From Foxtrot:
TV: Welcome to the BCS national championship football game, here at the Louisiana Superdome.
TV: Let’s begin by acknowledging that there’s been some controversy concerning the teams chosen to play for this year’s title, but they were determined by the computer, and who can question that?
TV: Whoa, Nelly! M.I.T. has fumbled the coin toss and Caltech goes wild!
One Researcher's Ouch
Courtesy Ben Toner, via a
math preprint by Craig Feinstein:
And the author welcomes and challenges anyone to produce a rigorous version, as he has no plans of even trying, because he is pretty tired of working on this problem and if he had to do it over again would never have even attempted it, not even for the prize of a million dollars for solving it – it’s just not worth all of the headache…
Life, Death, and the Meaning of it All
Well I will be away from blogging a bit. My dad (Larry) passed away suddenly last Friday at my family’s cabin in northern California. I’m now at home in Yreka among family and friends. Of course, normally this would be a depressing post, but there was little to nothing depressing about my father so instead I just wanted to write short notes on a few things which are very much Larry-esque.
1. Look up! When we go out at night, we just don’t spend time to look at the stars. Stop and look up at the sky (even if you can see but two stars because you live in a smog cloaked sky!) Stars remind us that we live in an amazing and wonderous universe. That those points of light are light years away and that we are small in this universe don’t diminish us but only put outselves in perspective of a greater grandeur. So look up at the stars! Spend an evening freezing yourself in a lawn chair and thinking about perspective. “As for myself, I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of stars makes me dream.” Vincent van Gogh.
2. Find humor and amazement in everything you do. There is nothing which enforces a law of seriousness (well maybe brussel sprouts, but even then, they’re pretty comic, don’t you think?). The human predicament, even in its darkest times, must alway remain a comedy, or a tragecomedy, or at least a bit of learning from the astonishing places we get ourselves into. The trap is that we find ourselves believing our ideas and stuck viewing the world through a single lens. Use the lens of humor and amazement! Don’t take the world’s seriousness seriously!
So remember my dad these next few weeks: look up at the stars and find humor in new places!
Berkeley
From The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick:
Dreams of poverty excited universal enjoyment in Berkeley, coupled with the hope that the political and economic situation would worsen, throwing the country into ruin: this was the theory of the activists. Misfortune so vast that it would wreck everyone, responsible and not responsible alike sinking into defeat.
Those silly undergrads
From The Register
To be fair, a vast amount of work being done at CalTech [sic] and Carnegie Mellon is coming from the efforts of undergraduate students more interested in beer than the military complex.
Update: For those wondering where this came from, it came from here
Posted Without Comment
WASHINGTON (AP) – The FBI is warning police nationwide to be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the popular reference books covering everything from abbreviations to weather trends could be used for terrorist planning.
In a bulletin sent Christmas Eve to about 18,000 police organizations, the FBI said terrorists may use almanacs “to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning.”
Mt Shasta Ski Park
My vacation:
Some Wine
Sputnik = 1957, but the boom in Physics PhDs peaked in 1970, with a second peak in the mid 90s (from the aps):
So those 1970 PhDs are now in their late 50s. And, of course, everyone knows that physicists always do their best work when they are much younger. So, logically, these 1970 PhDs should retire. Right? Right?
Going Uphill
A search on google for “academia skiing” yields 8650 results. Similarly “tenure track physics skiing” yields 2940 results. This must be fixed.
Powder snow skiing is not fun. It’s life, fully lived, life lived in a blaze of reality. – Dolores LaChapelle
Away
Visiting the University of New Mexico and Los Alamos this week, so posting may be sparse. It is wonderfully cold here.