Posts in category Other funny things
Aachen
Tuesday January 12 I’ve made a Blitzvisit to Aachen: not to the city proper, rather to the suburb were Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule is situated. Many years ago I had been looking for a job at RWTH and found none, so I avoided the place. Nowadays my former PhD student Marteen Wegewijs is a tenure-track prof over there. He has been repeatedly inviting me, and have promised a special treatment: lift from Roermond to short-cut a two-hour train loop. Though visit was quick, I’ve learned many interesting, unexpected things. Among them:
1. It is plausible to get an edible food in student’s cantine (knew that before, forgotten while in Delft).
2. Russian theory postdocs (Pletuyhov and Saptsov) and are tougher than they used to be. I did not manage to confuse the two about their own research though I did my best.
3. Markus Morgenstern does fantastic, exciting things by STM in both 2d gas and graphene. Unbelievable! I cannot reveal the details but he will post at arxive soon: please follow.
4. I’m still able to pull cars out of their snow graves with my bare hands only.
Thanks for 64000 views!
It is my pleasure to report another doubling of number of views. The previous doubling took place 45 days ago while the blog is running for more than 4 months. I expect to report next doubling in three months.
Thank you, dear reader, for following this. I’d be pleased to receive more comments, but the views are quite motivating.
2010
Happy New Year to you, dear reader!
I wish you will reach all the goals you have set for 2010. I also hope that this year something unexpected but pleasant will enter your life.
My plans for 2010 include:
– confronting my 50th birthday (not ready, feel terrible)
– gambling for big research grants: ERC Advanced grant and national Nanoprogram
– long (>2 weeks)research visits to Grenoble and Aspen
– preparation Advanced Statistics course
– setting up a decent and useful personal web-site
All that above the “routine” research, education and book-writting activities.
Besides, I’m still wishing something unexpected but pleasant…
Job Cohen in orthodox parish
So the rumour had it right: Job Cohen has visited our parish. There’s the official press-release:
“To begin the celebration of its 35th anniversary, on 4 Decemeber 2009 the parish of St. Nicolas of Myra in Amsterdam hosted a symposium on the role of the Russian Orthodox parish in the city of Amsterdam. Participants included Mayor Job Cohen, journalist Hubert Smeets (during part of his career he was based in Moscow), Jurjen Beumer, director of “Stem in de Stad” (Voice in the City) in Haarlem, and Archimandrite Meletious Webber, abbot of St. John of Shanghai Monastery in California, who formerly was a guest priest assisting the Amsterdam parish.”
You can find an excellent foto-set, a must-see for all PvDA’ers and Orhodox, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157622816245705/
The Entry of the Most Holy Mother of God into the Temple
is one of the Great Feasts in Orthodox churches. Catholics call it Presentation and have celebrated it — right you are, two weeks ago. For me, it’s more like "entry", or more specifically, "braving stairs". Imagine a little child put in front of stairs with sufficiently challenging steps.(See this) You know what will happen: the child will climb up defying
gravity, possible inconveniences and minimal action principle. Not
thinking much about being at height. Just believing it is worth
climbing. So I hope I still climbe, and hope I do it in a right
direction.
In our parish, the feast is combined
today with another event circumstances of which are not completely
clear to me. Mayor of Amsterdam Job Cohen will visit our parish:
reportedly, to give a speech. I wonder if he climbs some stairs before
that: in fact, we do have some challenging ones. I look forward to more
details.
Thanks for 32,000 views
It is my pleasure to report another doubling of number of viewes. The past doubling took place 20 days ago while the blog is running for about 80 days. Thank you very much!
If I had more comments, I could easily beat the feeling that most hits are done by robots rather than humans. Anyway…
More relics
to be found in Firenze, related to my post of Oct. 23.
Good news for all venerating science: Museum of History of Science reports acquisition of two more fingers and a tooth of Gallileo Galilei. Those have been lost for more than a century and will be on display in March when the Museum reopens. Naturally, after the acquisition the Museum will become Gallileo Museum.
http://news.discovery.com/history/galileo-fingers-tooth-remains.html
Meet the rector
Our rector Jacob Fokkema has a nice attitude of talking with every prof of this university at least once a year. The form of such meetings may look rather bureaucratic: it is a 20-30 participants round-table discussion about a given topic, and one better makes homework, a short preposition about a topic. However, the rector presides with charm; he is attentive to everybody and likes to listen to opinions that differ from his own. This is why the meetings are not at all boring and often rather informative.
I attended such meeting on 10-11-2009. The topic was "University of future — future of university". I would not go into details of the meeting that were either technical or sensitive: mostly money.
I better tell about my homework. That was inspired by weblog of the rector where he reasoned about (in)compatibilities between philosophy of open source and realities of university. (http://fokkema.weblog.tudelft.nl/2009/09/11/twittering) I began to think about, that has lead to the following (intentionally naive) presentation.
At the moment relations between a common taxpayer and universities are not quite problemless: People tend to mistrust the universities, in particular as a source of (useful) knowledge. Such broken relations have unfortunate impact on financing of the universities from public. To remedy this, and to prove their usefulness, the university scientists are requested to go to industrial partners and sell the knowledge to big (or small) business.
However: How people normally fix their relations? Well, usually one makes a gift, gives something valuable without asking any compensation. Like Prometheus did sometime ago. He did not try to sell, and his attempts to "valorise" the discovery have only resulted in chronical livercirrhosois.
There are famous and less famous Dutch people who have made a great impact (measured by millions and tens of millions users) by giving away the products of their creative work. Champions of open source. For instance:
Guido van Rossum (python programming language)
Ton Rosendaal (Blender 3d framework)
Erwin Coumans (Bullet library of physics and collisions).
Why did they do this beyond university environment? Why weren’t they employed by TU Delft so that we had Delft Python and Delft 3d Blender? Perhaps in this case TU Delft had less problems with public funds…
And perhaps it is not yet too late?
Eighth lecture quantum transport
has taken place during the official semester break. I do not know why Quantum Transport has been scheduled on this mysterious week 1.10 while Advanced Quantum Mechanics has been not. Perhaps quantum fluctuations was the reason. Anyway there were six students and I could not figure out if this number is big (for a semester break) or small (for a regular lecture).
This year I decided to swap lecture 7 and lecture 8. The reason was rather mathematical: it is handy to explain the quantum corrections with random matrix theory, the latter most naturally arises in the context of quantum dots. Unfortunately, there was a timing problem which made my presentation of random matrices rather short and incomprehensive. I cannot really understand what brought me behind the schedule. Perhaps I have spent too much time on introduction about optical dots, Eiffel tower and all that. I hardly had time to explain resonant tunnelling.
The interaction with audience was so-so. Get correct answers to my questions, while most answers came from a single student.
Thanks for 16,000 views
I’ve promised to report any doubling of number of views, and I do. Thank you very much for 16,000 views!
It’s about two month passed since the start of the blog and about two weeks since the last doubling. I did not have any comments for a long time: please, please, do comment.