Dundee's Travels

Wall Street Awaits

2010-08-14T09:22:00.000-07:00

I have been quite busy lately applying for jobs in finance. As it turns out, there is a well-worn path between academia and wall street, with phyiscist-cum-bankers sitting at the prop trading desks of Goldman Sachs, building models for PIMCO, and doing risk analytics for Moody's.

For an example as to WHY Wall Street might be interested in physicists and mathematicians, think about a typical pricing problem: suppose you want to buy the right to buy a stock in, say, six months. This might be a bet of a speculative nature (if you think the stock will rise), or it might be to hedge a position (perhaps you sold someone an option to sell that stock in six months). The question is, what's the fair price for that option? These are basic gambling problems, and the idea is to find out the best and worst possible outcomes, then put some odds on those outcomes, and then find the expected return.

The difference between, say, playing blackjack and pricing options is that we have a good model for the evolution of stock prices. For example, in a card deck, the previous card is no indicator of the next card---there is no correlation between the cards in the deck. However, given that a stock closes at 50 today means that it is very unlikely for the stock to close at 0 tomorrow, or 100. The crucial observation is that the stock price is a directed random walk, like a walk down the beach---if your're not paying attention, you walk mostly in one direction, but never in a strait line. The less attention you pay, the less of a straight line you walk. This is called the volatility of the stock price: the stock price is evolving mostly in a single direction (called the drift). (If you look at the history of a stock price in, say, the Wall Street Journal, you'll see a line that represents the 65 day moving average, or the 200 day moving average. This is the drift rate of the stock.) The deviations around the average motion are due to market volatility.

So given the drift and the volatility, we can build a model (called the Black-Scholes model) which models the evolution of asset prices. Given this, we only need to figure out the spread of possible outcomes (best case and worst case scenario), handicap those possibilities, and then price the option.

Anyway, I have had interviews with some big companies, and am excited about the whole prospect. Next week I fly to Vancouver to talk with a financial software company, and I have a follow-up phone interview with a major investment bank in NYC. There's also another company in Connecticut that builds trading software, and has a prop trading desk---I talk to them again the week after next.

Hopefully I will start posting semi-regularly again.

And so it begins...

2010-05-12T08:56:00.000-07:00

There's no turning back now...

Snow Days

2010-02-10T07:47:00.000-08:00

Over the past week or so, we've had about 10 inches of snow in Columbus. Daisy and I spent the better part of yesterday shoveling the sidewalks. Some of us contributed more than others.

Ben Takes on the Dog Food Nazis

2009-09-10T12:02:00.000-07:00

Since I've had a puppy, I've been trying to decide what kind of food I should feed her. Lefty (my last dog) was pretty happy eating Science Diet, but I never did any proper research about dog food, so I tried to enter into the field with an open mind.

As it turns out, if you do a google search for "dog food comparison", you find mostly product comparisons between "our brand and Brand X"---in other words, I would believe these comparisons as much as I would believe a comparison between Coke and Pepsi on coke.com. If you really look hard for some unbiased information about dog food, you won't find any. Most websites are clearly biased towards ``natural'' or ``organic'' dog foods. There are even several websites that insinuate that feeding a dog kibble, as opposed to raw foods like whole raw chickens, eggs, and organ meat, is tantamount to a violation of human rights.

Now, this seems like a good question to ask some ``experts''. And by experts, of course, I mean dog owners on an internet forum. Let me post some actual quotes...

Poster: vets get little teaching in class on foods. And the majority they get taught is by science diet (and other "high end" dog foods) company, so its a little biased teaching.

BenTheMan: Do you have proof of this, or is it something you've just heard other people saying?

Poster: [Posts link to a 1 year program for assistant vet technicians]. in a 1 year program 15 "lessons" 2 are out of class placements and 2 are repeat type of courses. 1 is animal nutrition. in a semester with 7 different classes in it. it is obviously not a long period of time to learn all about dog food.

BenTheMan: This is NOT a vet program, this is not even a vet technician program. This is a one year program for people who assist vet technicians. You do know the difference between vets and vet technicians, right?

-------------

Poster: Also, my dog recently ate a few kernels of boiled corn off the floor while we were cooking and the next day, she pooped them out completely whole and undigested. Which makes me question food with corn in it, if my dog can't digest the corn she 'stole' off the ground, what reasons do I have to think that corn meal can be digested by her?

BenTheMan: Haven't you ever noticed the same in...ahem...your poop? It doesn't automatically mean that corn is bad for you, even if it shows up undigested in your poop.

------------

Poster: Or once I heard somewhere that raw veggies make cancer grow slower so if I had cancer, even if it's completely unproven I would still try to eat raw veggies.

BenTheMan: And if you heard that making hats out of tin foil could prevent the government from reading your thoughts, would you try that, too?

Needless to say, the words ``logical fallacy'' are lost on these people.

More Daisy

2009-08-19T12:35:00.000-07:00

Here's a few more Daisy pics. She is a cutie...

I still have a blog post to write about Amsterdam, where every day is April 20.

Puppy!

2009-08-17T09:41:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we adopted a new puppy, Daisy. She is part beagle and part ``hound'', which sounds better than ``we don't know''. I think she's a keeper.

I spent the afternoon trying to teach her how to sit and take derivatives.

At least she can sit.

Either way, I'm looking forward to teaching her all kinds of things, like ``Go catch some squirrels'' and ``Go get me a beer.''

St. Nikolai Church: Hamburg

2009-07-10T12:07:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I took the train to see a monument that I had heard about: St. Nikolai's Church, in Hamburg:
St. Niolai Church in Hamburg (or Nikolaikirche) was finished in 1863, and was the tallest building in the world for a few years.
It was largely destroyed in July 1943 when Allied forces heavily bombed the city. While the city did house a naval base, many parts of the city (including some predominantly civilian areas) was leveled.
Today, what's left of the main spire and the nave are open to the public, and has been turned into a memorial.
The spire is covered in soot, and still bears the scars from Allied bomb shrapnel, and stands as a testament to the horrors of war.
For a few euro, you can ride an elevator to the top of the spire, where there's a small observation deck and some information about the church's construction, and the bombing campaign that destroyed most of the city. The view really is quite impressive:

I ask...

2009-07-08T15:14:00.000-07:00

Why have Starbucks when you can have Balzac?

More German kultur to come...

Ich bin ein...Hamburger?

2009-07-04T15:03:00.000-07:00

My first few days in Hamburg have been very nice indeed. I arrived on Thursday afternoon, only to find that I had left my laptop charger safely in the Columbus airport. So the first order of business was to track down a store that sold Apple products. This was a bit of a pain, and I had to take a cab across the city. All in all though, I am the proud new owner of a MacBook charger which will need an adapter if it is to work in America. So it goes, as they say.
The hotel was about as I'd expected, although the neighborhood is a bit...rowdy. The best way that I can describe it is a combination of 6th St. in Austin, the ``Lovely Ladies'' routine from Les Miserables, a Husler mail order catalog, and a Turkish street bazaar. If you're not sure, you should check out Reeperbahn on Wikipedia (this is the street where the hotel is located).

Apparently, the Beatles played several gigs here before they were discovered. The fact that they were actually from Liverpool seems to be lost on the locals, though. There is a nice plaza ``Beatles Platz'' adjacent to my hotel. I took this picture looking through Ringo's head, down the ``sinful mile'':
Yesterday I spent walking around on the waterfront, which is underutilized as it is in Galveston. This is a memorial to lost seamen, near as I can tell:
The port of Hamburg is pretty busy, and during business hours there was a lot of water traffic. The city is the third largest port in Europe, and has been for quite some time. Either way, the maritime tradition is evident, at least on the waterfront.
Yesterday and today I spent a good deal of time writing my talk for the conference next week, mostly enjoying German food and beer in sidewalk cafes...
Hopefully I'll have a bit more time to take better pictures once I'm finished writing this talk. Otherwise, all is well.

A Long Time Gone

2009-07-01T09:30:00.000-07:00

I know I've been quite negligent in blogging---so many things have happened these past months. Here's a brief recap:

Ben gets a Mac. A good friend of mine, Dean, works for Apple. (He designed the little antenna in your iPod which lets you connect to the internet.) As such, he gets a pretty ridiculous employee discount, which made the MacBook affordable. Now, I typically hate it when people gush about how much better the Mac operating system (OS) is than Windows. And, believe me, it's not that much better. In some ways it's actually worse---for example, you have very little control over the places where you save things, and the power manager is pretty sub par. iPhoto and iTunes are easy to use, but you can only store music and photos where Steve Jobs says you can store music and photos. The "sleep mode" isn't very good, and it runs the battery down pretty quickly. There are several pluses, however. OSX (the Mac operating system) is just a front end for Unix, which means that executing stuff from the command prompt and ssh-ing into other computers is pretty easy. The apps that people have built are also very nice. For example, there's a program called Papers, which builds a database of all of my scientific papers for easy browsing. All in all, it's better than your average laptop. The operating system is good, the components are good, and it's easy to replace simple things, like hard drives and RAM.
The Trip Home from California. Bryanne and I drove from Palo Alto to Columbus in April, making a stop at the Grand Canyon for a spectacular sunrise and a plethora of Japanese tourists. The vistas were, of course, breathtaking: We also found other things of interest, including some dinosaur footprints in New Mexico:
Bryanne and I Celebrate 1 Year. ...by going to the zoo! (It's been a good year, in my opinion.) The Columbus Zoo is great, and they have some very good exhibits. These fruit bats look kind of like my dog Lefty: I made a new friend, with a goat: I really like the moose exhibit, although the mooses were pretty inactive: Bryanne's favorite are the frogs:
A Chorus Line comes to town. Bryanne's good friend Matt is the company manager for the national tour of "A Chorus Line". We'd seen the show in Detroit in January, but this time they came to Columbus. The production is very good. Typically the whole point of the chorus is to blend in, and be completely faceless, yet the show is about giving the chorus dancers some actual face. Some are looking for their first break, and some are looking to keep living their dream as a dancer, however low the pay, and however small their chances. Anyway, Matt and his husband Sandro were in town for the weekend, (which was our anniversary, too), and they joined us for drinks:
Ben Dundee World Tour 2009. Currently, I am sitting in the Columbus airport, about to embark on a European Adventure. I am attending a conference in Hamburg, and it was actually cheaper for me to spend two weeks in Europe, than to spend just 5 days in Hamburg. I fly into Hamburg today, and fly out on the 15th. The conference runs from the 6-10, so I'll have a few days before hand to spend exploring the city, as well as a few days after the conference ends to take a side trip to Amsterdam. I will be sure and keep the blog updated with pictures and accounts of my exploits.

All Good Things

2009-03-18T00:14:00.001-07:00

My time in California, as a guest of the Stanford Institute of Theoretical Physics, is drawing to a close. Well, ok---I wasn't really a guest of the SITP, my boss was. I was more or less just along for the ride. Nevertheless, it was a wonderful few months.

I remember when my boss told me he was going to be spending six months on Sabbatical at Stanford. My first thought was this, exactly: "When I applied to Stanford, they couldn't reject my application fast enough. Now they have to take me."

This is me and the very famous Savas Dimopoulos. He is so famous that he has his own Wikipedia page. We shared a Greek salad once---he ate the peppers and cucumbers.

I spent six months doing physics, and exploring California, and enjoying myself immensely. I live in a 10 by 10 room, next to the train tracks, I share a bathroom with a Chinese girl, and my rent is $850 a month---but I wouldn't change any of this.

But as they say, all good things must end. I have enjoyed the benefits of being at a first class research institution, of interacting with first class people, and asking them stupid questions. I've made new friends, and hopefully I've made favorable impressions on them. I can say that, without a doubt, they've made favorable impressions on me. I will always remember Stanford for being a sunny place, partly because of the climate, but mostly because of the people.

I'm gonna miss you guys. A lot.

More SF Adventures

2009-02-18T21:45:00.000-08:00

Bryanne took some more pictures of our San Francisco escapades, and I figured I should post them.

This is my friend Nadir and I, with the main star of the dinner show that we caught on Saturday night.

All in all, it was a wonderful weekend---a great way to spend Valentine's Day.

Meet me in San Francisco

2009-02-17T22:16:00.000-08:00

After a mere five months of being an $8 train ride away from one of America's most unique cities, I finally made it into San Francisco for a long weekend. The occasion, of course, was Valentine's Day, and my girlfriend Bryanne flew in from Columbus.

Saturday night we went to a dinner theatre, Teatro Zinzanni. My friend Nadir is the drummer and was able to score us tickets at the "Producer's Bar". We sat next to a facial surgeon from Las Vegas, who was one of the acrobat's boyfriends (her name, appropriately enough, was Tatianna). After the show, we were able to meet several of the cast back stage. Anyway, I'm sure Bryanne will have some (compromising) photos from the show.

During the day on Sunday, we headed over to the Mission District to grab lunch, and check out a few shops that drove Bryanne wild. This is one of the areas of town that hasn't been completely gentrified, yet. If you're not familiar with this word, it's more or less what happens when gay people move into an old part of town.

First, it starts out as a part of town where only meth addicts and artists (who can tell the difference?) can afford to live. Then, coffee shops show up because meth addicts can't pawn espresso machines, and the artists are too poor to take a cab uptown to get a latte. This officially begins the revolution---property values begin to rise, more trendy shops start to pop up (where else do gay people and artists shop?), and eventually the meth addicts can't afford their rent any longer. Ultimately a Whole Foods store opens up, thus completing the process. Of course, the gays and artists are long sense gone, and all that are left are guilty white people, who complain that the same process is happening in another part of the city. This ostensibly leads to white people pushing for laws that prevent property owners from charging their tenants market value for their apartments, which stalls the process and creates a situation advantageous for the meth addicts. (For more info, see here.)

There was still a bit of time before dinner (which Bryanne was in charge of), so we caught a cab over to Haight/Ashbury, for to see the epicenter of marijuana culture in America.

(Bryanne has some better pictures.)

After a bit of marveling at the uses of hemp, we got back to the hotel room for a quick shower and change of wardrobe for dinner,at McCormick and Kuleto's. I had monkfish stuffed with chorrizo, in a chimichurri sauce. It was wonderful. Even better was this (according to Wikipedia):

According to Seafood Watch, monkfish is currently on the list of fish that American consumers who are sustainability minded should avoid.

I guess that made it taste even better. I won't go into detail about what "sustainability minded" even means (what a fucking joke).

Although the weather was mostly uncooperative, we did manage to get a bit of sightseeing in on Monday afternoon.

I was able to get a pretty decent deal on a hotel room on the Embarcadero, the street which runs down the eastern edge of the city, along the bay. The expensive rooms in the hotel looked out across the bay, onto the Bay Bridge, and the Ferry Building:

After a lunch by the bay, we caught a trolley back down to Fisherman's Wharf, where we had been the night before. We walked along the piers, where a solid commercial fishing industry still seems to thrive.

We walked down the waterfront, past shops that were more or less generic, and people who were more or less copies of people whom I had seen before in Baltimore, or Galveston, or New York. Of course, not every shop was a Hooters or a Vietnamese woman selling sunglasses---Bryanne and I found a nice bakery where we enjoyed some fresh sourdough bread and a cappuccino.

The sun began to sink, clouds started to gather again, and we headed back to the trolley stop. As we walked down the waterfront, past street vendors selling fried calamari and hot, boiled crabs, I couldn't quite help myself...

And, of course, I would be remiss if I failed to come up with the obligatory pictures of Alcatraz:

and of the Golden Gate bridge:

All in all, it was a wonderful weekend in the city---good food, good company, and a healthy dose of culture.

Of People and Causes

2009-02-01T14:05:00.001-08:00

Following on yesterday's post about PETA and it's misleading advertising campaigns, Steve Johnson of the Chicago Trib points out:

And PETA has [grabbed attention] in its time-honored fashion, winning attention not with the logic of its cause but with one more sensationalist public display of women as sex objects...Make that title People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Except Human Females in Their Physical Prime Who Will Be Stripped Down and Displayed Like Cutlets in a Deli Case).

This was another thing that I found ironic, but didn't include in my post---the same types of people who spell "women" with a y (you got it...womyn) are the people who send PETA checks. So why do they tolerate the use of the female body in this manner?

Given this, how is PETA better than the conservative senator who is caught soliciting sex from a man in an airport bathroom? The short answer is: they're not. It's always easy to have a moral crusade when you get to pick which morals you are crusading for.

I'll give another example. I was at the Farmer's Market today (don't laugh, the spinach is cheaper), and came across a guy soliciting signatures for some climate cause. I asked him what he thought about the scientific case for global warming, and he said (I quote) "Well, I'm not sure. I don't agree with all of the conclusions, but I do think we need to do something."

So here's a guy, trying to get me to sign a letter to Obama advocating a cap on carbon emissions in the US. The kicker is---he's not even sure that he's doing the right thing! If you believe in anthropogenic global warming, great. I don't know what the right answer is...but if you're not even sure that the science is right, you're just a pawn.

So back to PETA---if you're willing to support an organization that exploits sex the way that PETA exploits sex, and then you complain about the treatment of women in the porn industry (for example), you're a hypocrite. Sorry if this makes you feel a bit uneasy, but it's the truth. Boycotting something, or holding specific beliefs is great, and I hope everybody has something that they feel strongly about. But the minute you preach to me about how your lifestyle choices are so much better than mine, be prepared to be picked apart :)

So here's to the ethical treatment of animals: go for head shots every time, that way they're dead before they hit the ground.

Myth: PETA is cares about you.

2009-01-30T23:41:00.000-08:00

Ok, many things have happened since last I posted, including a wonderful weekend in (of all places) Detroit. But more on this later.

Today, NBC deemed a PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or, People Eating Tasty Animals) ad too offensive to air during the Super Bowl. How offensive is the ad? Well, unless you care about truth in advertising, not very.

The premise of the ad is this: stunning women use produce in a manner that was only fantasized about by the poor migrant worker who picked it. That's pretty much it. Beautiful in it's simplicity, the only message is that "Studies show, vegetarians have better sex." Ahh great. Let me put down my steak and go buy a copy of the Kama Sutra and some scented oils, and everything will fall into place.

First of all, what fucking studies? Surely such a virtuous organization as PETA, that paragon of reason, that beacon to progressives everywhere would have spent some money actually conducting a study. I mean, if you're paying $100,000 a second for air time, please, God, tell me you're not going to use it to lie to one third of Americans. I searched for 20 minutes looking for a study that supported this thesis, but to no avail. This leads me to one of two conclusions: 1.) I didn't look hard enough, or 2.) PETA is lying. Because I am so cynical, I was not surprised when I checked PETA's response to the decision :

Undulating bodies aside, why do vegetarians make better lovers? For one thing, vegetarians are, on average, fitter and slimmer than meat eaters. Also, heart disease and obesity—both linked to meat consumption—can slow someone down so much that sex can give them a coronary. And the consumption of meat and dairy products is linked to impotence: The cholesterol and saturated fats in meat and other animal products restrict the flow of blood to all the body's vital organs—not just to the heart.

So PETA didn't conduct any "studies". That's surprising. The thing that really---I mean really---pisses me off is the fact that the PR guy for PETA is so clearly choosing his words in such a non-committal manner. They know that they don't have any hard data to back up their claims, and they don't care! I mean, it's not WMD, but really...what is?

Eating meat can give you a heart attack, but so can eating peanut butter. (One ounce of chicken: 46 calories, 1 g fat. One ounce of peanut butter: 165 calories, 3 grams of fat.) PETA has only told me what I already know: if you're unhealthy, there's probably a lot bigger things to worry about than sex. Really, the ad should have said "A bunch of people who think that eating meat is morally wrong also think that people who don't eat meat have better sex." At least this would have been honest.

This all isn't really fair---I would have declared victory either way. Suppose I could have found a study that confirmed PETA's thesis. Of course, I can also find studies which show:

Rich men are better lovers
On average, white men are more intelligent than black men (by 15 IQ points)
If you floss, you'll live longer.

So, do I believe that black people are less intelligent than white people, and my sexual prowess is measured by the things that I buy for my girlfriend? Of course not. These studies don't prove anything except that white people are better at taking IQ tests, that people who floss probably also have a lot of other healthy habits, and that some women have become so good at faking orgasms that they can now fool themselves.

But, could it be possible that vegetarians actually make (gasp) worse lovers? This, surely, is the icing on the cake: vegetarian diets can lead to zinc deficiencies, and zinc deficiencies can lead to a low libido. Oh happy day---not only is PETA utterly dishonest in their advertising, they also are ignoring the proverbial plank in their collective eye.

This all goes to show: correlation is not causation. What does this mean? It means that flossing won't make you live longer. It means that rich men don't make better lovers, and it means that the guys who wrote The Bell Curve were full of shit. It works like this: does the fact that you're a vegetarian imply that you're a better lover? Does it imply that you have better sex? Of course not. Similarly, I can dress the question with a few "nots": Does not being a vegetarian imply that you are not a good lover? This is how "if" and "then" statements work. "If you are a vegetarian, then you are a good lover" automatically means "If you are not a vegetarian then you are not a good lover". Simply establishing a correlation between two observables is not enough to establish any logical link between those two observables.

The most honest statement that one could make is "In general, healthy people have better sex." (Why do healthy people have better sex, and what does "better" mean? What does "healthy" mean? If you're Bill Clinton, you have to quibble with the definition of "sex", too.) Just for argument's sake, let's assume that all people are either "healthy" or "unhealthy". There are a subset of "healthy" people who also happen to be "vegetarians". Good for them. But there is also a (much larger) subset of all "healthy" people who love "eating animals". Likewise, all "vegetarians" aren't "healthy"---some "unhealthy" people are also "vegetarians". But even this is not enough reasoning to establish causation between "healthy" and "better sex" because there are, I'm sure, some healthy vegetarians who are lousy in the sack. At best PETA is making a statistical statement with little or no hard evidence, on par with "Blacks are less intelligent than whites". At worst, they are deliberately misleading people.

Of course, the glaring irony in all of this is twofold. First, these are the same people who balked when Bush claimed that people who buy drugs fund terrorists. (Never mind the fact that the Taliban's main source of income is poppy farming, the raw material needed to make heroin.) This begs the question---is it ok to use misleading statements to achieve some moral victory? Even more deliciously, these are the same people who disagree with the proponents of "Abstinence only" programs who stretch the truth about condom fail rates. (For example, did you know that the fail rate for a condom is, at worst, about 15%?) It seems that the ends only justify the means if they're MY ends.

Let's get one thing straight: PETA doesn't care about you. PETA doesn't care about your sex life. PETA cares about cows that were raised to be slaughtered, and KFC employees playing football with chickens. PETA cares about funding domestic terrorists and advancing their own agenda. PETA could care less about you.

Back to California

2009-01-16T21:09:00.000-08:00

I had originally planned on heading back to California via the Grand Canyon (northern Arizona), however, I spent too much time stopping and taking pictures, and so I missed my schedule by a couple of hours---instead of catching sunset, it would have been already dark. This is coupled with the fact that I caught quite a bit of snow starting at the New Mexico/Arizona border.

My father gave me a GPS device that he no longer used, so the following will be enhanced by longitude and latitude numbers! Click on the links, and you will go to Google maps---you can then look at satellite views or (to give you a sense of scales) the topological view.

Gila National Forrest.

I spent the night in Silver City, NM, after hitting US 180 off of I-10 at Las Cruces. The drive into Silver City was straight and flat, and the drive into the Gila National Forrest was coming into the foothills of the Rockies, officially the San Francisco Mountain Range. My first stop was the Alfred Leopold Vista (33° 11.014' N 108°49.739' W, Elev 5197 ft).

I got out of the car and quickly realized how cold it was. I had to change into a sweatshirt as I took some pictures.

After leaving the rest stop, I traveled a few miles and saw a turnoff for the "Catwalk Whitewater Picnic Ground" (33° 22.342' N 108°50.547' W, Elev. 5131 ft.) . Luckily, the water wasn't TOO white, as the park would have been rendered inaccessible:

It was a very nice little picnic area, about six miles off the highway, with a small river running behind it.

And, of course, I had to try my fancy camera out. This is a small aperture and long exposure picture of a piece of driftwood in the water, doctored just a bit with Picasa.

US 180 continued through the mountains, with steep drop offs to one side, and sheer cliffs to the other. This is a turnoff at 33° 32.604' N 108°56.122' W, Elev. 5950 ft.

Apache National Forest.

I began to climb further and further into the mountains, and at about 7000 feet it started to snow. And, even more beautifully, they hadn't scraped the highway. Now, my truck has 4WD and a manual shift option (which makes engine braking a breeze), so I had no trouble navigating the roads. In spite of my Texas licence plates, I do know what I'm doing when I'm driving in the snow, but there are a lot of idiots around. I pulled off of the interstate at a pass (33° 43.945' N 108°56.101' W, Elev. 7835 ft.) and took a few pics.

I had to be quick, because it was a bout 25 °F degrees outside.

The Painted Desert and Petrified Forest.

As I came into Arizona, it was increasingly clear that I wouldn't make the Grand Canyon by sunset, so I decided instead to hit the Petrified Forest (34° 47.670' N 109°53.445' W, Elev. 5397 ft.).

Now, I was imagining a forest of trees which were petrified, as the name implied. If the name of the park was truly descriptive, it would be called "A Forest Once Existed Here, but all the Trees Died and Fell Over, and now They're Rocks", but I imagine that it wouldn't have fit on the sign.

I came into the park through the western entrance, and as I drove down the main road there were the fossilized remains of many ancient trees.

The ranger at the entrance to the park assured me that it rarely snowed in the park, and getting to see it in such a state was a real treat. Maybe it was a treat for her, but because it was cloudy, it was hard to see all of the colors for which the park is famous.

If I had to guess, I think that there used to be an ancient river which ran through this part of the country. The river deposited various sediments at various times, lending their colors to the sand.

This is a formation called the "Teepees".

I would have liked to have stayed a while longer, but it was getting late, so I had to move on.

I stopped for gas once I got back on the interstate, and found this dinosaur in Holbrook, AZ (34° 56.272' N 110°07.900' W, Elev. 5268 ft.).

Meteor Crater.

The final stop was Meteor Crater (35° 01.971' N 111°01.309' W, Elev. 5590 ft.), outside of Winslow, AZ (which is more than just a line in an Eagle's song). 50,000 years ago, a meteor hit the Arizona desert, leaving a crater about 1 mile in diameter.

It's a little hard to appreciate the scale of this thing. I'd suggest going to Google via the link above and looking at the satellite picture of the crater. It is really impressive.

To give you SOME idea of the scale, the rock I labeled in the picture is about the size of a house. That's the claim, according to the meteor people.

This is a piece of the guilty party...

All in all, I have to say I quite enjoyed my holiday. I got to see a good chunk of America, I learned some masonry, and I got to see Lefty. I also started a fossil collection, which (I'm sure) I'll post about in the future. There were TONS of fossils in Arizona, and even quite a few roadside shops which sold them. And, of course, Bryanne bought me a beautiful fossilized megalodon tooth for Christmas. But more on this later!

Mr. Dark Matter and Minimalism

2009-01-15T23:36:00.000-08:00

I don't want to make a habit of this, but this will be a post about physics. The first half will be non-technical.

Neal Weiner from NYU was at Stanford this week talking about his ideas concerning dark matter. He has been pursuing a pretty simple idea for the past couple of years which has recently garnered a lot of attention thanks to some new data from a satellite called PAMELA. I've had trouble finding a decent picture, but the excitement is over a few nice data points:

The red points are the new ones, which were only recently released.

What is this a graph of? The PAMELA satelite is measuring positrons in space. This is interesting, because it is very possible that there is some new physics which produces high energy positrons--specifically, high energy positrons are a generic signal for dark matter anihilations. Dark matter is the stuff that comprises about 25% of the universe. ("Normal matter", like protons and electrons, which doesn't interact with dark matter, makes up only about 4-5% of the universe.) The graph shows you (essentially) how many positrons they measure, and at what energy they measure them. The excitement is that PAMELA measures more positrons than people though there should be.

There are a few things about the graph that should jump out. First of all, the black line is what the expected background should be. That is, there are already tons of positrons shooting around space, which come from the sun, for example. The heavy black line is how many we expect to see if we understand everything completely. You shouldn't be worried that PAMELA sees too few of the lower energy positrons (energies less than 10 GeV). The experts assure me that this is due to natural solar fluctuations.

Second, there are a lot of other data points from older experiments. The difference between the old data points and the new data points is the size of the error bars. The best that we can ever do in physics is to get a bound on a measurement---for example, if you're buying meat, the butcher charges you for the nearest 1/100th of a pound. This is as accurately as he can measure things. You don't know EXACTLY how much ham you've bought, you can only confidently say that you have 1.03 pounds---in other words, you're limited by the accuracy of the measuring device. A similar story happens here---the older experiments were too inaccurate to be able to see the extra positrons with any definiteness because the error bars (mostly) overlapped the background. The new PAMELA data, however, has very small error bars, so we know for sure what we're dealing with.

The excitement is that Neal may have predicted this excess.

The thing that is interesting to me is that, if Neal is correct, we have to reconsider a guiding light which we use in physics, called minimalism. The idea behind minimalism is you use as few things as possible to explain as many things as possible. So, for example, if one were to talk about colors, we don't need to discuss the 16 million or so different shades that my computer can make. 16 million colors is too much to think about. Instead, we can think about three colors, and make all of the other colors by combining red, blue, and yellow in different ratios.

What Neal did was to depart from this approach. We HAVE been trying to explain dark matter as some single component thing. In general, people have worked very hard to get their models to fit the data, and they find a few things that are just not quite right. Of course, who's to say that Nature hasn't chosen something that looks "not quite right" to us---it certainly wouldn't be the first time that we've been surprised. But when you actually sit down to calculate things, they don't work out as nicely as we would like.

Neal proposed that the stuff that makes up dark matter is much more complex than what we've understood. Imagine that we only know about colors that can be made out of blue and yellow, and then one day someone discovers purple. Purple is an anomaly, and lots of people rush out to try and explain purple by mixing some ratio of blue and yellow. Maybe some people get close, but the colors they make aren't quite right. Then Neal Weiner comes along and says, "Well, what happens if you invent red?"

Now the technical part.

Neal's proposal involves having a hidden gauge group, usually just a U(1), but maybe something larger. The gauge group is higgsed at about a GeV, and the matter in the hidden sector (the dark matter) has MeV mass splittings induced by the spontaneously broken symmetry. The dark matter communicates with the visible sector through some operators linking the gauge kinetic terms of the hidden sector gauge group and the visible sector gauge group (called kinetic mixing). The typical process is DM + DM -> dark photon -> photon -> electron + positron.

Because the dark matter has it's own dark force, the scattering cross sections are enhanced via something called Sommerfield enhancement. This is a familiar effect, for example, in gravitational or electromagnetic scattering. Having particles which are charged under some force increases the effective impact parameter. This helps to explain why the cross section implied by the PAMELA data is so much larger than the cross section implied by the typical thermal relic calculations.

The thing that you'll notice is that the previous two paragraphs have been incredibly generic. Neal and his collaborators have only really drawn vague outlines about what the dark sector could possibly look like---it's up to others to actually fill these in.

I'll close with an example Neal used in his talk about "Mr. Dark Matter". Suppose that there are people made of dark matter, and that they measure the universe in the same way that we do. What they'd find is that 25% of the universe is made of "normal" stuff, 70% of the universe is made of dark energy (whatever THAT is), and 4-5% of the universe is made of some mysterious new things that aren't explained. Obviously, the Mr. Dark Matters will spend lots of time trying to understand what this last 5% of the universe could possibly be made of. Now suppose some dark scientist comes along and says "I propose that the mysterious stuff is actually SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1). There are three families of quarks and leptons, with approximately massless neutrinos. The quark masses will range from about 175 GeV to 4 MeV, and the leptons will range in mass from about 1 GeV to 0.5 MeV. The SU(2)xU(1) will be spontaneously broken at about 100 GeV, and the SU(3) will become strongly coupled at roughly the same scale, for no apparent reason, ..." The point is, nothing about physics as we know it is really minimal. In fact, the Standard Model is about the least minimal thing that we could have. (Ok, this is hyperbole, but still, the Standard Model is pretty complicated.)

We are at a point in physics where the typical approaches have gotten us close to the answer, but something is just not quite right. The minimal dark matter models that people have worked on in the past are very well-motivated, but they all suffer from the same tunings---it's like the pieces of the puzzle almost fit. Many times it takes a different perspective to see that you're trying to fit the wrong pieces of the puzzle together.

=================================

Edit: A good friend who works in the field has asked me to clarify that Neil Weiner was not the first person to think about positrons as they pertain to dark matter anihilations/decays. The story started in the 1980's. But Neal is the first person to use the types of hidden sectors to model the data, which is the idea that I like. --bd

Home for the Holidays

2009-01-13T19:02:00.000-08:00

I'm a bit under the weather, still, and very busy on three different physics projects, so I'll just use this space to post a random smattering of pictures from Galveston when I was there.

C. megalodon jaws at the Moody Gardens Aquarium. I've decided to start collecting fossils, but more on this later...

Rastafarian penguin at Moody Gardens...

Me and Lefty, my erstwhile dog. He hates the cold, so he couldn't make the trip to Columbus...

Holiday Owl at Moody Gardens Festival of the Lights...

With my girlfriend, in front of the kissing fish...

My Sister's dog...

Another dog of my sister. This one is much older and more...er...dignified...

Over the holiday, I built a fire pit in my back yard. As you can see here, it's round and has a very impressive foundation. If you want advice on building a fire pit, I'd suggest the instructions here.

Me and Reggie, on New Year's Day. We (Bryanne and I) spent New Year's Eve with my good friend Miguel in Houston.

Doesn't it look like this snowman is making a crude gesture with his hand?

Anyway, I hope to soon post some great pictures of my drive back to California, including the painted desert/petrified forest, and a huge freaking impact crater in Arizona, complete with GPS coordinates!

Driving Home: Sierra Nevada and Mojave Desert

2009-01-05T23:05:00.000-08:00

If you know me, you know I'll never miss a chance to see a part of the country that I haven't seen before. I took this Christmas break as an opportunity to see a little bit of America---specifically, the southwest.

I set out from Palo Alto at 7 AM. My truck was laden with Eucalyptus firewood, which I was assured is a natural mosquito repellent, aside from smelling nice when it burns.

My planned route took me down I-5, then east through the Sierra Nevada, to Bakersfield (of Merle Haggard fame) and Barstow where I picked up I-40. Then I turned south at Needles and traveled through the Mojave Desert on US 95 (which follows partly old US 66) to Blythe, where I picked up I-10 (for 1200 miles or so) into Houston.

Things were pretty uninteresting until I hit I-5, where I followed the Santa Cruz mountains south (just to my west).

At Bakersfield, I turned more eastward, and came across the southern reaches of the Sierra Nevada.

There was snow, in places, and the temperature dropped to the mid 20's as I made the ascent.

A vicious cross wind powered wind turbines at the pass:

Once I was trough the mountains, I pulled off the road to take in some of the scenery, and stretch my legs...

The weather was still a bit chilly, with a stiff west wind.

And, of course, I found some random poop:

The Sierra Nevada separate the fertile San Joaquin Valley from the Mojave Dessert---the mountains gave way to the vast flat, which stretched out for miles in front of me:

The road was straight and flat into Barstow...

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold... Suddenly, there was a terrible roar all around us, and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, and a voice was screaming "Holy Jesus. What are these goddamn animals?" (from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

Once I made it to Needles, it was time to turn south, along the eastern edge of the Mojave Dessert.

By this time, it was about 4 pm, and the sun was beginning to set over the desert.

There were several dirt roads off into the desert---most likely service roads for the utility lines which ran alongside the highway---and around 4:45 or so I pulled onto one and drove about a mile or so off road. I hiked up a small rise about a quarter of a mile or so, and got comfortable for the sunset.

The sky exploded into oranges and reds, and my camera afforded me many different shutter speed and aperture settings. I got several nice shots as I watched the sun sink over the San Bernadino Mountains in the west.

Of course, then I had to find my way back to the road...

The rest of the drive into Texas was more or less uneventful. I got food poisoning from a Subway somewhere in Arizona, so I was in no mood to take many more pictures, however, the desert sunset more than made up for the explosive gastrointestinal blight, and I got some nice pictures on the return trip.

Preview

2008-12-19T23:41:00.001-08:00

Here's a bit of a preview of a forthcoming post, about my journey across the Southwest. This is the sun setting over the San Bernadino Mountains in the Mojave Desert.

I think I'm in love...

2008-12-18T12:50:00.000-08:00

I ran across this great cartoon...

I found this new blog called "Jesus and Mo", about the adventures of two profits.

Notice the literature that Muhammed chooses as bed time reading:

The people who know me know about my opinions when it comes to religion. For those who don't know me (or, who don't know me that well), I have a very liberal view of religion in general. And, somewhere, I hope that God laughs at these things.

Landspeed

2008-12-17T21:00:00.000-08:00

Today I went up to the SLAC Linear Accelerator Center (formerly the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, name change because of copyright issues) to hear a talk about (wait for it Mrs. Bornstein...) dark matter. SLAC is at the top of a long (~2 miles) hill, which took me about 15 minutes to ascend.

After a hard day of physicsing, I headed home, which is a 2 mile stretch downhill, subsequently setting a new landspeed record on my bike...wait for it...30.5 mph! For the Canadians and Europeans who sometimes stop in, that's 49 kph!

Ok, so maybe it's not so impressive, but it was 40 F outside (that's 4.444444... C), which means 28 F (-2.22222... C) with wind chill. I really hope someone remembers to buy me new gloves:)

In other news, I put up a web page. It explains my research interests, and contains some pictures which may look familiar.

Iraqi Reporter Celebrates Freedom of Speech

2008-12-15T22:36:00.000-08:00

Luckily, he now has that right :) He didn't even have his tongue cut out! How many shoes were thrown at Sadam Hussein?

Congratulations Iraq...you've now graduated from dictatorship to democracy. Enjoy!

Via Gateway Pundit via Stubble-jumping Redneck.

Myth: Americans are bad at math.

2008-12-09T22:24:00.000-08:00

I can't tell you how many snooty Europeans have informed me how ignorant we are here in America. We elected Bush. Twice. (But honestly, Gore and Kerry were the best that the Democrats could do?) There are actually people debating about Intelligent Design (or neo-Creationism) as it pertains to school curricula. We drive too much. Our cars are too big. We use too many resources. And, of course, we're ignorant in general about the world around us.

To them I say "Ach, that's NON-sense!"

To address this latter point, I'd like to regale you, dear reader, with a brief anecdote. I was listening to the BBC about a year ago I guess, on the eve of a very important diplomatic visit to England from the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy---it may have been actually Jacques Chirac, but I don't know if it was that long ago . The BBC reporter was wandering around the streets of London, interviewing people and asking them about this historical event. What wasn't surprising was that many of the people didn't know about this meeting between their Prime Minister and the French President. What WAS funny was that a large portion of the interviewees couldn't actually name the French President. This, of course, puts in light all the poor kids who can't find Iraq on a map, being put on the spot by a news reporter---not that this ignorance is excusable, mind you. It seemed, at least to me, that this bunch of plebes in London were no different from the people you'd find in New York...more concerned about Steinbrenner and A-Rod than about Elliot Spitzer and his whores.

So I told you that story to shatter whatever illusion you had about the "well-informed European Unionite", and now I'll shatter another misconception: Americans aren't (that) bad at math. Now, I know what you may think. Many of you have probably been forwarded an email that says something to the effect of "If the government were to divide up evenly the $700 billion financial bailout package, each American would cash a check for $200,000!" Now, I can tell you that 300 million x $200,000 is $60 trillion (with a `T') but still the email gets forwarded. Ok, it's a lot of money and people just tend to forward emails without thinking about it, but still...

Today, however, the Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) was published by the U.S. Department of Education. The bottom line is that American students are pretty much average when it comes to Math and Science.

Of course, this is no reason to rejoice---we really should have a better education system in this country, and the disparity between the poorest schools and the richest schools is pretty amazing. The top tier is ostensibly filled with counties like Japan and South Korea. A bit surprising is the appearance of Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation in the top bracket, but good for those guys---they've yet to figure Democracy out properly, but at least they can calculate missile trajectories.

On the other side of the coin, however, is that US students in 4th grade and in 8th grade out-performed most of their European peers. For example, the only European countries where students out-preformed Americans were England, Latvia, Lithuania and the Netherlands. We beat countries like Germany, Italy, Australia (not in Europe, I KNOW) and Sweden. In science, the story is similar: the US beat most European countries which participated, but were outperformed by a few Asian countries, and Hungary, England, and Russia.

Past Performance

What's surprising to me, at least, is what this says about President Bush's education policy. Now wait, you say...isn't "No Child Left Behind" a complete and utter failure? I don't know, but it certainly doesn't get much good press. We can compare the previous study in 2003(math and science) and 1999. And, you can see for yourself, the US steadily improves.

I don't know what policies were in place before Bush came to office, but it's hard to argue with these numbers. Of course, the conspiracy theorists among you will be quick to point out that this is a study done by the Department of Education, staffed by Bush appointees. This is a fair point, but one that doesn't hold much water, I think. The studies aren't designed to make American students look good, they're (presumably) designed as an honest assessment of education policy. Of course, we can always add epicycles and invent a conspiracy, but then we're making the data fit the theory, and not vice versa.

So like him or hate him, you have to at least admit that during the Bush administration American students, on average, consistently improved in math and science when compared to their counterparts in other countries. Either in spite of Bush or because of him, we're performing better when it comes to math and science than we were 8 years ago.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Now, some people will be quick to point out that the numbers are meaningless, compared to each other. Each year the average is 500, and anyone who's prayed for a curve on a test knows that averages are based on how everyone else in the class does.

To this end, the people in charge of the study have worked very diligently to ensure that such comparisons can legitimately be made. The Appendix A of the study is dedicated to statistics. It seems that they've developed some sort of algorithm whereby the problems are ranked in difficulty each year. If one problem was ranked "very easy" in 2003, but became suddenly "very difficult" in 2007, it was thrown out. Further, each country's test scores were weighted a certain amount to account for the individual populations which took the test. You can argue that this weighting wasn't done properly, and I'm certainly in no position to refute you, as I only gave the Appendix a cursory glance.

Other Studies

Of course, you can look at the numbers yourself and take what you will from them. And certainly, one study doesn't prove anything. What we look for is a set of studies, all of which show the same general trends. For example, the recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress showed the same general upward trend in Math, while showing a similar stagnation when it comes to science.

Ultimately, as the world's richest country, we should have the best educational system, bar none. Clearly, this is not the case---there are very good schools in America and there are very bad schools in America. The fact that the average is so high speaks to the quality of the best schools, not of the worst.

And there can be no excuses. Other countries face similar challenges as we do, with growing immigrant (and in the case of Australia, indigenous) populations and looming recession, and still manage to preform better than we do---take the Netherlands, for example.

Ours is a country built on opportunity, and there are places in this Nation where the lack of quality schooling prohibits children from actualizing themselves. Robbing someone of the opportunity to improve themselves---in the land of opportunity---is as un-American as it gets. So while you can safely ignore criticisms coming from your European friends when it comes to the overall quality of our primary and secondary education, none of us should be complacent in the fact that we are just average.

California Dreaming

2008-12-06T14:24:00.001-08:00

So, since I've been in California, I've put nearly 300 miles on my bike:
The original goal was for 1000 miles by the end of March, and I am on pace to make it happen, except I'll be gone for a couple of weeks during Christmas, and for Bryanne's graduation and Miguel's wedding.

It's a nice bike, complete with disk breaks and 27 gears. (Some of the gears are degenerate, though, and I only use about six or seven different gear combinations, in practice.) It also has 29" wheels, which is a departure from the typical 26" wheels on a mountain bike. After test riding several bikes, I found that this size was a better option for me.

I've also dropped about 15 pounds since October, and about 30 since June.
I started lifting weights at OSU in June or so, and my legs and arms are getting bigger, and my calves are super toned. I joined a gym here in Menlo Park (I can't technically use the gym at Stanford), and got two free sessions with a personal trainer, Ulysses. On my own, I've done pretty good though. My squats have increased from around 100 pounds in October to 155 last week. My bench press started under 100 pounds and is now around 120 -130 (depending on how many reps I do). Ulysses (who uses words like "explosive" and "essentially" quite a bit) has designed a workout for me designed to increase power and build core muscles. I don't know how that will go, but I look forward to sitting in the steam room after I lift, at least.

I think that a lifestyle change like this is pretty doable---for me it took a realization that I would be in school for 30 years of my life, and that dying at 55 was really kind of a bad option. That, coupled with the fact that I more or less hate everything on TV (with the exception of Futurama reruns, South Park, football, and the Magic Bullet Infomercial) made it pretty easy. And, of course, I want to be "barrel chested".

There's tons of easy, healthy things to do, I've found. For example, I stopped drinking coffee and started drinking espresso and cappuccino. Coffee isn't bad for you at all---it's full of nutrients, and it makes you thirsty, so you drink more water. What IS bad is dumping half and half or cream into a cup of coffee. Also, for example, ZipLock makes these steam bags so that you can steam fresh vegetables in the microwave. So, for example, I can buy a whole roasted chicken from SafeWay (about $6) and a couple of pounds of vegetables. Then for dinner, I can cut a breast or a leg/thigh off of the chicken and steam up some vegetables. Total prep time is under five minutes (mostly because everything can't fit in the microwave at the same time), and the whole dinner has somewhere around 300-400 calories. For lunch I eat tomatoes instead of potato chips (you can buy these great little cherry tomatoes).

Of course, there's always the barrier that you have to get over first. And I still love fried fish, greasy Mexican food, and a thick steak as much as anyone. But I also enjoy feeling awake and healthy during the day, and not being out of breath when climbing up stairs.

Bornstein Family Thanksgiving

2008-12-06T14:23:00.001-08:00

Last week I headed back to Columbus to spend Thanksgiving with the Bornstein family. We typically have a small affair in Galveston, with 5-6 people, but early reports form intelligence officials had the Bornstein count at 24ish.

I arrived in Columbus on Monday night---it was quite a shock to remember how cold it gets in Ohio. I got on the plane in San Francisco at the temperature was in the mid seventies, when I got off of the plane in Columbus, it was mid thirties. I, for one, am perfectly happy knowing that snow exists somewhere in the world. I am also perfectly happy knowing that that somewhere is far away from where I reside.
Bryanne's father works for the NHL team in Columbus---he is an expert on concussions, and is employed by the Blue Jackets to keep hockey players from playing through the pain. Consequently, they have season tickets, and I caught a couple of hockey games while in town. I had never really watched a hockey game, and I have to say that it is a fast paced and exciting sport. There's not a lot of strategy when it comes to offense or defense---in this sense it is a bit like basketball, where you rely mainly on the ability of the defense to react to the offense, rather than on the ability of a coach to predict what the offense will do. It looks like (to my untrained eye) that you have to rely a lot on individual players doing their jobs. In a sport like football, though, playcalling and game management is much more important.
Bryanne's mom was very prepared for Thanksgiving dinner. She baked four pies the night before, and had ordered two ten pound turkey breasts from the turkey farmer at Columbus's North Market, and had them brined. The day of Thanksgiving just involved cooking the turkeys, and preparing the various side dishes.
Of course, I have to have my grandmother's zucchini casserole, which is actually pretty easy to make. It's like Atkins friendly stuffing: there's zucchini, red bell peppers, onion, garlic, bread crumbs, parmesean cheese, breakfast sausage and eggs in it. Basically, you boiled the zucchini until it gets mushy, then saute the peppers, onions, sausage and garlic and dump everything together in a big mixing bowl and mash it up. I boiled the zucchini in chicken stock instead of water. Then you add an egg or two, some bread crumbs, and I added some parmesean cheese. Put the whole thing in a casserole dish and top it with parmesean cheese, and bake it for a while until it's firm and delicious. I think it went over pretty well.It was a pretty grand affair, if only 14 of 24 people actually made the trip to Columbus. Mrs. Bornstein got the opportunity to showcase her new table, and there was more than enough food and pie to go around. Overall it was a wonderful week off, although I did sneak some physics in at odd times.

Maybe What I Said About Mountain Lions was Wrong....

2008-11-24T10:08:00.000-08:00

I've been wrong before...maybe it DOES pay to fight back...

Science Journalism: The Not so Good, The Worse, and The Downright Awful

2008-11-23T15:24:00.000-08:00

Almost without question, the state of science journalism is shit. This includes articles in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and most of the popular press you've ever read. (I don't think that I'm alone in this, nor do I think that this phenomenon is confined to physics. I can imagine economists and psychologists and home makers all sitting in their respective social circles, talking about how journalists simply don't get it.) It's SO bad that I can't even remember the last time I read something worth reading from some pop science publication.

I want to pause, from this impending tirade, to exempt from all of the following maelstrom of hate speech some truly shimmering exceptions: in particular, I would actually pay for a subscription to Scientific American, and a few others. Of course, I will also exempt most books written by actual scientists, like The Elegant Universe and The Road to Reality.

Now, back to the show.

It is simply ridiculous to imagine that some national publication, like New Scientist, or Discover Magazine, couldn't hire an actual scientist to do the writing. I mean, they probably pay some person with a B.A. degree in journalism and a passing interest in science to write popular, and interesting stories designed to sell subscriptions. But honestly---most people don't know much about physics, and these publications are doing nothing to help the matter.

There are too many categories of incompetence, and here I will list three, with examples. In general, articles about physics are either deliberately misleading, ridiculously confusing, or downright wrong.

Deliberately Misleading

While I can cut and paste many links here, I'll choose one from this week:

e=mc2: 103 years later, Einstein's proven right

First of all, the science.

All matter is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. The protons and neutrons are made of quarks, and the quarks interact with each other by exchanging gluons, just like electrons interact with each other by exchanging photons. The force that binds the quarks together is called the strong nuclear force. There is a strange property of this force that the strength of the force increases at larger distances. You're familiar with the way magnets work, for example: the closer you put them together, the stronger they attract or repulse. The attraction between two quarks due to the strong nuclear force, on the other hand, becomes stronger as you pull the two quarks apart.

One of the consequences of this is that the protons and neutrons (which are made of quarks), weigh much more than they should. Each quark weighs about 5 MeV, but protons and neutrons (which are made of only three quarks) weigh closer to 1000 MeV. The reason is due to the properties of the strong nuclear force. Remember, Einstein says E = mc^2, so the energy exerted in separating the three quarks which make the proton or neutron manifests itself as mass (m = E/c^2). And, as you can see, this is where MOST of the mass of the neutron and proton come from. What is lacking, however, is an accurate way to calculate the mass of the proton. This is a very important piece of science, because having such a calculation would allow us to really understand the dynamics of the strong force.

And this is what was recently done: a group of French, Germans (who LOVE to calculate), and Hungarians devised a way to actually do the calculation from first principles. This is impressive in and of itself, however, it aparently doesn't sell magazines.

Enter Yahoo! science writers. The title of the article implies that somehow some doubt about Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, which was considered more or less proven by 1920. That aside, as I outlined for you above, anyone who's studied particle physics could have told you that most of the mass in the proton comes from the binding energy between the quarks.

Even if I ignore the shitty perspective on science, the article reads like something a kid in middle school wrote:

By showing how much energy would be released if a certain amount of mass were to be converted into energy, the equation has been used many times, most famously as the inspirational basis for building atomic weapons.

Wow...many times! Perhaps even MORE inexcusable is what the French National Center for Scientific Research had to say:

"Until now, this has been a hypothesis," France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said proudly in a press release.

"It has now been corroborated for the first time."

So the article fails for many reasons:

The writer is a douchebag.
The writer totally missed what was really interesting about the physics that was going on.
Gratuitous use of E = mc^2.

Ridiculously Confusing

I had some trouble filling this section, so I will defer to two blogs which I read regularly: Clifford Johnson, a string theorist at USC, and Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia.

Recently, the History Channel aired a special on Parallel Universes which fits this bill pretty nicely. I didn't actually watch this episode (I don't watch much tv), but it has caused quite a stirring among physicists in general. Peter Woit writes (in a post entitled Shouldn't Something be Done?):

It seems to me that it would be a good idea for people in general, and the scientists involved in this in particular (Clifford Johnson, Max Tegmark, Michio Kaku, Joe Lykken and Alex Filippenko) to contact the History Channel with a polite request that this program not be rebroadcast, and that steps be taken to avoid creating more disasters of the same kind.

Clifford Johsnon, who was involved in the consulting for the project, was equally disheartened:

Got to first commercial break. Er… need more whiskey. There’s some good science embedded in there somewhere (e.g., Tegmark talking about inflation, and WMAP results and flatness and so forth (but the laser beams!?)), but the voice-over (among others) is taking serious liberties (like claiming right at the beginning of the show that scientists have evidence that there may be parallel universes…sigh. No, No, No, No. That was really not necessary.)…

So it seems that even with the help of people who are noted for their skills at explaining things to people, journalists are made of fail.

Downright Wrong

The last category of pop science trash comes from Bruno Maddox at Discover Magazine:

Three Words that could Overthrow Physics: "What is Magnetism?"

A brief history lesson. The pinnacle of classical physics is, without a doubt, the unification of electricity and magnetism by Maxwell in the mid 1800's. Not only did Maxwell show how two, seemingly distinct phenomena actually stemmed from the same force, he introduced a paradigm---namely unification---that drives theoretical physics even today.

However, Bruno Maddox would have you believe that we haven't learned anything in the past 140 years. The article is written in sort of a bombastic "look-at-all-the-words-I-learned-while-leafing-through-real-physics-books" style:

This information was not easy to come by. My copy of Electronics for Dummies now shares a shelf with Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics by Frederick Byron Jr. and Robert Fuller. Should a doctor at any point take a cross section of my brain, she will find patches of scarring and dead tissue, souvenirs of the time I pursued the mystery of magnetism across the 11-dimensional badlands of string theory.

What's worse, he actually researched this piece of shit:

Students of human pathos may one day cherish the 16-minute recording of me, with my 100 percent positive-feedback rating as an eBay purchaser, failing to make renowned physicist Steven Weinberg, who won a Nobel for unifying electromagnetism with the so-called weak force, admit that he can’t explain how a magnet holds a dry-cleaning ticket to the door of a refrigerator.

I can't imagine Weinberg putting up with this raving lunatic for very long---it makes me throw up a little in my mouth to think of this idiot sitting across from Weinberg in his office, trying to make Weinberg "admit that he can’t explain" how a magnet works.

---

Physics is a trivial thing, in the grand scheme---but what about the things that journalists are writing about Iraq and the Presidential candidates? I can't trust these people to understand how a fucking magnet works, and now I have to vote based on what they're telling me? Just examining these issues has made me a bit uneasy...when confronted with two sources of information, what do you do? Can you tell when some journalist misunderstood the events that he witnessed, or when some copy editor just wants to sell more newspapers, or when something truly important happens? Can you trust journalists to be fair and impartial, or are there a bunch of ignorant dumbasses like Bruno Maddox running around, trying to convince experts that they're wrong?

Santa Cruz Mountain Expedition: Purisimia Creek Redwoods

2008-11-16T21:34:00.001-08:00

I'll take a break from blogging about Moneterey Bay Aquarium to post some pictures of my hike this Sunday. The biggest thing that I learned from the whole experience is that you should break in your hiking boots before hiking, and that mountain lions aren't pussies:

This is the first (hopefully) in a series of installments about some hiking adventures in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I decided, somewhat on a whim but mostly in a rational and well thought-out manner, to go for a hike this afternoon in the mountains. Palo Alto is flanked by mountains---I see the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west every day as I drive to work, and I have been promising myself for six weeks that I'd get out and get my shoes dirty.

After doing a bit of research, I decided that I would go for a nice 3.6 mile hike in the Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve. The trail that I ended up taking was a 7.1 mile hike that took me along the North Ridge and down into Whittemore Gulch. After going west along the gulch, I hiked back up the side of Harkins Ridge, back to my truck. The route I took is here. I highlighted the entire route.

Redwoods.

The namesake of the park is the redwood tree, a conifer for which California is famous. We've all seen grainy, black and white pictures of the giant trees that must have awed the first generation of white Californians, but it is an entirely different matter to stand with your chest against one looking up, to appreciate the true breadth of these organisms.

Some of the trunks that I encountered were several tens of feet in diameter, at least, supporting massive limb systems which arched up, mostly out of view. The trees gave off a fragrant, cedary smell, which permeated the air entirely as I made my way down to the basin.

Do behold the King Sequoia! Behold! Behold! seems all I can say. Some time ago I left all for Sequoia and have been and am at his feet, fasting and praying for light, for is he not the greatest light in the woods, in the world? Where are such columns of sunshine, tangible, accessible, terrestrialized?
John Muir, 1870

Other Plants.

This isn't the prime time of the year for plant watching, even though it's more or less always springtime here. There were a few covering plants, along with a compliment of native grasses and mosses.

This next picture is a Coyote Bush, I think. I spiced it up a bit with Picasa, a picture editing app from google. I like how it turned out:

As I got to the bottom of the gulch, the air turned progressively cooler and more humid, and it soon became apparent that there was a creek at the bottom. Not only was there a marked increase in moisture, but there was much less ambient light (an artifact of the boreal canopy) and a gentle mumur as the creek made it's lazy way to the Pacific. This change in conditions meant that new species of plants thrived.

Whittemore Gulch.

My truck was parked at roughly 1800 feet above sea level, and the bottom of the gulch is around 600 feet above sea level. After making my way down the side of the North Ridge mostly in the sun, the shade and quietly babbling creek were a welcomed change.

Now I pause for a random picture of poop:

This is a banana slug, the namesake of University of California, Santa Cruz. The rumor is that you can lick them to get a "tingly sensation" on your tongue. "Tingly" seems like a stupid reason to lick a slug, to me. I would go for "mind altering", but "tingly" sounds a bit lame.

Mostly Up.

Once I got to the bottom (400 feet above sea level), I had a tough choice to make. I had overshot my turnaround point about 2 miles back, and was now standing at the trailhead for another trail along a parallel gulch. A ridge of mountains (Harkins Ridge) separates Whittemore Gulch from Purisima creek, so I could either climb back up the face of the North Ridge (which I had already seen), or take a different route up Harkins Ridge. Either way, the return trip was mostly up.

The road back up was definitely difficult in some places, and I had to take several breathers along the way. The route up Harkins Ridge was shorter, but that only meant that the elevation changed more quickly.

Vistas.

Of course, you may be wondering where all the mountain pictures are, in all of this. No matter how many little features your 10 megapixle camera has, or how many angles you take a picture from, it is simply impossible to capture the majesty of these scenes with $200 of plastic, glass and circuitry.

What you can't see in this picture is the Pacific, which was shining passively beyond the far mountains.
This is the best zoom that my camera can do: here you can see Half Moon Bay, and the town of Pacifica, I think.
In all, I would recommend spending a Sunday in the mountains to anyone who couldn't spend it on the beach fishing---even if your hiking boots aren't 100% broken in. Trust me---the blisters are worth it.

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains of the moon.
JRR Tolkein

Changes Afoot...

2008-11-10T01:38:00.000-08:00

So, let me know what you think of the new layout.

Good? Bad? What could be better?

Monterey Bay Aquarium IV: REAL fish

2008-11-05T20:33:00.001-08:00

So, without further ado...

Everything until now has been mere foreplay, the amouse bouche before dinner, the open fifths from the string before the conductor gives the downbeat...

Bottom Fish.

Most of these fish I've never seen before, nor would I have seen, as they aren't your typical aquarium fare. This means that I don't know, nor do I remember, most of the fishes names. The one above is some type of goby or blenny, I think, and it was in the tank with the Dr. Seuss Sea Anemones.

A lot of the fish weren't very colorful---not the typical blues and yellows and reds that one would expect if going to a tropical reef exhibit.

The Aquarium also had a dedicated flounder exhibit, with several different species in several rather large tanks. These two guys, above and below, are the same species. The flounder has a remarkable ability to match the bottom, regardless of the color---of course, anyone who's been floundering can tell you that. I had never seen such drastic variations in color back to back, however.

There was a whole tank dedicated to garbage---specifically, the ability of nature to utilize whatever shelter is available. I'm not sure what the point to this was, other than to encourage people to throw empty bottles into the ocean:

These gobies got along quite nicely in their improvised homes. It is even interesting that the darker goby chose the darker bottle (below) and the lighter goby (I didn't get a good picture of him) chose the lighter colored bottle. I don't think that this is a coincidence.

This is a shovelnose guitarfish, which I have never seen in person before. They live along the west coast, but I think there are species which live in the Gulf of Mexico.

I'm not altogether sure what kind of ray this is, but it looks like a cownose ray, which we catch from time to time off of the beach in Galveston.

This was another impressive exhibit. What they've done is actually opened the egg case of a skate (a type of ray) without disturbing the embryo, and then closed it against a piece of glass. The result is an actual look inside the egg case:

This is a wolf eel, found in cold water reefs. You can see a stupid person's camera display at the bottom:

This is a lingcod, wihch is a bit difficult to see:

This is a bit better picture.

And this is what it looks like after it returns from the dead:

There were tons of exhibits with little fish living in little crevaces, which occasionally popped out to see what was going on:

This is some species of blenny, again.

Kelp Fish.

There were several tanks dedicated to the kelp forests which the Pacific Coast is famous for. The next few pictures come from the third largest display in the whole aquarium. There are several species of fish in this picture, but the one I liked was the white sturgeon, in the middle. These guys are famous for their eggs, which rich people call caviar.

This is a leopard shark, one of few sharks which can live without moving constantly. For some reason, most sharks lack a mechanism to efficiently force water over their gills, which means they have to keep moving to keep water flowing. The leopard sharks (aparently) have the ability to just lay around. In the Gulf, we have nurse sharks with the same ability.

The second largest display in the aquarium was dedicated to the kelp forests, as well. I can't begin to name all the species in the tank, but this is a California Sheepshead, much less conservatively colored than the sheepsheads which live in the Gulf.

I'm not sure what this bruiser is. It looks like some sort of grouper or seabass.

These are some perches and rockfishes. I have much better pictures of rockfish below

This is also a rockfish, although unrelated to the ones above. Actually, I think this is also called a cabazon, but I am probably mistaken.

Tropical Fish.

Of course, no aquarium would be complete without the canonical reef exhibits. These fish were quite impressive, though, even if I have seen them before.

This is one of my favorites, called a butterfly fish.

This is the moray eel picture I promised. His teeth are very impressive. They are stalkers---the way they hunt is to hide in a hole and dart out when something tasty swims by. The long teeth ensure that the tasty thing can't wiggle away.

This is another one of my favorite fish, called a yellow tang. I just like yellow, I guess.

Rock Fish.

These guys are apparently quite tasty, and were fished to near extinction. They are sometimes called snapper, but I think they are not related to the deep water fish that we know and love (to eat) in Texas. This is a canary rockfish.

I can't help but think how he'd taste sauteed in butter, with some crab meat piled on top...

Nearest I can tell, this is an olive rockfish. I wonder if you can taste the difference?

This is called a bocaccio, I think.

This is a china rockfish. I tried to get more pictures, but they all turned out blurry.

Blue Water.

Anchovies!

I think this was my favorite exhibit of them all, the pelagic species. I didn't get very many good pictures, mostly because the light was low, and I didn't have a camera which would allow adequate shutter speeds for the low light conditions. I did get a FEW pictures, though. This is an ocean sunfish, flanked by a bluefin tuna to the left.

I was able to get some video, though. In this video, you'll see some (500+ pounds) bluefin tuna (sometimes called "fatty" tuna or toro), a 300+ pound yellowfin tuna (commonly called ahi) , some Pacific Barracuda, a few mahi mahi (sometimes called dorado or dolphin), and maybe a few other fish.

Here's a quick track list:
0:00 Pacific Barracuda.
0:12 Big Bluefin Tuna.
0:17 Huge mahi mahi
0:25 More Bluefin
0:31 Big Yellowfin Tuna
0:47 Bluefin (top) albacore? bottom
1:02 More Bluefin
1:04 Big mahi mahi again
1:18 Two big bluefin
1:28 Great picture of mahi mahi
1:32 School of albacore

Finally, this is a short (2 second) video of the full tank, with emphasis on the great hammerhead shark, which I've never really seen in the wild before.

There's still a few more posts to make on Monterey Bay Aquarium---it was THAT awesome.

Monterey Bay III: One more step up the evolutionary ladder

2008-11-05T20:32:00.001-08:00

Starfish.
I'm not sure how the evolutionary tree goes, but I'll start where I think is the bottom---that has to be starfish. They have this amazing property that if you cut them up, you just get more starfish. I wonder, though, what is the smallest piece of starfish you can have, and grow a new starfish?

Monterey Bay is home to a great many starfish of different colors, it seems. The one above looks pretty happy...I guess.

This starfish was in the octopus tank. In the background, you can see a "Bat Star"---all the other pictures I have of those guys are hopelessly blurry. Check Bryanne's blog, though: she has some non-blurry specimens.

These last ones are brittle stars, which are also a bit blurry. So it goes, I guess.

Crabs.

The crabs were much different to the ones that I am familiar with. I don't know how it works,but I guess the crabs in the Pacific Ocean and the ones that live in the Atlantic Ocean split from each other a pretty long time ago on the evolutionary tree. This probably explains why they looks so different. You can kind of see the "Prince William Sound King Crab" in the background:

This guy looks pretty armored---it's called a California King Crab.

This next one is a "decorator crab". The live mostly in the kelp beds, and harvest bits of seaweed and other invertebrates to decorate their shells with. This helps them camouflage themselves more efficiently. This crab only has some algae growing on it's shell.

Shrimp.

This is a local guy, called a spot prawn. Apparently they're pretty tasty.

This cleaner shrimp is not an indigenous species, however---it was in one of the few tropical tanks in the aquarium. You can see a bit of a moray eel in the background---I have a much more impressive picture of him for later.

Sea Dragons.

This was one of my favorite displays, next to the Jellyfish and the "Outer Bay" tank of pelagic species. None of these sea horses are native to Monterey Bay, either---I think they are native to the South Pacific. Of course, their beauty made up for this fact.

This is a "leafy sea dragon":

It was rather uncooperative, and I think Bryanne may have some better pictures. The animals are incredibly intricate, and were beautiful to watch.

This last one is a bit out of focus, but I'll post it anyway:

Finally, we have the "weedy sea dragon". The colors are pretty remarkable.

Next up: Actual Fish!

Followers!

2008-11-01T14:21:00.001-07:00

Somehow, I've picked up a few followers in the two weeks or so that I've been posting.

I know who two of them are: my wonderful girlfriend Bryanne, and a friend at the OSU physics dept.

But the other two are mysterious---one's a guy (or gal) who sends his/her greetings from Turkey. This narrows down the list of probably suspects, but not by much---I know more than a few Turks.

Finally, there's a dude from Croatia, Gacina. I suspect that the c should be pronounced like "ch", so I think his name should be pronounced Gachina. But I'm probably wrong. Anyway, he seems to be a new blogger, too, and wrote a pretty entertaining post about the first contact between non-eskimos and eskimos.

If any of you want to drop in to say hi, don't hesitate to leave a comment!

Anyway, I'm having a cup of cappuccino at Peet's, learning about N=2 D=4 (or N=1, D=6) compactifications of heterotic string theory (SPIRES is being slow, otherwise I'd link the paper). Great times :) I'll leave you with another Aquarium picture: this is a banana slug! Not the UCSC mascot, mind you, but it's marine cousin.

Monterey Bay Aquarium II: Jellyfish.

2008-11-01T00:58:00.000-07:00

First, an awesome picture (not taken by me):

And now, without further ado...

Monterey Bay Aquarium II: Jellyfish!

Another extremely interesting and unique exhibit that the Monterey Bay Aquarium was hosting included some of the jellyfish species that inhabit the bay. This exhibit was excellent for a few reasons. First, and foremost, I have NEVER seen, nor have I expected to see, anything like this.

Secondly, the tanks that the jellyfish were living in must have had some fine tuned currents flowing through them, in various directions. So, for example, in the picture above you can see the jellyfish (sea nettles) swimming top to bottom. Further, they must have tuned the currents to match the average jellyfish swimming (or whatever they do) speed---this caused the jellyfish to more or less pulse right in front of us.

Also, the colors that were chosen were very fitting. The deep blue backdrop of the jellyfish really served to illustrate some of their intricate features. Of course, I am familiar with the intricate features of jellyfish, having found them wrapped (on more than one occasion) around my legs.

Finally, the care that was taken with such fragile creatures was impressive. These "egg yolk jellies" were in tremendous condition, and it is incredible to think how these animals must be handled. Of course, they were raised from polyps (or wherever they come from), but it's still interesting to think about how they feed these things, and how they ensure that tentacles and such are not lost in day-to-day jellyfish life.

The next two are moon jellies, in different life stages. The first picture is a baby jellyfish, and I think Bryanne will have some better pictures of these.

I'll close with the sea nettles, which were the most impressive and (I think) Bryanne's favorite. Their fire orange bells stood out in stark contrast to the cold azure background, and there must have been a hundred specimens in what was the largest tank in the room.

This last picture is rotated by pi radians and is a pretty damned good picture, if I do say so myself.

Coming soon: Starfish, Crabs and the Last of the Invertebrates!

Monterey Bay Aquarium I: Anemones.

2008-10-31T00:17:00.001-07:00

This will be a long post, in six parts. The rough outline is as follows: anemones, jellyfish, starfish/crabs/seahorses, real fish, birds etc., otter madness---the astute reader will recognize that I'm moving up the evolutionary tree.

Anemones and Other Invertebrates.

Ok, I have to warn you: some of these anemone pictures would make Georgia O'Keefe proud...

The thing that's great about the Monterey Bay Aquarium is that the flora and fauna are all local. This is appealing to me because I can go to the Aquarium Adventure in Columbus, Ohio and see Clownfish. I mean, the reef exhibits are nice, but I'd much rather see the types of things that one normally doesn't see in Aquariums.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium is dedicated to the sea life that actually lives in Monterey Bay---from the tidal zones on the rocky coast, to the blue waters off the Continental Shelf. There are no whales, but that's ok---they do have a wonderful tank full of the pelagic species, including bluefin tuna, Pacific Barracuda (much different from their Atlantic/Carribean cousins), and even Ocean Sunfish (Mola mola). There will be more on these guys later.

I think these are called "Strawberry Anemones".

All of the embedded pictures today are of the various anemones that live in Monterey Bay, I think. I tried to find some of these guys in the tidal pools, but I think it's a difficult task if you don't know what you're looking for---at low tide (when you're looking for them) they bunch up like a fist, and only open again when they're covered with water.

In the background, you can see a crab---I can't remember what species this is, but I think it's called a Puget Sound King Crab, but I could be mistaken.

I think these are my favorite. There were some fish in this tank, more on that later!

I think the variety in these anemones amazes me the most---some have long, hydra-esqu tentacles, while some look almost fuzzy:

Finally, I'll leave you with a few pictures of the other invertebrates (that aren't crabs) which we encountered. These are Gooseneck Barnacles. I've seen them before on things that wash up in Galveston on things that have been adrift for a while. I think that the resolution is good enough so that you can see the actual barnacle, as opposed to only its shell.

This is a scallop of some sort.

The row of black dots around the rim of the animal are its eyes---they're very primitive, and can only sense light and dark.

Finally, these are pictures for my mom. This is what Sand Dollars look like, alive---they're pink and fuzzy.

So, stay tuned for equally beautiful pictures of fish and other wonderful things!

Close Encounters of the Cetacean Kind

2008-10-24T22:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I mentioned that Bryanne and I were going whale watching. I thought that we'd have a nice cruise in the Pacific, and maybe see a few whales and some less lazy seals. We were up at 7:30 AM, which is not normal (at all) for me, and we had some very questionable quiche at the Bed and Breakfast where we're staying. Then we headed off to the wharves to hop on the boat that would take us a-whaling.

Leaving the harbor, we saw quite a few California Sea Lions and Cormorants, who mostly smelled bad and laid around---I've come to expect this from the Sea Lions by now. Mostly, they are glorified stray cats I think. They hang around the docks because they are safe from predators and tourists feed them, which is all pretty much anyone could ever hope for in life.

We rode out of Monterey Harbor at about 10-12 knots (I think), which put us about 15 miles up the coast after the first hour of cruising. Monterey Bay is an inlet off of the Pacific Ocean where a submarine canyon pokes into the continental shelf. The deepest parts of the bay are about 6000-7000 feet deep, and we turned west at about 10:30 AM and rode along the north wall of the canyon, in about 2000 feet of water.

The the deep, nutrient rich waters are very close to the shore in California, which provide the anchor for a very elaborate ecosystem. The plankton, which form the foundation of the food chain, are present in huge numbers, which draw krill, sardines, and a plethora of species of whales, dolphins, popoises, seals, sea lions, otters, sharks and fish. We were looking for humpback and blue whales this time of year, but at other times, gray whales, minke whales, sperm whales, and fin whales all visit Monterey Bay.

At about 11:00, the marine biologist on board told us that they had spotted some humpback whales---the easiest way to spot these guys at a distance is to look for their spouts as they come up from feeding. The humpbacks eat krill, which are basically little shrimp. But other things eat the krill as well, including sardines, which seals eat---seals, whales, and ocean going birds are all found in proximity to each other.

Eventually, the whales seemed to take an interest in our boat. As they slowly made their way over towards us, the marine biologists mentioned that, on occasion, the humpback's curiosity would compel them to "check things out". This is called a "friendly encounter" in the business. Images of Ahab danced through my head.

Instead of trying to give play by play on what, exactly, happened next, I will only say that it was pretty remarkable. I know what whale breath smells like (don't ask), and I got closer to these animals than most humans ever get. Over the next hour, the pod of about three humpbacks swam back and forth under the boat, occasionally popping up to see what everyone was on about, occasionally showering us in the boat with whale spray and krill bits, and occasionally pushing the boat with their heads and backs. I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

Enjoy! If anyone wants anymore pics, let me know---I have hi res copies of them all, and can email them to you if you like. I especially like the last one---note the rainbow.

West Coast Time

2008-10-23T23:29:00.000-07:00

So, the point of this whole thing is to keep my family and friends informed about my adventures in life. Mostly, my dad doesn't know how to use facebook, and my mom doesn't know how to use a computer, so the idea is that my dad will dial up the web page, and he'll leave the computer on so my mom can read it before she goes to work.

That's the hope, at least.

Currently, I am living in Menlo Park, California, on furlough from Columbus, Ohio, and working at the very excellent Stanford Institute of Theoretical Physics. There will be, I'm sure, posts in the future about the beautiful Stanford campus, the charming downtown Palo Alto, and the mountain biking in the Santa Cruz mountains. Eventually.

But no, this weekend I am in Monterey, California, with my girlfriend for a short vacation. "Weekend" and "short" are very subjective terms in academia, one quickly finds out.

We left Menlo Park today at about 3 PM, and headed down California Highway 1, with the Santa Cruz mountains to our left and the Pacific Ocean to our right. I'm a sucker for salt water, and we had to stop and take some pictures about an hour into the trip.

The Pacific Coast is much different to what I'm used to---of course, we don't have any mountains in Texas (excepting, of course, the Davis Mountains out west), much less a rocky coast line. The vistas were breathtaking, to say the least.

We did see some very lazy sea lions, just sleeping on a rocky island just off the coast. They were doing what (I imagine) sea lions do best---that is, turning sardines into blubber and sea lion shit. This is, of course, their prerogative, but I would have liked to see them catch a fish or balance a ball or SOMEthing.

There was also this very tolerant seagull:

The bird aficionados will be quick to point out that this is actually some sort of albatros or something, and I'm just too lazy to look it up on wikipedia, and it looks more or less the same as the seagulls which live in Texas.

We are spending our weekend in the Centrella Inn Bed and Breakfast, located in the city of Pacific Grove, CA. We had dinner at a seafood place on Monterey Bay tonight, and watched the sun set over the Pacific. (Well, that's not exactly true. We would have seen a spectacular sunset, had we not stopped to take pictures of albatrosses and sea lions. But that's ok.) I had some halibut which was tragically overcooked, which kind of pisses me off. I had probably some of the better cooked fish that I've ever had in Columbus a few weeks ago (again, halibut), and I come to Monterey and get a piece of fish that's overcooked? Inexcusable.

Tomorrow Bryanne and I will go whale watching in Monterey Bay. She doesn't know this, of course, but I imagine that she'll have a great time, nonetheless. I went whale watching once off Montauk Point with my uncle Peter, but there were no whales to be seen---only some Yellowfin Tuna schooling. The rumor is that there exist "friendly" humpback whales, which like to circle the whale watching boat and check out the whale watchers. This is probably some figment of a whale watching advertising geek's imagination, but one can always hope. Other than humpbacks, we can hope to see blue whales (the big ones) and killer whales. There are occaisonal spottings of things like sperm whales and blue sharks, too. But, at the very least, there will be seals, otters and dolphins galore.

Satudrday will be spent at the heralded Monterey Bay Aquarium. This is great, because both Bryanne and I love aquariums. Pictures will, of course, follow.

I'll leave you with some nice plants which we found along Highway 1. They look particularly hardy, which is a function of the climate here, I'm sure. Either way, the flowers were pretty nice: