Misha Lemeshko's blog

The Journal of Irreproducible Results

2011-08-01T21:28:00.000+02:00

I didn't know that a predecessor of the famous Annals of Improbable Research (whose staff runs the Ig Nobel Prize award) was The Journal of Irreproducible Results.

It was founded almost 60 years ago and apparently became a very credible scientific magazine. At least, some people take it very seriously:

"...JIR received attention from American military intelligence when a copy of one of their articles was found among other papers in an abandoned terrorist headquarters in the Middle East. The article was a highly unrealistic and farcical explanation of how to build a nuclear weapon that some unwitting Al Qaida member had filed away. Nonetheless the discovery prompted a short-lived official investigation..." (wiki)

Take care,

Misha

Vavilov, Cherenkov, and credit for discoveries

2011-07-31T17:45:00.006+02:00

We all know that accelerated charged particles emit light - that's how modern high-intensity light sources, synchrotrons, function. Interestingly, uniformly moving particles can emit light too.

The idea goes back to the 1904 Sommerfeld's paper, where he studied the motion of charged particles in a vacuum, and demonstrated that particles flying faster than the speed of light emit radiation even when moving uniformly [1]. Of course, the special relativity theory that appeared next year, rendered Sommerfeld's discovery just a funny mathematical result that has nothing to do with reality, since according to the special relativity no particle can move faster than light in a vacuum.

It's worth noting that the velocity restrictions imposed by the special relativity apply only to a single particle (a group velocity of a bunch of particles can be anything) moving in a vacuum (the speed of light in a medium is much smaller than in a vacuum and particles can move faster than that). However, it took more than 30 years to generalize the Sommerfeld idea to the case of charged particles propagating through a material.

Pavel Cherenkov was a pursuing a PhD under Sergey Vavilov, a brother of a famous geneticist Nikolai Vavilov (who was imprisoned and eventually killed by the Soviet regime). Cherenkov was studying the luminescence of uranium salts in solutions irradiated by gamma-rays, and was quite surprised to see the "luminescence" of a pure liquid (sulfuric acid it was), with no salts added. Actually, he was convinced that his PhD work was completely ruined [2].

And it was Vavilov who suggested that this radiation was not luminescence but something completely new, and encouraged Cherenkov to continue the measurements. Indeed, very soon Igor Tamm and Ilya Frank developed a theory for the effect, showing that the radiation is emitted by electrons propagating faster than the speed of light in this particular solution. In 1958 Cherenkov, Tamm, and Frank shared a Nobel Prize for this discovery (unfortunately, without Vavilov who deceased in 1951).

Although Russians call it the "Vavilov-Cherenkov effect", it seems that the name of Vavilov is omitted in the rest of the world where people simply refer to the "Cherenkov Radiation". Why do they?

The funny thing is that immediately after the discovery Vavilov (himself) wrote a paper and submitted it to Nature, where it was rejected (!), and then to Physical Review. This paper had a single author - Cherenkov [3].

I wonder whether such an extreme academic generosity would be possible nowadays :-)

Take care,

Misha

[1] A. Sommerfeld, Göttingen Nachrichten 9, 363 (1904); 201 (1905)

[2] V. L. Ginsburg "About science and about myself" (2001)

[3] P. A. Čerenkov, Phys. Rev. 52, 378 (1937)

Google+

2011-07-11T10:06:00.000+02:00

I have no idea whether Google+ will last more than Wave and whether it's any better than facebook, but you can add me to circles here :-)

Misha

Some drums for this Sunday

2011-05-15T17:44:00.001+02:00

Some stuff for 27.04.11

2011-04-27T18:01:00.002+02:00

1) retractionwatch.wordpress.com - a very nice blog about misconduct, fraud, cheating, and other things we all love

2) A Harvard entrance exam from 1899

3) The world is producing more PhDs than ever before. Is it time to stop? (Nature)

4) Reform the PhD system or close it down (Nature)

5) "Down with Determinants!" by Sheldon Axler. The paper presents a different approach to linear algebra, the one without determinants.

Take care,

Misha

How to Publish a Scientific Comment

2011-04-26T23:18:00.023+02:00

A nice essay by Prof. Rick Trebino from Georgia Tech (here is the comment he finally published). I heard people complaining that publishing comments is hard - a lot of politics involved, journal editors don't want to confess in publishing wrong articles, and so on.

Perhaps, it might be a good idea to make a separate journal publishing only comments and replies to them, as guys propose here (in Russian). In such a way one may highlight all the fraud/misconduct/delusion cases via peer-reviewed comments and replies, without any troubles due to politics of a given journal.

No, really, why don't people do that.

Take care,

Misha

Fibonacci salad

2011-04-26T11:15:00.000+02:00

Bad food in the university cantine can be described by simple math. Every day they feed us with Fibonacci Salad - it's when you mix a yesterday salad with a salad from two days ago to get the salad for today.

(via Valera Yundin)

Take care,

Misha

What's so wrong with Comic Sans?

2011-04-01T23:38:00.001+02:00

First,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11582548

Second, a great affair failed due to comic sans - an old 1978 flyer turned out to be fake. Look at the "land" in "England", it's comic sans. And comic sans was invented in 1994.

via

Take care,

Misha

For you, little angular momentum fans

2011-03-20T19:02:00.001+01:00

- Why in the Varshalovich book active and passive rotations are defined in opposite way to the book of Edmonds?

- Because in Soviet Russia you don't rotate a coordinate system. Coordinate system rotates you.

Take care,

Misha

The new invention of integrals

2011-02-06T19:52:00.000+01:00

Oh mein lieber Gott, make me unsee it! Integration was invented only in 1994, in case you didn't know:

Tai, "A mathematical model for the determination of total area under glucose tolerance and other metabolic curves.", Diabetes Care 17, 152 (1994).

Some phrases from the abstract:

...In Tai's Model, the total area under a curve is computed by dividing the area under the curve between two designated values on the X-axis (abscissas) into small segments (rectangles and triangles) whose areas can be accurately calculated from their respective geometrical formulas. The total sum of these individual areas thus represents the total area under the curve...
....The Tai model allows flexibility in experimental conditions, which means, in the case of the glucose-response curve, samples can be taken with differing time intervals and total area under the curve can still be determined with precision.

Take care,

Misha

Do you remember Super Mario?

2011-02-03T17:49:00.000+01:00

Check it out :-)

P. S. I finally submitted the thesis.

Take care,

Misha

The swastikas

2011-01-30T14:19:00.001+01:00

Researchers have designed the first emitter of circularly polarized light made from a stand-alone semiconductor device:

"Giving Light a Spin", Physical Review Focus

I doubt that a paper containing nazi symbols would be published in Germany nowadays :-)

Misha

Hell for scientists

2011-01-24T09:44:00.000+01:00

First Circle: Limbo

"The uppermost circle is not a place of punishment, so much as regret. Those who have committed no scientific sins as such, but who turned a blind eye to it, and encouraged it by their awarding of grants and publications, spend eternity on top of this barren mountain, watching the carnage below and reflecting on how they are partially responsible..."

Second Circle: Overselling

"This circle is reserved for those who exaggerated the importantance of their work in order to get grants or write better papers. Sinners are trapped in a huge pit, neck-deep in horrible sludge. Each sinner is provided with the single rung of a ladder, labelled 'The Way Out - Scientists Crack Problem of Second Circle of Hell"

Third Circle: Post-Hoc Storytelling

"Sinners condemned to this circle must constantly dodge the attacks of demons armed with bows and arrows, firing more or less at random. Every time someone is hit in some part of their body, the demon proceeds to explain at enormous length how they were aiming for that exact spot all along."

Fourth Circle: P-Value Fishing

"Those who tried every statistical test in the book until they got a p value less than 0.05 find themselves here, an enormous lake of murky water. Sinners sit on boats and must fish for their food. Fortunately, they have a huge selection of different fishing rods and nets (brandnames include Bayes, Student, Spearman and many more). Unfortunately, only one in 20 fish are edible, so they are constantly hungry."

Fifth Circle: Creative Use of Outliers

"Those who 'cleaned up' their results by excluding inconvenient data-points are condemned here. Demons pluck out their hairs one by one, every time explaining that they are better off without that hair because there was something wrong with it."

Sixth Circle: Plagiarism

"This circle is entirely empty because as soon as a sinner arrives, a winged demon carries them to another circle and forces them to suffer the punishment meted out to the people there. After their 3 year "post" is up, they are carried to another circle, and so on..."

Seventh Circle: Non-Publication of Data

"Here sinners are chained to burning chairs in front of desks covered with broken typewriters. Only if they can write an article describing their predicament, will they be set free. Each desk has a file-drawer stuffed full of these, but the drawers are locked.

Eighth Circle: Partial Publication of Data

"At any one time exactly half of the sinners here are chased around by demons prodding them with spears. The demons choose who to chase at random after ensuring that the groups are matched for age, gender, height and weight. Howling desert winds blow a constant torrent of articles announcing the success of a new program to enhance participation in physical exercise - but with no mention of the side effects."

Ninth Circle: Inventing Data

"Here Satan himself lies trapped forever in a block of solid ice alongside the worst sinners of all. Frozen in front of their eyes is a paper explaining very convincingly that water cannot freeze in the environmental conditions of this part of Hell. Unfortunately, the data were made up."

via

Take care,

Misha

Physical Review X

2011-01-20T09:36:00.002+01:00

American Physical Society started a new journal - Physical Review X. It's somehow analogous to the New Journal of Physics: an online-only open-access journal, covering all branches of physics. As far as I understand, there will be no page limit for articles, and you'll have to pay $1500 to publish there (you also retain copyright to your articles due to open-access).

The first call for papers opens in March 2011, so hurry up! :-)

via

Take care,

Misha

Conspiracy doesn't work

2011-01-18T23:01:00.000+01:00

I had a job interview in one of the US universities. It was full of conspiracy: one day per every candidate, you're not allowed to attend other candidates' talks or even show up on the campus during that time. I find it great, probably better than the European system where all the short-listed candidates often spend the whole day together.

Flying to London on my way home I started a small talk with a girl sitting next to me. Guess what? It turned out that she was interviewed at the same place the day before. You know, these transatlantic planes are huge, like 50 rows, so the probability of such an event seems to be negligible. But it happened anyway.

Conspiracy just doesn't work.

Take care,

Misha

Chemistry Journals and Chinese Mothers

2011-01-09T12:52:00.000+01:00

Two links for today:

1) "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" - how Chineese kids are raised

2) Chemistry Craziness - Taylor&Francis granted free access to the plethora of chemistry journals until January, 31

Take care,

Misha

What's Special About This Number?

2011-01-08T23:01:00.000+01:00

A webpage, explaining why every single number is special. Nice.

Misha

Ladies, please cry if you don't feel like having sex

2011-01-07T13:11:00.000+01:00

A funny article from the Science magazine:

Gelstein et al., "Human Tears Contain a Chemosignal"

The authors found that women's tears contain some molecules, which, being sniffed by men, reduce their sexual desire and the level of testosterone:

"...We found that merely sniffing negative-emotion–related odorless tears obtained from women donors, induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of women’s faces. Moreover, after sniffing such tears, men experienced reduced self-rated sexual arousal, reduced physiological measures of arousal, and reduced levels of testosterone."

via Igor Ivanov's blog

Take care,

Misha

Starting your car think about Einstein

2011-01-06T21:12:00.002+01:00

Today a funny article appeared online:

R. Ahuja et al., "Relativity and the Lead-Acid Battery", Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 018301 (2011)

Scientists from Uppsala and Helsinki calculated the voltage produced by a lead-acid battery (such as we got in cars). The theory yielded 2.13 V, which is in compelling agreement with experiment (2.11 V).

The funny part is that most of this voltage (1.7-1.8 V) arises from the relativistic effects in Pb compounds.

As the authors put it: "Finally, we note that cars start due to relativity."

Take care,

Misha

Happy New Year!

2010-12-31T18:00:00.031+01:00

We, physicists, will never understand the logic of chemists. But, che fare - che fare, the forthcoming year is going to be yours:

Be happy, and remember that if two cesium atoms are bound together by only 0.000000004 kJ/mol - we call it "the Cs₂ molecule". Because... this is a molecule. :-P

Take care,

Misha

8-year old kids publish an article

2010-12-29T11:49:00.001+01:00

That's so-o-o sweet: Blackawton et al. "Blackawton bees", Biol. Lett. (2010).

via1, via2

Lev Landau was used to count the age of a scientist from the year he published the first article. Landau himself published his first one at the age of 18, so these kids have at least 10 years of a head start.

Take care,

Misha

Referees' quotes

2010-12-17T16:43:00.000+01:00

That's awesome: referees's quotes 2010 from the journal of Enviromental Biology.

"This paper is desperate. Please reject it completely and then block the author’s email ID so they can’t use the online system in future."

"The biggest problem with this manuscript, which has nearly sucked the will to live out of me, is the terrible writing style."

"Merry X-mas! First, my recommendation was reject with new submission, because it is necessary to investigate further, but reading a well written manuscript before X-mas makes me feel like Santa Claus."

Take care,

Misha

The shortest research paper ever

2010-12-11T14:03:00.001+01:00

This one is really the shortest. :-) There is also a referee comment...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/pdf/jaba00061-0143a.pdf

via Daniel Lemire

Misha

A nice title

2010-10-14T14:56:00.001+02:00

It's an art to write a title in such a way that no one even needs to read an article:

"In general, the less degeneracy the less transition. A principle for time‐dependent Hamiltonian systems in quantum mechanics", H. Gingold, J. Math. Phys. 28, 2400 (1987).

Misha

Physics Nobel Prize 2010

2010-10-05T18:54:00.000+02:00

I was about to make a joke that the third part of the Nobel Prize should have been awarded to Andre Geim's hamster Tisha, but I better don't :-)

Misha

The scientist whose rudeness cost him a Nobel prize

2010-10-04T21:44:00.000+02:00

The Nobel week began today, and The Guardian published a nice article about Fred Hoyle, the scientist who should have gotten a Nobel prize, but never did.

Misha

Ivan Pacheco's drum solo

2010-10-02T13:26:00.000+02:00

A weekend drumming video

The snare sound isn't perfect in this video, but this "elbow thing" at 2:14 is completely sick. :-)

Misha

Google street view in Antarctica

2010-10-01T23:43:00.008+02:00

There is no Google street view in Germany, but there is one in Antarctica.

Penguins might sue these guys for privacy violation...

Misha

A Million Random Digits Book

2010-10-01T18:07:00.002+02:00

Back to Russia I had two favorite books: one was called "The history of the USSR in IX-XIII centuries" (yes, of the USSR!), and the second one was "Tables of prime numbers from 2 to [some 10-digit prime number I don't remember]"

Actually, there exist something more weird than that: a book called "A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates" published by the RAND corporation. Only $81 on amazon.com.

Don't ask me how I found it. :-)

Misha

Brian Josephson

2010-10-01T14:53:00.001+02:00

It turned out that Brian Josephson, who received the 1973 Nobel prize in Physics for prediction of the Josephson effect, is an active protagonist of cold fusion and parapsychology.

That's funny.

Take care,

Misha

Chicken chicken

2010-09-29T14:33:00.002+02:00

Doug Zongker from the university of Washington published a paper using only "chicken" as a word. Later he was invited to give a talk about it at the AAAS meeting, check it out:

I especially enjoyed the way he'd answered questions. That's probably how experimentalists feel attending some of theory talks.

Thanks to Peter Kupser for sending me the link.

Take care,

Misha

Top 50 communication blogs

2010-09-24T22:51:00.000+02:00

Otherwise I'll loose it: top 50 communication blogs. Enjoy.

Misha

Life after death by Powerpoint by Don McMillan

2010-09-24T22:47:00.001+02:00

Benford's law

2010-09-23T13:12:00.002+02:00

In 1881 the American astronomer Simon Newcomb noticed that in books of logarithm tables first pages (logarithms of numbers starting with 1) are much more worn than others. This means that people look up numbers starting with 1 more often than higher ones, which is a pretty weird result.

This effect was rediscovered in 1938 by Frank Benford, who checked it for different real data sets, and it's called Benford's law since then.

The thing is that such a distribution of numbers arises if their logarithms are distributed uniformly, like it's equally probable to find a value between 10 and 100 and between 100 and 1000. This is the case for most of real world statistics, such as distributions of salaries or building heights.

Well, I'm writing about all that because in 1972 the law was proposed to detect fraud in statistics, because people who make up their data tend to distribute numbers pretty much uniformly. For instance, Benford's law was used as an evidence of falsifications in the 2009 Iranian elections.

Be careful if you're making up your experimental data :-)

Misha

It tears me apart

2010-09-11T01:04:00.007+02:00

Some people have problems with choosing between two men or women, two job offers and things like that. They say “it tears me apart”, which always reminds me a story from my childhood.

We’ve been little kids, about 10-11 years old, waiting for our English teacher in the classroom. For some reason our teacher was late, we’ve been very noisy and the director asked one of the security guards to come by to watch us and keep us quiet. The guy was a resigned soldier, and, as many of those, he took part in the first Chechen war (I’m talking about mid-90’s). All of us, especially boys, have been asking him what war is about.

He told us a story. Once they captured a girl, a Chechenian sniper, who had eleven ticks on the butt of her rifle, which means she killed eleven Russian soldiers. They didn’t think a lot, they just tied her to two tanks and teared her apart for real. I still remember a relaxed, casual face he had talking about that.

Little everyday things don’t tear you apart. It could be worse.

Take care,

Misha

...and papers citing it

2010-09-10T19:07:00.002+02:00

Nowadays we have around such science databases as Web of Knowledge and Scopus, monitoring all the citations a published paper gets.

I think it would be nice to use "see ref. [x] and papers citing it" along with familiar "see ref. [x] and references therein" while writing articles.

It may come in handy if you refer to a field when a good up-to-date review is not published yet. Just cite one of the "citation classics" or an old Nobel lecture, "and all papers citing it".

Misha

Harry Potter course at Durham University

2010-09-08T17:31:00.000+02:00

That's basically it. Durham University offers a course in Harry Potter to the students. That reminds me of the Starcraft course taught at UC Berkeley.

Take care,

Misha

The most useless machine. Ever.

2010-09-05T00:15:00.001+02:00

Well, this is not really about science, but this is brilliant!

This toy is now the first on my wish list. :-)

Misha

Hitler about the P=NP problem

2010-09-02T12:18:00.000+02:00

About the light-green color

2010-08-29T15:42:00.002+02:00

If (for some reason) you want people to remember your talk but don't remember any of results you've presented - just perform naked.

There is another, more conservative, option - use the light-green color on your slides.

How to plot spin-up and spin-down?

2010-08-26T13:50:00.000+02:00

Nice figure with an energy levels diagram from one of the papers:

V.H. Kurreck, B. Kirste, W. Lubitz, Angew. Chem. 96, 171 (1984)

Thanks to Stasia Gonchar for passing it on to me.

Misha

Misconduct or not?

2010-08-25T15:52:00.000+02:00

Imagine such a hypothetical situation. Someone is working in a research institution as a PhD student or a postdoc. She/he is very lazy and hires university students to analyze her/his experimental data, paying them as low-class workers. No one knows about that including the group leader, and names of these students never appear in articles neither among the authors nor in acknowledgements.

As for me, I think that this situation would make a case of misconduct, since it goes against such basic principles of research as openness and confidence.

What do you think?

Misha

Fritz London about BEC

2010-08-18T08:49:00.005+02:00

A funny quote about Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) from Fritz London's article (Nature, 1938):

About the same time, Erwin Schrödinger explicitly said that BEC will never be realized experimentally, since required temperatures are way too low (I cannot find an exact quote, please tell me if you came across it somewhere!)

However, in 1995 BEC in dilute atomic gases was observed in a number of labs [1, 2, 3]. In 2001 Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl Wieman shared a Nobel prize for that.

Take care,

Misha

Schizophrenic Neutrinos

2010-08-10T19:47:00.002+02:00

I had a fellow artist who was completely ignorant in sciences, but tried to make an impression that he "knows something" every now and then. Once he asked me:

- Do you know who is the greatest schizophrenic in the Universe?
- No, who?
- An electron. Know why?
- Why?
- Because he thinks that he is a wave and a particle at the same time!

Back then I found that funny, and I still would, if Igor Ivanov didn't share a link to the following preprint today:

R. Allahverdi, B. Dutta, R. N. Mohapatra "Schizophrenic Neutrinos and $\nu$-less Double Beta Decay"

The abstract starts as "We point out a novel possibility for neutrinos where all neutrino flavors can be part Dirac and part Majorana." :-)

Take care,

Misha

Google wave is dead

2010-08-05T20:41:00.002+02:00

Google officially closed the Google Wave project. That's it.

Take care,

Misha

Equalis - another Science 2.0 tool

2010-07-31T06:17:00.004+02:00

A few days ago I got a message from Carmine Napolitano, who is a co-founder of recently launched Equalis project. It's a kind of new "Science 2.0" social network for sharing ideas, blogging, connecting people and tackling math-related problems together. I didn't get deeply into it, but it's worth checking out.

A story from academia

2010-07-30T18:47:00.006+02:00

Getting a permanent job in science is extremely tough. Even if you're superbrilliant and get a tenure-track professorship, it's still very likely that you don't get through. In this case your chances for a permanent job at one of the good universities are scarce, but on the other hand you are probably too old and not competitive enough to get a good job in industry.

Recently we heard a story about Amy Bishop who killed a few people after being denied a tenure at the University of Alabama. Yesterday I was told about a chemistry Professor at MIT, who didn't get tenured after 5 years of tenure-track (acceptance rate is about 50% there). After that he gone completely crazy and joined the US army. He is in Iraq right now.

Take care,

Misha

Here is what experimentalists do for fun

2010-07-29T16:17:00.004+02:00

Some friendly PR for a friend of mine Stasia Gonchar. She is an experimentalist and gets bored waiting for long data scans to end. As an entertainment she makes nice little sculptures like that:

http://stasia-gonchar.deviantart.com/art/bear-172016439

(follow the link and check her other animals out)

Her deviantart page is here, some of you may like her paintings and photos as well.

Take care,

Misha

The Science article that made me speechless

2010-07-24T18:55:00.005+02:00

In his blog post Igor Ivanov dragged attention to the following paper, that recently appeared in Science magazine:

Sinha et al. "Ruling Out Multi-Order Interference in Quantum Mechanics"

In the abstract the authors refer to unification of quantum mechanics with gravitation and such kinds of things, that somehow don't seem to be very relevant. Here is what they do.

In an optical double slit experiment two different light paths interfere with each other. That means that the resulting intensity is not given by the sum of intensities from two "one-slit" experiments, but by the square of added electromagnetic amplitudes:

I = (A₁ + A₂)² = A₁² + A₂² + 2A₁A₂ = I₁ + I₂ + I₁₂

In this way, in addition to one-slit amplitudes, I₁ and I₂, we have the interference term I₁₂ here.

If we have three slits, all three paths will interfere with each other, and the resulting intensity will be also given by the square of the resulting amplitude:

I = (A₁ + A₂ + A₃)² = A₁² + A₂² + A₃² + 2A₁A₂ + 2A₁A₃ + 2A₂A₃ = I₁ + I₂ + I₃ + I₁₂ + I₁₃ + I₂₃

What the authors do is they measure diffraction of light in the three-slit experiment and prove that the equation above is correct, and there is no "three-slit term" there, such as A₁A₂A₃.

Then they explicitly state that the absence of the three-slit term means that light paths interfere with each other only in pairs, and there is no interference of three paths.

This is not correct, all three paths interfere with each other: we still sum up three amplitudes and then square them. The absence of the A₁A₂A₃ term means that intensity is calculated as square of the amplitudes, but not cube or any higher power. However, if the intensity wasn't given by a square of the amplitude, that would be already revealed in other (even more precise) experiments with light, electrons, and atoms.

This article was highlighted in Science perspectives and Nature News, but I'm still puzzled how it passed through into the Science magazine.

Physics is useful. Even in engineering.

2010-07-20T18:24:00.004+02:00

I'm at the Gordon conference on Atomic and Molecular interactions right now, having lots of fun. For instance, here in Colby-Sawyer College they've got "hands free towel machines" in bathrooms:

(sorry for blurry picture)

In the bottom of this thing there is an infrared trigger that rolls out the towel if you put your hand close to it.

The problem is that water absorbs infrared, and this machine works well only if your hands are already dry.

Funny.

Naming kids is hard

2010-07-15T17:30:00.002+02:00

Last year chemistry Nobel laureate Dudley Herschbach was giving a plenary talk at the Faraday Discussions conference. After the talk he got a question somehow related to angular momentum algebra and started his answer with

"You know, I love angular momentum. I even blame my parents for not naming me 'Angular momentum'!"

What puzzles me a bit is the whole 'naming kids' business. I can understand that guys far from math don't name children using indeces or primes, although 'Anna-double-prime' or 'John-three' looks and sounds great. But if people stick with the name of the mother/father while naming their dauther/son they should use something of that sort. Vladimir-prime Vladimirovich Putin, for instance.

Math is like love

2010-07-14T14:17:00.003+02:00

There is a famous quote by R. Drabek:

"Math is like love - a simple idea but it can get complicated."

Does anyone know who this guy Drabek was (or is)? It looks like wiki has no idea about him, I cannot figure out even his first name.

Thanks for collaborating :-)

Misha

von Neumann's words come true

2010-07-12T21:45:00.004+02:00

Everyone heard a famous quote of John von Neumann: "with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk".

A friend of mine Valera Yundin sent me a link to an awesome article:

Jürgen Mayer, Khaled Khairy, Jonathon Howard, "Drawing an elephant with four complex parameters", Am. J. Phys. 78, 648 (2010)

And it works!

That is definitely something to highlight in the Max Planck Research magazine :-)

Take care,

Misha

Getting married is dangerous

2010-06-30T09:42:00.003+02:00

Willis Lamb (discoverer of the Lamb shift) got married three times: to Ursula Schaefer when he was 26, to Bruria Kaufman when he turned 83, and to Elsie Wattson at the age of 94. He deceased the same year, soon after his last marriage. I don't believe that's a coincidence.

Boycott to Nature Publishing Group

2010-06-11T19:15:00.002+02:00

University of California threatens Nature Publishing Group with boycott, after the publisher proposed to raise the cost of California's license for its journals by 400 percent next year.

UC faculty members wrote a letter, explicitly stating that researchers will be strongly encouraged not to contribute papers to Nature journals or review manuscripts for them, if NPG doesn't negotiate.

Seven years ago this tactics worked out with Elsevier.

Science and religion

2010-06-09T12:33:00.004+02:00

It turns out that Georges Lemaître, who proposed the Big Bang Theory (yes, the theory itself, not the sitcom), was not only a scientist, but also a catholic priest. That's funny.

All models are wrong

2010-06-03T19:41:00.001+02:00

My research deals a lot with different analytic models. Here are two quotes about that, a long one:

"Unfortunately, models are rarely exact. The semblance of sophistication inherent in the model and used to develop parameter estimates frequently masks their deficiencies. Models are only approximate, and their predictions when the parameter estimates are based on analysis of plant performance must be considered as approximate. Validation of the model and the parameter estimates using other operating conditions will reduce the likelihood that the conclusions have significant error."

Perry's Chemical Engineers' Handbook

But there is no need in long quotes since we have a short one that captures everything:

"Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful."

George Box

Take care,

Misha

Pumping the journal impact factor

2010-06-03T08:28:00.004+02:00

I found a funny last year story at the forum of Russian researchers. A guy (nicknamed ST) quotes a message that he got from the Editor of one of the physics journals after submitting a paper there:

"Editor's Final Remark
In addition to the reviewers' comments given above, I recommend the authors to address and cite the relevant articles published in "....Journal ....". Such improvement on the revised version of the manuscript would not only provide a solid background to the readers regarding the current state-of-knowledge on this topic, but also promote the awareness of the available information resources in "... Journal ....". I would appreciate authors' concern and sensitivity on this matter."

So, the Editor not even encourages, but 'recommends' citing his own journal. And such 'improvements on the revised versions of manuscripts' seem to work: in his post ST mentions that the impact factor of this journal raised from 2.7 to 3.4 within one year, which is quite a jump.

Cheating is unscientific.

Take care,

Misha

I did not shoot the comic sans!

2010-06-02T19:39:00.002+02:00

via Mike-pulsifer.org

(as a sequel to my Comic Sans post)

It's even shorter that the shortest article ever!

2010-05-30T20:34:00.003+02:00

In comments to my post "The shortest article ever" EastwoodDC pointed out a paper that is even shorter than that: "The Effects of Peanut Butter on the Rotation of the Earth."

This one belongs to the Improbable research project, but still...

Take care,

Misha

Laser 50 anniversary

2010-05-30T13:38:00.003+02:00

This year it's 50 year anniversary of laser. There is a special website about that, laserfest.org, quite a few interesting links there...

Topless models

2010-05-27T13:27:00.006+02:00

As you've understood, I do a little literature search now, and I came across the following (Italian) article:

Is there any chance to figure out what the "topless models" are about? It looks like the Google outcome is about something different.

Hm, probably 50 years ago even Italian prime minister was interested in these topless models... :-)

The shortest article ever

2010-05-26T22:11:00.004+02:00

I'm pretty sure I've posted it somewhere about 3-4 years ago, but anyway. This is the shortest article I've ever seen, it was published in Physical Review:

Guys involved in the 'variation of fundamental constants' business always show it in the talks. But I wonder whether it was a joke or not...

Phys. Rev. Lett. half a century ago

2010-05-26T15:36:00.006+02:00

Imagine, that you publish an article in Physical Review, then find a mistake and a misprint in it, and decide to submit the correction to Physical Review Letters. Sounds crazy?

This was somehow possible fifty years ago:

(by that time Phys. Rev. Lett. was a section of Phys. Rev.)

But anyway, later there was another, real erratum to this letter to the editor...

Take care,

Misha

How would you know?

2010-05-25T17:15:00.006+02:00

Here is a quote from the popular article of Nissan Zeldes "Giulio Racah and theoretical physics in Jerusalem":

"Tensor algebra is the natural mathematical tool for treating angular correlations of successive nuclear radiations, as shown ﬁrst in [Racah, Rhys. Rev. 84, 910 (1951)] and independently in [Lloyd, Phys. Rev. 85, 904 (1952)]".

Well, that sounds fine. Two scientists were involved in the same kind of business and came up with similar theories about the same time - we see that everywhere in science.

The only problem is that in 1951-52 both Giulio Racah and Stuart Lloyd were working at the same place, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Can one really be sure that the theories were developed independently in such a case?

Stravinsky in jail

2010-05-24T19:08:00.003+02:00

In 1940 Igor Sravinsky was arrested in Boston for playing his arrangement of the American National Anthem, which was considered a 'national property' by Massachusetts law (it was forbidden to tamper with any national property). He was released the same day after convincing authorities of his good intentions.

via undernews

Nice quote from the past

2010-05-10T13:47:00.002+02:00

"Every attempt to employ mathematical methods in the study of chemical questions must be considered profoundly irrational and contrary to the spirit of chemistry... if mathematical analysis should ever hold a prominent place in chemistry – an aberration which is happily almost impossible – it would occasion a rapid and widespread degeneration of that science."

Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, 1830

Do you still use Comic Sans in your presentations?

2010-04-27T14:57:00.006+02:00

Here is what Vincent Connare, creator of the Comic Sans font thinks about it:

"You know, I just have to ask, like, why? Why the hell do people choose Comic Sans? It boggles the mind. There are more than 200 fonts in Mac OS X and Windows Vista, meaning there are much better fonts out there for most everything. But people still choose Comic Sans for the most retarded, improper uses. I made Comic Sans to fill a dog’s speech bubble in Microsoft Bob. Then the marketing department got ahold of it, and they included it in the OEM version of Windows 95. And that is when my problems began. I don’t know if you can really understand what it is like to have your life defined by the most improperly used font in history. I am introduced as ‘the guy who created Comic Sans,’ and I think people have a viscerally negative reaction to that."

Here is his presentation I Hate Comic Sans.

Take care,

Misha

Hamster Tisha

2010-03-14T19:08:00.002+01:00

It turns out that some years ago graphene pioneer Andre Geim published an article co-authored by his hamster Tisha, here it is:

A. K. Geim and H. A. M. S. ter Tisha, "Detection of earth rotation with a diamagnetically levitating gyroscope", Physica B 294-295, 736 (2001)

That's crazy.

via Igor Ivanov's Buzz

When theorists are forced to do experiments

2010-03-13T14:05:00.006+01:00

It is well known that Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford was a brilliant but very authoritarian type of scientist. He was a head of the Cavendish lab in Cambridge and many well known scientists passed through it, such as Piotr Kapitza (Nobel Prize`78), Patrick Blackett (Nobel Prize`48), and Robert Oppenheimer (later chief of the Manhattan Project).

These three were increasingly at odds, due to their different relationships with Rutherford. While Kapitza shamelessly flattered and courted his boss, who in return gave him favours and even friendship, Blackett, who admired Rutherford's creative running of the lab, never had time for such things.

Also, Blackett was tutoring Oppenheimer by teaching him the art of experiments, for which Oppenheimer had little aptitude, and Blackett knew well about that. The tension between the two became so strong that one day Oppenheimer left on Blackett's desk an apple poisoned with chemicals from the lab (!).

Hopefully, Blacket survived, and Oppenheimer didn't lose his job only because his parents persuaded the university to put him on probation, on the understanding that he will have regular sessions with a psychiatrist.

A few months later Oppenheimer completely switched to theoretical physics.

Graham Farmelo, "The strangest man"

Scientific glastnost

2010-03-13T13:55:00.003+01:00

Interesting Nature Editorial about Russian science:

"A small, but telling example came to light last month when the popular online newspaper gazeta.ru published an interview with Yuri Osipov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Pressed by the reporter about the very low citation rate for articles published in Russian-language science journals, Osipov dismissed the relevance of citation indices, questioned the need for Russian scientists to publish in foreign journals and said that any top-level specialist 'will also study Russian and read papers in Russian'."

Well, nothing to discuss here – I second every single word of the Editorial (not Osipov's :-).

Take care,

Misha

Not even intelligence

2010-02-27T21:16:00.002+01:00

When famous Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was asked what characteristics Nobel prize winning physicists had in common, he said:

"I cannot think of a single one, not even intelligence."

Google Buzz

2010-02-19T19:52:00.002+01:00

As you probably know, Google launched the Buzz project quite recently. This is something in between blogs and twitter - you post messages that appear in a followers' roll, and those are not restricted to 140 symbols. You can also link Buzz to your blog stream or posts you share in Google Reader - they will appear there immediately.

A few scientists already took advantage of this, for instance here is the Buzz stream of the Field's medalist Terence Tao. For Russian speakers I would recommend the Igor Ivanov one.

If you use Buzz or know anyone from the scientific community who does, drop a comment about it. )

Take care,

Misha

Some photos of Albert Einstein

2010-02-16T23:11:00.004+01:00

A famous theoretical physicist Michio Kaku posted some historical Einstein photos on his facebook page. These pictures come from Michio's private archive and are mostly not very well known.

That's all about the blood, the sweat, the tears

2010-02-13T20:02:00.002+01:00

Yesterday Amy Bishop, a Harvard PhD and a faculty member of University of Alabama in Huntsville unfolded a shooting in the biology department over there. Three faculty members were killed and many more were injured as a result of her shooting spree.

The most possible reason is that Dr. Amy Bishop was denied tenure at the University of Alabama at Huntsville last year.

Nice post about spam

2010-02-04T19:04:00.003+01:00

Tom Martin sent me a link to his post about spam.

I always get lots of spam-like comments with no links to any porn, or warez, or anything else. Just "It was very interesting for me to read this blog post...", and so on. At some point I just gave up on erasing those – who cares about spam with no spam content? But after having a look at Tom's post I understand that I should...

History of science: Gulio Racah kicks ass

2010-02-03T09:14:00.006+01:00

As many other branches of atomic, molecular, and chemical physics, the field of chemical stereodynamics emerged from nuclear physics. Basically all this business about how molecules rotate after a chemical reaction, or how to boost the reaction efficiency controlling the reagents – it was already there, in nuclear reactions and spectroscopy.

In 30's some people were involved in studying double gamma decays, when a nucleus goes from some excited state A to state B and then to the ground state C, emitting two gamma-quanta. Already in 1940 Dunworth proposed that there might be some correlations between the directions of emission of these two quanta. Here "correlations" mean that, for instance, if we detect the first gamma-ray from the upper side of the nucleus, the second one most likely will be emitted to the left, less likely to the bottom, and never to the right.

Dunworth was not able to check this experimentally, but induced Donald Hamilton to theoretically prove that there should be some correlations. A few years later Edward Brady and Martin Deutsch from MIT found an experimental evidence of gamma-gamma correlations in the decay of Co(60) and Sc(46) nuclei.

In the meantime theorists published lots of papers, step by step trying to improve approximations and thoroughly elaborate the problem. This lasted for more then a decade, from 1940 to 1951, when a brilliant article by Gulio Racah was published.

He starts it literally as: "Hey guys, last ten years I was interested in something else, but I just bumped into you and I see that you are really stuck. Well, the problem becomes very easy if you use the tensor operator algebra that I developed about a decade ago..."

And, of course, the problem turned out to be solvable in a very natural and straightforward manner. Now tensor operators is an important tool, not only in nuclear physics, but anywhere in physics in general. We all use it and like it.

Take care,

Misha

UPD: By the way, I never knew that Gulio Racah was a cousin of Ugo Fano...

Learn something every day...

2010-02-02T19:08:00.003+01:00

The words "introvert"and "extrovert" appeared in English in 1923 upon translation of the Carl Jung's book "Psychologischen Typen" published in German two years before.

Something you should know about vodka

2010-02-02T04:42:00.000+01:00

On the 31-st of January 1865 the author of the periodic table of elements Dmitri Mendeleev defended the doctoral dissertation "On the Combinations of Water with Alcohol":

People often say that in this piece Mendeleev proved that the solubility is the best for 40% of alcohol and 60% of water, and thereby invented vodka as we know it. Unfortunately, that's nothing but an urban legend: Russians were drinking vodka long before Mendeleev was even born.

Web of Knowledge - how Google sees it

2010-02-01T19:01:00.001+01:00

Everyone knows that ISI Web of Knowledge maintained by Thomson Reuters, is a very raw and unfinished, but still commercial project. Here is what Google thinks about it:

I think that's unlikely to get better unless any substantial alternatives to WoK appear.

Two quotes from Paul Dirac's letters

2010-01-31T10:46:00.003+01:00

I certainly loose it if I don't write it up somewhere. These two quotes picked from letters to Manci Balázs, entirely describe Dirac's childhood:

i) 'I did not know of anyone who liked someone else – I thought it did not happen outside novels', 7 March 1936

ii) 'I found it to be the best policy as a child [...] to make my happiness depend only on myself and not on other people', 9 April 1935

Take care,

Misha

The Gunning-Fog index

2010-01-30T21:33:00.004+01:00

Nature publishing group has a science blogroll with a bit of statistics for each blog, here is how it looks like for mine:

Ranked 18 in science (377 overall)
2 post(s) per week (on average)
65 post(s) collected so far
7,032 words per post (on average)
14% complex words (on average)
Readability by Flesch-Kincaid : best understood by university graduates
Readability by Gunning-Fog : 146.0
On 0 blogroll(s)
2 links to other science blogs
0 links from other science blogs

The first thing that crossed my mind was "what the hell this Gunning-Fog index is?". If you follow the link you get that "The Gunning-Fog index [...] is a rough estimate of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to understand the text on a first reading."

So, basically an average person needs to study for 146 years to get a rough idea what I'm writing about, while a well understandable text should have the index below 12. First I thought that this is due to appalling English I'm used to, but if you read further you'll see that there is nothing to do with that. The Gunning-Fox index comes from analysis of the average sentence length and the average number of syllables in words.

I never thought those indexes even exist. I promise, I promise to keep sentences shorter... )

Take care,

Misha

In fifty words or less

2010-01-30T13:01:00.007+01:00

In his book “Indiscrete thoughts” famous Italian-born American mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota mentions that Stan Ulam was used to say “Whatever is worth saying can be stated in fifty words or less”.

Well, these days he would probably adjust it a bit:

“Whatever is worth saying can be stated in 140 symbols or less”

)

True random numbers: linguistics may be of help

2010-01-29T19:04:00.007+01:00

I'm completely ignorant in computer science, but even I know that it's tough to get true random numbers. The problem is that any software-based algorithm generates "pseudo-random" numbers, that is there is still some regularity in a row of those, and the sequence will repeat itself after a while.

People are used to get the real randomness from the outside, like picking up the thermal noise of the sound card, the displacements of mouse (that are supposed to be random), or even monitoring the atmosphere. But, there is at least one challenging method to get true random numbers out of the software part.

Let's take a block of English text (say, a .pdf of a paper), written by a native Russian speaker. What is to do, is to analyze the articles "a" and "the" over there. If the correct article is used, we have "1", if not – "0". In such a way, we get a truly random sequence of 1's and 0's, and we can generate true random base-10 numbers out of it.

Is there anyone who wants to give it a try? )

Take care,

Misha

A bug in Mathematica: Clebsch-Gordan coefficients

2010-01-29T10:51:00.012+01:00

A technical issue for those of you using Wolfram Mathematica. Apparently there is a bug in the function furnishing Clebsch-Gordan coefficients, check it out:

These two inputs are equivalent, but the outputs are different somehow. Actually, this Clebsch-Gordan coefficient is zero, because the angular momentum j=9/2 cannot give a projection of m=0. In general, for a coefficient to be nonzero all the (j+m)'s should be nonnegative integer numbers.

The ClebschGordan[] function in Mathematica is used to test all the conditions of existence, such as the triangle rule, but as we see it fails when it comes to substitutions of parameters.

I dropped a message to the Wolfram support team, and they promised to do their best to figure out where the problem comes from. I hope to hear from them soon and I'll keep you posted about it.

Take care,

Misha

arxiv.org seeks donations

2010-01-22T23:55:00.004+01:00

Keeping it short, the arxiv.org preprints server faced serious problems after significant budget cuts for Cornell university library. The annual budget is as large as $400,000 and the library will provide only 15% of it. The rest is expected to be donated by top 200 heavy user institutions, allowing to keep both submission and downloading of preprints free of charge. Here is the arXiv support FAQ.

Fake structures published in Acta Crystallographica

2010-01-21T15:26:00.000+01:00

Stop press from the wonderful world of scientific misconduct:

"Regrettably, this editorial is to alert readers and authors of Acta Crystallographica Section E and the wider scientific community to the fact that we have recently uncovered evidence for an extensive series of scientific frauds involving papers published in the journal, principally during 2007. Although several thousands of structures published in Acta Crystallographica Section E every year will continue to reflect results of serious scientific work, the extent of these problems is significant with at least 70 structures demonstrated to be falsified and meanwhile acknowledged by the authors as such...

...The falsified structures have many features in common: in each case, a bona fide set of intensity data, usually on a compound whose structure had been correctly determined and reported in the literature, was used to produce a number of papers, with the authors changing one or more atoms in the structure to produce what appeared to be a genuine structure determination of a new compound. The worst example generated no fewer than 18 supposedly original structures from a single common set of data. There is nothing to suggest that the authors of the original papers describing the real structures are in any way aware of, or complicit in, this fraud...

...The initial set of falsified structures arises from two groups. The correspondence authors are Dr H. Zhong and Professor T. Liu, both from Jinggangshan University, Jian, China. The co-authors on these papers included other workers from Jinggangshan University together with authors from different institutions in China. Both these correspondence authors and all co-authors have signed forms agreeing to the retraction of 41 papers published by Dr Zhong and 29 by Professor Liu. Details of these retractions appear elsewhere in this issue of the journal. Having found these problems with articles from Jinggangshan University, all submissions from this University to Acta Crystallographica Sections E or C have now been identified and are being checked for authenticity. Preliminary results indicate that further retractions will result from this exercise."

Huh, this way they will end up with checking every single submitted structure by hands soon...

A city in 140 symbols: Leeds

2009-11-23T06:44:00.001+01:00

Leeds has a redbrick university built out of white bricks. But if you look for a good weather in Britain – better go to the south of France.

The Hirsch-bar index: leave your boss' name out of the authors list

2009-11-21T14:40:00.015+01:00

I think you know what the Hirsch-index is: if you have n papers cited at least n times – then your h-index is n. For instance, if out of your 10 papers two were cited 4 times, and the rest three times, then your h-index is 3. The index was introduced by Jorge Hirsch in 2005, and became an accepted tool to rank scientists within about one year: community found it useful that a scientist's productivity may be described by a single number. However, the h-index does not take into account such important things as the number of co-authors and the self-citations.

Recently Jorge Hirsch himself wrote a preprint, where he proposed a new, ħ (hbar) - index, that is aimed to solve at least one of these problems, multiple co-athorship. Indeed, the "mass graves" (sorry), published by high-energy physicists and the institute policies to include everyone's name to any article, can unreasonably increase the Hirsch-index, with no extra work.

Some of the h-index terminology before describing the ħ-index. You have the h-index n, if n of your papers belong to the "h core". The paper belongs to the h-core if it was cited n times or more. Your co-authors will probably have other h cores, and a given paper may belong there or not.

The ħ - index is defined in a similar way: you have the ħ - index m if m of your papers belong to the ħ-core. But, the paper belongs to the ħ-core if it was cited m times or more and it also belongs to the h-core of your co-authors. (Actually, the latter h should be also ħ, but since the index would be extremely difficult to compute in this case, Hirsch decided to relax the condition a bit)

In other words, only if the paper improves the h-index of all the authors, it will contribute to your ħ-index. Imagine that you have the h-index of 20, and you have a paper cited 25 times, co-authored by a student with a h-index of 5. Then, it will be included in your and the student's ħ-index, because it belongs to the h-cores of both of you. But, if you add a third author to this paper, say, a director of your institute with a h-index of 45, the paper will not count for any of you, because it doesn't belong to the director's h-core.

So, if you have 200 papers, cited 44 times each and co-authored by your director, who has the h-index of 45, none of them will count, and your ħ-index will be zero. Hirsch expects this to stimulate young scientists to work independently. However, he mentions, that the ħ-index will be definitely useless for postdocs, since they are used to include senior scientists in their papers.

I wonder whether it will be possible to eliminate self-citations at some point.

Theorists vs experimentalists again

2009-11-20T14:36:00.005+01:00

Here is how I imagine the difference between experimental and theoretical particle physicists:

Left: Blind Reese can't spot the cheese. Right: Neither Phil can get a meal.

The LHC will be launched tomorrow

2009-11-19T17:02:00.003+01:00

You may follow it online: here is a live display of the beam status. You may also follow CERN on twitter.

via cherstn (friends-only)

Another case of scientific fraud

2009-11-17T17:20:00.002+01:00

The ETH Zürich research director Peter Chen decided to step down by the end of September after being accused of data falsifications:

"The institute made the announcement in a press release issued 21 September, saying 'there are suspicions that scientific data may have been falsified in two publications and a doctoral thesis in 1999 and 2000' while Chen was group leader. A panel of five chemists was formed earlier this year to investigate, confirming data had been falsified."

Chen will remain a full professor at ETH.

A city in 140 symbols: Frankfurt an der Oder

2009-11-13T19:29:00.002+01:00

The Oder river separates Frankfurt from Polish town Słubice. Caravans of German smokers cross the bridge to buy cheap Polish cigarettes.

Who cites you is important: a new approach to ranking scientists

2009-11-12T19:11:00.011+01:00

We are used to such metrics of a scientist's impact in a field like the number of papers published, how many times they are cited, and the h-index that the scientist has. These parameters are expected to rely on credit given to the researcher by the rest of community. However, they don't account for the important thing, namely who cites the published work.

In a paper recently published in Phys. Rev. E, Filippo Radicchi with colleagues propose a new ranking technique that captures this "who" issue: the citations coming from renowned scientists have more weight than those from less known researchers. The authors focused on physics and used the PROLA journal archive (1983-2006) as a testing ground for the methodology. The results show that the probability to win a major physics prize is more accurately predicted by their new method, than by the other metrics, such as citations count.

The only thing is probably missing here – the "negative" citations. The results may be cited as "doubtful" or "wrong" even by famous scientists, and the trustless paper will be scored higher. However, in the case of a scientist's rank, averaging over all his papers will probably make this contribution negligible.

Here is a website where you may figure out a rank of any scientist, based on his articles in physical review journals published before 2006. This piece of work was also highlighted in Physics.

Vitaly Ginzburg Dead at 93

2009-11-09T10:42:00.004+01:00

Nobel Laureate Vitaly Ginzburg deceased yesterday due to heart failure. Apart from theoretical physics, he was renowned as an outspoken atheist and irreconcilable antagonist of religious obscurantism. Even being already seriously ill some two years ago, he wrote:

"...I'm 91 years old and suffer from an incurable blood disease, for that reason I cannot walk since about three years ago; I also have another difficulty that I don't feel like describing here. Passing through it would be probably much easier with a belief in God. But, until I'm in full possession of my faculties, I will never address to the mythic God. I would like to emphasise that the illness has no affect on my writings, and I ask my opponents to make no allowances for me..."

A city in 140 symbols: Prague

2009-10-30T20:39:00.001+01:00

Prague is a charming old city with strikingly large historical center. The hilly landscape favors enjoying magnificent panoramic views.

Humans are not so far from monkeys in drinking

2009-10-25T13:16:00.001+01:00

John Fenn and age discrimination

2009-10-12T19:24:00.007+02:00

In European academia there is a mandatory retirement age: if a university professor becomes older than 65-68 years (depending on country), he cannot hold a position anymore. This was also the case in the US some 30 years ago, when the Age Discrimination in Employment Act still allowed for the mandatory dismissal of tenured workers.

A few days ago I was told a fascinating story of John Bennett Fenn. He was working at Yale for a quarter of a century, until he reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 1987. After a while, the law was changed to fight the age discrimination, and Fenn became officially allowed to get a job. By that time his ex-position at Yale was still vacant, and he applied for it. Believe you or not, he didn't get it.

Eventually Fenn joined Virginia Commonwealth University in 1994, where he started working on the Electrospray ionization technique, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 2002. John Fenn was 85 by that time and he still remains the oldest Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.

Yale University claimed that Fenn was working on electrospray ionization while still holding a position there. After submitting a lawsuit against Fenn, Yale was awarded over one million dollars and partial patent rights to the technique.

A city in 140 symbols: Vienna

2009-10-11T11:12:00.002+02:00

Vienna impresses with its calm old-fashioned style. No haste, no rush, just enjoy the legendary chocolate cake and astounding coffee.

The moronometer

2009-10-10T18:59:00.007+02:00

There is a rumor that a renowned Soviet physicist Arkady Migdal thought up a device dubbed "the moronometer". That was a spool of thread placed in a breast pocket of the jacked in such a way that the thread slightly sticks out. Then Migdal was hanging around and meeting people. During such sporadic conversations a company exclaimed "Hey, you've got a thread there!", and tried to detach it, in fact unreeling the spool. Some folks kept pulling the lengthening thread for a while.

According to Migdal, the company's silliness is proportional to the resulting length of the thread.

Reference (Russian)