The Dark and Evil Forest (My Backyard)

The house (or “terraced” as they call it here) that I rent from the college has a nice little garden in the back. As I mentioned shortly after moving in, I did not have much motivation to take good care of the garden. Then later that year, when I discovered a giant monster spider named Shelob living there, I decided that it was a good idea never to set foot in the garden again.

A year later, as one might expect, the garden began to get a bit overgrown. Actually, it began to get a lot overgrown. It looked like the deepest and darkest part of the Amazon jungle: I keep expecting to see anacondas and jaguars.

Unfortunately, it is written in my lease that I am supposed to keep the garden under control, and the all-knowing powers-that-be at college found out what it looked like and sent me an email reminder

This is just a gentle reminder that we do expect the tenants of College houses to keep the garden of their house under control

(This was actually one of the 363 emails that were lost this summer, so I managed to spend the whole summer thinking I had gotten away with my jungle experiment.)

This is what my garden looked like yesterday:
My excuse – that I’m turning the garden into a forest to combat global warming – might not go very far. So early this morning, I went and got myself some garden shears and a bunch of large garden-waste bags and went to work. My first shock was that most of the huge plants that you see in the picture are actually stinging nettles. Although you can apparently make good food from this stuff, the plants are plenty nasty. Even with thick gloves on they can sting you, and it really hurts! You can get some major welts that last for days. So the weed cutting went very slow as I only very gently approached these evil beasts.

Bit by bit, I filled up waste-bag after waste-bag. No doubt this is going to be a long project. So far, this morning, I pulled weeds for about three hours before I ran into Shelob, the monster spider, who scared me back inside. I decided that I’m not going to do any more gardening until later in the fall when it becomes too cold for spiders.

This is where I left the situation.


I know it doesn’t look all that much better, but maybe it is a start. It is hard to even see that it has improved, but believe it or not, there were four full-sized garbage bags of weeds removed from the yard between the first and second photo. At least there are one or two places where you can actually see the ground in the second photo.

The email black hole

The whole world is far too dependent on email. I am no exception. I have three email accounts that I check many times daily --- and usually I respond fairly quickly, even to things that I could probably ignore with few ill effects. But email is my main connection to most of the world, so I try to keep the lines of communication flowing properly.

This summer, however, something unimaginable happened – my email broke down. (shudder!) I didn’t notice it at first because only a small fraction of my emails were getting lost --- being mistakenly forwarded to a black hole of the cyber-aether. As the term began this fall, increasingly people would say to me “didn’t you get my email?”, and I’d just look puzzled. Finally, this week I figured out that there really was a problem and I started investigating. To my complete horror, I discovered a hidden backlog of 363 emails sent over the last few months. So (after fixing the forwarding problem) I started going through all 363 emails. Perhaps not surprisingly, it turned out that of these 363 emails that I was so horrified to have missed, only 6 turned out to be important enough to actually require a response (and/or an apology for not having responded sooner), and actually even these were not all that crucial. 6 out of 363 --- a pretty small fraction. Considering how much time I spend reading and writing email, I’m starting to wonder if I might not be better off just to send them all down the black hole.

Graphene

The Nobel Prize in Physics today was awarded for the discovery of Graphene, a single layer carbon sheet. Back in this post in 2009, I mentioned that this was a hot topic at the APS march meeting.

It turns out that the whole trick to producing graphene is Scotch-Tape. If you take a piece of tape and you lightly touch it to graphite (pencil lead) you frequently will pull off just a single layer of carbon. Pretty cool. (This trick for pulling off thin layers with tape has been known for many years to chemists and material scientists).

Back in this post when I was taking bets for last year's Nobel prize, I made the following statement suggesting that it was not actually deserving of the prize:

Reuters proposes Geim and Novoselov (22%) for the discovery of graphene (carbon sheets) and Ijima (14%) narrowly behind for the discovery of nanotubes (carbon sheets rolled up into a tube). Not that I am opposed to carbon but…

I will remind everyone that Buckyballs, yet another form of Carbon, already won the Nobel prize recently – but in chemistry, not physics. I will also remind everyone that not every molecule made of carbon deserves an immediate Nobel prize. I know that the Carbonists have been lobbying hard, and admittedly both nanotubes and graphene are pretty cool. But I don’t think they are so overwhelmingly cool that they need a Nobel prize just yet. And if the lessons of Buckyballs are anything to learn from, we should expect that the hype will far outweigh the actual usefulness of, or interest in, the stuff in the long run.

I'm amused to see that Doug, over at nanoscale views seems to have a similar opinion.

On the flip-side, graphene is pretty cool stuff. If any fraction of the hype turns out to be true in 10 years, then I would certainly support the prize (and simultaneously eat my words). But from the buckeyball experience I would have thought the Nobel committee might have waited a bit longer on this one. It isn't like the winners are old geezers about to croak who have to be given the prize now since they are not going to survive until next year.

So there you have it... the Nobel prize won with Scotch-tape.

Presentation to the Visitor

Last Saturday, Somerville College officially inaugurated its new Principal, Dr. Alice Prochaska. The ceremony is actually known as “Presentation to the Visitor” with “Visitor” here not meaning something out of star trek, but rather meaning the Chancellor of the University – the Lord Patten of Barnes.

[The person with the real power at the top of the administration is actually the Vice-Chancellor. The Chancellor is mainly a figure head, but does preside at formal occasions such as this one.]

During the ceremony of “Presentation,” the Fellows of the College gather, in academic gowns, in the Senior Common Room. Many were dressed in Black and Red, the Somerville colors. (I was happy just to have found a clean shirt and did not think much about the color). Then the senior fellow of the College, Mrs Lesley Brown, presents the principal-elect to the visitor.

[Mrs Lesley Brown has been a distinguished scholar of Ancient Philosophy at Oxford for many many years – having been elected fellow at Somerville College in 1970, and even having chaired the Philosophy department for several years since then. However, having been elected fellow so young, she actually never bothered to obtain her DPhil or PhD, and is thus listed as Mrs rather than Dr or Professor]

Mrs Brown then did the “presentation”, reading the officially prescribed text, in English (Of all the times when Latin might have been appropriate, this might have been one – being that Mrs Brown is a Latin expert).

I, Mrs Lesley Brown, Fellow of Somerville College, in the University of Oxford hereby declare the Dr Alice Prochaska was formally elected Principal of said College, in Succession to Dame Fiona Caldicott at the stated meeting of the Governing Body held on the 17th June 2009.

Then the Principal Elect makes her declaration:

I, Alice Prochaska, hereby declare that I will faithfully perform the duties of my office as Principal of Somerville College, and will observe the Statutes and By-laws of the College in force for the time being

People were a little puzzled by the phrase “for the time being” that occurs in this declaration, but that is what is officially prescribed in our statutes (although no one could quite explain why this phrase is inserted).

And finally the Visitor confirms that this has been witnessed

I, the Right Honourable Lord Patten of Barnes, Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and Visitor of Somerville College in the University of Oxford, hereby declare that Mrs Lesley Brown, Fellow of Somerville College, having announced to me on this twenty-fifth day of September 2010 that Dr Alice Prochaska had been duly elected Principal of Somerville College, presented to me Dr. Prochaska as said Principal. The said Dr Prochaska declared before me that she would faithfully perform the duties of the office of Principal of Somerville College and would observe the Statutes and By-laws of the College in force for the time being.

That first sentence is a bit hard to Parse, huh?

After the ceremony, toasts were made to Somerville and to our new Principal, and we all adjourned to the Margaret Thatcher Centre (the Iron Lady was a Somervillian) for lunch. This gave the fellows a chance to catch up with each other after their respective summers away.

At one point (after only about four champagnes) I found myself sitting next to the Visitor, the Lord Patten. I should have done my research about him in advance so that I could have intelligently argued with his disparaging remarks about the Black-Scholes equation -- although if his remarks were focused entirely on the excesses of the system and rather than on the wisdom of the Nobel prize, we might have agreed entirely.

Incidentally, you can also read the new principal's view on this event on her blog.

Nobel Bets 2010

It is that time of year again -- the time when the best and the brightest from around the world lose sleep wondering if they are going to get that early morning call from Sweden announcing that they have won the Nobel prize.

Last year I placed my wager on Yakir Aharonov and Michael Berry for geometric phases in physics. This turned out to be a bad bet. From now on I am removing Aharonov from my list of likely candidates. Why? Because I was informed that the 1961 work he is most famous for actually discovered 12 years earlier by Ehrenberg and Siday (Even Wikipedia appears aware of this). The fact that it is called the “Ahanronov-Bohm effect” appears to be a good example of Stigler’s law: The principle that nothing is ever named after its original discoverer. (Stigler’s law itself was discovered by Merton).

Since last year, the prize went to Smith and Boyle and Kao for what many people disparaged as “just engineering” (albeit some pretty amazing engineering). Given that, I think this year the prize might go to something a bit more fundamental. A decent bet would be Sir Michael Berry (without Aharonov).

However, for my money, I think the front-runner is the WMAP experiment (Wilkenson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) which measured the fluctuations of the temperature of the universe – telling us a whole lot about its history. It is a very important experiment. Reuters actually agrees that this one is a pretty good bet. Another really good bet (in my opinion) is the Neutrino Mass experiment from Super-K. I bet on them in 2008 (and lost, as usual).

Another bet on Reuters is Ebbesen for surface plasmons: collective motion of light and electrons together on the surface of metals. While this is nice work, and Ebbesen is a good scientist, I think it is far from a Nobel.

Olaf Smits, in Dublin, mentioned a really interesting possibility. While a bit out of the box for a Nobel Prize in Physics, the fact that last year was a bit out of the box indicates that the Nobel committee is willing to break some rules these days. Olaf’s bet is that the prize will be awarded for the discovery of exo-solar planets. In the star-trek futuristic “this is our moment to discover that we are not alone” kind of way, I think a case could be made that this is worthy.

Singing

A long time ago (in a galaxy far-far away)...

…I had a more musical life. I sang in choirs, played in orchestras, played in multiple jazz bands, classical chamber ensembles, and occasionally appeared in marching bands, handbell choirs, and even the stray pit-orchestras (swearing never-again each time). I called myself a “musical slut” because, more or less, I would play anything anywhere any time (thank you Dereth Phillips, where-ever you are, for coining that delicate phrase). These days, mostly just because I have way too many other things keeping me busy, such devotion to music has faded from my life.

Now, as mentioned in this previous post, all spring I heard many details of Christiane’s woes planning her wedding. One of the many things she worried about was the music for the wedding ceremony – she wanted a full choir in the chapel. When I confessed that, yes, I do read music well, and yes, I did once sing in a real choir, I was quickly drafted for the chapel choir and handed a stack of music to learn. Only then did I realize that the last time I tried to sing seriously was during the Reagan administration. I was unsure if the equipment was still even remotely functional.

To begin with, my voice was never great – it had a weak tone and my singing range was poor. I could never even get close to the top of the tenor notes, and I was really really weak down by the bottom of the bass notes. And this was years ago when I actually worked on my voice to stretch my range. Furthermore, I had a bad tendency to miss pitches. Not that I didn’t realize when this had happened – my ear about these things was pretty good. But I’d land on the wrong pitch and struggle to fix things – ending up either spontaneously changing keys or sounding a bit like a trombone doing a wa-wa as I slid between pitches.

Nonetheless, wanting to contribute to this wedding, I accepted the challenge from Christiane. I was fairly confident that I remembered the main secret to learning music – practice, practice, practice. If you study a piece of music enough, until it was like you had written the whole piece yourself, you can’t go too far wrong. (So I hoped).

First of all, I needed a place to practice: preferably a place where no one else would be listening to me singing --- because I was pretty sure that, at least to start with, I would end up sounding like a walrus in heat. A place to practice was harder to find than I had expected. It would have been great if I could have also found a piano to help me out, but alas, random pianos are pretty hard to find when you are on the road. The best practice room I found as the wedding approached was in my office in the Hamilton Institute. I would show up to work very early in the morning (before all the commuting Hamiltonians showed up) and make a whole lot of gargling and warbling sounds trying to learn my music. Then I did it again late at night after all the Hamiltonians went home.

So I spent many hours singing full volume in my office. It would kind of go like this: I would sing two or three measures; then listen to the relevant measures in a recording of the piece; then say out loud “crap, that’s not right”; read the music again (wishing I remembered my solfege better); then try again; then listen again; then curse again; and so it went on. Unfortunately some of the pieces I was supposed to learn had some tricky harmonies – and it took quite a bit of trying and cursing before I made any progress. To make my life worse, the bass parts frequently went either too high or too low for my voice – and as predicted, walrus noises came out instead.

Unfortunately, during these exercises, I was never quite sure that the Hamilton building was empty. So I’d be mid-walrus-sound and I’d see a Hamiltonian looking into my office with either a curious, or sometimes a rather perturbed look --- a perturbed Hamiltonian, as it were (that’s another physics joke). At that point I would put away my music and start on my usual physics work as if I had no idea where the walrus sounds were coming from.

Anyway, after quite a few days of this (hoping that I would not get kicked out of the building for disturbing the peace) I actually started to feel like I had a pretty decent handle on most of the music, and my vocal range was getting just a bit better – now being almost able to convincingly hit most of the high and low notes. Nonetheless, I was also increasingly hoping that the other bass in the choir (there would be only two on a part) would be a strong singer.

The choir would only have one hour of rehearsal just prior to the wedding ceremony. So on the day of the wedding, dressed in my wedding gear, I showed up early and started warming up my voice before the rehearsal. The choir consisted of 5 genuine friends and relatives of the betrothed, and 5 hired guns to fill out the parts – along with a conductor and organist from Somerville college (the organist is a bit famous around Somerville for being the best organist ever to set foot in the place – so I knew we would be fine in that respect). Within about 30 seconds of singing, I knew that this whole adventure was going to be no problem. The voices in this choir were wonderful --- all I had to do was not completely screw up and everything would be fine. The other bass (a childhood friend of Christiane’s named Martin) was a very solid singer and all I had to do was follow him (Thank you Martin!). I was probably the weakest voice in the choir by a good margin. It was very fun to sing with such a talented group.

So here were the pieces that were part of the service:

The first song at the beginning of the service was a modern hymn or something of the sort. I was a nice tune, although it sounded to me a bit like the kind of song you might hear at a Christian youth-group convention or up-with-people concert. It is in German so I have no idea what it means, but I strongly suspect that the words are in similar spirit to the youth-group-esque “we should all love each other” blah blah blah. This is not the actual arrangement we sang, but it gives the right feel of the kind of harmonies that were used (although it was a piano rather than electric organ accompaniment). To my taste, the best version of this song on the web is this rather simple version from a plain girl with a nice but not particularly spectacular voice just singing and playing guitar. It sounds a lot less like “up with people” this way. Kudos to her whoever she is.

The next musical part of the service was this standard German hymn. I was told that the Germans in the audience would fully expect this one to be sung.

During the bulk of the religious part of the service there were a bunch of little Kyrie-s interjected between the Greek orthodox priest’s singing of various bible verses. This was only a problem because the priest would pick some random pitch out of the air and we were supposed to come in on four part harmony with respect to his random pitch (it worked only about 70% of the time).

The hardest of the pieces came near the end of the service: The Lord Bless You and Keep You -- a very beautiful but difficult tune by the well known (still living) choral composer John Rutter. The harmonies on this one tested even some of the good singers. I really suffered to learn this. The piece also gave the sopranos a nice chance to shine (and indeed some of the sopranos had wonderful voices).

Finally, the majestic conclusion of the service, and my favorite of the pieces by far: “Lord in Thee Have I Trusted”, by George Frideric Handel. This piece, the conclusion of his “Dettingen Te Deum,” is a magnificent work meant as a celebration of a military victory as much as in praise of God. Considering the level of organization that went into putting together the wedding ceremony, the spirit of military victory seemed appropriate.

The piece begins with an alto solo which was to be sung by our common friend Sabine Müller (lecturer in modern languages). I’ve known for a while that Sabine took singing lessons, but for some reason it never really occurred to me that she might actually have a great voice (oh me of little faith). During rehearsal when we launched into this work and I heard her sing this solo for the first time I admit I was rather shocked by how good she sounded. Then when the rest of the choir came in with the strong sopranos, 5 part harmony, and organ accompaniment, the whole thing knocked my socks off.

So in the end my experience singing for this wedding went really well (meaning, it didn't sound like a walrus). It was fun contributing to the event and I realize I have missed the feeling of being part of a musical ensemble. Maybe I’m even so inspired that I’ll join a choir. Then again, joining choirs in Oxford can be bad for your health, as the famous Inspector Morse once discovered.

In regards to my previous post

I received this plot from my brother Rob.



I think there needs to be less green.