What's so wrong with Comic Sans?

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

- 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

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?

Check it out :-)

P. S. I finally submitted the thesis.

Take care,

Misha

The swastikas

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

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

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

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

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?

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

Misha

Starting your car think about Einstein

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misha

Life after death by Powerpoint by Don McMillan

Benford's law

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

...and papers citing it

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

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.

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