season greetings to excellent people

This is the time of year — again! — when they start cleaning their desks and send holiday greetings to unsuccessful applicants. I don’t even have to open these emails anymore to know what’s there. I just got one today.

Dear Dr. Doctor,

Thank you for your recent application.

The appointing committees have now had a chance to consider your application and have on this occasion decided not to take it any further.

You were up against some outstanding candidates and the choice of the shortlist was very difficult.

On behalf of whoever it is who couldn’t bother to write himself, I should like to thank you for your interest in applying.

With best wishes,

Human Resources

The other one came last week. I don’t remember what the application was about because the letter referred to it by some number and right now I am too tired to look it up. Most probably it was regarding the position advertised last Summer. I liked the wording so much that I made a note of it:

To continue its policy of investment in excellent people, the School of Something Else at the University of Poshborough is seeking to appoint up to (some number) high calibre individuals at either high or even higher level.

But I am the excellent people! How come they don’t see that?

I know. This is all my fault, really. Instead of just sending the application off and forgetting about it, I am worrying that they will expect more of me than I can deliver. So I put all sorts of ridiculous stuff in my covering letter. For example:

As you can see from my CV, I do not have a strong record of teaching at the university.

How’s that? I bet nobody else is doing this. My goal is to convince them that I am the best candidate to fill the position, not some sort of impostor. If they can see something from my CV, then they will see. Or maybe not. The point is not to worry about that.

Another mistake I keep on repeating is to do an informal enquiry, whenever such an option exists.

Dear Professor Professor,

I would like to apply for a position of Somebody in Something as advertised somewhere. However before sending the full application, I am asking for your kind advice.

<insert a stupid bit about not having a strong record of doing Something>

I do not wish to waste the expert committee’s time. <Why?> Therefore I would greatly appreciate your frank opinion whether I should proceed with full application.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Doctor

Dear Dr. Doctor,

Thanks for the email and CV. Your career track is a bit unusual and the fact that you have not been active in science in the last three years will probably catch the attention of the assessment committee.

I can not tell you whether to apply or not, it has to be your own decision.

Kind regards,

Professor

See? Totally absurd query and deservedly useless response.

Sir Patrick Moore (1923—2012)

Moore was perhaps the last in the great British tradition of significant contributions to science by distinguished amateurs, and was fiercely proud of his amateur status.

Derek McNally

I wonder what academic bureaucrats of today would make of Sir Patrick Moore’ CV if he ever applied for professorship. Moore never went to the university (he famously refused a government grant to study at Cambridge), let alone wrote a Ph.D. thesis. So what. Dennis Barker wrote in The Guardian:

With one exception after his teaching days — his directorship of Armagh Planetarium in Northern Ireland (1965—68) — Moore was never an employee.

Even better.

I first learned about Moore from Англия, a British magazine published (in Russian) in Soviet times. I remember the black and white photo of him by the grand piano, the caption saying that Moore is an accomplished musician possessing perfect pitch. Back then, I thought he was some sort of English eccentric. Many years later, I saw him on the BBC. Yes he was an archetypal English eccentric all right, and amazingly brilliant at that. He joined the RAF during World War II; he met Yuri Gagarin and appeared in Doctor Who. He was the world’s longest-serving TV presenter — and, briefly, the finance minister for the Monster Raving Loony Party. According to Wikipedia, “as a pianist, he once accompanied Albert Einstein playing The Swan by Camille Saint-Saëns on the violin”. He wrote hundreds of books, including the one called Bureaucrats: How to Annoy Them. So I think his application would not be successful.

find your passion and pursue it

From the introductory lecture to the MIT course 3.091, Introduction to Solid State Chemistry by Professor Donald Sadoway (Fall 2010):

Let me begin by saying that 3.091 is the most important class you will take at MIT. It’s true. But, you know, anybody who stands in front of you to lecture should say the same thing about his or her class. If they don’t believe that they shouldn’t be standing in front of you lecturing. The difference is, when I say it, I’m right.

See, I have tenure. So what does that mean? It means you find your passion and pursue it. You don’t waste time on trivia. And that’s what I urge you to do: find your passion and pursue it.

Making safe batteries out of earth-abundant, accessible materials for portable power, ultimately to drive the car with electrons, electric fuel, to eliminate this country’s dependence on imported petroleum — we can do it. How? By inventing. And the way we’re going to invent is to learn the lessons in 3.091 that will give us the chemistry we need to invent a battery that can send that car 250 miles on a single charge, and put it in a show room for the same price as a car with an internal combustion engine. The only thing that stands between that image and where we are today is invention, and the requisite material is right here in this class.

And then, lastly, let’s never forget about dreaming.

What are the origins of chemistry? The ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs refer to khemeia, which was a chemical process for embalming the dead. You know the Egyptians were very fixated on the afterlife. And the chemists were revered in that society — not like here.

Newlands was a musician and he talked about octaves. So if you start here, if this is a diatonic scale, so this is C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. So potassium lies an octave away from sodium. He was ridiculed. They said, have you considered perhaps putting the elements in alphabetical order? They were cruel. Scientists can be very cruel to new ideas.

checking the winning formula

The day when the first of 2012 Nobel Prizes was announced, a short article containing the recipe for winning one of those appeared on the BBC website. Let’s see what we’ve got this year.

Physics
• Serge Haroche, 68, French
• David J. Wineland, 68, American
Chemistry
• Robert J. Lefkowitz, 69, American
• Brian Kobilka, 56, American
Physiology or Medicine
• Sir John B. Gurdon, 79, British
• Shinya Yamanaka, 50, Japanese
Literature
• Mo Yan, 57, Chinese
Peace
• European Union
Economic Sciences
• Alvin E. Roth, 60, American
• Lloyd Shapley, 89, American

If there are deviations from the winning formula, they are neither significant nor surprising. (For example, the formula does not reflect the fact that the prize winners are getting older.) Excluding the EU, we have the average age of 66. Five out of nine winners are Americans. Wineland and Shapley went to Harvard, Lefkowitz and Roth to Columbia, Gurdon to Oxford. Two economists and one physicist sport facial hair. I’ve counted at least five pairs of glasses. And no women.

Too many factors to consider, I say. Last year, Benjamin Jones and Bruce Weinberg published a paper in PNAS where they concentrate just on the age dynamics of Nobel laureates (prizes given between 1901 and 2008 in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine). It has rather fascinating figures in it.

In chemistry, great achievement by age 40 converges toward 0% by 2000, but it accounted for 66% of cases in 1900.

professor awakens, you fail

Transitions may be the only type of human-like words and phrases that could make mathematical texts accessible for — and, hopefully, even understandable to — humans. On the other hand, in this document dealing with issues of mathematical communication Zajj Daugherty warns:

Be careful with clearly, obviously, and surely, as graders often interpret these connectives to mean that important parts of the problem are being glossed over and that they should therefore read over the surrounding text more diligently.

And you wouldn’t want that. I recall an anecdote about great mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov who for many years was a professor at the famous Department of Mechanics and Mathematics (мехмат) of Moscow State University. Now Kolmogorov normally was snoozing his way through the exams. A successful exam strategy tactics approach was to talk non-stop whilst trying not to wake him up with a careless transition word such as obviously. Otherwise, he would open his eyes and say with a smile: “Очевидно? Докажите!” (“Obviously? Prove it!”)

the end of the world as we know it?

I don’t think so. Not this year anyway. Instead, we have the next best worst £!@#$%* thing. Today, the Spanish government announced its austerity budget. Which, as you may have guessed, is not a good news. Especially for those with even a passing interest in schooling.

The spending on education was not that great in the first place; how cutting it any further can help to plug the hundred-billion-euro hole? I know. One does not choose to be a teacher because it is a well-paid job, right? That means, to save some money, you have to sack thousands of teachers, rather than a dozen or so of bank CEOs.

Will they ever start to learn? That is not very likely. Stupid — I repeat, stupid — austerity measures will not get Spain out of crisis. Far from cutting, they should start investing in education. Furthermore... But I guess I could as well stop here and now: anybody who sometimes takes time off to think can continue the argument.

editing the uneditable

My classes were not going that well. And so, some time last month, in a moment of weakness (which lasted couple of days actually), I sent a few job applications. To keep myself and my CV in shape. So to speak.

To my surprise, I got a human-written response from one of the companies straight away. The job was a freelance editor, and I was sent an editing exercise consisting of three “extracts from papers to be published in international journals”. One of them was in the area of biochemistry, another medicine, and third pharmacology. I was asked to edit at least one of the text(s) using the change tracking tool and mark my time.

It seems that I did underestimate the difficulty of the task. I chose one abstract only (biochemistry) hoping to complete the editing in one hour. In fact I spent more than three hours. Frankly, this was the worst piece of “scientific writing” (no I cannot omit the quotes) I ever seen. Yes I understand that English is not the author’s native language. Even so, I started to doubt whether it even was a real abstract. Maybe it was specifically designed to test editor’s ability to remain sane. Or maybe, as Tamara suggested, it was some sort of crowdsourcing exercise and the company never intended to hire anyone in the first place. I sent the completed task away and forgot about if for a while.

But let’s assume that these abstracts/extracts are real. It is my deep conviction that humankind would lose nothing if they were never published. If the authors are unable to formulate what is the point of their work, in whatever language, with or without external help, these texts shouldn’t even have reached the editorial office. Ever. Period.

To my surprise, one month later I got the response from the company thanking me for taking the test. The letter proceeded to say that, regrettably, the test did not meet their (unspecified) benchmark for freelancers and therefore they were unable to consider my application any further.

I should say that I feel relieved.

Einstein was right, so what?

I don’t know about you, but I am really disappointed with the “news” that neutrino, after all, does not exceed the speed of light. According to CERN Press Release, the surprising results of the OPERA experiment were due to what many researchers now say suspected all along: faulty wiring or something.

The mass media, which got (understandably) overexcited since last Autumn, had to make less-than-exciting coverage this time and explain us that slower-than-light neutrinos are actually good news. Alok Jha wrote in The Guardian:

Travelling faster than the speed of light goes against Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity. If it were possible, it would open up the troubling possibility of being able to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect.

Or dear.

So Einstein was right, or, rather, special relativity was not proved wrong on this occasion. As it was not proved wrong when the antineutrinos from Supernova 1987A, some 160,000 light years away, arrived to Earth about three hours earlier than photons. The conclusion was that they actually were not faster than light, it was light that was slower than light. Great stuff. Based on observation of, in total, 24 neutrinos. Of course, there is only a slim chance of repeating an experiment on such scale.

Back to the OPERA. What kind of distance is 730 km anyway? We are talking the speed of light here. We’d better do collaboration with somebody at least from the other side of the galaxy. Forget the GPS then.

Please don’t get me wrong: I have no problem with newer experiments showing that the original experiment was flawed. That happens all the time in science. But the collective sigh of relief from the mainstream physics community, that saddens me. (As if everybody’s scientific career depends on that thin unblurred line between past and present.) Ditto the resignation of Antonio Ereditato and Dario Autiero. What, exactly, was their crime? Presenting their results?

Although the existence of an extremely light neutral particle emitted during beta decay was postulated first by Wolfgang Pauli, it was Enrico Fermi who coined this lovely term, neutrino. In 1934, Fermi wrote his classic paper on beta decay and submitted it to Nature. The manuscript was rejected because “it contained speculations which were too remote from reality”. Good thing Zeitschrift für Physik published it. As for Einstein, I doubt that the author of 300+ non-peer-reviewed papers would even be taken seriously by the scientific community today.

putting the spheres back into tetrahedra

This post has its roots in a discussion during the coffee-time, inspired by an almost empty jar of condensed milk. It seemed obvious that spherical jars do not pack as good as cylindrical jars. But how good do they pack? Some scribbling ensued.

Realising that solving the problem from the first principles might take much more than quarter an hour, I looked up the problem of close-packing of spheres, seemingly one of easier packing problems, in Wikipedia. I thought it was solved ages ago. I was wrong (or only partially right, if we are optimists.)

Sir Walter Raleigh posed so-called Cannonball Problem around 1587 to the English polymath Thomas Harriot, his scientific adviser on the expedition to the New World. Later, the correspondence of Harriot with Johannes Kepler influenced the Kepler conjecture (1611), which says that no arrangement of equally sized spheres filling space has a greater average density than that of the face-centered cubic (fcc) packing and hexagonal close packing (hcp) arrangements. Gauss proved in 1831 that the average density of close-packed spheres is π/√18 ≃ 74%. (Compare that with circle packing — or cylinder packing — density of π/√12 ≃ 90.7%.)

In 1998 Thomas Hales announced that the proof by exhaustion of Kepler conjecture was complete. It took four years for a twelve-strong panel of referees to agree with 99% certainty that Hales’s proof is correct. (How did they do that?) However a complete formal proof is still to be produced — Hales’s Flyspeck Project is said to last at least twenty more years.

What is the best container for close-packed spheres? At first, I naïvely thought that, if one can stack spheres as tetrahedral pyramids, maybe tetrahedral boxes? Provided, of course, that one knows what to do with tetrahedral boxes. Another discovery awaited me. Aristotle wrote in 350 BC in his treatise On the Heavens:

It is agreed that there are only three plane figures which can fill a space, the triangle, the square, and the hexagon, and only two solids, the pyramid and the cube.

It is somewhat reassuring that until recent I shared with great Aristotle the belief that one can fill space with regular tetrahedra. On the other hand, it is not. It was known at least since fifteenth century that these polyhedra do not tile space. Interestingly, the optimal packing for regular tetrahedra remains to be found. The best known packing of 85.63% was achieved as recently as 2010. Of course it is much better than 74% density of spheres, but maybe there is still room for improvement.

Even so, as this diagram shows, one can quite nicely stack the balls in more convenient cubic boxes, which do tile space for sure.

What, if any, is the moral of the story? Not every statement starting with “It is agreed that...” is true. The old problem does not mean it is a solved problem. You might as well have a go at it. Or, at least, read in Wikipedia about it.

Update (25.05.2023): The Flyspeck Project was completed in 2014 and a formal proof of the Kepler conjecture was published in 2015.

dead don't read emails

Over the last twenty or so years, I have changed several email addresses. Not too many — less than my postal addresses, in fact. It’s not a big deal. My old email addresses could be found in some papers that I authored, although I seriously doubt anyone will ever bother to check their validity. In any case, my readers had a few years to ask their questions. Now the shop is closed. I moved on. Emails happily bounce back.

But when a person dies and his or her email is still active — that by some reason freaks me out. That felt weird twenty years ago, that still feels weird today. Inbox full of unread emails. Creepy.

Now, with everyone connected by social networks, it feels weirder still. Yeah, let’s all write “R.I.P.” on the deceased’s Facebook wall, that will help.

Death of a friend. That emptiness left behind. Do we have to fill it with worthless words?