What happened to John?

Hi everyone. I’m still alive and life has been interesting. Ann and I bought a house that we’ll move into in August, but in the mean time we’re packing up and heading to an apartment in Chapel Hill. The lease on our rental house is up at the end of the month and the crummy owners wanted to get it on the market so as not to miss out on those oh-so-common July renters rather than give us an extension of less than a year.

In addition to that fun, I’ve been to both Huntsville and Jacksonville briefly and watched one of my EPA mentors head off for industry.

Finally, on Sunday night, as we were driving into RTP to get some paperwork for the next morning’s mortgage signing, we got caught in a freak rain storm that caused puddles to form on Martin Luther King Parkway (a newly built, divided four lane road). The first puddle was fine (I was going less than 20 MPH so we didn’t even hydroplane) but the second one was two to three feet deep and as we plunged in my engine cut out and still hasn’t restarted. The water was most of the way up the passenger door and we were stuck for a good fifteen minutes or so before the water drained and we could push the car off the road (with the welcome help of some samaritans).

Fortunately, Andy’s googling and Mary’s dashing rescue allowed us to get out of the lightning and retrieve the needed papers in time for the morning.  Unfortunately, I may have totaled my relatively new, unpaid-off car. Oh, why couldn’t we have hydroplaned over that puddle? (Feel free to discuss the physics of that, or lack thereof, in the comments section.) In the meantime I am driving a rental pick-up truck — you should have seen the rental agent’s draw drop when I asked for one — in order to help with moving. For some reason everyone wants a compact right now. All I know is I’ve already ordered my “W - The President” bumper sticker.

In the meantime, I have a great story on how two ball boys saved Michigan’s undefeated season in 1997 as well as a nominee for the blog roll:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

It’s like crack for anyone who likes graphs, statistics or politics (a triple-whammy for me). Also in the intersection of cool graphs and politics is Presidential Watch 08, which has great tools for plotting the political blogosphere as well as trends. Without these very impressive analyses, would we have ever been able to tell that Fox news leans Republican?

Finally, if you can show that playing Minesweeper is NP-complete, you can win a million dollars…

The Physics Arxiv Blog

In the physics community it is common practice to submit “finished,” but not yet peer-reviewed, research papers to a preprint server so that they become time-stamped (useful for establishing credit) and freely available to the public. Often, once a paper is revised in response to peer-review and published, a “preprint” copy of the final version is placed on the server so that copies can easily be obtained without tracking down whatever journal it was published in (something that has gotten vastly easier thanks to Google Scholar). The arXiv preprint server started in 1991 at Los Alamos (where it had the dubious-sounding address of xxx.lanl.gov since the Web was not yet especially World-Wide) and now hosts papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, and quantitative biology. Anyone who wants may subscribe to have a listing of all the new and updated papers on a given topic regularly sent via e-mail. For me, at least, scanning through the daily cond-mat listing is one of the main ways I try to stay current in my field.

The newest addition to our blogroll is a very cool idea — The Physics Arxiv blog. The author combs through the daily update emails and writes about the interesting papers they see and you’ll never guess how I stumbled across it. Sometimes papers on arXiv are kinda crazy and take a long time to get published (if ever). Sometimes research is happening so quickly that entire research groups dictate what they do in response to the latest preprint (right Joe?). No matter what it’s a neat blog and a good way to stay current in physics.

Innotech, er… EniTech

I spent Saturday through Friday last week in Seattle at the Society of Toxicology annual meeting. Seattle is awesome and I had a lot more time to explore than my previous, three day trip. The weather was actually pretty decent — it was often rainy but not raining. In fact, it only rained the two times I didn’t take my umbrella with me.

Anyhow, I need to get back into the blogging habit, and as a big Terminator fan (apparently one of the few that prefers the original) I think that the website for Enitech is pretty entertaining.

Presidential Politics and the Economy

No, not that economy.  Instead it is the the prostitution industry which, at least in Denver — site of the Democratic nominating convention — is expecting a lot of bangs for their bucks August 25-28.  According to San Francisco based postitute Carol Leigh, however, “It would be a lot better for the sex workers if it was the Republican convention… We get a lot more business.  I don’t know if they’re just frustrated because of the family values agenda.”

Republicans, it seems, are not the optimal convention-goer either.  Said Leigh: “Computer conventions can be lucrative.  There’s a lot of nerds that don’t get out much.”

The Accelerating Nature of the Web

We all know that the internet is nearly instantaneous, yet the rate at which information is disseminated still shocks me. The Columbia Journalism Review has an interesting blurb about how the unexpected death of Heath Ledger spread throughout the internet, specifically blogs, and how the mainstream media (MSM) caught up. There’s also a story about Fred Thompson’s recently-ended Presidential campaign and the media.

On a tangent, I found myself very much saddened by Ledger’s passing. As a numbers and facts guy, I’d made a connection to him through the fact that we were born only a day apart, and I found him to be a great actor who starred in many films I loved. I find the fact that we’ll never be able to enjoy any of his gift after “The Dark Knight” to be a great loss.

And now for something completely different

I have nothing constructive to say, but Small and Wang have been up for a week now.

Apropos of nothing:

We don’t read so good.

Snoopy gets deep.

Physics is easier than football. Google image search “BCS explained” and this is the first hit you get.

Predicting Movie Tastes

To yet again shamelessly steal from a post on Andrew Gelman’s blog, there is a Netflix Prize that “seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences.”  Apparently at least one group is applying clustering approaches similar to those used to study the influence chemicals on genetics to group various tags (such as “action” or “drama”) assigned by Netflix reviewers.  Straight from the Department of Measurement and Information Systems at the University of Technology and Economics in Hungary (via the internet) I present to you the analysis of the Keanu Reeves vehicle Constantine:

  

Apparently our Hungarian friends have a real soft-spot for old “Whoa,” because they also analyze the Matrix trilogy:

It would seem that becoming more of a “drama”, less “typical for men” and more “dirary style” (!) accounts for the sequels to the Matrix sucking so hard.  I suppose that defining a “three-hour long rave scene” property isn’t very useful for other movies.

Confounding yourself with Google

My boss is a Google addict (Googaholic?). He never keeps references to web pages he’s visited, no bookmarks, favorites, or anything like that. His philosophy seems to be that if you want to find somewhere you’ve been, just ask Google how to get there. This includes his own academic web page. Whenever he wants to go there, he simply puts his last name into Google.

For years his page would come up 6th on Google’s list. A while back it failed to show up at all. Why is his page suddenly demoted out of existence? This was the state of things for several months until recently his page is back at 6th place. It’s already a little strange, but here is where the fun really starts. If I search his name on Google on the computer in my office, he comes up 2nd. If my office mate searches, he comes up 5th. If I search again, but with a different browser, he comes up 6th.

As far as we can tell, Google is giving different results based on what browser you are using, or possibly browser/OS combination. I wonder what deep meaningful reason they have for this, or maybe they just like messing around with us.

I’m never getting anything done ever again.

Coastal gave me a new Tablet PC today. There are lots of cool applications, but the coolest by far is the Physics Illustrator. It’s basically the same thing as this YouTube video.

Yeah… it’s pretty awesome.

the vague and corrupting hope that, in a crisis, the government would bail them out

“In the financial markets, you have to care what other people think, even if what they think is screwed up. Crowd dynamics build on each other. But these things — hurricanes, earthquakes — don’t exhibit crowd behavior. There’s a real underlying risk you have to understand. You have to be a value investor.” John Seo

The New York Times has a great article on the catastrophe insurance, emphasizing that freaky behavior occurs in the long tail of probability distributions. It’s a Sunday Magazine feature article (meaning that it’s a hefty ten web-pages long but it has some really cool stuff on statistics, finance, and the life of a mathematician named Seo who has made it big in finance. After taking a temp job because the insurance at his new post-doc didn’t cover his wife’s pregnancy, he ended up with a $250000 salary and $40000 signing bonus after six weeks of work.

Apparently he’s a genius at pricing unusual events. Rather than being counter-intuitive, the article suggests that he has a knack for coming up with prices that actually seem fair.