Absent minded professor

It is my good fortune that the acts of breathing and pumping blood are involuntary actions. For if they were deliberate actions, I would have had a long life spanning 30 minutes at the most.

The problem is that I cannot remember the most routine activities on a daily basis. For example, I've been wearing a wristwatch since the age of 13; and yet after 16 years, I still, oftentimes, forget to wear it when I head out to work in the mornings. My wife says, "Can you do while I go take a shower?" I do hear it, I do understand what she is saying,¹ and, in fact, I would've responded in the affirmative, "Yes dear, I will take care of it."²

It is not like I've a poor memory. In fact, compared to many people, I come across as having an elephantine or photographic memory. I can remember snippets of very casual conversations (over Instant Messaging, that is the only kind of conversation I've been known to be capable of) from two years ago down to the last minute detail. I can remember roads and locations just by driving through it once. And yet I cannot remember to pay my electricity bill without a dozen reminders. I cannot remember to post the mail-in rebate offer until almost the deadline, regardless of the fact that I would've filled the form the day it arrived, attached the UPC code and put it in an envelope and sealed it. But it would sit there in my desk gathering dust because I would not have a stamp handy to mail it off right away. And pretty quickly, it would be buried under a pile of electronics like hard drives, video cards, memory chips, etc.³

Oh! Another good one: charging my cell phone battery. One would think that after 5 years of owning a cell phone, you'd get used to the mundane routine of putting it on the charger every night or so. But not me! You'd not believe the number of times someone tried to reach me and the phone was off because it was low on battery and they think that I'm deliberately avoiding their calls or screening calls.⁴

I started wondering about my inability to remember routine tasks on the long and boring metro ride to Fairfax, VA, after I realized that I'd forgotten my watch. So I pulled out my cell phone only to find that it had turned itself off because the battery had no charge. The first thought that came to my mind was: absent minded professor. So naturally, I wanted to blame it all on the soul-sucking effect that a PhD has on a person. But unfortunately for me, the very same PhD had trained me to spot logical inconsistencies in a theory faster than a speeding bullet.⁵ How can I blame it on PhD if I've had these symptoms ever since I can remember.

May be the reason is I'm always lost in thought... daydreaming is more like it. I am always thinking about imaginary situations, mostly complicated conundrums, some physics equations that I read about on the internet, figuring out how to solve a particular problem on the computer in at least five different programming languages, or trying to choreograph to a song that is playing at that particular moment in my head.

I doubt there is a cure for daydreaming. Luckily for me, my epitaph won't say, "Here lies a man who dreamt himself to death," because I asphyxiated during a daydreaming session, forgetting to perform the voluntary act of breathing.

¹ Yes, I do understand what my wife is saying. Well, most of the time.

² Sorry, the last part was a bit of dramatization. I still haven't taught myself the art of punctuating the responses to my beloved with phrases like "yes dear" and "honey" or its shortened counterpart "hon."

³ Why do you look at me like that? Normal people do have those lying around on their desk, don't they?

⁴ Yes, I'm a recluse and don't like to talk on the phone. But that will be the topic for another day.

⁵ That is right, kids, PhD makes you the superman of smelling bullshit in publications. At least, it will give you an ego big enough to pooh-pooh other theories which aren't built upon yours and don't cite your publications at least thrice in their publications.

FORTRAN

Reading Slashdot this morning informed me that John W. Backus, the developer of FORTRAN died last weekend (NY Times link). Aerospace/computational fluid dynamics geeks might be amongst the dying breed who still use fixed-form FORTRAN as their bread-and-butter programming language. All of us have at different times expressed frustration at the quirks of the language, and wished that it had nifty features which made our lives easier in the more higher level programming languages. But I doubt very few languages can even come close to beating FORTRAN's efficiency when it comes to serious number crunching algorithms. And, yes, it is still FORTRAN for us old-timers.

On an unrelated note, one comment on Slashdot pointed out the hilarity of the Slashdot title for this article John W. Backus Dies at 82; Developed FORTRAN. Headline writing, especially in English, is an art.

Kids these days

... that and "Back in my day, we'd to..." are pretty much the responses that I'm used to when it comes to discussing education (or the stuff you'd to know by a certain grade level) with my grandparents. The point that always came across was that we kids were getting off easier than how the adults had it back in their childhood. And what's worse, every time this topic came around, they would invariably ask, "So what are they teaching you in school these days?" And the idiot that I was, I'd brag about the most difficult thing (at least in my opinion at that point of time) that I'd heard about in school. This would lead them to quiz me on the subject, and determine how much I knew, which, I'd be made painfully aware of, is pretty much nothing. Of course, I'm much wiser now and just mumble when this question comes up, except in my CV.

But this was back in India, and back when I was growing up. Now in America, it seems that the opinion is quite different, at least that is the impression I get after watching the show Are you smarter than a 5th grader?: that kids in grade school learn and know much more than what adults know about, or have long forgotten if they were ever taught these things in the first place. I am sure that the adults generally agree that they were taught a lot more things which the kids these don't have to, e.g., do cursive writing, learn grammar and spelling, or use slide rules. But I also see that the adults generally are quick to follow it up with this disclaimer: "Kids these days have calculators to do these things, do you think they'd know what to do with a slide rule? Of course, I never understood any of it, and boy it was difficult." What am I missing? Why is it that something that I'd think you'd brag about with pride, like say knowing how to use a slide rule and still knowing how to use it, is often dismissed off with a disclaimer "we'd to do it, but we didn't know what the hell we were doing"?

Anyway, back to the show, I saw the promos while watching reruns of Simpson, and it did make me wonder, I'm ashamed to admit, if I knew the concepts that a fifth-grader should know. So I watched the show yesterday, and boy were the questions trivial. But people seemed to have trouble with it. Of course, there was this question: what is the minimum number of coins you'd need to make 61¢? and I answered 4, because I didn't know 50¢ coins existed!

Another question that I was not sure of, more like a nitpick, is: What gas do humans exhale that is important for the plants to survive? I think that is the exact wording, but I cannot guarantee. However, while the expected answer is probably obvious from the context of a fifth-grade level knowledge, I think that the question is ambiguous. Humans exhale air which has a significant amount of O₂ and CO₂. Now plants need both these gases to survive. So unless they clearly specify if they meant plant photosynthesis or plant respiration, the answer is unclear.

Am I right, or am I, in fact, NOT smarter than a 5th grader?

What is your pedigree?

My friend Maccanena has this unique superhero-like serendipity that makes her stumble upon the most interesting of websites. If it weren't for the fact that she immediately sends me the links to these interesting sites, I'd be extremely jealous of her powers.

Today, she stumbled across this treasure-trove of a site (for ignoring what we were supposed to do and go on a link-clicking-spree, that is) for math and science geeks like me. Trying to schedule her PhD defense she came across the mathematical lineage page of a professor in University of Maryland, College Park. The mathematical lineage was traced all the way back to Lagrange via people like Courant, Hilbert, Dirichlet, Poisson and Fourier! Now if that array of names didn't make your jaw just drop onto the keyboard, a la Jim Carrey's in the movie The Mask when he saw Cameron Diaz, then you sir (or madam as the case may be) are no geek or have ice water running in your veins.

Needless, to say the geeks in us were extremely amused and excited about it wondering what great scientists we might be linked to. The link provided at the end of the page didn't work, but a simple search of mathematics genealogy quickly led me to The Mathematics Genealogy Project. Now while the page says Mathematics, it is much broader than the general "math" that most people are used to.

A search of the database for Lagrange yields a connection to Euler (more as an intellectual link and not as a thesis advisor) and from there on to Bernoulli. Somewhere along the line Kronecker also was featured. Now to find other Fluid Dynamics greats in the list... I fear much of the rest of the day, and probably the next few days will be wasted in tracing the genealogy and possibly reading the original papers and dissertations from famous scientists and mathematicians. This happened once before when I came across the original paper on Reynolds number which was reprinted for Osborne Reynolds' birthday a couple of years ago.

Talking about genealogy, I am reminded that the place where I work has an apple tree which is purported to be the direct descendant of the apple tree that Sir Isaac Newton was sitting under when an apple fell on his head and led to the theory of gravity. Thought whoever is reading this would like to know.

There are no equals in research.

Researchers, especially the ones with a Dr. in front of the name, or a Ph.D trailing after their name, or worse (or even better?) a Dr. in front of their name and a Ph.D trailing after their name, or, the ultimate, a Dr. in front of their name, a Ph.D trailing after their name and a title like Albert E. Linnaeus Professor of the School of Engineering, have big egos.

And, it is a fact that a graduate student can prove no theory quicker than he could prove that when two such researchers get together, no conference room is large enough to hold both their egos. It doesn't matter if they are working on exactly the same problem, using the same approaches, and refer to the same set of literature references in all their papers (in the Previous Work section), each would still have nothing but scorn for the other person's approach, mainly because it deviates from their own approach by a trifling detail.

The numerical simulations guys are only too familiar with this, "His research is worthless, he has no understanding of the empirical model. He uses α=0.3756 ×10^-6, when clearly everyone knows it is 0.3782 ×10^-6. How can you trust a research like that?" And who can forget the experimentalists' opinion, "Clearly everyone knows that you cannot get any reliable data when you conduct measurements at 10 microns resolution, you need at least 1 micron resolution, that is why we got this fancy new equipment. And don't even get me started on his curve-fit approach. The error bars are all over the place."

From there on, it just gets worse as you move further up the spectrum, computational simulation guys vs. experimentalists, engineers vs. scientists, economists vs. science folk, etc. They all sincerely believe that their field is the most complicated and that others can never fathom the intricacies involved, whereas they inherently have a better understanding of the other's field mainly because it is simpler than their own.

Personally, I feel that my own field was so mind-boggling-ly simple that I feel that my PhD degree was a steal, and I wake up in the nights with scary dreams of how an angry horde of professors discovering how I'd duped them came crashing down on my house for revenge. I've often wondered, how people achieve this sense of accomplishment and a feeling that their PhD is worth something. I mean don't they just beat out all sense of self-worth during your PhD? How does it grow back? My theory is that professors (well, as with every theory it only works on a finite sample set of cases and has more exceptions to the rule), at least, build it back up by breaking the spirits of their graduate students.

Anyway, leaving my morbid dreams aside for the moment, and returning to the topic, it is always amusing to be a part of this clash of egos, assuming that you are watching it from a distance and never have to take sides or chip in with your opinion. The argument never ends, each party tries to act sympathetic to other's inability to fathom the depth and complexity of their research. Different tactics are employed: "Because of your experience in your field/approach, you are making assumptions which just cannot be made in our field/approach. These things have distinct meanings, which you'll never understand even if I explain it.", or "You know you are complicating things far more than necessary. But I guess that is the inherent nature of your field/approach, and you are struggling to get our way of thinking/approaching the subject matter.", or when one suddenly realizes that the other person just stated their life's work in a much more clear, concise manner than they'd ever been able to, "Well, you are almost there, there are some nuances which you are obviously missing. But, of course, we cannot expect you to know them. So let us just move on for the sake of time. We've only booked this conference room for another hour you know."

The only happy coexistence between two researchers is when there is a master-slave err... I mean master-subordinate relationship. Once the pecking order is established, nothing paints a more harmonious picture than a research lab. Approximations of this peaceful coexistence can be found in situations when one controls the funding that the other desperately needs to survive. On the surface, they paint a picture of serene calm, but in private this situation makes for the best drama. Too bad, they don't have reality shows about PhD nerds. I'd watch that. Oh wait, PhD comics is a pretty good approximation of that. Damn, and I thought I'd a million-dollar idea. Oh well, back to research then.

Louisville slugger

Although I am of the opinion that much of the country music is quite silly with trucks and whiskey, it seems that listening to country music on the radio did teach me something new about the great American tradition of baseball.

Lately, I've been hearing the term Louisville slugger on almost every country music song that I hear. Well, not almost every song, I exaggerate, I've heard it in two songs. One is by Mary Chopin Carpenter whose title I forget, the song goes something like "sometimes you're the Louisville slugger, sometimes you're the ball." And the other song is by an artist whose name I cannot remember, nor can I remember the title, but it is about jilted lover smashing the tricked-up four-wheel-drive that belongs to the guy who dumped her.

Initially, when I'd heard the Mary Chopin song, I figured she was referring to the nickname of some famous baseball player, and since I'm not at all interested in baseball (even though I like cricket very much, and the Cricket world cup starts soon!), I left it at that.

But then when I heard the lyrics about hitting a four-wheel-drive with Louisville slugger, I'd to wonder - it would take a woman of extraordinary strength to be able to wield a baseball player. Now to the feminists out there, I'm not trying to be chauvinistic and saying that women can never do that, I'm just saying it is weird. Now, putting aside the question of Louisville slugger, one must wonder if she was arrested for vandalizing someone else's property.

So using my amazing powers of scientific reasoning and deduction (after all I've a PhD, never mind I got that because the department ran out of funding and had to send me off with a PhD so as to not mar their good graduation record) I figured out that they must be talking about a baseball bat. Yeah, it was a clever piece of deductive reasoning that led me to conclude that the sport must be baseball because of the word slugger. Genius, huh?

Once at work, I consulted the omniscient Google, and I'm enlightened. Louisville slugger is a famous baseball bat which have been used in US games since 1884, and is apparently the Official Baseball Bat of MLB.

Coming to think of it, it was a good thing that I wasn't quizzed on this sport by my father-in-law as a part of the approval process to marry his daughter. Phew!

Of wedding invitations

My wife and I were discussing our wedding invitations today, or rather what our invitations should say. For those of you who are scratching your head and wondering, "why do you worry about the text on your wedding invitations after you are married? Obviously, you're married, otherwise you cannot call her your wife." Good job, Sherlock, but ours isn't anything like a traditional wedding. We decided to do away with the traditional ceremony, and just got married at the courthouse. Now we are planning a wedding reception, which will (hopefully) happen in the next six months. These invitations are for the wedding reception.

We started out with the traditional stuff. My wife prefers the usage: "The presence of your company is requested...", and I prefer the usage: "... request the pleasure of your company..." A google-fight of the two usages shows that the latter is more prevalent. Any opinions?

Anyway, this got me thinking of all the various wordings in invitations I think I've come across so far...

"... invite you to join us in blessing the couple as they embark..."

"... share their happiness as they begin their journey of life as partners..."

"... celebrate their union as they exchange vows..."

etc. Although I don't think I've ever come across this,

"... celebrate their license to fornicate under state and religious sanction..." (My wife likes this one especially. Too bad, we cannot go with this.)

I wonder why.

Oh, anyone who stumbles on this page, please leave suggestions for our invitation wording in the comments if you happen to read this within one month of the posting date. As for the funny, outlandish invitation wordings that you can think of... you can leave them on the comments section anytime.

PhDs on blogosphere

This blog seems to have absolutely no visitors (other than my three, may be two these days, loyal readers). I guess it is partly my fault that I've an account on blogger rather than on livejournal, myspace, facebook or one of those social networking sites, where more of my friends would stumble upon it. I detest social networking sites pretty much for same reasons the respectable physicists in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy detested the use of Finite Improbablity for breaking ice at parties: I'm never invited to these social networking sites, nor am I ever added to anybody's friends list.

Yesterday, I was lamenting the poor readership of this blog to Maccanena, and she mentioned this blogging community of postdocs. Starting with propterdoc's blog, I went on a link-clicking spree which wasted the rest of my afternoon. A few had clever titles like Minor Revisions, which led me to consider some silly titles like Results & Discussion, or Conclusions & Future Work for my own blog. Some seemed to rediscover the academic concept: if you don't publish, you don't exist, a fact I, and some of my friends, were sorely made aware of by our diligent advisors back in our PhD days. However, one common thread in all these blogs: folks worrying about results, publications, funding or the lack of it.

One thing I noticed is that much of the postdoc bloggers I've come across so far are mostly women, at least they sound that way on the blog. Does it mean that there are more women postdocs than men postdocs, or does it mean that women vent more than men online on blogs?


P.S. For those of you who didn't get the Hitchhiker's reference: "The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub- Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood - and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.

Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this - partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties."

P.P.S. You should check out the xkcd's strip on the trouble with Wikipedia.

A flash-based quiz

So here is something for those that stumbled over here to waste time on: a quiz.

Hopefully, this will cheer up those who are looking to waste time at work clicking on something silly and time-wasting. Also you might want to hit the mute button.

RIP: Scattered thoughts...

Continuing on with the spring cleaning of the blog, I've decided to change the title to what, in my opinion, represents the blog more accurately: a digital snapshot of the neural misfirings of my brain.

Now if only I can find some issue to blog about...

Spring cleaning

I'm bored, can you tell?

So now that I've overcome the inertia and have started dusting off the cobwebs off of my decrepit blog, I'm trying to come up with things to do with it or post to it.

I'd like a new design (layout, color scheme, fonts) for the blog. Blogger has a small list of templates, none of which I particularly like over the present one. So even after two years... this seems like the best of the worst. Wow! Just had a realization that my tastes haven't changed much over the last two years. Not sure if it is a good thing or a bad thing.

I notice that the blogger interface had changed quite a bit. I'd read about the renovations on Slashdot ages ago, but never bothered to do the migration, nor did I check out the new interface. The labels option seems like a good addition. Me likee. So now that brings the question of whether I should have different blogs for topics, like rants, computer geekery, and *sigh* cats... (of course, this one will always be the home of pointless rants and in-my-egotistical-opinion funny writings), or just use labels to tag articles appropriately. But then again, if I use labels, will I be able to do sub-categories? I guess I'll have to investigate blogger features to figure this out.

At this point, a faint voice in my head gently reminds me that the more important issue here is: am I going to sustain enough interest in this blogging fad long enough to run into limitations of labeling system in blogger? Judging by the last time, probably not. I guess that pretty much answers it.

Random thought(s) that popped into my head while writing this entry: I was reminded of this funny xkcd comic while talking about cats.

No time for cynicism...

In other words, I finished up my PhD, graduated from university, got myself a job and embraced the adult way of life. That, in a nutshell, is my explanation/excuse for neglecting this blog during the last one and half years.

Well, almost! The first half was mostly spent on wrapping up what was long and seemingly never-ending research spanning four years, summarizing it in what turned out to be approximately 250 pages of text (double spaced, 10pt Times New Roman font) and figures, and about 50 minutes worth of Powerpoint presentation. Reminded me of that PhD comics strip. Then came the task of finding a job, which by a combination of my laziness, ill-luck and ineptitude(?) turned out extremely suspenseful. Once I got the job, life just went ahead and made itself too busy to even contemplate anything else; and before I knew it, it was one and half years... the blog languished, gathering dust and cobwebs.

Of course, it must be mentioned that during this period, I realized that the friend that I was good friends with, was much more than a friend. This realization necessitated me to undergo the age-old romance ritual which I have jeered all through my life. Oh! how the mighty fall. This downfall caused much mirth and celebration amongst my friends. Luckily for me, the girl I fell in love with is as lazy and sociopath-ical as I am. So we are quite cozy in our own little world.

Things that have transpired since I last wrote up a blog entry:

1. Finished up my PhD thesis. Reason: department ran out of funding and had to let me graduate.
   


2. Successfully defended aforementioned thesis.


3. Landed myself an adult job... as a postdoc. Net pay increase: $100 per month :( Bottom-line: poorer than I was since I last blogged. Reason: no more student discounts on things.


4. The adult job required me to know a lot of things that had nothing in relation to my PhD topic, thereby necessitating a crash course of most stuff that computer science majors and code monkeys learn in the first year of undergraduate course.


5. Quickly developed a sense of cynicism about the new job, and realized that the work place is not as great as it is touted to be, especially if you are only paid a 100 bucks more each month, but are expected to work more than you did for your PhD. Promptly started missing the PhD life.


6. Now this is important... so pay attention! Found the love of my life. Bottom-line: now have to learn how to be romantic and realize that the voice in the background is not my roommate watching TV at a high volume, but my girlfriend saying something. So I've to actually pay attention and not continue to stare at the bright monitor in the dark room.


7. Moved to a new house with my girlfriend. Standard of living improved drastically.


8. Married the aforementioned love of my life. Sounds like a fairy tale almost. Quite a recent development and one that I'm truly happy about. No complaints here. No really! Really really!


9. Proud father of two fat and lazy cats. Bottom-line: Nothing in our house is safe anymore. If you treasure something, lock it away... or else risk curious cats scratching all over it.

As you can see, things happened one after another in a quick succession, and I was left with no time to be cynical about things... until now...