Posts in category Other funny things
Grand Idiotic Hike
I’ve made in Aspen this weekend. My initial plan was to make a circuit tour in Hunter Creek-Frying Pan wilderness area east of the city to cover 40-50 km of trails. I was planning to start Friday morning and, with some luck, be back in town Friday close to midnight, or, without, Saturday morning. Eventually, I was met by mountain resque in 3 km from the town: that was Monday 2:30 pm. A long relaxing weekend.
My mistake had deep roots: relaying on indirect sources of information like Internet and topo-maps. The trails looked perfect on the maps. Four years ago during my previous visit to Aspen I made 40% of the circuit to find resonably well-marked and walkable trails. By symmetry consideration, that should apply to the rest of the circuit. It took me a while to understand that the trails became increasingly worse and eventually ceased to exist. By that time it did not look like a good idea to turn back, since there were no trail in any direction. Indeed, later I have heard that the trails are abandoned decades ago.
My GPS unit honestly wanted to help for 2,5 days, last half of the day showing 0% of charge remaining (and the trails that unfortunately did not exist). Later I had to relay on my recollection of the local geography and teenager experience of beyond-the-route hiking in Siberian hills. The later was not completely irrelevant: I would define the local forest as mountain "taiga", and the landscape of creek-cut hills and rocks looked familiar.
Unfortunately, I think I developed a light mountain madness: sometimes I’ve heard and seen strange things and decisions I made on the way , while looking back on it, did not look at all optimal. For instance, when I found a trail it took me several attempts to figure out a good direction: the right answer eventually was that no direction is good. If there were no such things, I’d be back on Sunday morning.
Anyway: my wife called mountain rescue Monday 2 a.m. and they meet me several miles near the city. While I did not need the directions anymore, I certainly appreciated the lift to the town, luxurous meal and tons of warm attention they provide. Thank you, Scott Messina, for finding me, Hugh Zuker for being a president of such needed NON-PROFIT VOLUNTARY organization. They of course cooperate with law enforcement: it was my pleasure to meet the sheriff and his deputy. Many thanks to everybody.
Finally, I propose that Pitkin county (that could be the richest in US) invests in restoring the trails. First, that could save several lifes of Internet-dependent geeks, Second: though this may sound shameless after making so much idiotic things, but I enjoyed the hike. It’s a truly beautiful wild country. Would not mind to repeat it: if there are trails…
First week Aspen
Aspen does not appear to be a good place for blogging: the second week is almost over, yet I still have to write about the first week.
Aspen Center for Physics is certainly a good place for doing science: it hosts many workshops during summer, and a bunch of people communicating, writting formulas, listening to talks, making fun and hiking in nearby mountains. There are two workshops going simultaneously: Low Dimensional Topological Matter (here matter as in consensed matter not as in matter of routine) and Quantum Many-Body Physics in One Dimension. According to traditional classification, most participants belong to strongly correlated community, to more theoretical and abstract part of it. While it’s not precisely my community, I certainly enjoy intellectual intensity and logical taste of their discussions, something I sometimes miss in quantum transort. I could listen to a talk not understanding a bit and still find it interesting and inspiring.
As to talks, we,ve got plenty for workshops of the style. Yuval Oreg told about Creating and braiding of 1D non Abelian Majoranas (that is, 1d superconductor with spin-orbit in polarizing magnetic field). Thierry Giamarchi discussed Non-Luttinger liquids (that is, cold atom chains). Alexey Bezryadin has reported his quest for phase-slips in 1d superconducting wires. Jay Deep Sau told about Majorana fermions and non-Abelian statistics at the interface of ordinary semiconductor and superconductors (that is, polarized superconductor again).
I could not escape entaglement over here, of course. Daniel Arovas gave a colloquium on that in complicated many-body states. I was surprised by abundance of the results he reviewed. Besides, I discussed the stuff with Israel Klych and Karyn Le Hur: they also did a work on Renyi entropies and their relation to full counting statistics.
Alina and Ciprian were kind enough to send me frequent progress reports about our projects, so I do not feel guilty for letting them alone without my valuable supervision.
My personal interest is in collaboration with Leonid Glazman, we go on with the stuff I described in Grenoble. The progress is slow, and we encounter many strange things not fitting our plans, but we do not give up. It’s like a difficult hike without a good map.
As to hikes, I wish I could enjoy them as usual. My last time in Aspen was four years ago. When I get to a familiar Ute trail, I’ve clearly understood that that time I was four years younger. I could not make it to the top of Aspen mountain… Providence was so much displeased with my hiking performance as to dispatch a truck with a good Samaritan of driver: he brought me down to the town saving me from hiking back in darkness. Another attempt was to bike to Snowmass village: again, I was dissappointed with my performance, though I could breath normally at least a third of the way. Looks like I could not adopt to height during the whole week.
Look, I am an Iconic Achiever
International Biographical Centre (see http://yuli.weblog.tudelft.nl/2010/05/20/top-100-scientists-2010) at Cambridge was quick to comfort me with the loss of ERC grant. They promote me to Iconic Achiever and are ready to send me International Einstein Award ( they ask 400 quid for this). Hurra.
Oranje
I did not think I would be watching a football match on TV. Last time I enjoyed this activity the TV sets were black-and-white (and Uruguay was on forth place, if I recall correctly). Yet the magic of collective madness works on me as well, and today I was watching.
Not bad. Was a real fight, was a sense of achievement. A deserved win.
Altai summary
I’m back from Altai, the trip took 33 hours from door to door. Time to summarize things learned and impressions collected.
1. Qubits and nanomech grow closer and closer together. Recent works of NEC group in collaboration with Munich prove this.
2. Astafiev from the same NEC group bets to re-do all non-linear atomic optics with a qubit and is close to completion of this challenging plan. If accomplished, qubits as artificial atoms will acquire all the functionalities of traditional atoms. So we do not need old atoms anymore: we can safely replace them with qubits.
3. Theorists can be useful in revealing and studying problems the engineers of Intel corporation will enconter next year (talk of V. F. Lukichev, Institute of Physics and Technology, Russian Academy of Sciences)
4. Varelii Vinokour from Argonne National Lab has made a major contribution to the art of scientific presentation. First half of his talk has been devoted to scrupulous description of wrongdoings of his scientific opponents. He also mention that these wrongdoings were instrumental for his accelerated promotion to Argonne Distinguished Fellow. Unfortunately, I appeared too conservative for this novel type of talk and so-extended introduction did not help me to gasp the scientific side of the conflict described.
5. Fluctuation-dissipation theorem is wrong: this was a claim of prof. Averin from Stony Brook. Yet during the talk we have learned that FDT is ok: rather, there seem to be a problem with description of high-frequency thermal conductance with Kubo formalism.
Qubits in Altai mountains
do occur. It’s a second day I am here, in the heart of Altai, mysterious craddle of all turkish nations, among mistly forests, rocky hills, and unbelievably wild rivers: water seem to be boiling at all times.
There is a workshop in nanotech organized by people from Novosibirsk State Technical University. It is dominated by quantum superconducting devices and Russian-born scientists who work and live in West. The hidden agenga is perhaps the organizers wish to run a full-scale international conference, not sure about the place and use former compatriots as testers.
This is an unnecessary precaution: the place is well-run despite being in real wildreness, welcoming and the surroundings are magnificent. The only point it is a bit difficult to reach. We flew to Novosibirsk, that is an adventure by itself. Then we made a 10-hour bus ride through Siberian steppes. Those are usually dubbed cold. I wished it were true on that day: there were thirty in shadow, and there was hardly a shadow. It begun to rain only soon after we have reached the place…
Chekhov’s jubilee
Anniversary of graduation
is hardly celebrated, have you ever even remembered that, dear reader?
Yet I’m proud to belong to a small community where this anniversary does matter. I graduated from Moscow Physical-Technical Institute and in my first years I’ve been specializing in experimental physics of elementary particles. Though I changed this towards the end of the course, I still kept the links with old friends. On May 29th, 1982 we had a marvelous deep-night picnic celebrating the graduation. That outing was so sucsessful that it would be a sin not to repeat it in a year, and then in a year, so it became a tradition that helps us to bear the rush of years…
My friends have been scattered over the world, some in US, some in RU, and some in a micro-state called CERN that borders France and Switzerland. The celebration still goes on, tough this year at Swiss site only. I wish I could be present: these memories are sweet.
Top 100 scientists 2010
yes, here am I, in this prestigiuos list, perhaps just opening it. Finally noticed by International Bibliographical Centre. Very good for my career.
The only detail is that this is a so-called phony award, I’d pay for silver medal "designed by regalia-makers to the World’s Monarchies" and certificate (and I won’t), and the distinction will not be made public. Some people are upset while receiving such spam. However, others proudly include those in their CV’s along with real awards. That’s wise because everything is vanity.
Maple 13
There are no bad programs: there are silly users. This is what I’ve learned in hard and harsh way in course of my research life. I could tell many entertaining stories about, starting form my first computer experience in 1974 (when, listen to grandaddy, the computers looked very-very different) but I rather skip it in favour of that of yesterday.
Learning never ends, you know. One could hypothesize that if you (or your institution) pays heaps of euros for a well-established prog advertised as indispensible tool for learning math, the requirements on user intellegence/awarness might be somehow relaxed in comparison with, say, open source solutions. In order to check, I installed Maple 13 yesterday and made a couple of checks. The image above represents the result of the second one.
For non-experts: the integral to take is one of the simplest possible, and the answer is good except the overall sign. Vividly imagine a bridge desinged with the aid of Maple sofware …
And silly me: of course I would make a better time investment if I computed the integrals by hand. There are no bad programs!