After watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos “remixed.” once, I’m not sure what to make of it.:

My initial reaction is one of cautious interest, mixed with doubt and unease. I also don’t know that I actually like the music/melody regardless of subject.

First, my unease... I love Carl Sagan’s work for science outreach. I grew up with a copy of his book Cosmos. His work, and those by people like Timothy Ferris, played no small part in my choice to pursue physics degrees and eventually to study science professionally. If you’re going to take his work and redisplay it, then my automatic reaction is going to be somewhat adversarial. It is up to the writer or artist to convince me that what they’re displaying is indeed going to adequately communicate his ideas and be true to his vision. If you’re going to remix Carl Sagan, then you’ve got plenty of things stacked against you in my mind.

Plus, starting from the whale-songs is a little... well, odd or disjoint. Anyhow... I can look beyond all that, if for only a single reason.

It’s not a matter of whether or not I like the music, the video, or whatever (so long as it’s not miss-representing him). I don’t need to like it. What matters is if other people like it and, upon seeing it, decide to learn something more about Sagan and his messages. If someone decides to go out and read Cosmos because they saw that video, then that’s a great success regardless of whether or not I actually like the “remix.”

I’m not really sure what to make of the music. I’ll readily admit to listening to “spacey” ambient music while driving out into the country with friends to setup a telescope on several occasions. There was even a really cool one that was largely inspired by S.E.T.I., complete with a small reading by Frank Drake. Maybe I’m too old for the Sagan music/video to appeal to me, but again, maybe that’s not the point.

After watching it a second time, I didn’t notice anything adverse with regards to taking Sagan out of context. What I did notice was more interesting, even just watching it and hearing a few of the phrases from Cosmos evoked rather powerful feelings of what it was like when I was younger and reading (or watching) Sagan. His inspirational messages still manage to touch me across all these years. When I was an undergraduate, I wanted very much to meet him, to convey my appreciation for his work to educate and inspire. Sadly he lost his battle with cancer just weeks before I was to leave to attend school in upstate NY and I never got that chance.

Anyhow, have a look at it (the whole thing, don’t just turn it off after the whale-song hooting) and meditate a bit on some of the beauty of nature.

It is time for me to begin my search for a faculty position in earnest. I’d actually prefer not to discuss many of the details of this process and will not be disclosing much of that information. In fact, I find much of the information to be rather inappropriate to publicly talk about.

However, there is something that I’ve noticed that I would like to expand upon that I was not expecting explicitly at the outset. Part of the process of applying for faculty positions involves preparing statements of teaching philosophy and research intent. It’s this preparation that has struck me in a rather interesting fashion, in a way that actually reminds me of my physics qualifying exam experience.

It may seem trivial to write down a “statement of research intent” or “teaching philosophy.” However, in practice this has been quite a project and resembles very much the process I go through for writing academic papers and proposals. My own approach to writing papers often boils down to an organic ``growing” of the paper. First, I tend to try to write down the principle idea/result to convey. Then I write everything I can think of that might possibly be important, details and all. This causes the manuscript to balloon to a length usually much to large to be suitable, and to be fair, many of the details included in the first draft are not sufficiently important to be included. At that point I begin to cut down the manuscript into something smaller. Each time asking if a paragraph or sentence is really needed. Eventually I end up with a shorter, more to the point paper that is suitable to submit for publication. This also describes the process I’ve been using to create my own application package for these faculty positions.

It has actually been rather enjoyable to write all these things down and edit the thoughts into a coherent whole. It’s also rather interesting in that much of the information are about subjects that I feel rather strongly about. The whole process has been very beneficial in providing sort of a unified vision of what I want to do. What are all the parts? What do they have to do with each other? How do they work together?

It’s that unification that reminds me of my qualifying exam. The purpose of that exam should* be for the students to study enough physics over a singular period of time to develop a unified ``world view” and approach to physics. That approach may be very different from how others do physics (and often is), but the important thing is to have one and to have a enough physics in your head at once to see the similarities across many different fields of physics (a unified vision). This idea may be a bit idealistic when it comes to students actually taking the exam. But to me taking the exam is not the important thing, preparing for it is. That is where the benefit comes from.

After spending quite a bit of time on my application package, it feels like a similar unification has taken place. It’s a feeling that now more than ever before I know what I want to do with my career and life in science.

It’s a rare event when any picture I take of our fish tanks comes out nicely.



Above is a little “Cobalt Zebra” or Metriaclima Callainos. This happens to be a she in our mixed Mbuna tank. Even though she is a she, notice how incredibly bright her color is. This is true for lots of cichlid species.



We also got a picture of our little Melanochromis Auratus. This is a very androgynous fish in our case. Above she looks like a she. But at times she’ll turn brown and eventually black. While black (male) “he” will behave like a male and chase. But eventually the black fades to brown and we’re back to a little she.

We’ve just gotten word that one of our papers has been accepted to Physical Review Letters. The preprint is available here on the arXiv servers : cond-mat : 0909.2273. The paper deals with our work on studying the surface reconstruction of gold using coherent scattering techniques.

The short story is that we’re able to get access to how quickly the microstate (the microscopic configuration and profile of the surface) is evolving even when the average properties of the surface are not changing. We’ve been able to collect speckled scattering patterns and, by comparing how fast the speckles evolve, determine some new information about the surface dynamics. This was principally a demonstration experiment that happened to have some nice results along with it. We’re now working to extend this technique to a few new samples and system combinations.

Surprisingly I did not have my usual multi-hour fight with the arXiv server either. Usually it takes countless attempts, anger, meditation, bribery, and some things I should not admit in order to get through the automated paper submission process. But for some reason this time it happened without a hitch.

One of the fun things about papers is creating the figures. Well, sometimes it is fun, and sometimes it is tedium. However, the results are sometimes quite nice. The little thing above is a ray-tracing example or ``cartoon” of the two different surface orientations of a hexagonal arrangement over the square facet of a face centered cubic arrangement.

Actually, that’s a nice way to begin to explain the header graphic for the blog (at least the current one). If you notice the two hexagons are offset from each other by a rotation of 30 degrees (it’s actually a 90 deg rotation, but 30, 90, 150, etc... are all the same. That is called symmetry, but it takes too much digression for the moment). Each hexagon has 6 corners. Though for our purpose, it’s better to think of each hexagon as having 6 possible orientations. But since there are two was of laying the hexagons down over the squares, you get 12 total possible orientations. These orientations can all be made to satisfy a diffraction condition.

The graphic below is an example (albeit a computer generated one) of what such a diffraction patter would look like.

There’s a bright region in the center, but let’s ignore that for a moment. Instead, count the number of bright spots going around in a large circle. There are 12, one for each of the possible orientations. To be fair, this picture is as if we are diffracting photons through the sample, instead of off of the sample (we reflect them).

Today we brought home a new tropical fish, a Clown Loach that is roughly 8-9inches in length. She is the SUPER LOACH. She is the new queen of the tank. She’s also somewhat mesmerizing to watch, kind of like the “hypno-toad.”

We’ve added her to our loach tank with 14 smaller clowns roughly 2-5 inches in length and they seem very happy to have the giant among them. Nightly we observe a “loach jam” where most all the loaches in the tank choose to cram and stuff themselves around their new queen, regardless of where she chooses to stay the night. It’s really quite amusing to look at the tank with a flashlight after the lights are out and see loach heads and loach tails all sticking out from a single place.

I’ll try to get a picture of her posted eventually.