately. The actual reason is that I'm sitting on a huge pile of application documents for our postdoc positions. Thank you for your interest in Nordita! This isn't the first time I'm doing this, but reading hundreds of letters of recommendation is invariably as humiliating as debilitating. And sometimes amusing. Here's some gems from letters I came across "he is much better than he looks," "we have shared a common nightmare," and "he spends endless hours on delving about various aspects with a tireless face," which sounds to me like an advertisement for Botox.

Anyway, some other things that I've come across lately is this nice selection of high speed photos of fluids, my mother sends this video for everybody who is Windows-Vista-damaged, and this graph gave me a good laugh. Besides this, I just uploaded a paper, so check the arXiv tomorrow.

This and That

• It's this time of the year again: Postdoctoral recruitment has begun. Perimeter Institute has their job posting here, though it reads more than an advertisement for the "award winning facilities" and the "distinguished researchers" than a job posting. Nordita's postdoc positions are posted here. The deadline for both applications is Nov 15th. Don't hesitate to ask me for the fine print ;-)
• This year's Oskar Klein Memorial Lecture at AlbaNova was given on October 1st by Peter Higgs. Unfortunately I missed it due to my trip to Atlanta, but you find the recording of Higgs' talk "My Life as a Boson" (wmv) here.
• I am happy to let you know you there will be a second installation of our 2007 workshop on "Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity," which was held at Perimeter Institute. The next one will take place in July 2010 and will be hosted by Nordita. Details are to follow.
• If you like nightskies, check out the Gigagalaxy Zoom project.
• Some days ago I met with a reader of this blog, who, after hearing I moved to Stockholm, sent me an email. So we went for a coffee and talked. Among other things about reasons to unsubscribe from blogs. We found we had both unsubscribed from blogs because they were posting too much. 15 new items? Mark all as read! This reminded me of a poll, according to which too much posting is indeed the top reason for unsubcribtion. Thus, if you're one of these 24/7 bloggers that think they have to echo every news item, calm down.

This and That

• Clifford Johnson now makes into movies.


• For those of you who speak German: the German Science Foundation (DFG) now features video clips of scientists reporting on their research. As amusing as informative. (Thanks to Andi!)


• The Quark Matter, the largest regular nuclear physics conference, awarded this year a "Young Scientist Award," which went to Sarah LaPointe for the best poster presentation and to Mateusz Ploskon for the best oral presentation. I think such an award is a lovely idea. Makes me a little nostalgic, since I won the poster award at the Quark Matter 2004.


• The previously mentioned Quantum to Cosmos Festival in honor of PI's 10th birthday has a blog.

This and That

• The Economist has a nice article on The Underworked American:
  

  "Americans like to think of themselves as martyrs to work. They delight in telling stories about their punishing hours, snatched holidays and ever-intrusive BlackBerrys. At this time of the year they marvel at the laziness of their European cousins, particularly the French. Did you know that the French take the whole of August off to recover from their 35-hour work weeks? [...]
  
  But when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans [...]



• Did you notice we're in the middle of a global pandemic? Here's California's reaction: Drive Through Doctors, see "The Doctor Will See You At The Next Window."


• Nature has a special on Science Journalism, accompanying the 6th World Conference of Science Journalists from 30 June-2 July 2009 in London, and to "shine a spotlight on the profession in changing times." It contains several interesting pieces, for example Boyce Rensberger's essay "Science journalism: Too close for comfort." (Thanks to George for sending the link!) Rensberger's essay is a brief historical account "to reflect on how far the profession has come since its beginning." (Occasionally a bit too far?) He closes with saying
  

  "We are obviously now in the 'Digital Age', and the very definition of journalism is changing in uncertain directions. Science journalism has moved from working for the glory of the scientific establishment to taking back its independence and exercising a new responsibility to the public. Now, traditional news outlets are withering, leaving many journalists to self-publish online with total independence and a direct connection to the public. But scientists too can use the web, bypassing journalists altogether and taking their science — and their agendas — directly to the public. It is becoming increasingly difficult for readers to tell which sources are disinterested and which have an axe to grind.
  
  If science journalists are to regain relevance to society, not only must they master the new media, they must learn enough science to analyse and interpret the findings — including the motives of the funders. And, as if that were not enough, they must also anticipate the social impacts of potential new technologies while there is still time to make a difference."

  
  Also recommendable is the editorial "Filling the void" (comments in square brackets added):
  

  "[S]cientists are blogging in ever increasing numbers [are they?], and the most popular blogs draw hundreds of thousands of readers each month [#visitors not equal #readers]. These blogging scientists not only offer expertise for free, but have emerged as an important resource for reporters. A Nature survey of nearly 500 science journalists shows that most have used a scientist's blog in developing story ideas [sure, it's all our own fault] ...
  
  Sadly, these activities live on the fringe of the scientific enterprise. Blogging will not help, and could even hurt, a young researcher's chances of tenure [Who want's tenure anyway?]. Many of their elders still look down on colleagues who blog, believing that research should be communicated only through conventional channels such as peer-review and publication [petroglyphs!]. Indeed, many researchers are hesitant even to speak to the popular press, for fear of having their carefully chosen words twisted beyond recognition [once bitten, twice shy].
  
  But in today's overstressed media market, scientists must change these attitudes if they want to stay in the public eye. They must recognize the contributions of bloggers [YES!] and others [others??], and they should encourage any and all experiments that could help science better penetrate the news cycle. Even if they are reluctant to talk to the press themselves, they should encourage colleagues who do so responsibly [pass the buck]. Scientists are poised to reach more people than ever, but only if they can embrace the very technology that they have developed [the spirits that we called...]"

  
  See also our earlier post Do we need Science Journalists?
  


• Paul Fendley was offended by a "the" in Lee Smolin's book "The Trouble With Physics" and thus offers us Five Problems in Physics without the Definite Article. It must totally suck to be a writer. Thanks to Matt for the link.
  You find my top 10 unsolved problems in physics here. Note absence of definite article. Now do I qualify to write a book or what?