Conan O’Brien/Jim Carrey

I just came across this video via a friend of mine. It is, quite simply, a work of genius.

Jim Carrey: I was just reading this incredible paper on the stochastic phase-shifting of the parametrically-driven electron in a Penning trap; and apparently, a bistability arises dynamically in the specific parametrically-driven systems, because the phase of the electron’s steady-state oscillation can either have the two values separated by .

(…)

Conan O’Brien: You know, it’s funny, what shocks me about an electron in a Penning trap is that most amplitude collapses are accompanied by a phase flip. Given that the rate of escape from the trap depends exponentially on an activation energy as the diffusion constant approaches and approaches .

JC: Absolutely. No question there.

Max Weinberg: I don’t know about that, Conan. Have you considered that the parametric driving force excites a nearly-resonant electron oscillation at the drive frequency, ? It’s a classic example of the period-doubling that occurs when a linear oscillator is strongly driven.

JC: Max. Did you just say that ?

MW: Yeah.

CB: (Laughs). It’s actually ! Wow, Max. Max, you know nothing about quantum physics!

MW: You’re right.

As far as I can tell, they’re alluding to this 1999 Gabrielse paper. Speaking of neat things that can be done with electrons and Penning traps, I recently came across these two other recent Gabrielse papers reporting very precise measurements of the electron magnetic moment and fine structure constant, which is pretty neat.

Anyway, back to work for me. Spring break is just a day away…

Quantum cuteness

This paper is absolutely hilarious. Here’s the abstract:

Abstract: We generalize the concept of classical cuteness to the quantum regime and thereby provide a rigorous formulation for the notion of probabilistic and quantum cuteness. We suggest several experiments and establish that women can be used to construct quantum computers.

Keywords: Cuteness operator, rigidity operator, quantum mechanics, women, perturbation theory

Further googling results in further hilarity of a similar nature.

Bayesian Humor

I was googling Bayes’ Theorem, loosely motivated by this post (think Bayesian spam filtering) and came across this website. Here are some excerpts:

Your friends and colleagues are talking about something called “Bayes’ Theorem” or “Bayes’ Rule”, or something called Bayesian reasoning. They sound really enthusiastic about it, too, so you google and find a webpage about Bayes’ Theorem and…

It’s this equation. That’s all. Just one equation. The page you found gives a definition of it, but it doesn’t say what it is, or why it’s useful, or why your friends would be interested in it. It looks like this random statistics thing.

So you came here. Maybe you don’t understand what the equation says. Maybe you understand it in theory, but every time you try to apply it in practice you get mixed up trying to remember the difference between p(a|x) and p(x|a), and whether p(a)*p(x|a) belongs in the numerator or the denominator. Maybe you see the theorem, and you understand the theorem, and you can use the theorem, but you can’t understand why your friends and/or research colleagues seem to think it’s the secret of the universe. Maybe your friends are all wearing Bayes’ Theorem T-shirts, and you’re feeling left out. Maybe you’re a girl looking for a boyfriend, but the boy you’re interested in refuses to date anyone who “isn’t Bayesian”. What matters is that Bayes is cool, and if you don’t know Bayes, you aren’t cool.

or this fabulous Q&A:

Q. What is the Bayesian Conspiracy?
A. The Bayesian Conspiracy is a multinational, interdisciplinary, and shadowy group of scientists that controls publication, grants, tenure, and the illicit traffic in grad students. The best way to be accepted into the Bayesian Conspiracy is to join the Campus Crusade for Bayes in high school or college, and gradually work your way up to the inner circles. It is rumored that at the upper levels of the Bayesian Conspiracy exist nine silent figures known only as the Bayes Council.

Great moments in physics writing

I typically don’t do this, but I’m lifting this whole post (because it’s so brilliant) from here, the (not very frequently updated) blog of one Tom J., a CM physics grad student at Yale:

The award for best use of the word “potty” in a graduate physics textbook goes to Binney et al., The Theory of Critical Phenomena, page 260:

“‘Well, come on,’ you will be saying. ‘Who are you trying to fool? This argument is clearly potty. For surely, if lambda-hat diverges near the critical point and g-hat does not, there is no way it can be legitimate to make the substitution (lambda-hat goes to g-hat) in the vicinity of T_c? The expansion is divergent, and no amount of shuffling of variables is going to change this.’”