Humor as a Guide to Research
Over at the optimizer’s blog, quantum computing’s younger clown discusses some pointers for giving funny talks. I can still vividly remember the joke I told in my very first scientific talk. I spent the summer of 1995 in Boston at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (photo of us interns) working on disproving a theory about the diffuse interstellar absorption bands by calculating various two photon cross sections in H2 and H2+ (which was rather challenging considering I’d only taken one quarter of intro to quantum mechanics at the time!) At the end of the summer all the interns gave talks about their work. I was last to go. In my talk, I drew (transparencies, you know) a cartoon of “photon man” (wavy line stick figure) who explained the difference between two photon absorption and absorbing two photons. No one reacted to these cartoons during the talk. But at the end of the talk, one of the other interns, trying to be cute asked me “So, what does photon man think about all of this?” I paused. Thought for a second. And replied “He was very enlightened by the whole thing!” The simultaneous groan emitted by the audience (who had sat through 8 straight talks) was, I must say, awesome. I have a vivid memory of my adviser in the back of the room giving a hearty actual laugh! And I have been hooked on trying to insert at least one bad joke in every talk I have given ever since.
Since I enjoy humor in talks, lately I’ve been wondering if there isn’t an easier way to make funnier talks. The optimizers list is a good start, but I’m lazy. Which led me to the idea: maybe I can make funnier talks by simply basing my research on things that are inherently funny? I mean, you try taking How a Clebsch-Gordan Transform Helps to Solve the Heisenberg Hidden Subgroup Problem and making a funny talk! On the other hand it is, without a question, nearly impossible to give a talk about Time Travel without (purposefully or not) uttering really awesome (and well timed) jokes.
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Bacon Bubble
Okay, I’m calling it. We have officially reached the top of the Bacon loving bubble. Why? The dress made of Bacon indicator has been tripped. This indicator has a 50 percent probability of beating the magic 8 ball in predicting the top of past Bacon bubbles. I predict a hard landing for Bacon lovers everywhere. Until they shed their few extra pounds (a lagging indicator) we are entering a dark period for Bacon.
Hat tip: Jorge.
Summer Time
Summer doesn’t officially start here in Seattle until the fourth of July, but the summer vibe is definitely here. Which means no teaching, so it’s all research all the time. But a man cannot live by his own research alone, which leads me to the vast brain dump that is the internet.
Things found…
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Theorist In a Box
When I was a postdoc, I made it a habit to try to spend at least one week a year visiting Isaac Chuang’s lab at MIT. There were many reason for this, including that Ike has been a collaborator of mine, and Ken Brown, another collaborator was working as a postdoc in the lab. But another reason was…it’s damn nice for a theorist to sit in a real experimental lab. Oh sure, you need to keep the theorists away from all the cords and knobs for fear that they might actually touch something. And don’t ever let a theorist chose the music being played in the lab or you’ll end up hearing some real wacky “music.” But as a theorist I got a lot out of simply being around the actual enactment of the ideas that otherwise exist for me only in a paper or in my head. Being in a lab is very inspiring for an aspiring theorist.
So now I could go and bother one of the physics people and ask them if I could work in their lab. But this is 2009, damnit, and that 2 in 2009 certainly stands for web 2.0 or science 2.0 or iTechnology 2.0. In other words I want the same effect of visiting an experimental lab without getting of my lazy bum and walking across campus. So…
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Bing Zings Pontiff
So bing, Microsoft’s latest search engine, is up and running the tech word is a twitter. I checked it out and…well. On google when you search for “pontiff” my blog comes up as hit number five, after a few silly things like wikipedia entries and dictionary definitions (but no actual links to the *ahem* real pontiff. Sadly the days when I was number one on google are gone. But I will someday tell my grandkids…) But on bing, what happens? I’m down at number nine. Nine, Microsoft, really? I live in Seattle you know: shouldn’t this give me extra rank in your algorithms? And among the related searches, none of these are for “quantum pontiff.”
(I’d like to conclude that this is a good thing for how the search engine works except for the fact that bing gives the number three spot to a real estate agent. And we all know that real estate agents are actually all devils responsible for the collapse of the financial system and probably also for things like Mondays and gum stuck on the bottom of your shoes.)
Strip Malicious Mischief
Ah, the games people play:
A 23-year-old Tacoma man and an 18-year-old Lakewood woman are suspected of throwing rocks from a railroad trestle onto at least 14 vehicles traveling southbound on Interstate 5 early Monday.
…
Investigators told KOMO-TV that the couple was playing a stripping game that involved each of them shedding a layer of clothing for every headlight they managed to break.
And Now a Commercial Break
This Intel ad cracks me up:
Reminds me of the classic Onion: Stephen Jay Gould Speaks Out Against Science Paparazzi.
The Equilibrium Theory of Games
The other day I ran into a good friend from Tlön, who told me the most fascinating story about his discovery of a new theory of games.
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An Identification Problem
Some quotes, with some substitutions, denoted by [], for the actual words:
“The famous physicist Max Planck was talking about the resistance of the human mind, even the bright human mind, to new ideas…. And he said science advances one funeral at a time, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that and it’s certainly been true in [FIELD X].”
and
“If you stand up in front of a [FIELD Y] class and say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, you won’t get tenure…. Higher mathematics my be dangerous and lead you down pathways that are better left untrod.”
and
“The more symbols they could work into their writing the more they were revered.”
Question: who said these things? A disgrunted professor? Peter Woit talking about string theory?
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