How to Ruin Your Career, Part I

The post is "part I" because, I suspect, there will be many more to come. I seem to have a particular knack for getting myself in embarrasing situations, especially around those I am trying to impress the most. I tend to accidentally insult those mentors in the academic world who deserve the most reverence. Some examples:

1. I went to Israel one summer in a group that included this chick named "Abe". She had short, black hair, and looked vaguely like a math TA that I had; one particular math TA who happened to be dating (and is now married to) my advisor at Northwestern. One day, I'm passing by someone who I think is Abe. "What's up Abe," I utter. I see a look of horror and confusion flash across this woman's face. Five minutes later I realize it's my advisor's girlfriend and that the "p" of "up" has surely been perceived as a slurred p/b sound such that my advisor's girlfriend thinks that I have called her "babe". Intense embarrasement results. I apologize to my advisor for about a month. I still doubt he believes me. It sounds like the lamest excuse story ever.

2. Two weeks ago Very Promient and Famous Physicist From Havard (VPFPFH) comes to give a talk at MIT. He/she is hanging out in the tea room. I decide I could use a mid-afternoon pick me up. Unbeknownst to me, some bastard has replaced the normal, insulating tea cups, with super thin waxy cups. I pour the hot water in, pick up the cup. It's hot, I fumble with it, spilling water all over myself and saying "ow ow ow" in front of VPFPFH. I panic, throw the scalding water and unused teabag into the garbage, and run out the room.

3. Last week I emailed Extremely Important Professor Who Invented Much of Quantum Field Theory (EIPWIMQFT), asking for a meeting as I am considering asking him for a research project in the future. He has not responded to my email. I have been acting awkwardly in halls around him. Today, on the way back from class, some friends and I are talking animatedly. I am telling a story or something, and as I do, a man exits from a nearby bank onto the street in front of us. At this part in the story I am telling, I yell "Hey you!," and point down the street (I get into my stories). The man from the bank turns around. It is EIPWIMQFT. Ugh.

Riemannian Geometry and Tensor Calculus

Tired of computing curvature tensors and Christoffel symbols (I'm looking at you Tom Jackson ). Use the "Riemmanian Geometry and Tensor Calculus," notebook for mathematica. It's wonderful, you plug in the metric and it calculates all curvature tensors (including Einstein), and the Christoffel symbols. It doesn't do exterior calculus, but its incredible for its very specific function. It was sort of hard to track down on the internet, so its located here . Just copy the text and save it into a Mathematica notebook.

Two unrelated posts

Well, it's been a while, and I have no excuse except for laziness. Two things:

1. I recently joined the physics IM Ice Hockey team. That's right, be impressed, we actually field an ice hockey team. We're even in the D+ league. Our first game was two weeks ago or so, and we played Hillel. Before the game, I consoled myself with the old adage "Jews don't play ice hockey." While still true, it turns out there is another truism I forgot, "Physicists don't play ice hockey." Even more so, these combine exponentially to suggest "David doesn't play ice hockey, but somehow chases the puck, never touching it, mostly crashing at high speed into the boards." We got walloped by the Jews. This past tuesday we got walloped by some more jews, my own fraternity AEPi. Our team name is the "Annihilation Operators." That's right. Our jersey is an "a" with two superscripted bloody daggers.

2. I'm fed up with so called "popular" physics books. Mostly I'm fed up with this monstrosity of a book "The Road to Reality," by Roger Penrose. I joined a study group on this book (comprised of students and faculty from a few different departments), and we are going through it slowly. If you haven't seen it, it's 1000 pages, and tries to encompass all of scientific knowledge to date. It's unclear who the demographic for the book is. Nonscientists? No. There is no godly way that a nonscientist could understand this book. Scientists? Well, not really. It's hardly rigorous enough for a typical mathematician/physicist. One recent passage that pissed me off was when he was talking casually about the "floppiness" of symplectic manifolds. What?! It took many references to "mathworld" and to some differential geometry books to finally understand what the hell he was talking about. I finally have come to the conclusion that the target audience is people who know all of this stuff already (err, namely Penrose I guess) or small study groups comprised of graduate students and faculty. It's a little bit galling to think of the many fans of popular science who shelled out forty bucks for this thing and who are able to get very little from it. It's the like time that I bought "The Bell Curve," and never got page 5.