Weblog Yuli Nazarov
WWII song
I should have posted this 5 days ago when me and my mother observed Russian V-day which is simultaneously remembrance day of all perished during WWII. Mother remembers the time vividly. I was also born early enough to hear and learn about WWII from my folks who took part in, and from books and movies which were plenty till, say, 1975. To some extent, my feelings about WWII are personal coming from intense impressions of my childhood, like stories about my relatives who did not make it through.
Among other activities, we listen to WWII songs, mostly scrolling youtube. Bad thing about Russian culture is that good songs are somber, and best songs really intend to crash your emotions to complete misery (very mush like Portugese ones do). So after some time we started to look for something merrier. I recalled one American song translated and promoted in Russia by a celebrated jazz-man of the time. Here it goes
One of our planes was missing
Two hours overdue,
One of our planes was missing
With all it’s gallant crew,
The radio sets were humming,
They waited for a word,
Then a voice broke through the humming
And this is what they heard:
Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer,
Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer,
Though there’s one motor gone
We can still carry on,
Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer.
What a show! What a fight!
Yes, we really hit our target for tonight!
How we sing as we limp through the air,
Look below, there’s our field over there,
With our full crew aboard
And our trust in the Lord
We’re comin’ in on a wing and a prayer.
You can listen to it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1W4rVtT4Ok
Ascension
is today, a great feast in all Christian churches.
I never manage to understand the time-line of the events, neither with my ratio nor with my heart, perhaps just because never manage to live this period properly, with persistent memory of Christ. For me, it’d be natural if Pentecost and Ascension happen in the same day. I experience the ten-day pause as a period of confusion. Where is He and where am I? I’m here and He must be everywhere, so why do I see him leaving me?
"Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up into heaven?"
Weird printing jobs
Our printers are centralized for several years already, this includes paper, technical services, printing costs and printer access: our printer is in principle can be used by anybody at the University, from student to rector, essentially anonymously. Counter expectations, this system usually works rather normally. Well, you need sometimes to wait for half a day for paper refill, but this does not happen very often.
Today was a bad day, it did not work for whole morning and calls to central maintainence have not immediately brough a relief. By applying random button-pushing and cross-cursing, we manage to reboot it. Wow!
And it gave out a huge number of delayed printing jobs. Mine was in the middle, so I had to review the printouts. Most of them concerned the subjects of this technical university (or physics). But what would you say about an article entitled:
Introduction to Narrative Violence in Africa
Weird enough? Not at all. Another printing job was just an empty search form of Google as seen at www.google.com. Did anybody want to frame it and mount in his/her bedroom? Interesting people we scientist are. Especially on conditions of anonymity.
Some simulation fun
Today is a day off, Liberation day. I was up to some scientific fun in the afternoon. It came in two kinds.
Science in question concerns the current in overheated transistor (http://yuli.weblog.tudelft.nl/2009/12/15/fully-overheated-sigle-electron-transist ) that we study with Matti Laakso. We have concentrated on current fluctuations and recently have found a regime where these fluctuations are really wild. The distribution of current values is of Patero type, and it so happends that the average current is parametrically bigger than its optimal value. This suggest that the time-line of these fluctuations must be rather amusing: most time current is low, but occasionally it gives a giganitic surge that drops quickly to the low level. The average current is determined by surges. I wanted to simulate stochastic dynamics giving rise to such a time-line.
Recently I fall in love with python programming language. Being invented by math student Guido van Rossum, it’s certainly a biggest contribution of the Netherlands to world culture for at least last thirty years. Too bad Guido could not find the job over here. I’ve made a draft simulator in python within an hour, and rather advanced and reliable one within another hour, and the prog text is still 48 lines ( six of them are blank). So I could see these miracluous surges, up to four orders of magnitude above the normal level.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed.
Proposal FOM projectruimte
was submbitted today. It was Queen’s birthday yesterday, it is Labour day today: to ultimate irritation of my family, I’ve spent both days in office. As usual, I would need some more time, for instance, to format the text in a readable way. Anyway it’s too late today, and I was too much exhausted and disgusted with the project contents to read it one more time.
This is by the way quite a slavonic attitude, an unfavorable heritage of my ancestrors: to work hard for a long time and get sloppy and negligent in the end. I know it’s better to do otherwise, but I cannot change my birth place. If I would, I’d certainly be a Polynesian: I’ve heard this is the most privileged minority in US.
The project is in nanoelectromechanics, its title is: " Devising polarons in carbon nanotubes". I really hope much for sucsess. I will publish a link to this proposal soon.
Farewell celebration Kees Harmans
has taken place today. Unfortunately I will not able to attend the dinner party promised to be ‘grand’. Yet the party at the University was quite significant and enjoyable (if accustom to Dutch catering). Chirstmas-like decoration of the room has been made of first pages of sci works of Kees, printed in various colors.
Kees was as usual: handsom, collected, sincere. There were two "official" speeches. Herre van der Zant, the department head, addressed all Kees’s career with a special stress on the course "mesoscopic physics" Kees has been giving many years thereby bringing up generations and generations of Quantum Transport students. Hans Mooij who has collaborated with Kees for twenty some years has told about his devotion to science and students and artistic skill to measure combatting and tricking noises.
Guess everybody agrees that the most spectacular part of the party has been run by Raymond Schouten who demonstrated the "thermophone", a device that translated into sound noise the thermal noise in a resistor on the end of a long wire. Supervised by Raymond, Kees has demonstrated that noise intensity is propotional to the resistor temperature. He did so soaking the little one into cold beer, liquid nitrogen, and, finally, into liquid helium. That worked. Kees could not beat the teacher inside: he explained in detail the absolute temperature scale, the details and significance of the experiment. In the end of the part, he’s got a present: a functional pulse generator, indispensible tool for quantum manipulation.
Then Kees took the word. In his speech, he was mentioning phase and phases, interference and interaction, and applied these physical terms to human aspects of his long scientific carrier: promotion in Amsterdam, job in National Standard Instute, since 1987 nano(well, that time yet micro)structures in Delft, students (like van Wees and Kouwenhoven), quantum dots, hybrid structures, great sucsess of superconducting quantum bits, his main bisness of last ten years…
He mentioned the tragic death of his eldes son 13 years ago that hit and broke Kees at the rise of his scientific career.
Yet life goes on, Kees will remain active and gave us the list of his "life-after-TU-Delft" highlights: all sounded quite tempting. Also he won’t dissapear just like in a movie, we will see him in coming months.
My dean, my department head and me
have met today for an important bureaucratic rite: periodic evaluation of my job performance from all angles possible. This is a must for all employees of all Dutch universities. I wished my job performance was spherically-symmetric, that is, I’d look equally good from any angle. This is not so, and one of the working tasks of my supervisors is to find the least favourable angle. So for me such meetings are always like going to a dental check (with firm knowledge that there is something better not checked). I’m afraid I was emmiting the mood, and was making the discussion equally unpleasant for all three sides.
After all, it did not go as bad as I imagined. I received several useful (I mean, really usefull) advises and made several appoitments (wish all have been pleasant) but my severe incompetence, although partially revealed, has not yet lead to organizational consequences.
So I was able to sincerely thank the gentelmen in the end of the meeting.
Jeroen Oostinga
has been promoted to Ph.D. today. He is another student of Alberto Morpurgo who has left Delft for Geneve and brought some students with him. The previous promotion of this kind was that of Hangxing
Xie (the blog of 2010-03-29), and guess what: Hangxing Xie was there in the role of a paranymph, one of the two assisting the candidate during the defence.
He had to work, because the attack on the Ph.D. candidate has been pretty hard. All members of the commission have been persistent in the questioning. Serge Lemay has even formulated a question in a graphical form: a seemingly simple drawing to confuse the candidate (at least, it was confusing for me). I personally required computing a square root of a misspelled number and responsibility for a time reversal occured about four years ago. The promotor was interested to recieve a feedback on his (micro)managment activities.
Jeroen has withstood all with glory and honor. Main reason for this is of coourse his spectacular record in experimental physics of graphene: five fundamental effects measured and explained.
Thanks for 256,000 views!
So I am happy to report another doubling of views. It took 61 day to achieve this. During this period, I have observed big slow fluctuations of visitor activity: factor-of-two variations in daily number of views. I could not find any relation of these variations to the content posted or other global events, I think I should not look for a rational explanation.
The blog remains my most sucsessful project of the past year. While feedback is scarce, it is emotionally useful. The fact that so many are interested in my stories and research is very encouraging.
Thank you very much, dear reader!
Strangled for my own safety
The modern or post-modern society pretends not to recognize the question of a sense of life, but does provide a very definite answer to that. The sense is: to live and die proudly in full compliance with safety regulations imposed by beloved authorities.
My mother has become 75 and I promised to accompany her to a correspondingly great trip. Coming Monday we would fly to Madrid. Well, nobody knows and nobody cares to say it openly but the trip seems as good as cancelled. The skies are closed by overexcited administrators.
Come on, assheads. The sky is blue. The danger to air traffic is smaller than that from drinks and lighters aboard that you have been trying to forbid. You strangle European ecomony and intimidate hundreds of thousands of innocent citiziens just because your marginal salary does not depend on devastating consequencies of the "safety regulations" you impose. It is doubtful that you will give a thought to it before you find yourself in a queue for food coupons: yet it is where you head all us doing everything to endanger economy and prosperity of individuals.
I must be free to fly where I please.