Yesterday was an official holiday at UCSB. I went to see the new Cohen brothers movie: A serious man.
It is about a physics professor in the late 60’s who is facing tenure and is besieged by all kinds of things that make life not worth living. It is a very dark comedy, in a sense about the meaning of life (or the lack of it). For some strange reason I felt at home in the movie (never mind the fact that I belong to the category of people who can spot errors in the uncertainty formulas as they’re being written on the blackboard, or maybe I didn’t spot it because afterwards it was ok). I recommend that if you are physicist that you go see the movie. You might also feel at home there.
Time keeps on passing by. Right now, apples, pumpkins, squashes and persimmons are in season, amongst other vegetables and fruits. The fall weather has settled in nicely, and the usual seasonal events are happening. For example, this is the season when postdoctoral applications are made, and I find myself writing a lot of letters of recommendation. In over a month, I will be reading these applications with the rest of the folks here, to make decisions on who we are going to hire.
Imagine my surprise this week when going to a grocery store, they are already setting up their Christmas decorations. Isn’t it a bit early for that? I was hoping that they wold be setting up the `Turkey day’ decorations after Hallowe’en. This is not the only place. To me, it’s too early for the end of year Holiday decorations. Seems to me they want to rush the end of the year. Or maybe they have nothing to be thankful for.
Yesterday night I attended a reception for the international scholars to UCSB. This was the first time that such a celebration took place in Santa Barbara, thanks to an anonymous donor. It was a lively event, and various important people from the UCSB campus showed up. I won’t bore you with the details.
Amongst the interesting facts that I collected yesterday, was that most international students in the US come to study in the science and technology fields, while very few people from the US go out to study and when they do, the statistic is mostly on humanities. I also found out that there are about 640000 students from abroad in US Universities, and that US Universities graduate about 30000 PhD’s annually.
Not surprisingly, current cuts in US University funding (especially state Universities) will hurt the efforts to get the best (graduate) students to the US, with the consequent deterioration of the pool of people with talent contributing to the US economy. An interesting article regarding this issue can be found here.
This year I am working on a University committee in charge of international education. So I have to learn quite a bit about this stuff.
Simple observation: if you lose loose the people from abroad (who are extremely good students), and you lose loose the local people (because they can not afford to go to school any longer), where is the human capital investment in the future development of technology going to come from?
Remember, modern economies depend on having the best and most innovative modern technology in order to compete. And, new ideas for technology come from people who know what the current technologies are, what they can do and how to make them. Ideas are not born from thin air.
Rather than complain about my lack of time for doing anything, I thought I would share something that I stumbled upon and I just had to stop for a few minutes to listen.
Take out the popcorn and watch this. If you’re a cat owner, like me, you might have seen situations like this in the past. It’s nice to finally understand what the arguments between cats are about.
Here I am, completely overwhelmed by my academic endeavors (hence the low amount of recent blog posts). Over the past few months I have collected spam in Russian directed to this site, and turned it via Babelfish into English. These are the spam messages that say, in some form or another: your blog is good, with a link to a dubious website. This is unlike the random letters with nasty links sort of spam. The whole point of this exercise is that the simple message above gets garbled. I’m sure that having a lot of slang helps in this. Plus it also shows some interesting cultural differences between here and there, wherever there might be.
Sufficiently interesting and cognitive theme
Outstanding [statya].[Respekt] to the author.
It is excellently written! I will much think…
[Mlin], [spamery] simply reached already by this their primitive!
This here from what you did take that so especially and one-sided? I think that it is possible to make in order to open this hypothesis.
But why it is here exclusive thus? I search for, why not to enlarge this theme.
Well why you did solve only thus? I reflect, how it is possible to enlarge this theme.
[Blog] is very qualitative. To you reward for it or order of honor. =)
Lunch here can be very entertaining at times. Especially on days like today where we didn’t speak about physics at all. Today I learned that the proper plural for a (relatively large) set of crows is a murder of crows. Unexpected, perhaps, but I’m sure there is an illustrious reason for the name of such a collection of birds to be named such. That is not too different from a school of fish or a herd of antelope. Except for the fact that the plural collective sounds more gruesome in the case of crows. Here is a link where you can find a few of these fun plurals. Now, in the spirit of this idea, here are a few suggestions on plurals for professionals:
A confusion of economists.
An arrogance of physicists.
A rabble of politicians.
A conspiracy of lawyers.
Some suggested a co-set of mathematicians. It doesn’t ring right. I’m still considering what would be the correct way to describe large numbers of accountants ( a book of accountants, perhaps?). Perhaps I could play to stereotypes that accountants are boring, but I couldn’t find something that sounded quite right either. Bring in your witty suggestions. It is especially important to play to stereotypes of professions. Looking especially for fun ways to describe academics of various branches.
Update: it’s a congress of baboons as well. No surprise there.
Charles K. Kao did research in material science of glass, and argued that the losses in glass fibers available in the 1960’s where mostly due to impurities in the material. A few years later glass of sufficient purity was made by Corning, and modern fiber optics telecommunications where born. Nowadays, this technology impacts us directly by making the infrastructure that handles the information traffic of the internet possible.
Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith created the CCD. This is one of the main technologies in modern photography. It make the capture and reading of light fast and efficient and it essentially made photographic film obsolete: the cost of capturing an image went down to essentially zero. It is also one of the standard technologies for astrophysics and most importantly, it is not restricted to the visible spectrum. It can be used to read light from distant sources very fast, data that can be transmitted to researchers all over the world very quickly (we don’t have to wait to develop the film), and being in electronic format, it is easy to manipulate, send and store. This is anther technology that has wide applications on the Internet, capturing live images that end up in U-Tube and Flicker.
Lubos laments the fact that the Nobel prize went just for technology. Although I sympathize, I think that this is not a bad choice at all. Although one can call this applied physics rather than fundamental physics, the technological breakthroughs enabled by these inventions is truly remarkable. Nowadays, we take it for granted. But it is truly a marvelous thing. Today, I can have a video-phone conversation on the Internet with someone on the other side of the planet, for a costs that is essentially zero. This is a science fiction idea that did come through, but not necessarily the way they were originally envisioned.
You should also consider that modern telecommunications account for a big chunk of the worlds GDP, and it will surely grow in the future. The technologies that make this possible come from Physics research, and it might take many years before the engineering issues and the costs can be lowered enough so that we all benefit from them. Besides, the whole architecture of the modern Internet came out from CERN. A lot of people needed to look at large chunks of data with completely independent computer systems ans operating systems. A common message protocol for communications and standards for addressing data was born from these necessities. It would be hard to give a Nobel prize for that.
I would wish that the public at large was more aware that the technologies of today are the product of years of development, starting from physics discoveries and inventions and refined by engineers so that they can be mass produced with quality that can be controlled. Without the first invention, the rest of the process doesn’t work.
I have just attended the XV European Workshop on String Theory. It took place in Zürich, Switzerland. Here is the link to the conference information and the talk slides. The conference featured a lot of young speakers who I had not met before. I found it very entertaining. Curiously enough, I really got to feel for the first time that different countries have their own way of doing physics. I think this reflects a bit on the attitudes of different cultures on what constitutes good taste. There is nothing wrong per se with any such preferences, it’s just an observation that I have heard many times before, but it had not really made itself so obvious to me as this time around. The menu of topics covered was rather formal and the hospitality of the event was incredible. I’m very grateful to Matthias and Matthias for providing such a welcoming environment. Here is a picture of Zürich (the best of the ones I took while wandering aimlessly through the streets of the city).
The weather was absolutely perfect and the town is truly a lovely place to loose oneself into.
