The two basic criteria to establish whether someone is your boss are: – Can they fire you ? – Can they give you a raise ? Unless the answer to both questions is yes, then they are not your boss. (can’t recall who said that to me… my dad, maybe
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Terahertz: My BCHA talk: 14 Billion Years in 90 Seconds
I finally got a half-decent video of myself giving a talk. Of course the projector still failed to work with my laptop, so I went slide-less (but it still works I think). I gave this talk this morning for the BC Humanists at Oakridge Seniors Centre. The TalkOrigins article I referenced can be found here. […]
Continue readingExponential Book: Time to simplify
As I was discussing with my collaborator the wisdom of following the request of one of the referees to include an additional figure in our manuscript, I expressed my doubts on whether, upon heeding that suggestion, we would be able to stay under the in…
Continue readingExponential Book: Why should I publish in PRX ?
Dear Colleague: “Why should I publish in PRX?” We have heard this question often, and with the inaugural issue of PRX about to close, we have our first concrete answers.” As I read this first line of the e-mail message, the thought go…
Continue readingExponential Book: Sliding into Fall
Oops, it did it again…. The Fall term 2011 has managed to sneak up on me, like its 2010 predecessor. All of a sudden, it’s all back. I am facing a crowd of 400+ students, teaching the same introductory physics class I taught last year, in t…
Continue readingExponential Book: Computers do not ruin physics…
… physicists ruin physics (bumper sticker — I doubt if it exists, but it should) The efficacy of a computer simulation (or of any other numerical computation) in predicting the behaviour of a physical system, crucially hinges on two ingredi…
Continue readingExponential Book: Happy birthday, High-Tc. I miss you.
Twenty-five years ago, the first so-called high temperature superconductor was discovered — unexpectedly, almost out of nowhere. Suddenly, the interest of physicists all over the world in the phenomenon of superconductivity was re-ignited (click …
Continue readingExponential Book: Impact factor trends
A few days ago, I received an e-mail message from the Publisher of my favourite physics journal (JLTP), who was pleased to inform me that its Impact Factor (IF) climbed in 2010 to 1.403, seemingly a significant improvement from the 2009 value of 1.074….
Continue readingExponential Book: My lost chapter
Dear Editor, It is now almost one year since I submitted to you the chapter that you solicited from me as a contribution to the upcoming volume “Real cool phases of matter”, which is going to be included in the distinguished series “E…
Continue readingExponential Book: Killing me softly with his (referee) report
Dear Colleague, given that every other day we seem to be telling each other appalling stories of disgraceful article refereeing to which we are subjected, I think we should all try and agree, first of all among ourselves, on what constitutes “bad…
Continue readingExponential Book: My thoughts on CCP
The Division of Computational Physics of the American Physical Society has now its own blog, brought to you by its very own executive committee, of which I am presently a “member-at-large” (soon to be apprehended and brought into custody, I…
Continue readingExponential Book: Great blog. By the way, you are full of it.
Last week I was in Dallas, at the annual March meeting of the American Physical Society, attended by members of the Division of Condensed Matter and Computational physics. For different reasons I ended up spending quite a bit of time talking to postdoc…
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