It's Official

Happy Pi Day!

Assumptions: Quote of the Day

Godel says you have to assume shit; physicists just give an explanation for why it is brown and smelly.

Citations and Paper Length

Interesting paper on astro-ph this morning from Kris Stanek. As it turns out, in general, longer papers tend to get cited more. The exception is that, in astronomy, two of the major journals have a "Letters" section, which limits papers to 4 pages. These Letters do tend to be cited more than other short papers (presumably because they are Really just longer papers squeezed into a shorter format). Thus the graph of number of citations versus page length looks an awful lot like the state of Ohio:
The paper also includes some silliness-tinged career advice.

An Engineer's Guide to Kitties

To ensure it doesn't get too serious around here, here's some Friday afternoon fun:

Personally, I prefer the phrase "snuggle attack" to "corporal cuddling," though the alliteration in the latter is appealing. And, for the record, δ Carina is about 18 inches by at most 5 inches, for an aspect ratio of about 3.6; this is why she has graduated from "furball" to "furslinky."

Definitely a Link Dump

I'm tired, and therefore you're not going to get a real blog post out of me. So here are some interesting and/or funny things I've seen on the internet lately.

• Class and National Service as well as Social Class and Educational Access tackled at Uncertain Principles


• And then there's Sean at Cosmic Variance discussing even more evidence for why funding and curriculum standards for public schools should be nationalized.
  


• From Freshome we have a house that looks like a toilet and a sideboard with a glowy full moon


• Are Homophobes Aroused by Homoeroticism? from Dispatches from the Culture Wars


• a funny kitty:
  


• A delightful discussion of typography and political campaigns, via Deadly Mantis
  


• Hat tip to Blake for pointing me to the Relativity Song from everyone's favorite Max Tegmark and 8.033:
  
  


• And finally, via the Friendly Atheist, a nice explanation of how Jesus and Tetris are really the same thing.

DoorKitty

δ Carina recently figured out how to get on top of the bathroom door. I haven't seen her actually get onto the door, but she's pretty funny and proud of herself once she's up there. For your lolcat captioning pleasure...:

The Subprime Primer

Your questions (and mine) about the subprime mortgage crisis answered...

A Kitten's Decision Tree

How δ Carina decides whether or not to attack something:
Basically, she wouldn't have attacked Iraq unless she was feeling hyper that day, and I'm not 100% looking forward to flipflop season.

Mystery Hunt 2008 Post Mortem

I spent this past weekend at MIT for Mystery Hunt, and like last year, I was planning on doing an "obligatory hunt post." But this year's hunt, to be blunt, was simply not fun. The puzzles were too hard, required too many leaps in logic to solve, relied too much on flavor text, and often came with a basketfull of extraneous information and red herrings. Hunt started at noon on Friday and by 7pm I was ready to stop ... and it just kept going until 9pm on Sunday (by the time the coin was found, our team was almost completely cleaned out of headquarters, in the middle of a team debriefing, and setting up a dinner mob). I could say more, but since the winning team is known to write a good Hunt (they wrote last year's, for example), and I'm actually not in the mood for a full-fledge rant, I'll share with you this Sesame Street gem that came up in the middle of an "oh my god I'm so sick of trying to solve impossible-to-solve puzzles" conversation Saturday night:

A Dose of Not the Daily Show

Miss the Daily Show? Here's what one of its writers has to say about the WGA strike:

Kitty, Part 1

I got a kitty today!! The apartment I was living in for the last two years did not allow pets (something about undergrads being irresponsible creeps), but now I'm in a pet-friendly place and in town for a while, so ... I will do my best to not let this devolve into a cat blog, but first, there's this post which has been sitting in draft for for almost a year ...

Why I need a kitty:

Because my at-home vocabulary is too large:
Because I need another website to check obsessively.
Because traveling frequently will be just that much easier.
So I can take silly pictures and attach dorky captions to them.




Also, KITTY!!!

“This is because taking the derivative of something makes it redder.”

Hat tip to Blake:

Also, I totally want a Derivative Machine now, especially if I can run it backwards!

My Mother, the Math Teacher

The post a while back wherein I mentioned my dad's crazy doings was somewhat popular, so I figure I'll go with the flow and let y'all know about my non-stereotypical mother. Consider it a belated Mother's Day post. The actual impetus is Friday's xkcd comic:
My mother is a chronic middle school math teacher. She half-heartedly tried retiring sometime when I was in high school, but continued to work full time. Then, about a year ago, we had a big retirement party for her because she was quitting for real. So then she worked part-time for most of the last year... and announced earlier this week that she will be teaching part-time next year. My brother and I keep reminding her of the definition of "retirement," but the message does not seem to stick. We think she is beginning to think of herself as a "free lance math teacher." This new job will not be at the school she's been at for the last 15ish years; instead, she will be teaching at a "gender magnet school," teaching 8th grade girls Algebra I and Geometry. This will be her 40th year of teaching.

The xkcd comic also rings true because my mother is not the kind of person who decided what she believes about the way the world should work decades ago, only to stop thinking about it now. She still talks about what she wants to be when she "grows up" ... perhaps she thinks retiring is the same as growing up? Regardless, it's going to be interesting hearing her perspectives on same-gender education over the next year. She says she hasn't given it much thought yet; she took the job because it's a good job, not because it involves teaching in a gender-separated environment. The more I think about it, the more morally opposed I am to gender separation in an academic environment; but then, it's something I've never had to actually experience myself. The teachers and the students are the ones who can attest to how bad or good of an idea it is, and how it does or does not "work." I'm yet to meet a student who has had both co-ed and gender-separated education and believed the gender-separated to be superior.

And, sadly, this is certainly one way to "politicize" math. Jerks.

UPDATE: Comments were disabled for unkown reasons. Everything should be working fine now, though.

People Study Astronomy; Hijinks Ensue

Typically, one would be afraid that a 244 page anything showing up on astro-ph would be dry and boring in addition to being long, especially if it lacks figures. The recent summary of Astrophysics in 2006, which showed up on astro-ph Monday evening, is in fact a 244 page report sans figures. But it's far from dry and boring—instead it's fresh and funny and snarky. I like snarky. And I know you blog-reading types are more likely to look for ways to punt on Fridays than other days of the week, so here you go. Think of it as a an astronomy blog carnival, only, papers instead of blogs.

The paper goes into all sorts of "real" astronomy, like "things of which there is currently only one (habitable planets, the Sun, and the universe)," but what I find the most entertaining are the sociological-esque aspects. This is especially true as the suspicion is that one motivation behind this treatise is providing an opportunity for the first author to rant. See for example,

the departures of Wesley Huntress, Eugene Levy, and Charles Kennel from the NASA Science Advisory Comittee. Their error seems to have been in advising that science continue to be done.

Or, in Section 4.2:

Each year, anything from 10 to 50 folks respond to requests for suggestions of highlights of the past year. The request is intepreted in interestingly different ways, ranging from “My gut feeling is that, for the first time in my career, the most exciting things may be in the fields of solar system studies and the discovery of planets rather than in my own realm of the extragalactic” to a list of 17 papers on arguments for the respondent’s own ideas, of which he is the senior or sole author. The “he” is deliberate. None of the responses of that sort were from women, though this may be a selection effect − 10% of 10% of 50 is 0.5 (and you must supply your own hermaphrodiate joke). This year the author who collects most of these responses thought it only fair to be sure that at least one paper or topic proposed by each respondent get mentioned. A good many of the suggestions already had green circles, red rectangles, or other notebook entries; some were out of period (perhaps in Ap07) or otherwise not in the data base.

Can you imagine having collaborators like this?:

We caught at least two papers being retracted out from under their first authors, who either disagreed or were not consulted (Nature 437, 940; Science 310, 49; Science 310, 425). One of the first authors concerned plans to sue.

Of course, to the outside world, the biggest happening in astronomy in 2006 was that whole Pluto and "definition" of a planet mess. So, of course, this is mentioned on at length, including some of the press reaction:

Concerning Kuiper Belt and Trans-Neptunian objects, there is both good news and bad news. The good news is that 2003 UB313, the one that caused all the fuss and bother about what is a planet is now merely Eris, named for the goddess of discord, and her moon is Dysnomia, goddess of lawlessness and daughter of Eris. Those are IAU committee decisions and so to be trusted as much as any IAU committee decisions. But the LA Times article reporting the names also declared that Clyde Tombaugh named Charon after his wife Charlene. Yes, Tombaugh (1906−1997) was very much alive when Charon was discovered in 1978 (by James W. Christy of the US Naval Observatory), but he was not the discoverer, and his wife was Patricia (nee Edson) 43. You might want to start over and assume that Christy’s wife’s name is Charlene and that the LA Times has (at least) one editor like the one who just processed a chapter of ours for a book on evolution in general.

Given that I like the sociological aspect, the most entertaining (and potentially embarassing) section is the final one, "Misteaks Were Made." A few of these are clear honest errors (e.g., “four redshift bins over 0.1 Mpc < z < 3.0 Mpc"); others were just plain hilarious:

ISS is like an old suitcase whose handle is missing − it is totally useless, but you just can’t bear to part from it” (Nature 437, 1214).

They also mention at least twice the acknowledgements including the "faint praise" of "EB thanks the Israeli Army for hospitality during the last month of this project.” And did I mention the snarkiness?:

“Does it really make a material difference whether references are arranged by authors (alphabetically) or numerically?” (Nature 437, 1232). Oh, only to the grammatical structure of about every third sentence.

Mmm, snarky.

Jorge Cham at Ohio State

So I've not felt like blogging lately, apparently. According to Jorge Cham, this isn't a bad thing; "procrastination is when you're doing what you want to be doing." I heard him say so himself Tuesday night when he gave a talk here at OSU to an auditorium full of graduate students. (Is it bad that though I knew there was a coffee shop on the first floor of the building, I had no idea what its name was?)
Anyhow, the talk was entertaining, even for someone like me whose been reading the comics regularly for the last, uhm, six years. It started with a routine "I had to learn about Ohio State before coming here" bit ... talking about how the Wikipedia article for OSU is gushing about how big and great of a university it is ... and then we find out that Larry Sanger apparently is an OSU alum and it all begins to make sense.

So this part isn't going to be funny; I know, and I'm sorry, but deal with it. Apparently one of the main points of Cham's talks is that many graduate students are depressed. Apparently, for many people, graduate school is the first time when the ratio of what they think they know to what they think they don't know becomes very small, the first time they feel as if they are not "one of the best" at something. Uhm, so that would have been ... 11th grade for me, at the latest. And if it hadn't happened then, a few days at MIT would have cured that right up. And it goes without saying that my self-confidence is muuuch higher now than it was when I was an undergrad ... although that really isn't saying all that much. My view of stress as an undergrad v. as a grad student is somewhat skewed; while MIT is a high-stress environment, it's also true that my current department most certainly is not, relative to other places (or what's portrayed in the comics). And, seriously, if people are unhappy as graduate students because they don't like what they're doing, then, uhm, why are they in grad school to begin with? People should be doing what makes them happy.

Anyhow, the talk was pretty good and all around entertaining; the only thing that could have made it funnier would have been if he'd actually made a L'Hopital's Rule joke instead of just alluding to the possibility of one. More jokes about how annoying undergrads are would have also been appreciated. They were, unfortunately, not selling the new book (which ships, I think, tomorrow). I'd even brought money from one of my officemates (which I should return ...) to buy one. Instead, I was one of three people to win a raffle for a free (old) book, which is funny because I already own both books. Two years ago Cham gave a talk at MIT, and instead of going, I took a nap. (I was thesing, OK?) A friend bought both books for me—and got them autographed—as a graduate gift. So, I decided to give my free book to one of my officemates, who had decided to not come to the hour-long talk because he needed to work. No lie. Severe workaholic silliness I try very hard to not compare myself to.

Regardless, how come there aren't any couches in my department? My brother, a graduate student in history, maintains his office has one exactly like this:

It Seemed Better Than Getting a Real Job

As a prize for myself for finishing my paper recently, I bought this t-shirt from PhD Comics. The text reads,

GRAD SCHOOL
IT SEEMED BETTER THAN GETTING A REAL JOB

Which is, of course, fantastic. It's also completely true, in that I didn't have any desire whatsoever to get a "real job," and grad school was really the only choice for someone wanting to make a career out of astrophysics research. Annoyingly, the shirt is short-sleeved, and it's been freaking snowing here in Ohio the last few days, so I won't get a chance to wear it for a while. And, yes, after complaining bitterly about how too hot it was in my office, now I am complaining it is too cold.

Incidentally, Jorge Cham, the writer of Phd Comics, will be giving a talk at OSU the beginning of May. He gave a talk at MIT about two years ago, right as I was finishing my undergrad thesis. I really was planning on going, and I was looking forward to it it and everything, but I wound up taking a nice four-hour nap instead. A good friend of mine, who was a graduate student in physics at MIT at the time, went and bought both of the PhD books for me, and got them autographed. The third book is coming out soon, but unfortunately won't be available until after Cham's visit.

The Stryngbohtyk Model of the Universe

To the left is a figure depicting the shape of the universe according to the stryngbohtyk model of the universe, from Miralda-Escude (2007). The author recommends, "For better inspiration to think on the stryngbohtyk model, it is recommended to place an object as shown in the figure on top of one’s head." While this paper is not the only significant contribution to comedic cosmology on astro-ph today (see also Scott & Frolop 2007; Follop et al 2007, and be sure to read all of the footnotes contained therein), it is perhaps the one offering the best enlightenment on the relationship between dark energy and a certain famous equation:

As a note, the name dark energy for a component driving the acceleration is particularly bad among all the bad terminology that astronomers have made up, because Einstein discovered that

E = mc²,

(this equation is written here in case anybody had forgotten it), so everything in the universe is energy (and the name “dark stuff” would be no worse than dark energy). Moreover, dark means something that absorbs the light, whereas something that lets all the light go through without interaction should be called transparent, or invisible (which means detectable only through gravity, because Einstein found that nothing can be invisible to gravity).

Terra Bite

I think I need to go visit Kirkland, WA now. They've got this new coffee shop, see, and I like coffee. First of all, the place is owned by a Google developer and is named "Terra Bite," which is hilarious enough for me to want to stop by. But the completely cool and completely crazy part is that they apparently work on a "voluntary" payment system. As in, you decide how much you feel like paying, and then you pay that much. No prices on the menu, no cash register, no tip jar. And they have free wireless! What more could I possibly want?

Ma'am

I proctored an exam this morning for the class I'm TAing. One of the students called me "ma'am" more than once. He can't be more than four years younger than me, if that. I feel midly disturbed, kind of old, and, yet, oddly powerful.

I also had an amusing exchange with someone in the physics department today. It went something like this: "So what's your position over there in Astronomy?" "... I'm a second year grad student ..." "And they let you work on just whatever you want?!" "Well, yeah ..."

IT WORKS, BITCHES.

A slightly belated christmas present came in the mail today. I'm so psyched, but unfortunately, it's a short-sleeve t-shirt, and while I am wearing it, no one can tell. It'll be our little secret for now.

On the front:






And on the back ...









This is, of course, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) spectrum, with the COBE data on top of the predicted model, where the errorbars/points are grossly oversized, and it is, of course, from xckd. Because where else would you see the ACM mentioned in a comic—let alone one that is also discussing the inherent hilarity of trancendental numbers disturbing cozy close to integers?
And now I must stop, lest I either link to or show every other comic on the site. Bitches.