You better brush up on your Rabelais ... (or, when to say this PhD thesis is good enough)

August committee co-members

We, denizens of the Upper Aetherial Realms, commit all our work to our common repository (well, Professor Heartthrob commits our common work to [Spam] folder, but the rest of us do :) so we are up to very latest latest on the latest PhD thesis saga:

On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 3:23 AM, TheStudent wrote:

Author: TheStudent
Modified:
   thesis/thesis.pdf
Log:
I've addressed everything I intend to

Let me translate this for you.

In Gargantua and Pantagruel Rabelais thus describes the birth of the giant Gargantua (AKA PhD thesis):

Whereupon an old ugly trot in the company, who had the repute of an expert she-physician, and was come from Brisepaille, near to Saint Genou, three score years before, made her so horrible a restrictive and binding medicine, and whereby all her larris, arse-pipes, and conduits were so oppilated, stopped, obstructed, and contracted, that you could hardly have opened and enlarged them with your teeth, which is a terrible thing to think upon; seeing the Devil at the mass at Saint Martin's was puzzled with the like task, when with his teeth he had lengthened out the parchment whereon he wrote the tittle-tattle of two young mangy whores.

 

... and so has TheStudent's thesis adviser been lengthening out the parchment whereon he has been writing his desiderata for the said theses; TheStudent reports that it is a multi-branched, exceedingly lengthy affair with rewrites of the rewrites. The said adviser has pulled the same trick as for TheStudent-1 a year ago. He ignored our thrice, clearly and loudly repeated request that we take the signed committee approval of the thesis over to Chair, and is clutching it to his breast, unsigned by him as until such time he is fully satisfied with the said student's implementation of the aforementioned multi-sheeted Riemann parchment diktats.

One is inclined to think that this all has to either with male menopause, or something Newt Gingrich adds to the water in Gingrichland, north of I-285, but no - unbeknownst to the adviser, the aforementioned thesis committee member made TheStudent-2 write an entire new chapter in the 2008 thesis, before giving up hope, and writing to the lowly student that this was the Thesis of Missed Opportunities. Which is the work that in periods is one of the most cited article in the lowly Journal of Aqueous Mechanics, and upon which the entire reputation of several professors of tenure as honorable plumbers' guild members rests. But who are they to judge, with their lowly Cornell and MIT pedigrees.

So starting today, what TheStudent says in the above is: No More Rewrites. The matter is coming to the head fast, as the thesis has to be approved and uploaded in a week:)

Servus

Aeternally Yours
Panurge

PS clearly, this is an email from a professor who should instead be glued to grants.gov, completing the NSF report in the face of a very fast approaching deadline :) 

PPS This actually is not our favorite translation. You can try it in the original, if your medieval Latin and French are in good shape - the modern French footnotes for each page tend to run to many pages:)

God misfathering, the first decades

Usually you are -like- not even born when your mother sticks Godparents on you, for some reason that seemed obvious right then, but no one remembers 30 years later. Godparents have long since moved to Toledo and dedicated their lives to Orphaned Samoyeds of Northeastern Ohio.

But not so when you get appointed to God-parenting Jun 1, 2015 by a fully-fledged Superchile herself. As perfect Aphrodite emerging from Zeus' split head. With a feel and the zeal of Born Again Godchile.

Cannot speak for Professor S., but for me it all started innocently enough. If I am made to enter a mall, I start developing green spots within the 1/2 hour of confinement. So Godchile and Godchile's Mom, who is a pro in all things Cuban Latin American Princess, drove me to the scariest, meanest of all the malls in this town, and within 20 minutes I was owner of fancy Japanese tweed pants (I've never been able to find that miraculous textile again), cargo pants, and a flower-patterned shirt that my department's Black secretaries compliment me on to this day, and we were out of the Mall again.

We did not get a pair of sneakers, so that's a Mall visit still awaiting: getting me my J'z :)

Then I went to Copenhagen, and Godchile had flipped the script for me - with the new pants, shirt

and a gay boy cut young women saw me again. Reborn. Even fell in love with the 23 year old Nína from Iceland (did not take much - she actually started talking to me) but no need to alert the authorities, it was over by the 2:30am night bus and nobody noticed. Except I have like one zillion pics of a woman with flowers in her hair.

Strictly speaking it was not illegal, but it was pushing it, with my puzzled nephews and nieces, thinking "WTF? Why is uncle P. sitting out there in the night on a bench with Nína, 47 years out of sync?"

 

Godchile and I share secrets that no one will ever be able to crack:

Me: "Check mine (scroll down for the details) https://m.flickr.com/#/photos/birdtracks/9344308133/in/set-72157634630128814/ . Do you approve of the derailler? What has changed my life is Modolo Brevettoto E-2091 handle bars - wide bars make one feel more manly :) I've gotten lazy (and now lack tools for that) so I had a bike mechanics replace the bottom bracket UN-55  for the steep $30. And gave up on cleats, replaced them by classic commuter pedals MKS Sylvan Stream black  for  another steep $35."

Godchile: "Ahhhh vintage aluminum! Before I was subjected to the pothole addled streets of New York, I rode nothing but Aluminum bikes.Very whippy and like an extension of the body. Once had an Italian steel bike. The Italians definitely know something about frame building - it was the only frame I've ever ridden that had the responsiveness of aluminum but the forgiveness of steel."

Godchile: "Love cleats I just don't like the shoes I have  as much. Current pair of shoes belonged to my friend who is dead so the mojo is skewed. But regardless with properly tensioned pedals you never think of releasing your feet it traffic. Like driving stick. Oh and surely you are referring to SPD pedals ? There is no other way to go in the city." 

So I got Corky for Godchile. (Corky is a heroine of Jarmusch "Night on Earth"). My post-teenage year's idol,  could not do better. But Heathers? Godchile: "At the same time I was memorizing every word in Heathers, I was reading and rereading Brave New Word and using it as the subject matter for my Paideia application essay. Shouldn't that have been a greater cause for concern than Heathers? Seems like I must have grown up in the Wild West days of parenting..."

 

But that could not last. After splitting a decade between two very miserable though decent men, the Godchile was on a move again, sucking me instantly into the eye of a falling-in-love hurricane.  

Godchile: "In other news I have a viable crush on a mathematician (with Standford credentials and all) at work. Everything was fine until our offices moved and they sat him across from me. Now I'm deeply distracted."

 

Me: "Wonderful news. But, what was his PhD on?" Godchile: "Ultimately he had to be eliminated due to the fact that his PhD in Math is in fact - UNFINISHED."

 

Godchile: "I met  Mr. R. at the bar downstairs and I have a terrible crush. I am still trying to gather my wits and connect the dots. I have not had a crush in at least 12 years and I am - to say the least - not very good at it. Though this guy definitely does very good work and what good's a crush without excellent brains???  So now you get to truly be my godfather because I feel like I'm TWELVE."

Godchile: "I had a nightmare about  Mr. R. last night. I was sitting at the same bar where were met, he walked in and sat down next to me. Proceeded to say nothing. And I was suddenly MUTE and unable to say anything either. Then some woman walks in, sits down next to him and captivates his attention. After observing his hands on her legs for at least five eternal minutes, I wake up feeling bad."

"I have since consumed 5 shots of espresso and dyed my hair black. Well... not jet blue goth black but dark enough."

 

Me: "Cute. You are a LAP (Latin American Princess) and it cannot be helped. You have not had a conversation with him yet, and you are already fending of the Other Woman? :)"

Godchile: "Oh but i HAVE had a conversation with him! The most scintillating hour I spent all year, so much so that then i panicked and ran! I may yet have some LAP in me but i do NOT get crushes without conversations :)  Shit, I got NO moves. Maybe you do need to  come up here and seduce him for me."

 Me: "I'll go to bed with him, ungay as I am, if that's what it takes. Decade ago he claimed to be dating a woman (“Nurse, pass the vagina!”), something some of the attractive NY men have done at some time or other. Well, maybe. There is always the issue of the hair on his back. "

Godchile: "My first instinct upon meeting Mr. R. was to run like hell. So after 45 min of conversation that spanned what seemed like several universes, I bolted leaving no phone number, no suggestions and only my name. When the article came out a month later I emailed him. We had a few e-exchanges wherein I have also failed to suggest anything outside my affinity for brains and an overwhelming disdain for the FDA.  Thanks for considering it as ungay as you are."

Godchile: "Other than that, I have been working 80 hours a week and have little to report.  Oh, I'm going to have some art in an upcoming gallery show in Chelsea. I'm going to shave my cat now."

 

 

All this adrenaline - it had to go somewhere. And indeed, things took a darker turn next:

 

 

Godchile: "Tomorrow I will return to my local climbing wall and meet Schauerbach (don't they all have such WHITE names??) and enjoy the falling and the catching for what it is and be happy that at least I have confirmed that his back is totally free of hair"

 

Me: "Well, if the brain is what it seems to be, a hairy back is a minor distraction, quickly forgotten. A funny smell, however, can be insurmountable. We are mammals."

 

Godchile: "We had a friendly outing today to the rock climbing gym. A VERY good place to go with a crush it turns out. How ridiculously appropriate is it that one belays the other and then if and when one falls, (which I certainly did) the other one catches the one falling but i'm sure you've rock climbed and can appreciate this"

 

Me: "I like the physicality of it - falling, catching, holding - no better way to be mammals together.  I might be over romanticizing your physical prowess, but this Youtube.com/watch?v=0bHF5Yfu_jQ makes me think of you two :)"

 

Next thing. Godchile shows up at our house, and drives me to this place

 

All I can say about that is that I am still alive. Nothing like this had ever happened to these keyboard tapping hands. However, and I says this with all proper Godfatherly decorum: in the same setting, my Godchile is very presentable.

 

 

The `climb' cured me forever of feeling excessively guilty as a dead-beat Godfather. It's a job a wimp like me cannot live up to. Me, the dancing chicken! , just happy that we have each other.

So, let's dance!

 

Windbag senior calling, and what Googlitta understands

If a woman from Inhuman Resources records a message for me, Googlitta transcribes it 100% spot on. But if it my beloved calls, or Stanford-trained literata reads a sonnet, or my most articulate Columbia professor calls, what Googlitta transcribes is a 100% riot. Here are three consecutive calls:

hello hello you are receiving this message i can tell there's a lot of blood in my ear from your phone so i don't know what it was okay anyway so few days back you more calls anyways he's in town everyone starting to change you supposedly machine's not keelin chinese food say one see this movie with me please call betty mccollough i was talking to somebody else in the room so i didn't quite catch it alright i know that the restaurant hello kitty street facility but i don't know her name because it in my could you tell me the date so we agreed to meet but i don't know what we're supposed to meet at like a copay every night so i'm trying to find you tomorrow and i can i guess persian cat doesn't exist anymore at least her number is answering machine or some such so i'm calling to ask you if you have any information on how i could reach you 2 more can you give me his phone number which turns out to be a cell number is you but it doesn't sound like the correct number could you send text to let number but it's not doing any good so you a little advice or even listen to solve this problem and i would be grateful for it and i send you my humble apologies for this foolishness but i don't know what else to do thank you for your ever use your help bye bye
Play message

  and the 2nd attempt:

pembroke there's some guy talking on my computer and i think he's pretending to be you but i couldn't tell what language it was it something about a persian cat i don't know what the hell it was so good morrow my road to confirm our appointment which i don't think it's too late but i miss printed and i said 48th street and he's confirm 48th street where is the other days and 58 so i still have it i don't know if since i don't know how to get to it i think if you're available i know something about 3 up over this chinese restaurant is i would be very grateful if you would call and tell me I'm sitting by the cellphone that you chose and hope for the best but this is crazy read well allen wolf another problem but i won't go into that now so please tell me what the hell is going on bye bye
Play message

 and the 3rd attempt:

but i have not reached period she told her which color heard was her computer and i'm by the computer my computer there was a voicemail of a voice i don't recognize it all it'll i think it was claiming to be you what's going on in the world and asked to enter mark well he hasn't improved there it is bye bye
Play message

Who needs poetry when we have Deep Data.

I, of the Atlanta Command Center, found the address of the Manhattan restaurant, and directed the Windbag Senior to it. He writes:

I finally reached I., but before I got your timely message. We agreed to meet on the corner of 48th St. and 5th Ave.

But you know how it is with mice and men.  Wu Liang Ye  is closed for renovation.  After some phone calls, I. led the troops to Shun Lee, formerly on 24th St. It's not the place for staying slim.  Even I. admitted to being a bit overweight.

May Aeolus smile on your ventures.  ----  Sine labore nihil

Academics Say

another problem we face: I just cannot do twitter, the idea of a constant stream of tweets is too scary. But this is hilarious, so here is a link (for myself), so I can find it again:

twitter.com/AcademicsSay

The Pedants' Revolt

Deep down, academics want the same thing as everyone else: acceptance, with minor revisions.

Why doubt yourself, when anonymous reviewers will do it for free.

In the end, we are all two drinks away from being interdisciplinary.

Warning: conference deadlines are closer than they appear.

"Having trouble addressing the final point from this proofreader."

A doctoral student and their advisor walk into a bar. The advisor orders a rough draft and they sit in awkward silence for eight months.

To err is human. To err repeatedly is research.

Kaj mogu, purger sam

Fjesbuk je velika crna rupa, pa cu ovdje ovo sačuvati:

Kaj mogu, purger sam, Gollmayer mi kmetiška rodbina gre pač za nemške priseljence, ki so pa bili vsaj že v 1. pol. 18. stol. udomačeni v radovljiškem okraju. Zato i kazem: ajnprenica, buhtla, perec, knedla, auspuh, blic, cimer, beštek, farba, feder, flaša, fleka, fušariti, gemišt, gojzerica, hauba, haustor, karfiol, kek, kifla, kinderbet, koštati, kremšnita, klofati, krigla, krumpir, lojtre, kremšnita, kupleraj, majstor, oberliht, plac, paradajz, pegl, rolete, remen, rostfraj, ruksak, sekirati se, šajba, šalter, šank, šarafnciger, šeflja, šihta, šlag, šlank, šlamperaj, šminka, šnicla, špotati, špek, špahtla, špica, špreha, štand, šteker, štikla, štrudla, švercer, tri frtlja sedam, vešmašina, na vuri, zacopati se, zrihtati se, žemlja.

Bob Crease and Tom Kinoshita, oral history interview, Predrag excerpts

Excerpts from AIP Oral History Interview - January 9, 10 & 18, 2016 Robert P Crease 

Crease:

Oh, right. ok. And now you do another sixth-order radiative correction paper.

Kinoshita:

Yeah.

Crease:

Paper 53.

Kinoshita:

And this was my graduate student.

Crease:

How do you pronounce it?

Kinoshita:

Cvitanović.

Crease:

Cvitanović, oh.

Kinoshita:

And this is the beginning of the serious g-2 work.

Crease:

Why do you describe this as serious as opposed to the other papers?

Kinoshita:

Because the other papers were approximations. These are all approximations. You cannot be serious. So is this. If you use the renormalization group technique, you only calculate the leading term, not the complete calculation. But this is the beginning of a complete sixth-order calculation. And he was a very good student.

Crease:

Where was he from?

Kinoshita:

From Yugoslavia, or whatever that…

Crease:

Where is he now?

Kinoshita:

He’s at Georgia Tech or someplace in mathematics. After writing this paper and a few more papers on physics, he decided not to work on physics. [pause] To work this, we wrote several papers with Cvitanović. These are all different parts of the same problem.

[... later...]

Kinoshita:

[...] But experiment is better than 10%. And so, you have to do eventually the exact calculation to all the sixth-order terms. That’s what I did. By that time, I said—I did a few more diagrams with Brodsky, but he had something else to do, so I took care of all the remainder. In particular, I had a very good student, and he was responsible for filling out how to do the sixth-order in a numerical way.

Crease:

Who was that student?

Kinoshita:

I just [laugh] need to remember. Cvitanović.

Crease:

Cvitanović, oh yes.

Kinoshita:

And then after—many years after, we solved numerically the sixth-order problem, not only the light-by-light, but all the terms, with the help of Cvitanović

[... later...]

Kinoshita:

You see, when we did the sixth-order with Cvitanović, algebra formulation was general enough you can apply to any order. So, the [inaudible] was already sort of set up. So, going from sixth-to eighth-order theoretically there was no roadblock to worry about except that it was a much bigger problem [laugh] and you needed much bigger computers. [...] I wouldn’t do any calculation unless some experiment has come out with a challenge, a new measurement and so on. At this time, when I finished the sixth-order, I thought that was the end of my calculation of g-2 because it was better than the experimental result coming out of Michigan.

[... later...]

Kinoshita:

Yeah. But anyway, this was at the international conference at Tbilisi in 1976.

Crease:

Tbilisi, yeah.

Kinoshita:

I was attending the conference, and then a guy named Lowell Brown at the University of Washington told me that I had to get busy again [laugh] because Dehmelt was doing a new experiment using a Penning trap which was three orders of magnitude more accurate than the [inaudible] precession experiment at Michigan. And Dehmelt, a few years later won the Nobel Prize for that work. So, that’s why I started the eighth-order. Or no, let’s see is that eighth-order or tenth-order? I’m not quite sure. Tenth-order essentially I start around year 2000, so later than that. So, must be eighth-order.

[... later...]

Ok, anyway, so Lindquist started on the eighth-order and because of Lowell Brown’s information that Dehmelt was now setting up a new experiment or he was getting new results which were three orders magnitude better. So, the eighth-order has to be done. That’s why [laugh] I did it. And as I said, the machinery for eighth-order was already available due to the work of Cvitanović in the sixth-order. So, that was not a big problem. The computer at Cornell was never as good as I wished, so I used some national computers at San Diego or someplace. But anyway, the requirement for the computer at that stage was not really big, and so we could get some preliminary results fairly quickly. But then when Dehmelt’s result came out, certainly I wanted to do the next order, the tenth-order, because the tenth-order can be as big as the contribution of the eighth-order.  [...]

Rashômon  (what I remember)

Perturbative QED - Flying to Brookhaven with box-fulls of cards - and why did I do this? - Gauge invariance is the bane of my life - Finite QED

Poincaré's work habits

[...] his way of working further dismantles the idea that Poincaré pursued a path of pure intuition. He worked regularly from 10 till 12 in the morning and from 5 till 7 in the late afternoon. He found that working longer seldom achieved anything, but that it was not always possible to switch off, which was why he never worked in the evenings. He took a complete rest when on holiday.

Henri Poincaré
A Scientific Biography
JEREMY GRAY

from Flannery O'Connor's diaries

She said she treated everybody alike whether it were a person with money or a black nigger. She told me all about the low life in Wilkinson County. I seldom know in any given circumstances whether the Lord is giving me a reward or a punishment. She didn't know she was funny and it was agony to laugh and I reckon she increased my pain about 100% .