Earplugs from Paris

For Christmas, I gave my roommate a set of earplugs from Paris. He didn't even smile.

Two Dead Squirrels

Susan became President of Monash's humanitarian outreach effort. She has become politically savvy, recovering from the fiasco of last year, when she produced the best speech but did not form a pre-vote alliance of supporters. Who would have thought? Lately, I've been reading a lot about the political maneuvers of President-wannabes, on the front page of New York Times, while waiting in Starbucks for my coffee. Rom's message to the people: Oba has failed America. Sometimes I think that's his only message, and I forget what merits he himself claims to have.

It seems my whole family has caught the Whatsapp bug. Nun tried to guilt-trip me into buying a smart phone, by arguing that valuable information is not conveyed to me otherwise. 'Did you know that Susan became President?' she wheedled. Honestly, I did.

I was walking Alex to his car and he was telling me about Argentina, about a month of escape from the oppressiveness of theoretical physics. He says that physicists are like athletes, but rarely behave as true intellectuals, because they are so absorbed in their work they lose track of what it means to be alive. He wants to disappear to a remote Russian village, philosophize, romanticize. I privately have my doubts as well, and I didn't know how to console him. Or myself. 'Sorry' I finally offered, lamely, before getting on my bike and riding to my new Butler apartment. This is one conversation I would like to revisit, after some reflection.

In the first Friday Beer of the year, I heard Diablo ask Stoic, 'How are you?'  Stoic deadpans, 'Okay.' So I christened him Stoic, and invented the simile 'stoic as a Ukrainian' to describe his character. Much like how I had to redefine alcoholism when I met a true alcoholic, who prefers consuming pure alcohol to any other form of alcoholic drink. On impulse, Stoic invited me to Sunday Brunch at GC - he proclaims that their omelettes are so fantastic he would come every week of his five years if humanly possible. That is, if he wakes up in time. I knew it was impulse, because he could only have glimpsed a split-second-farewell wave of my hand from an oblique angle in his office, before he jumped out of his seat to make the offer. In honor of this rather uncharacteristic behavior, I agreed. Nowadays, cycling to GC from Butler is an uphill task of length 16 minutes, and it gives me an appetite. On the way back to Jadwin, Stoic and I stopped to inspect the warm carcass of a dead squirrel, victim of a roadkill. He tells me that he wants to take it home, drain the carcass and fill it with stone. This is what people do in Ukraine? I replied that he should do it, that squirrels are iconic in Princeton. Finally he shrugs and leaves the carcass, 'That would be too disgusting.' We got on our bikes and rode less than fifty meters. 'Look!' Stoic cried out. I got off and found him prodding a second dead squirrel with a branch. 'Is this natural?' He was referring to the squirrel's protruding eye, which now resembles a small punctured balloon. He turned the corpse over and the fur where it had been lying on looks different, somehow, due to gravity's pull on the carcass' blood. I must be recalling tidbits from CSI. I even think I know why the eye is punctured like that, or I get the feeling that the knowledge is somewhere in my head. This time, I told Stoic to leave the squirrel, because it has been dead a while and surely its innards will not drain so readily. What do I know about death and corpses? What does anybody know? I vaguely recall Annie Dillard, that the first surgeons must have felt like god, restoring life where there had been none, prodding their hands into the soft, inner tissues of the human body, where no light shines, where ignorance has bred a sense of inviolable sanctity.
 

The Theme

Dear Has,

BAB's philosophy is that as a graduate student, one must make contributions to as many topics as humanly possible, within one broad theme (with BAB, the theme is topological phases). This is not only to make a nice resume, it is also to give as broad an education as possible to a graduate student, so that he/she is in a better position to choose his/her specialization after. 
More specifically, BAB wants his students to contribute to

1) non-interacting theory of topological phases, for example the crystalline topological insulator I described in the meeting

2) interacting topological phases, for example, the model wavefunctions that YL was talking about for the fractional Chern insulators, which are strongly interacting

3) experimental predictions, e.g. the Landau levels of mirror-symmetry PbSnTe, which I may talk about on monday

4) proposals for materials which realize topological phases

5) more high-brow mathematical stuff; CF will give a talk on monday that will give you a flavor of this

Distances determine shape

I was trying to understand why the metric matters, by reading the black bible of gravitation. I came across this application of the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem on a tetrahedron, that if at each of the four vertices we lay out the equilateral triangles on a flat plane, the angles will fail to meet by pi. Summing them up, we have a total failure of 4pi, which is robust to deformations that don't change the topology of the two-sphere. I must remember these simple applications! When it comes to convincing people (myself), simplicity is strength. And finally I have a more kick-ass introduction to topology than the lame-ass ones I always give friends and family. 

Good trial!

Good trial, Imps! I decided that good morning and good night and good day are too cliche. For imps, the standard well wish will be good trial. Especially her crane trial today.

H Index of 1

Today, I found out from Jun that my H-index is 1; he claims that a person with an index n has n papers with n citations each. That made my day, that I'm not a 0. Time to celebrate.