Image of Evil Incarnate via Wikipedia

I don’t like Facebook.

I don’t like that it sets cookies and follows you everywhere else that you go on the web. Privacy concerns, buzz words, etc. I don’t like that CNN.com asks me to comment on an article — or shows me what other friends of mine have read on some news site. And finally, I just don’t like Facebook as a company.

However, Facebook is undeniably useful. Especially since I moved to the other side of the world, Facebook gives me a simple way to maintain a connection with the people back home.

So, I have a problem: how do I utilize Facebook without allowing it to have access to information it doesn’t deserve? Let me answer that question with a short digression on browsers.

Browsers

As much as I don’t like Facebook, I also don’t like Safari. I prefer either Firefox or Chrome to Safari (do I even have to mention Internet Explorer?). I’ve started using Chrome to the point where it’s my main browser. What does this have to do with Facebook? Because my hatred of Safari allows a solution for the problems that I have with Facebook.

My Solution

On my computer, Facebook is placed into a restricted ghetto called Safari. Since I dislike both Facebook and Safari, I’m killing two birds with one stone. Emphasis on killing. So every time I use Facebook, it’s exclusively through Safari, and I never sign into Facebook with my Chrome browser. I do all of my non-Facebook interneting in Chrome — free from the soulless all-watching eyes of Facebook. Make Safari and exclusively Facebook browser.

If you like/dislike different browsers than me, make whatever browser you dislike into your own Facebook ghetto.

Image via Wikipedia

There was an interesting article that showed up in many places that had some neat information in it. It also didn’t really explore one of the things that struck me as interesting.

The article(s) is MSN: The stroke of genius strikes later in life today. It talks about the idea that scientists do their best work before the age of 30.

It turns out that it definitely USED to be generally true; but it has increasingly not been the case. It turns out that for physics at least, 48 is the average age at which their most genius work is done.

Cool.

One thing that struck me was this sentence:
“In fact, in 1923, the proportion of physicists who did their breakthrough work by age 30 peaked at 31 percent. Those who did their best work by age 40 peaked in 1934 at 78 percent.”

Let’s keep those numbers in mind for a minute. Consider for a second that it was a certain generation of physicists who bring about the Quantum Mechanics revolution, and not a particular age. Let’s consider the generation born in 1893-4.

If this generation was in the proper place due to an accident of birth, they might have the lion’s share of substantial breakthroughs over a twenty year span or so. This group of physicists would have turned 30 in 1923-24. This same group of physicists would have turned 40 in 1933-34.

So, it’s the same generation in both cases, the only thing that differed was when their “best work” was considered to have occurred. In fact, since the percentages peaked in both decades, it appears that that generation is the one that dominated physics for twenty years.

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Now that I’ve been here just over a month, I decided to write down a few of the suggestions that I had about relocating to Melbourne while it is still relatively fresh in my head.

Finances

Step 0. Take out Aussie $$ via ATMs from your US $$ accounts.

Step 1. Get an Aussie bank account. It’s dead simple, just do it. Walk into a bank and do it.

Step 2. Get a mobile (cell) phone. For some reason, it seemed to me that everyone in Australia will conduct interactions via phone calls and not via email almost on pain of death. Perhaps it was just the specific things that I was trying to complete, but it seemed that no one wanted to email. This lead to a number of phone-tag back-and-forths, including one situation where a real estate agent and I called and missed each other 7 times over a span of about a week.

Housing

If you are looking to rent: I recommend going with www.domain.com.au and www.realestate.com.au websites. The process for finding an apartment is roughly as follows. Before you are allowed to apply for an apartment you have to physically inspect the apartment. The real estate agent posts a time on one of the websites I listed above that everyone interested in an apartment needs to arrive. They will advertise a place and say: on 17/09 12:30-1PM (remember they do the date day/month/year) — you need to show up at 12:30, maybe even earlier. They don’t usually stay the whole time. Also, the walkthroughs were fairly quick in my experience. When you show up, they will write your name and mobile phone number.

If you are looking for house shares try: melbourne.gumtree.com.au and swinburne.studystays.com.au.

Also, the addresses are listed like this: “343/57-59 Main Street” means: Apartment Number 343, Street Address 57 through 59. Don’t ask me, it just means you can show up at 57, or 59 and you’re at the same place either way.

The rent is listed as $/week — but you normally pay per month. (And it can be 4 or 4 1/3 times the weekly amount listed, so clarify w/ renter).

Applying

I applied to a number of places. Here is what I did and some suggestions.

If I noticed that a certain real estate company is representing a number of apartments that I am interested in looking at, I filled out their application with information that would be the same each application: the references, my name, my contact info, etc. I then made a “master copy” that I made photocopies. This allowed me to quickly fill out their application for several places with the same real estate agency.

Rent application credentials.

• 1 page cv/resume; if you have a phd make sure you write: Dr. Jonathan Whitmore and in general during this application process, put Dr. wherever you can (or PhD student if that’s what you are, don’t lie). You are trying to be as impressive as can be.
• Clear photocopies of as many forms of ID that you can find: passports, drivers licenses, staff ID cards, etc.
• Include your letter of offer for employment
• Include work visa (mine was the email printout from the Aussie government saying the terms).

Make a number of copies of your credentials so that you can easily fill out the application and attach your credential packet. I recommend filling out the applications for each of the apartments that you are going to look at before you go. This allows you to hand the entire filled out application packet if you are interested applying for the place.

Some final thoughts: weekends are busy and usually have many people looking at once. You have a better shot with during the week ones (less people seeing/applying means your odds are slightly better). Be friendly with the real estate agents. Finally, try to email/call and schedule a private showing during the week — these worked out the best for me.

Good luck!

Image by WilLiao via Flickr

Do you ever get the feeling that your presence holds everything together, and that if you leave it’ll all collapse? This feeling almost never reflects reality, and if you get it frequently and think it’s true, it’s probably often sign of a narcissistic personality disorder.

That being said, I left the US on Monday, and in the subsequent 5 days the entire country seems to have done nothing but get itself into trouble. I’m not saying that if I stayed in the US that the debt limit crisis would have played out differently, or that the stock markets wouldn’t have fallen almost 5% in a day, or that the S&P wouldn’t have downgraded the US government credit rating for the first time in history… but the timing is interesting, isn’t it?

I’m currently in Hawthorn, which is a suburb very close to Melbourne, Australia, to begin my postdoc position at Swinburne University of Technology. Leaving the 100+ degree weather of Texas for the mid 50′s and rainy (today at least) Melbourne winter has been quite a jolt, but I think I’m really going to like living here.

I’ll provide more updates in the near future as I find housing and get settled!

I think that the future of education is an amazingly interesting idea to kick around. To begin with, I fully recommend watching the video of Salman Khan at TED where he talks about his Khan academy (I’ve embedded the talk below). This Khan academy is a nonprofit that he started after several tutorial videos that he made for his cousins on youtube started garnering an intense interest and following. He currently has over 2,000 videos that he has uploaded that teach a whole range of topics: from mathematics to biology to history.

He also has hired people to help him develop software that help to test students on what they are supposed to be learning. For example, to get through a module on simple addition, you have to answer ten questions right in a row — and you can ask for hints, or jump back to see a video on the concept you are having difficulty with. Also, once you get that done, you can go on from there to another subject.

The data is already impressive; in a few years, there are about one million students participating in the Khan academy and traditional teachers using the lectures to supplement the classroom. In most cases, the videos do the lectures, and the teacher looks at the dashboard for the class and figures out who is having trouble with what concept, and where. Further, she can see that another student has mastered the subject, and can use other students to help teach each other about the subject.

I’ve written about my thoughts on the future of education before, and I didn’t have a clear concept of exactly what the teachers would be doing if there was an adaptive computer model that instructed students based on their history and current understanding. Khan argues that this humanizes the classroom experience; I am surprised but I think he is correct.

I think Khan is missing one piece (or at least, I haven’t heard that it has the following piece): I think he needs to open up the possibility for videos from people besides himself. Now, this doesn’t mean that he has to accept any, and hell, I think he’s earned the title of Benevolent Dictator for Life on what is displayed by the Khan Academy. But there are a number of subjects that can be pressed into and teachers who are willing to contribute in useful ways that simply cannot be implemented by Khan himself.

Let’s just stick with physics, since I know physics. Let’s say that I thought I could explain the difference between electrical potential and electrical potential energy in a different/better way that Khan — so I create my own youtube video and submit it to the site. Does my 10 minute video module teach it better than Khan’s? I don’t know, perhaps yes, perhaps no. But the nice thing about having a million students, is that random testing can be easily implemented to display one video or the other to different students and to see what results come from it. Perhaps there’s not one video explanation that’s better than the other — just that people who are more auditory learners learn better from one video, while the opposite happens for the other students. There doesn’t have to be only one “right” video.

If people were allowed to submit videos, they’d clearly have to pass a minimum quality level, but after that level is reached, it would be interesting to be able to test and eventually implement the best video instruction over time.

In fact, I’m sure they have statistics on the videos that would make it easy to determine which video segments taught the concept they were aiming to the best, and which video segments students had the most trouble with. The Khan academy could have a “help us with your version of these 5 videos” that get put up for a week at a time, and as the new videos get cycled through, the bottom of the feeder gets filled with the “most need for improvement” videos. I think replacing from the bottom would be the simplest and most effective way for this kind of a thing to be implemented.

Finally, it would be awesome to have the courses like this be involved through the graduate level in all subjects that can be taught in this way — and I simply don’t think there’s time for Khan to be able to learn and regurgitate all that there is to learn in physics/math/history/biology/everything else. I understand that his goal might be to fully develop K-12, but there’s no reason to limit the benefits of the video database infrastructure to those levels and subjects.

Image via Wikipedia

I accepted an offer to work at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia! I’ll start this August, and I’ll be there for at least 2 (probably 3) years. I’m working as a “Postdoctoral Research Associate in Extragalactic Fundamental Physics” — that’s the official title — and I’m very excited!

All I have to do is complete and defend my thesis by June.

If you’ve ever wanted to visit Australia and just didn’t feel like you had enough reason to get over there, make it happen in the next couple of years!

First things first — Dropbox is awesome. (Also, if you signup through that link, we both get extra free space… so do it). It’s a service that syncs a folder on your computer with a central server — and any other computers you have Dropbox installed on. But it does much more than that — you can share subfolders with other Dropbox users.For example, if I want to give my roommate a directory full of PDFs, I can just drag the directory into our shared folder, and Dropbox will automatically sync it so that he gets all the files without doing anything. Also, the files are on your computer — so if you lose internet or are on an airplane, you interact w/ the files just like any others on your computer.

Writing anything with LaTeX can be a trying experience. Writing an academic paper with multiple authors in LaTeX can be especially tricky. Dropbox comes in handy — but so does being able to use version control to track who changed what and when. Since Dropbox syncs files (and keeps a record of how the file looked in the past) it can sorta do the version control thing on its own.

Let’s just say you have the desire to use git (the fast version control system).

One trick I’ve found handy is to write LaTeX papers with each sentence on a new line — rather than putting returns on some number of characters. This way, diff and version control finds changes between sentences instead of just lines, which makes everything much easier to understand.

I wanted for git to ignore a number of the helper files that get created when compiling LaTeX and found a useful repository of gitignore flags here. (Read the gitignore manual page here).

Easy enough to setup — I put it in my home directory, so keep that in mind if you put it somewhere else — so I did the following:

cd 
git clone git://github.com/github/gitignore.git

Now, I was actually confused about what to do at this point. After playing around with it for a while, I ended up making a bash script that keeps the git-ignore repository updated and referenced for my laptop. You can find the bash script here.

bash ~/Dropbox/scripts/git/gitignore.bash

Assuming you have my bash script in that location, that should create the .gitignore in your home directory. Next, you have to tell git that you want it to use the .gitignore file that the bash script created at ~/.gitignore for everything.

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore

Here’s how I have cobbled together how I work with

On my laptop:

cd ~/Dropbox/Writing/
mkdir New-Project.git
cd New-Project.git
git --bare init
cd Project/location
git init
git add .
git status
git commit -m "First commit"
git remote add dropbox ~/Dropbox/Papers/2011-02-17-Whitmore-KeckCalibration.git
git push dropbox master

On another computer with a Dropbox account:

cd 
mkdir Papers; cd Papers/
git clone -o dropbox ~/Dropbox/Papers/2011-02-17-Whitmore-KeckCalibration.git

change some file

git commit -a 
  "First other computer edit"
git push dropbox master

Back on my laptop:

git pull dropbox master

work work work

git push dropbox master

Back on other computer the destination isn’t required:

git pull

work work work

git push

That should do it. If you have a better way of accomplishing the same thing, please let me know, I’m always on the lookout for doing things the right way.

I was messing around and recorded myself playing Gershwin’s Prelude 2 (which is still under copyright, funny enough).

I’ve been meaning to force myself to record and post myself playing piano more frequently in an effort to publicly shame myself into practicing more… It’s only working a little. As always, I welcome constructive criticism!

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I finally have a working python setup on my Ubuntu desktop that has all the bells and whistles that I want at the same time with the same setup.

The python setup I use comes from the Enthought Python Distribution.

System specs:

Ubuntu 10.10 x86 64-bit
Python 2.7.1 |EPD 7.0-1 (64-bit)| (r271:86832, Nov 29 2010, 13:51:37)

I also wanted to have the python wrapper for Minuit, pyminuit, available for use with some code that I’ve written.

Following the installation instructions verbatim for the linux distribution will spew the following errors:

MnUserTransformation.cpp: In constructor 'MnUserTransformation::MnUserTransformation(const std::vector >&, const std::vector >&)':
MnUserTransformation.cpp:30: error: 'sprintf' is not a member of 'std'
make[2]: *** [MnUserTransformation.lo] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/jonathan/Minuit-1_7_9/src'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/jonathan/Minuit-1_7_9'
make: *** [all] Error 2

The way I got it to work

$ sudo apt-get install g++

I also did (but not sure if it was necessary):

$ sudo apt-get install python-dev

The error I talk about above can be fixed by going into the Minuit-1_7_9/src/MnUserTransformation.cpp file and adding to the fifth line:

#include <cstdio>

Just like this well-hidden gem says to do.

Download:

• Minuit-1_7_9a.tar.gz
• pyminuit-1.1.0.tgz (though you should go to the pyminuit site for the most up to date version of this one).

After finding where Minuit-1_7_9a.tar.gz downloaded, move it somewhere convenient (or just do what I do):

$ mv Minuit-1_7_9a.tar.gz ~/Minuit-1_7_9a.tar.gz
$ cd ~
$ tar -xvzf Minuit-1_7_9a.tar.gz
$ cd Minuit-1_7_9a

Find where pyminuit-1.1.0.tgz was downloaded

$ tar -xvzf pyminuit-1.1.0.tgz
$ cd pyminuit
$ python setup.py install --with-minuit=/home/[your-username]/Minuit-1_7_9a

Add the following to your .bashrc and you should be set to fly!

$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/[your-username]/Minuit-1_7_9a/src/.libs:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
$ export PATH=/home/[your-username]/epd-7.0-1-rh5-x86_64/bin:$PATH

Hopefully that helped!

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So, my first half marathon turned into my first 10K race: The Death Valley Borax 10K. A few other friends I talked into running came with me and in the end Stephanie and Jeff raced and completed the half marathon, while Kelsey kindly ran the 10K with me.

Death Valley is a beautiful place — and in the early morning in February, it’s a great temperature. I had a great time (as in fun, not finish).

I ran with my Forerunner 305 and I exported the GPS data and used Google Earth to run the same route — so you could enjoy following along!