Physicists Rule?

This might as well be a strip from phdcomics. 'berto and I were in the grad lounge when Paul showed up. Paul is several years ahead of us, probably close to graduating. He is also the president of the Physics student association or something similar. He is in charge of organizing talks, worrying about what we need in our new lounge and things like that.

"What year are you, Paul?" I asked.

"What year is it? 2006?" Was the reply.

It is too bad that Jorge has already thought of exploiting the abundance of quirks in the world of academic science. One could have a journal (or comic) just about them and never run out of material!

A couple of days ago Israel came down the stairs looking upset.

"Nobody understands Thermodynamics!"

"I think that is true," Said I.


Pita Pete's feels like home. No, not Pita Pit. Pita Pete's. Tons of organic produce. A very Eugene feel. You can stuff as many veggies in your pita as you want. Fresh humus. Wonderful. Today Pete even asked if it was ok with me if they sauteed my veggies on the same skillet they use to cook the meat. Somehow Pete and I got to talking about politics while my falafel was cooking.

"You know what the problem is?" Pete said frustrated.

"There are too many lawyers who are politicians. How much money do lawyers make?"

"Way too much," I answered as Pete continued.

"In other countries being a lawyer is just a middle class profession -- not here! That's because they are in control. I say we need more scientists and engineers in congress!"

Surprisingly, I replied "Well... I agree."

Scientists running for office? I don't think that will happen too soon. Google even seems to think there is something wrong with the phrase! Apparently we should be training for office. Maybe they mean office hours? I heard answering questions from freshman physics students can be quite demanding.

In any event, the question is: do we want the same people who are not sure what year is it or who are convinced that we don't understand one of our oldest theories to be in charge of things? You may have to think about that one, but for me it is a no-brainer. Of course we do! ;-)

Read My Mind

Google adds have been around for a while and they must do a decent job at showing people relevant things. Otherwise google wouldn't be able to use them as their main source of revenue, no? Nonetheless, I've never been too impressed with google adds. While they are somewhat relevant to what I'm reading/doing at the time I see them, I've never clicked on one out of interest in what the add said, just out of curiosity of what they do once you click a few times.

Today I went to check for a new post at waiterrant.net and the add on the page caught my eye:



If you can't quite see, the amazon add is for a well known General Relativity book that is certainly in my get-when-I-have-money list. Also notice that this is on waiterrant which couldn't have anything less to do with science, math or anything similar. So I figured I was probably still signed on to amazon and it recommends based on a cookie or IP, right? Wrong. I was not signed on to amazon. It must be recommending based on a cookie, though. A few refreshes of waiterrant showed me adds for QFT in a Nutshell by Zee, the book for my GR class next term, Weinberg's QFT book, Peskin and Schroeder's QFT book, a cosmology book, Jackson's E&M and a math book. All but one of these are on my get-when-I-have-money list (the last one sits on my bookshelf already). It seems that amazon does a pretty good job at giving me recommendations. Of course I won't stop reading waiterrant to go buy a physics book that very second, but still, I'm impressed.

Prediction Trading

TradeSports is a brilliant idea. I had thought about making a site of this nature as a startup idea and even tried a very naive implementation of it for my cis422 project (which failed miserably, btw). This was right after I read about Nassim Taleb (thanks to Prof. Hsu's blog). Taleb proposes that being an 'expert' isn't (perhaps shouldn't be) worth that much because even experts get dominated by statistics when it comes to making predictions and do no better and even worse than non-experts. (this is a good talk on the subject). After having listened/read what Taleb has to say, it seems that he is very right. So, what better than a site which allows everyone to trade on predictions? Not only does it allow to test what Taleb says, but it has other possible implications.

First, if the site becomes popular the people running it get a large database of 'experts' (common people) predicting. They can then use Bayesian techniques to make their own predictions and do better than the best of their 'experts'. See this recent entry on Prof. Dave Bacon's blog, for example.

Second, imagine having a track record of all the times you've been right about something. If you are usually right this is the kind of thing you'd like to show to a potential employer or admissions committee. If nothing else it may give you some bragging rights. Such a record would also be desirable from an employer's perspective: in addition to comparing people based on how perfect they say they are compare them on how often they are right. Selling prediction reports could be a viable business plan if the site was popular. Of course, they already make money on each transaction so perhaps this would be unnecessary, but still.

For now, though, TradeSports seems to be a little too focused of sports betting. This probably because that is the easiest to implement/automate and has a large potential user-base already. Also, I am yet to make sure I understand exactly how TradeSports decides the outcomes of events. For things like sports or stock market predictions this is straight forward. For things like current events, not so much. Probably more on this topic as I look into it. It may be a TradeSports' trade secret, though. :-)