Dr. Chu goes to Washington...

... and ends up hungover, waking up next to a solar panel. In a clever combination of the politician's non-denial denial of the affair and his characteristic dry wit while more or less staying true to what he believes in:

“I just want everyone to know that my decision not to serve a second term as Energy Secretary has absolutely nothing to do with the allegations made in this week’s edition of the Onion. While I’m not going to confirm or deny the charges specifically, I will say that clean, renewable solar power is a growing source of US jobs and is becoming more and more affordable, so it’s no surprise that lots of Americans are falling in love with solar.”

His wife purportedly expressed skepticism: "Is that really you? You don't have hair on your chest."

In a sense, Prof. Steve Chu's stint in Washington D.C. does indeed feel like the Frank Capra's movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He even showed an excerpt of it (2m16s until about 2m37s). The naïve and nerdy physicist who's an ardent advocate for renewable energy and had to be forced to talk about the oil and gas industries as SoE.

He talked about many many examples of how a technology was initially derided and dismissed even by subject experts until it found an agent of dissemination who made it economically feasible and popular. And then it becomes as obvious to anyone. Like James Watt to the steam engine and Henry Ford to the automobile. A log-log-linear learning curve, if you will.

"[Refrigerator size] is not plateauing because of the size of the American appetite. It's plateauing because of the size of the kitchen door."

He clearly enjoyed his time at Bell Labs. Of the "flat structure where everyone argued about ideas but respected one another as people." I wish I could always find such places to do my work in... If there are more articulate scientists with social conscience, perhaps the Earth would not be totally destroyed after all...

"We Do Not Inherit the Earth from Our Ancestors; We Borrow It from Our Children."

At the end of the talk, he quoted Apollo 8 astronauts and showed the entirety of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot.

Two members of the audience asked him questions along the line of "how do you encourage scientists/ students/ student-scientists to be involved in policy? Any advice?" I don't remember what he said exactly, but it had the gist of Dory the blue tang's "just keep swimming just keep swimming just keep swimming swimming swimming"

Mwahaha sorry about the earworm. And if anyone can comment on the feasibility of fusion as an energy source, it would be the veteran laser guru.

Double, double, toil and trouble;

... Fire burn, and pseudopotentials bubble. That about sums up my research these days.

Fiddling with the mysterious inner workings of how to best represent atomic orbitals so they appear to behave just like in experimental observations...

It's like the simmering of a secret sauce where each ingredient must be mixed in the right amount and added at the right time. Otherwise dramatic explosions break out in the form of error messages like "Jacobian has collapsed", "5s is unbound", "x1 must be monotonically increasing", or "failed to bracket eigenvalues". 

Now I know why Snape the potion master is perennially frustrated. At least my research group appreciated the Shakespeare reference and the clip-art of a bubbly cauldron.

Poetic connections to quantum physics

- - -
        THE LOCKLESS DOOR

        by: Robert Frost (1874-1963)

        It went many years,
        But at last came a knock,
        And I thought of the door
        With no lock to lock.
        
        I blew out the light,
        I tip-toed the floor,
        And raised both hands
        In prayer to the door.
        
        But the knock came again
        My window was wide;
        I climbed on the sill
        And descended outside.
        
        Back over the sill
        I bade a “Come in”
        To whoever the knock
        At the door may have been.
        
        So at a knock
        I emptied my cage
        To hide in the world
        And alter with age.

Sublime description of two eigenstates superimposing on each other (I read it as a metaphor of life/death, of being/non-being, or just two different perspectives...) and the observation paradox of Schrödinger's cat :-P

Brain Pickings is the most intriguing and illuminating website I've visited in a while

- - -
io9.com is a close second. Together this makes for my shortest blog entry with the most number of tags.

I particularly should check out these collections of books... on the left panel on the main page. I already read a few of them and heard about a few more, but hmm... haven't read real books in a while. Too many things are happening lately...

Interdisciplinary approach to the energy issues

- - -
Met students from all different fields of science, economics, business, and law. [Insert "synergy" here]

Really got a comprehensive view of how to solve the energy problems, although a lot more breadth than depth. Lots of brief talks (engineers/scientists thought were too non-technical and some MBA/law students thought were too technical). I learned more about carbon capture & sequestration, geothermal powers, wind turbines, aviation and automotive research, etc. On the non-science side, there's carbon tax, cap & trade, behavioral economics, and that McKinsey greenhouse gas abatement cost graph...

Fun tours to local habitats and companies and labs...

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

- - -
The first 1/3 of the book reads like an expansive and poly-sourced mega blog entry. Not in a pejorative sense! I live for well-informed blog entries. :-P Just lots of editorializing involved.

Dr. Sagan provides many compelling points to debunk the UFO theories (e.g. NSA secrecy during the Cold War) or alien abductions (e.g. sleep paralysis, suggestive and mildly schizophrenic people). But I was a little taken aback by his accusatory tone. Perhaps it stemmed from the frustration of dealing with this ignoramus-masses issue for many years. And his failing health at that time... the book was published in 1995.

Last page of the alien chapter:

Despite this apparent variety of extraterrestrials, the UFO abduction syndrome portrays, it seems to me, a banal Universe. The form of the supposed aliens is marked by a failure of the imagination and a preoccupation with human concerns.

I had to ROFL at that one. After all, the purported aliens seemed remarkably concerned with terrestrial affairs like environmental damage and global epidemics. And some of them even look similar to the local denizens. Annnnd... these aliens "knew nothing about Fermat's Last Theorem or Goldbach's Conjecture". (That's because they never went to math camp!!)

But Dr. Sagan should have given these people a break because the general public really doesn't have the combined technical and imaginative prowess of astronomers. :-P

Not a single being presented in all these accounts is as astonishing as a cockatoo would be if you had never before beheld a bird. Any protozoology or bacteriology or mycology textbook is filled with wonders that far outshine the most exotic descriptions of the alien abductionists.

The believers take the common elements in their stories as tokens of verisimilitude, rather than as evidence that they have contrived their stories out of a shared culture and biology.

 Indeed, if there's actually extraterrestrial life forms, they're most likely microscopic.

Revealing water’s secrets - MIT News Office

Revealing water’s secrets - MIT News Office

Water is an interesting substance indeed - I mean, ice floats in water... what other material's solid form floats in its liquid form?






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Mythologically abstruse acronyms

- - -
Came across this fun little widget. I seriously guessed on 6 of those. Good times...

Molecular Biology Jargon or Minor Thundercats Character?

90% (9 out of 10 Questions Correct)

Facebook quizzes, quiz apps & blog quizzes by

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Copenhagen (play)

- - -
The title aptly plays on the locale and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. This play is about intentions and their interpretations thereof. And the difficulty that arises when things are left unsaid.

Niels Bohr had treated Werner Heisenberg as more than a colleague, closer to a star protégé or a son. And Heisenberg was the prodigal upstart of the physics world who corrected Bohr's math error at a conference when he was a 21-year-old grad student. Thus began ~20 years of collaboration that revolutionized quantum physics until they had a falling-out when Heisenberg insisted on meeting Bohr in WWII-raging 1941... while they were on the opposite sides of the war.

In a way, they are both like experimenters trying to characterize an elusive particle, trying to understand why one wants to meet the other while the potential barrier is overwhelming. (Oh punny puns...) In the attempt to gauge what the other is thinking, they ask questions (make a measurement), all the while tiptoeing around political landmines (stringent experimental conditions).

I would like to think that Heisenberg wanted to warn Bohr about the destructive force of atomic fission and thereby dissuading the governments (on both sides) to develop weapons from it. Or he could have been trying to fish out information from Bohr. Or he missed his mentor after being out of touch for many years. Or some combination thereof. So many eigenstates... whose wavefunctions collapsed into a broken friendship.

All the while, Niels' wife Margarethe stays mostly in the background as an observer, albeit not a neutral one. Like a meta-overseer whose presence keeps the particles from bouncing off into Neverland, i.e. talking in math equations and throwing nerdy references around.

My favorite scene is where Heisenberg likens Margarethe to an atomic nucleus, Niels to an electron who is "here, there, everywhere and nowhere", and himself to a photon trying to find the electron. Upon meeting, both particles are deflected, i.e. affected forever. It captures their dynamic rather well...

As an aside, all the actors are fantastic in this. Daniel Craig (Heisenberg) is probably the most famous of the three in the U.S. at least, and it was fun watching him play a brilliant, troubled, earnest character.






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A scary congregation of toxic gases

- - -
I think this is more than what Britney Spears had in mind when she wrote "Toxic"...

Yeah, um, I was too scared to get closer for a clearer shot. I couldn't tell what the bottom two were... but here are their identities:
(1) tertiarybutylarsine
(2) trimethylgallium
(3) tributylphosphine
(4) trimethylindium
(5) trimethylaluminum
(6) dimethylzinc
(7) Jabba the Hutt's fart
(8) Meth lab explosion

I will figure out what (7) and (8) really are.

[Edit 2011.07.28 19:06]
(7) is 1,1-dimethylhydrazine (UDMHy) ... My original guess wasn't too far off.
(8) is 200ppm silane in hydrogen






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Going against the flow

- - -
Wow, this is a whole new level of rad! Counter stream uphill and all... hail to the power of physics!






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More neuromarketing, i.e. tapping into your deepest and darkest desires

- - -
According to Buyology, auditory and olfactory signals are much stronger than visual ones. That means... out go the company logos, in come the fragrances and musical jingles.

Does that mean Facebook is gonna gather data on our favorite composers, analyze their musical signatures, and tell the ad companies how to make addictive tunes? I bet they're probably doing that already.

And the scents and fragrances are even more primal... they go straight to the limbic system and elicit instant recall of the most profound emotional memories. Hmmm!

Be afraid. Be very afraid... Hohohohohohohohoho......






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Mirror into the depth of psyche

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(1) So apparently if you're trying to impress someone in a teleconference setting, make your 3D avatar vaguely and subconsciously resemble that person. Hmmm! That should work for the vast majority of people who're not prone to self-hatred. While I'm not really endorsing self-hatred, America does need more people with even a modicum of such tendencies. Case in point: Donald Trump. [gag]

(2) In "The Finder", a recent episode of the TV series Bones that introduced the curious trio of Walter, Ike and Leo, Walter berates a waitress for bringing him decaf that he doesn't think it decaf and why does decaf cost the same even though it takes more processing to extract the caffeine out. Ike explained that people don't like to pay more for something less. Granted, Walter has a rather paranoid and suspicious nature, but this raises an interesting point. Humans are designed to be primarily sensory creatures, so a straightforward correspondence between size and cost (i.e. food) makes sense. Few people would ponder what processing took place behind the packaging, e.g. chemicals used, amount of water used, etc. That reminds me, I should start reading Buyology. Because economics is hardly about mere numerical models, however elegant they might be. Much of economics is behavior psychology, which is fascinating but rather messy...

(3) Ever since I could remember, I've always felt like something was lacking in those "happily-after endings". In fact, one of my favorite pastimes was mocking Disney fairy tales back in the '90s with some co-conspirators around my age. Morally ambiguous characters intrigue me, e.g. Dr. Gregory House, Dr. Remy Hadley (Thirteen), Dexter Morgan, Jack Bauer (and his reincarnated assassin in The Confession)... come to think of it, morally ambiguous female characters in TV are rather rare. Sonia from Crime and Punishment seems to be one. Hmm... Akemi Homura from Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica could be one... at least in the beginning of the series :-P

Why we buy what we buy

- - -
Just got Martin Lindstrom's Buyology from the Law School Library. Hmm, I would have thought this would be in the Business School Library... I expect this to be an illuminating read.

One way or another, this book has been prompted by all this self- & corporate-branding movement. Certainly leads to more revenue for those who do it well, the self-promoters... understanding their tactics would be crucial in defending against them. Or in the event I have to use these (gasp) and sell my soul to the Money Devil... ugh, what a despicable thought.

Conversational

- - -
Met a friend I haven't seen in a while. As good grad students, we chatted about research. I talked about my quantum physics simulations and he talked about MOS cap parameter extraction and modeling...

And then I managed to turn a conversation about the new football-themed decor at a campus dining place into a dialogue about philosophy, religion, and science :-P

"So many football pictures here... people are obsessed!"

"Yeah, the whole sports fan concept is like a religion... hardcore fans almost worship their favorite teams and/or players..."

"Are you Christian?"

"No, you?"

"I'm Buddhist."

"Buddhism is more like a philosophy... Christianity is more similar to sports team worshipping :-P"

"So do you believe in anything?"

"This may sound a little strange... I believe in the laws of Nature."

"Like Newton's Laws and such?"

"Yes, although they're only a subset of Nature's laws because they only work part of the time... And we won't ever discover all the laws because of our limited perception..."

(Then we talked about scientific discoveries and technological advancement... and decided that anything could happen in the next thousand years.)

Oh the humanity...

- - -

(12:27:12 AM) friend: The cat just jumped on my lap and demands to be petted.
(12:27:36 AM) me: I see
(12:27:48 AM) me: I wonder if having a pet would make me feel more useful
(12:27:54 AM) me: although I might accidentally kill it
(12:28:02 AM) me: due to neglect
(12:28:31 AM) friend: I had a student with this dilemma
(12:29:00 AM) me: existing track record?
(12:29:01 AM) me: :P
(12:29:12 AM) friend: Her friends started her off with a cactus plant.
(12:29:16 AM) me: it died.
(12:29:22 AM) friend: Alas she killed it.
(12:29:37 AM) me: I had a pot of African violet
(12:29:49 AM) me: the flowers died after 1 week
(12:29:58 AM) me: and then it never flowered again
(12:30:05 AM) me: and it died after a few months
(12:30:24 AM) friend: Don't take it too personally
(12:30:28 AM) me: haha
(12:30:50 AM) friend: It happens to other people too like cactus girl.
(12:32:19 AM) me: cactus is pretty hard to kill.
(12:33:02 AM) friend: Yes that's why cactus girl was distraught
(12:33:09 AM) me: oh no
(12:33:18 AM) me: what is she like?
(12:33:32 AM) friend: Very attractive, I dunno.
(12:33:36 AM) me: :P
(12:33:39 AM) friend: Talkative.
(12:33:40 AM) me: temperament
(12:33:41 AM) me: really
(12:33:44 AM) me: curious
(12:33:58 AM) me: so one possibility is that she completely forgot about it
(12:34:36 AM) friend: She thought it didn't get enough light, and wanted me to design a giant parabolic mirror for her to concentrate light.
(12:35:05 AM) friend: I said that was stupid, but not quite so bluntly.
(12:35:25 AM) me: well, it would set the cactus on fire
(12:35:48 AM) friend: Yeah, well english majors don't know that.
(12:36:03 AM) me: oh man, I was laughing too hard at that one

For the greater good...

- - -

Currently running (not all simultaneously) Folding@Home, AQUA@Home, and climateprediction.net from the list of distributed computing projects.

Donated to Wikipedia. After all, I use it many times every day :-P

I would like to think that I'm helping out... even when I'm goofing... especially when I'm goofing.

All is fair in food and love... and improvisational recipes

- - -
After more than ten years of dormancy, I have baked again. Cake for a surprise birthday celebration... like more than two months early... LDR, sigh!

I have significantly revised this recipe... this is what I actually used:
(1) 1 pack TJ's Vanilla Cake Mix
(2) 8 (~1" by ~1"by ~0.2") squares of 70% cocoa dark chocolate
(3) About 200ml of assorted nuts
(4) 3 large eggs
(5) ~1 cup (organic?) vanilla soy milk

I crushed the chocolates and nuts (butter substitute) and mixed everything... one ingredient at a time at andante pouring rate. The cake batter felt starchy and thick (like really thick puke, I thought). I added another egg because the cake mix was more than I expected. :-P

Took about 45 minutes at 350 degrees F and 10 more minutes at 250 degrees F. It has the consistency between a cake and a cookie. I think it was the extra egg... maybe I'll call it a cakie. :-P Actually, it's most like a giant muffin. Giant muffin!

No fruits went in the oven because I like to preserve their vitamins. I added them on after the cakie's been completely baked. In lovely geometric patterns. With subtle 90-degree rotational quasi-symmetry (quasi because my makeshift cake pan is not exactly a rectangle...)

Didn't come out too badly I think...

Sprinklers

- - -
Shortly after sunset, the sprinklers near White Plaza synchronize their parabolic sprays in a misty, mystic dance. Very contemplative. Meditative. Dangerous for bikers with tendency to stare at such.

While I was admiring this choreography, I noted the streams of water running on the pavement. I'll bet if there's a way to not waste water like this, the university would save a good amount of money.

How about sensors that can adjust spray rate according to... say relative humidity?

The Singularity is near!

- - -
And no, the NEMSSS seminar today did not involve giant Madagascar cockroaches. It did involve cybborrg beettles, complete with implanted chips inserted during pupal stage.

The chip talks to the remote control and stimulates muscles that pull on the exoskeleton that creates a mechanical resonance to flap the wings. With directional control by individual pulse train stimulation on left vs. right wing. The speaker was a former student of my PI. He was very energetic like a boy with his favorite toy.

He was also very eager to discuss the ethical issues about controlling beetles, etc. I think that he's only interested in it as an intellectual debate. N from my group thinks that if it were our PI, he would be more inclined toward the "don't hurt the beetles because it causes pain" side.

The study is basically funded by DARPA. Surprise surprise!