The Science of Who’s the Best

The Physics ArXiv Blog recently discussed a paper on the statistical problem with soccer tournaments.  In particular, the authors note the problem that there is only a 28% chance that the “best team” won the most recent World Cup.  They also point to the presence of intransitive triplets,  or rock-paper-scissors type relationships where team A beats team B beats team C, who then beats team A.  They cite these results to support their claim that single-elimination tournaments, and soccer games in general are a bad experiment to determine the best team.

I don’t know much about soccer, but as a basketball fan, I’m not surprised to hear about the existence of these intransitive triplets.  Sure, after an 82-game NBA season where every team plays each other at least twice,  you can feel pretty confident about ranking the teams on a rough hierarchy.  But three teams of roughly the same level can definitely have a rock-paper-scissors relationship because of different areas of strength.

More interesting, however is their claim about single-elimination tournaments, as it makes me think of the age-old debate that seems to come up every March: Which is better, NCAA or NBA basketball?

Unpaid Internships and Power

Because I have always had my eye on academia, there are many things I don’t know about the business world, including the process of getting started as a young person and moving up the ranks.  However, whenever I hear aspiring business-types talk, internships perpetually come up.  Internships seem to be central to the plan of getting experience, getting noticed, and getting on track to a good job.  And the accompanying question is always asked: is the internship paid or unpaid?

Before today, this question never fazed me.  I have always been paid for my internship-like research experiences, but I was not surprised that in some fields, people paid their dues by working for free.  However, a blog entry that I read today completely changed my mind, and not in the direction that the author intended.

Cumulative Links Dump

It’s Friday afternoon, time for you to goof off with this list of links that I’ve saved up over the past few weeks:

• Advanced physcis labs — What we expect from them, what we should expect from them, how to change them.  My experience with advanced lab didn’t teach me all that much, and wasn’t all that rigorous.  I didn’t mind, since I had my mind made up to be a theorist anyway.  Plus, we were all required to do a senior research project, which filled in many holes, along with our fairly demanding modern physics lab.  But a more challenging advaced lab might have been like foul-tasting medicine that would make me better off today.
• Physics Toolbox: Symmetry: The return of Morning Coffee Physics!  Explains the role of symmetry in physics.
• Cities and Ambition — What does your city say to its ambitious people?  I’ve been trying to figure out the underlying message in Minneapolis, but haven’t quite gotten there yet.  Plus, it’s interesting to think about ranking cities by the quality of the eavesdropping that you can do.
• Grad School and Vacations, PhD Comics — Q: So what do we get? A: Exploited, mostly.
• Impossible Tasks, PhD Comics – I think we all go through this at some point.  Not quite as disheartening as saying it’s impossible and then having your adviser do it in five minutes, though
• Thoughts on Grad School: Trying to employ as many of these tips as possible this semester.  Especially intriguing: #10  Take Days Off.
• Most Depressing Ideas in Physics: The eventual heat death of the universe is harshin’ my mellow.

Going Greener With Alternative Power

It’s been a little over a year since I blogged about my carbon footprint, and detailed some of the steps that I was taking to reduce my environmental impact.  Here’s an update, along with a new step that I encourage all of you to look into: purchasing electricity from alternative energy sources.

Car-Free Existence

I grew up dependent on cars for transportation, but I’ve found the transition to not owning a car to be pretty easy.  I ride my bike when the weather cooperates, 8 miles round trip to school.  Thanks to a good network of bike lanes and trails, plus (mostly) conscientious drivers, my bike commute is usually pretty nice.  I can definitely see why Minneapolis is considered the #2 bike friendly city in America.

When it rains, and during the winter, I take the bus.  This is also very convenient, as the Twin Cities have good public transportation.  I can use Google Maps to find the best route at any given time.  Plus, it’s great that the Twin Cities have a growing number of hybrid electric buses, which furthers the cause of going green.

Unsolicited Advice, Volume I

So you want to be a physicist?  Hey, me too!  While I don’t know everything there is to know about getting there, I might be farther along than you are, and have some wisdom that I’ve accrued along the way that I can impart to you, even though you never asked for it.  Hence, this series of Unsolicited Advice.  (I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the inspiration I got from Cosmic Variance.  Plus I borrowed stole the name.)

Since this is Volume I, we’ll start early: before college.

Nurture Your Interest

If you’re reading this, and you’re not yet in college, then I’m willing to bet that you got interested in physics by reading one of the many popular books on physics.  It’s a great way to get into physics (it’s the way I got into it all those years ago).  You should continue to feed that interest in any way you can: read more books, watch tv specials, and discuss what you’ve learned with anyone who will listen.

Concentrating on Focus

A couple of weeks ago, I ran into an article with a very provocative title: Is Google Making us Stupid? Ordinarily, these types of articles strike me as the older generation failing to cope with technological changes, and decrying the younger crowd for embracing them.  I generally find reading such articles to be unrewarding, but this one was different, because lately I had been asking myself a similar question.  Not so much whether Google makes us stupid, but if getting much of my information from reading blogs, Wikipedia, and other web pages was changing the way that I read and the way that I think.

In contrast to the title of the article, I don’t think this is all bad.  For instance, the instant access to supporting or contradicting information in the form of hyperlinks or the ability to do a quick Google search is certainly a good thing.  Now, we no longer have to confine ourselves to the limited and perhaps biased view of just one author, which certainly has the possibility of increasing the amount of critical thinking done while reading.

Let’s Make Up New Words Oxt Weekend

One of my my side interests outside of physics is linguistics.  One interesting topic that fits into this interest is the creation and spread of new words.  Most of these new words are created and spread in an organic way that is difficult to trace.  However, sometimes people try to create and spread new words for a variety of reasons.

One such movement was brought to my knowledge recently: oxt weekend.  “Oxt” is supposed to be an easy way to say “not this [weekend], but the [weekend] after.”  There are some good things about this idea: it solves an ambiguity in our language, it’s pretty easy to remember, and they’ve got a good-looking website, and are taking advantage of social networking sites.

Number the Stars

My uncle asked me an interesting physics-related question the other day, so I thought I’d share the question and my answer on the blog:

Q: If a trillion seconds take 30,000 years and there are three trillion stars in the universe, it would take ninety thousand years to count them at one per second. So how do we know?
Before you click through to my explanation, why not take a few minutes to think about how you might answer this?  How DO we count that which is essentially uncountable?

A hint, by way of another question: How would you count the number of grains of sand on a beach?  What’s your strategy for those “guess how many candies are in this jar” type of games?

Now, after you’ve mulled it over for a little bit, here’s my response:

Bloggers Pseudonymous

As a semi-pseudonymous blogger, I appreciated the post on the difference between anonymity and pseudonymity at Uncertain Principles, in response to the vindictive outing of Publius, a formerly pseudonymous blogger:

Someone like Publius, or FSP [Female Science Professor], or Mark Twain writes under a different name than their given name. This does not mean that they are without identity, though– quite the contrary. They write consistently under a single name, and this body of work establishes an identity for them that is every bit as solid as the identity that “Chad Orzel” establishes for me.

I haven’t tried to figure out who FSP is, because it doesn’t matter. The alias is enough to establish an identity, as revealed through years worth of blog posts. And that’s really the thing that matters in blogdom, or even in literature.

Pseudonymity has a long and honorable tradition in literature, and Publius and Female Science Professor fit in that. Anonymity, not so much. It’s a distinction that matters.

There are plenty of good reasons to use a pseudonym, some of which I’ve talked about before, and which you can find in other discussions about the perils of blogging.  But I have a different reason at this point in my blogging career that has become more clear to me recently:

I don’t like to have a reputation that precedes me.

New Blog in the Blogrolls

I’d like to draw attention to a new blog in my links section.  The authors are three fellow grad students studying high energy physics, covering the range of experiment, phenomenology, and theory.  Combining their diverse intellects, they have come up with the name High Energy PhDs.

From their introductory post back in November ‘08, here is a description of what you will find on their blog:

Short reviews of topics in high energy physics. Our main goal is to generate an online discussion where we can jot down summaries of interesting ideas.

Accessible summaries. We are also interested in writing posts that will bridge the divides between hep-th/hep-ph/hep-ex communities. While these may not be “public outreach” level, they should be accessible to other graduate students in physics.

News. Some discussion of recent events in high energy physics, e.g. LHC commissioning.

Grad student resources. We will also have posts dedicated to grad student resources for items such as post-doc hunting, publishing, finding review articles, adviser management, etc.

I look forward to making use of their list of Resources for Learning New Topics.  Their discussion of Renormalization looks good too, which will hopefully help me make sense of that tricky topic as I try to teach myself some field theory.  You can also find some reviews of technical papers, and discussions of experiments like MiniBooNE.