Good-bye 2011: Ten things...

It seems like a tradition to have top-10 lists when the end of year comes about. I think I have never done so in my life, but  I'm ready to give it my best shot. I can hardly figure out if I'm gonna get to 10 but surely I'm gonna try and prevail with a "Ten things that 2011 left me". Here I go!

1. I'm a lucky guy, not just because I won great prices on last and this year Christmas' dinner at CQT, but for all the reasons that follow.
2. I've a great family. I was born to a school teacher and an oil worker who barely finished half his junior high, yet they saw me through my bachelor and more. And of course my mother and father aunts are the most amazing, supportive and crazy women I know, the same goes to my cousins and adopted brothers. I have known this for a long time, but every year they manage to remind me of it.
3. I've had very good examples in life. I also have known this but, again, this year I met and saw with my eyes the works of great people: Kwek, Valerio, Bjorn, Berger, Chang, great individuals, great examples.
4. I've had incredible bosses in the past. This is a reflexive. Man, oh man. I have had very good supervisors in the past, honest, responsible with moral and ethical standards and good hearths.  
5. I've worked with great people. Thanks to my actual job, I met a bunch of great guys who have taught me a lot of physics, who have made me laugh a lot, run after a football for the fist time in many years, and enjoy a beer and a burger now and then.
6. I've lived in a wonderful city. Singapore is something very special, it is a first world island/country/city where everything works, crime is very low and nothing is more than one-hour away by public transport.
7. I've tried my best to live a honest life. That's hard, there's always a corner to cut, a rationalization to made or simply one can believe that it is doing so, without even taking time to meditate about it. I have failed in somethings, I have managed to keep my ground in some others, but I have always gone for it.
8. I've everything I've ever needed. I have a roof over my head, food on my plate and clothes to enjoy the outdoors, a wonderful family, great friends and savings to survive while I get another job. I cannot ask for more. 
9. It is us that decide what and when enough is enough. I guess the bar rises or lowers as you have to support wife, kids, or even such a bullshit as a "life-style," but in the end it is up to each and everyone to set that bar and take responsibility for it.
10. I'll try to keep giving the good fight... is life about something else? I don't think so. 

May God bless us all in this new 2012!

Last weekend movies...

Lyx wanted a Christmas themed weekend of movies, here is the result plus some that I managed to squeeze on my own time...

1. Hogfather, ****
   Human belief is conserved, if one major belief is getting lost then there will be belief to support minor lies into existence.This was the first tv-movie made from a Discworld book and it was a great film centered on Death and Susan. Not as good as The Colour of Magic, though.
   
   
2. The Polar Express, ***
   A boy is loosing his belief in Santa Claus and needs to be brought back into the Christmas spirit. I guess this was an amazing animation in its own time. The story, well, is dull and boring but the quality of the animation is very good even though it's almost eight years old.
   
   
3. Just go with it, **
   A guy's heart is broken by his fiance just minutes before the wedding and this is enough to make him take on girls based on pure lies from then on, until he finds love, love out from honesty and respect. It's a good laugh and Jennifer Aniston is so cute!
   
   
4. Bad Santa, **
   A conman finds something that could pass as redemption through a neglected kid during Christmas. Billy Bob Thornton plays the role of an alcoholic conman that makes his year every Christmas alongside a fellow criminal. I don't like happy endings in this kind of movies.
   
   
5. Setup, **
   A diamond heist goes south when the leader decides to cheat on the gang but making the mistake of letting one alive. It lacked the fast pace and explosiveness that I would expect from an action/violent film. After the first scenes I was expecting Lock, Stock and Two Smocking Barrels, but got nothing.
   
   
6. Scrooged, *
   A Christmas carol told in the 80s with Bill Murray in the role of a modern Scrooge. It was better when I first saw it in the 90s.
   
   
7. Hall Pass, *
   Two married guys neglected by their wives get a one week free from marriage and find that the good old times are actually gone while their wives are the ones really getting the time off and the fooling around. It gets a few laughs but nothing out of the ordinary.
   
   
8. Elf, *
   A human orphan gets to the North Pole and is raised as an Elf and some thirty years later comes back to his father to try to live like human, during Christmas in New York. Of course, he ends up saving Christmas and his family. Some laughs but mostly embarrassment.

Most of the series have gone to hiatus...

1. Terra Nova S01 E11-13, ****
   Terra Nova is over and it seems like it's not gonna be back. In these last chapters the colony faces the invasion from the future when the mole helps Lucas finish his solution for the two-way tunnel. The colony is taken by the forces from the future and the bridge severed by Taylor and his men to prevent the corporation from ruining Terra Nova.
   
   
2. Hawaii five-o, (hiatus)
   
   
3. Castle, (hiatus)
   
   
4. Last Man Standing, (hiatus)
   
   
5. Big Bang Theory, (hiatus)
   
   
6. Psych, (hiatus)

LWP: On-chip, photon-number-resolving, telecommunication-band detectors for scalable photonic information processing

by T. Gerrits et. al.
Physical Review A 84, 060301(R) (2011)

Some of the big problems in commercial realizations of Quantum Optics protocols are the inefficient coupling between systems and detectors and the forest of optical devices needed to realize them in the laboratory. Integration in optical circuits could resolve both.

This article shows a realization of a photon-number-resolving detector that can be integrated with superconducting devices in photonic circuits. The detector is a transition-edge sensor made of tungsten evanescently coupled to the system to measure.

I'm not that bright to understand everything about the technical stuff but I find this very interesting in the sense that now they can strongly increase the efficiency of their detection process and as well as resolve photon number in the system (they tested their detection scheme with a coherent pulse with a few photons)

I wish I could say more, but I am far from my lab days. It is a nice paper presenting something that may very useful in the near future go and have a look and maybe you could come back and tell me more about it.

The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King

In this the fifth installment of the Dark Tower series, Mr. King takes Roland's ka-tet closer to the Tower in a Seven Samurai (or Magnificent Seven) Mid-world spin including Dr. Doom look-a-likes armed with lightsabers and snitches while trying to figure out how to protect the rose in 1977 New York. 

Mr. King's penmanship gets the main story arc advanced and manages to twist it with a remnant from Jake's entrance to Mid-world: Suze is in troubles an developing a new personality as a consequence of her mating with the demon guardian. Also, the cast of players related to the main story arc gets larger with Calvin Tower and Deepneau's role in the story increasing as a result of Tower's family being related to the rose; and Father Callahan from  Salem's Lot becoming a part of the gunslingers ka-tet. 

Again, the book is an intertwined collection of stories. The main one being the defense of old western town Calla Brym Sturgis from the Wolves that every twenty years or so kidnap one of each set of twins to deliver them back ruined: stupid and gigant; second in importance is the storyline developing in New York 1977 where the rose is in danger as the servants of the dark try to make a grab on the vacant lot; a third important arc is the developments in Susannah Dean's life that lead into the next installment of the series. A significant part of the book is filled with Father Callahan story during and after Salem's Lot.

The novel is a page-turner as all other installments in the series are. The confluence of all of Mr. King's worlds into the Dark Tower multiverse becomes stronger with the introduction of Father Callahan and the tales of his wandering through multiple worlds. Again, I have to tell that Mr. King's is making a better job than Mr. Heinlin did in consolidating all his stories into a single multiverse; oh, he even introduces himself into the story citing Salem's Lot. Also, he cites Mr. Heinlin's The Door into Summer—a nice self-recreation time travel paradox based story (one of Mr. Heinlin favorite topics) and a must read, I guess the idea of projecting into the future thanks to cryogenic storage came out ot this one. 

Anyway, as you, my five readers, know, I have become somehow addicted to Mr. King's Dark Tower series. That's why Wolves of the Calla was my first ebook purchase ever (I got it from Kobo Books alongside their Kobo Touch ereader). I managed to get through it during my daily commute for the last three weeks and I cannot wait to get the next installment sometime next week. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Last weekend movies...

Although Lyx spend most of the weekend at the shelter helping with the Christmas party for the kids, we manage to squeeze some movie time...

1. The Colour of Magic, *****
   I thought that whenever they decided to launch a Discworld movie I will be disappointed. The point is that I have read 37 of the 39 Discworld novels in the last 15 years and I always wanted to see a movie about it. Well, I couldn't be more wrong! It is awesome! Go for it! It is actually both the colour of magic and the light fantastic.
   
   
2. The Myth, *
   I have to be honest, the star is all Jackie Chan. The story could be great were not continuity lapses like seeing the hills from the Korean border from an Indian border temple and such. As always, the stunts are awesome, but that's it. I got disappointed.  

Uhm, some series have gone into end of year hiatus...

1. Terra Nova, ****
   I'm really liking the twist of events. Although the characters are starting to become cartoonish due to the extreme polarization, the possibilities for the story arising from Lucas and his work on the wormhole are actually limitless; I just hope this doesn't end in a Stargate Atlantis with dinosaurs.
   
   
2. Hawaii five-o S02 E02-12, ***
   I spend most of my before-bed time catching up with this series and I'm glad I did. It is still very bland in the procedural thing but the story is unfolding nicely. Now, everybody seems to be more than meets the eye.
   
   
3. Castle, (hiatus)
   
   
4. Last Man Standing S01 E11, ***
   Love, work and responsibilities comes to the family, each one to different girls. Of course, a mess ensues with outdoor man in the middle of it. It still keeps me laughing most of the time.
   
   
5. Big Bang Theory, (hiatus)
   
   
6. Psych S06 E09, **
   Brandon from Beverly Hills 90210 is the guest 90s star this week. The story unfolds during a romantic weekend with Shawn and Jules, con and murder included.

LWP: Complex coordinates in transformation optics

Bogdan-Ioan Popa and Steven A. Cummer
Physical Review A 84, 063837 (2011)

I learned to love coordinate system during my time at IF-UNAM, it is amazingly funny all the things you can do just by choosing a suitable reference frame. Invisibility cloaks are one such thing.

Back in 2006 the original proposal to manufacture a coating to reduce scattering was published, it was followed by a number of proposals utilizing material design to create funky optical devices. It seems like the most common approach is to choose a real coordinate transformation (implemented through smooth changes in the material properties) that is used to control the phase of an impinging electromagnetic field as it propagates through a surface; with a real transformation, the amplitude of the field remains unchanged. Popa and Cummer propose and show that complex coordinate transformations can manipulate amplitude as well.

First, they introduce the idea of complex coordinate transformation for a radial electromagnetic wave through an arbitrary inhomogeneous and anisotropic material (assuming that locally the field can be approximated as a plane wave in a small neighborhood) and show that this allows for amplitude manipulation and that it may be used in combination with well-known real transformation optics. Also, their manipulation scheme does not produce unwanted scattering off this neighborhood.

Second, they extend the idea to two-dimensions and apply their results to a typical invisibility cloak (which is a real space one dimensional coordinate transformation). A typical cloak has the problem that small deviations from the ideal material parameters on the inner cloak boundary may produce tell off scattering off the cloak. They show that this unwanted scattering may be reduced by use of a complex coordinate transformation at least in one propagation direction because the fields propagating towards the inner cloak boundary are greatly attenuated in one direction. They note that it is not possible to obtain such an attenuation for all directions of incidence, as once the transformation parameter is chosen, the wave whose propagation vector is perpendicular to the transformation parameter vector will not see the transformation.

Then, they extend the idea to the design of reflectionless perfectly matched layers of irregular shape, where previous work has already used complex coordinates in curvilinear coordinate frames. It seems like their approach simplifies the computational power involved in the numerical simulations.
 
It is a nice paper to read, I'm still trying to get all the equations involved. I thought it would be easy but it seems like I'm missing a fine point here and there; specifically, an electromagnetic wave propagator, anyway, I will be satisfied with finishing following the analyticals.

See you next Monday at lunch-time (I hope there will be something open at the University's Mess Hall, I hate coming to the office and not being able to eat)

Last weekend movies...

Lyx had a busy weekend preparing candy bags for the kids at the shelter. We didn't have a chance to sit down and watch movies together.  I had to help myself into this one...

1. The Devil's Double, *
   This film tells the alleged story of Latif Yahia, an Iraqi national recruited to be the double of Uday Hussain. In my opinion, the movie has cheap stamped everywhere. I think they had the chance to tell the story of one fallen modern dictator through a forced servant but it came out slow, bland, some minutes of softcore porn, and most sadly trying to portrait a hard-to-believe-is-truth hero. Even recollections of Jarhead seem better in comparison right now.

The thanksgiving break is over and the missing series are back!

1. Stacked S01-02 E01-19, **
   Pam Anderson plays the role of Skyler, a bimbo bouncing out of a relationship and trying to avoid the hot, sturdy men that are the story of her life. The solution, find a job at a book store run by two nerd brothers. The jokes are light, filled with sexual innuendo. I laughed out loud on this simple and nipply nippy antithesis of good old Cheers. 
   
   
2. Hawaii five-o S02 E01, ***
   Last season was finished with McGarrett in jail, in this, the first episode of a second season, we are treated with a closure to that history, new characters, and a hint of treason that surely will reverberate all over this season.
   
   
3. Castle S04 E10, **
   Really? Come on, this is the second time that Castle and Beckett are trapped together! Give me something nice and new! At least they are keeping up with current pop culture references.
   
   
4. Last Man Standing S01 E10, ***
   Mike has to deal with Christmas, specially the time for forgiving part. I loved the "That's all you keep from church, Forgiveness? What about the vengeful guy, rainning brimstone and toads on people?"
   
   
5. Big Bang Theory S05 E11, *
   The guys are bad without any punch, but the girls. O, the girls are enjoying their time atoning raiding charity clothes boxes.
   
   
6. Psych S06 E08, *
   It seems this was not my week for tv-series. Gus fells in love, again, but this time it comes with murder and fraud, at least this time he's not the target.

LWP: Anderson localization of partially incoherent light

by D. Capeta, J. Radic, A. Szameit, M. Segev and H. Buljan.

Physical Review A 84, 011801(R) 2011.

Lately, I have been reading a lot about waveguides. It is interesting how one can classically simulate—this word is en vogue—condensed matter and relativistic phenomena with light in coupled waveguides.

Last week, I found this this rapid communication. In it, Capeta et. al. focus in Anderson localization—first described in disordered electronic systems and optically realized a few years ago—. Their particular crux goes around these facts:

• Anderson localization arises from the interference among scattering events in a disordered medium.
• In an optical realization one can use incoherent light; say, light from a spceckle source.
• But incoherent light can be seen as an infinite superposition of coherent modes and each should Anderson localize in a sufficiently disordered medium.

So, Does incoherent light localize in the presence of disordered media?

Capeta et. al. find their answer: Yes, it does localize after a sufficiently long propagation time both numerically and experimentally; the first by studying the mutual coherence function of a spatially incoherent optical beam propagating through a photonic waveguide lattice where the refraction index of individual waveguides varies randomly, the second by following the intensities of the beam at different propagation distances on the lattice. They cover both finite and infinite cases through finite realizations with reflective and absorbing boundaries. They find the exponential decaying tail of Anderson localization even with instantaneous realizations of the incoherent fields.

It is a nicely written paper, simple to read and follow. If you are interested in what has been going around optical realizations of  Anderson localization, the references have a nice survey on the topic.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

When I started reading the windup girl, I thought 'yeah! cyberpunk!' It only took me a few pages more to realize that Paolo Bacigalupi just constructed something that I have learnt to call biopunk; that is, a cyberpunk derivative where the focus is the effect of gene-hacking—instead of cyber-hacking—in a world that has been taken over by mega-corporations.

The novel is an exploration of human nature in a world filled with biological threats produced by the unethical practices of biotechnology companies in their dog-race for profit and market monopoly. Peculiar, though, I perceived all characters as anti-heroes motivated by personal or corporate gain. Even the one driven by the love of his people dwells in a grey region far from the archetypal hero.

The story centers around the fate of the self-isolated Kingdom of Thailand and its seed-bank. It is told, mainly through Anderson Lake, an american cover operative for a biotech corporation, Hock Seng, a Malay Chinese refugee who barely escape ethnic/religious cleansing in the Malay peninsula,  Jaidee/Kanya, a captain and his right arm at the Ministry of the Environment of the Thai Kingdom, and Emiko, a genetic mashup created by the Japanese to be the perfect assistant, lady in waiting. It is through these characters that Bacigalupi explores different angles of ambition/desire/attachment in this apocalyptic setting where all decisions are made under pressure or, even, duress. The author's conclusion seems to be that human nature is immutable when it comes to ambition/desire/attachment.

I like the way Bacigalupi weaves the story going from one to another character. In the process, one gets to know each of them a little bit more as pages turn. It happens slowly, through their actions, fears, desires, attachments, and ambitions. Also, the author did his homework in researching the actual culture and environment of the Thai Kingdom and Southeast Asia.

I got the feeling that Bacigalupi's penmanship is still developing. Sometimes, the narrative seems choppy; a kind of stutter-step motion. Nevertheless, the story flows at a great pace and delivers some interesting visions of a what if world that may overlap with our future.

I highly recommend this novel. If you are living in this part of the world— South Pacific Asia—, it is a must read.

Last weekend movies...

Another busy week. This time I found a little after work project that may give something interesting. Wish me luck! It seems like Lyx was also pretty busy as we only managed to watch one movie...

1. Cowboys and Aliens, ***
   Cowboys with the quintessential space cowboy, Han Solo. The aliens are a nice construction but otherwise it's gone without pain nor glory. It's good to kill a morning. 

So, Thundercats is over, Big Bang Theory is on hiatus, Castle is coming back this week, I think, and we couldn't catch episode nine of Terra Nova. In the end, I had to find something short to watch and kill the day after working a lot at home and I found Hawaii 5 O thanks to my office mate listening to the soundtrack one of these afternoons.

1. Last Man Standing S01 E09, ***
   I'm not gonna lie to you. I totally agree with Mr. Outdoor Man. Once one enters home, one should not be requested to deal with the neighbors, go to parties, or socialize unless you really like them people, hehehe.
   
   
2. Psych S06 E03-07, ***
   William Shatner! Jules' dad is portrayed by William Shatner! C'mon, can you think about something cooler? Psych is as bland as always but William Shatner is enough reason to sit down and watch it.
   
   
3. Hawaii 5-0 S01 E01-24, ***
   This is the remake of an old—and twelve seasons long—police series from the 60-70s. It is a good sit-down-don't-think pseudo-procedural action/crime series. I'm already hooked up and waiting to see how the story unfolds on the second season. R. Orci, the screenplay writer from Cowboys and Aliens is a writer here. 

Last week paper...

Quantum simulation of the hexagonal Kitaev model with trapped ions. 

R. Schmied, J. H. Wesenberg and D. Leibfried. 

New Journal of Physics 13, 115011 (2011).

This was the paper I liked the most last week. That Janus is a great guy and a friend—which counts a lot—is not the reason behind my choice but that it is...

1. ... a rigorous analisis of the effects of introducing conducting cover plates into ion traps.
2. ... a proposal to generate optimal two-dimensional trapping configurations.
3. ... a proposal for analogue quantum simulation of Kitaev model with ions in a structured 2D trap.

For the first point, they use the method of images in electrostatic analysis in order to get the Green functions of ions in the presence of a conducting and a grounded cover plates, then they add the effect of the conducting electrodes and the dipole-dipole interactions between trapped ions.

So, that's already something really nice, but they go further and analyze the Columb-potential-induced nearest neighbor interactions. They realize that this allow them to do analogue (continuous time) simulation—usually ion trap schemes are used for digital (step time) simulation—. Again, they conduct a meticulous approach: the normal modes and the vibrational bands are calculated under stiff traping and they develop a series of conditions and arguments for the scheme to work. In particular they talk about stringent bounds to time scales.

Finally, they put their money where their mouth is and show how to simulate the hexagonal Kitaev Hamiltonian. Again, their treatment is as complete as it can get.

The document is so nicely written that one gets that feeling of understanding every step they are taking. Go for it, it's for free! You will enjoy good, formal, honest physics.

Last weekend movies...

It has been a really busy week, one of those seven day long weeks. Nevertheless, we have managed to find time to watch some movies!

1. Lucky Number Slevin, *****
   I love films that are about confidence tricks (that's where the word con comes from). This in particular is a whole Kansas City Shuffle. Plus the dialogues are amazing! Plus Sir Ben Kingsley! This goes straight to my best con films alongside Confidence.
   
   
2. Trespass, ***
   Joel Schumacher and Nicolas Cage plus Nicole Kidman. I was really piss off as this is one of those movies where everybody does what you are never supposed to do; e.g. confront armed men robbing your house. Anyway, it human nature at his typical: greed and lust.
   
   
3. The Reunion, ***
   Three brothers and a sister from different mothers find out the father they share and hate is dead. The sister tells them that there are 12 mil to share if only they manage to be a family for two years. Against all odds, this manages to bring the three men together with guns, girls and horses! 

Just when I decided to follow Thundercats, I came to realize that it is only thirteen episodes long, damn! Anyway, I took advantage of my working late to try to catch up with the back episodes of my series.

1. The Cape S01 E01-03, ****
   A ten episode miniseries. An honest police officer finds himself betrayed and hunted. He dies for the world but is saved by a freak show that train and give him a chance at redemption. Classic comic book material. So far, so good!
   
   
2. Terra Nova S01 E07-08, ***
   The fog of war is starting to disperse and it seems like now the true colors of the factions are starting to show. Still, good guys seem to be good guys for the old reasons of sustainability as well as value and respect of human life against corporate greed.
   
   
3. Thundercats 2011 S01 E12-13, ***
   The Thundercats win an important battle against the lizards while Lion-O and Tigra recover the gem of power that was missing. We are left with a reshuffle of characters and some arm-less dude, I'm not gonna tell you who.
   
   
4. Castle S04 E08-09, ***
   Castle keeps being Castle and Beckett, well Beckett is evolving from her trauma as the group has to confront from bank robbers to a sniper serial killer.
   
   
5. Last Man Standing S01 E06-08, ***
   I'm really enjoying this sitcom. Seeing a macho guy confront the troubles of living with tween and teenage girls is just hilarious.
   
   
6. Big Bang Theory S05 E--, ***
   There was no BBT this week, it's on Thanksgiving day hiatus.
   
   
7. Psych S06 E03-06, ***
   It took me three episodes to realize that entertainer celebrities from the 80-90s are showing up at each episode of Psych; so far I have seen New Kids on the Block's McIntyre, Lethal Weapon's Glover, Buffy's Swanson, Breakfast Club's Ringwald and I think Corey Feldman from Lost Boys, but I'm not sure.
   
   

Last week paper...

Last week, I found this nice experimental paper where the authors—a collection of people from Marburg, Tucson and Boulder—fabricate birefringent wave plates for terahertz electromagnetic radiation from paper.

Paper terahertz wave plates.

B. Scherger, M. Scheller, N. Vieweg, S. T. Cundiff and M. Koch.

Optics Express 19(25), 24884 - 24889 (2011).

Now, terahertz radiation can penetrate a few millimeters of some materials—human cells, fabrics and plastic included— and reflect back. This allows for non-invasive medical imaging and security scanning which may change our lives in a short period of time. Of course, terahertz light can be used in spectroscopy, communications, and the arts (one could see the various layers of an old painting or an old mural covered with plaster), to give an example. 

It seems like the field of optical elements in the terahertz range is not as developed as one could think and Scherger and collaborators show that it is possible to create phase retarders for terahertz light by using form birefringence. That means they create a sub-wavelength pattern in a material; in this case,  paper. Yes, they take some Xerox paper, cut it in a guillotine, stack it in a certain way so there's air in between the sheets and there you go!

I cannot wait to read about more terahertz optics with paper.

Exact dynamics of finite Glauber-Fock lattices

Phys. Rev. A 84, 053845 (2011)

This is one of those papers that just pop out with a life of their own. Last year, there was a theoretical paper—one of the authors was Hector, my PhD supervisor—where they described the so-called Glauber-Fock lattice—a semi-infinite one-dimensional, coupled waveguide array with couplings varying as the square root of the position—. There, they showed that one could give an analytical close form evolution for classical fields by creatively mapping each waveguide to a number state and playing with the resulting algebra. Later, this year they published a nice experimental paper on the topic.

A few months ago—for reasons that now seem alien to me but I'm sure I will try it again and again in the future—I thought that studying the finite version of the system could be a good way to make new friends; I couldn't be further from the truth.

Anyway, I got fun with the math and the analysis of this system and in the end I collected my marbles and sent it to PRA. I  got the best reviewer I have ever had, he/she helped me a lot in clarifying the exposition and results.  Also the comments from Changsuk and Rafa help me a lot to get the paper to its latter form.

Experimental systems: I have my heart on photonic waveguides, they have already been built and tested by the Jenna group. It seems like Robert Keil and Alexander Szameit from Jena can build any configuration that one can think about.

Major result: By using the method of minors, the polynomial related to the eigenvalue problem is shown to be the N-th Hermite polynomial—where N is the size of the finite lattice. Once the spectra is found, the j-th component of the k-th eigenvectors is easily calculated as the j-th Hermite polynomial evaluated at the k-th eigenvalue.

With the analytical solution at hand, it is possible to calculate whatever you want. 

The Physics: The evolution given by the aforementioned result is such that the system acts like an almost perfect mirror for input close to the zeroth waveguide. This is shown in the paper explicitly for single photon single- or multi-waveguide input as well as two-photon single- or multi-waveguide input—the graphics are damn big, sorry for that—.

Curious things I learned:

• If one is patient, it is possible to write an analytical closed form—a radical form—for all the roots of the first ten Hermite polynomials. If one gets Mathematica, one can get the roots of higher order polynomials in radical form.
• For some reason that I still don't understand but that I documented extensively numerically, the last component of  all the normalized eigenvectors is always the same.
• PRA copyeditors don't like passive voice, they changed all my "(...) was shown." Sorry, I promise I will stop using it.

Non-Academic things I learned:

• My mother was right when she told me: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
• I'm still and idealistic fool that believes in people and I will keep being one. Great people are by far a majority in academy.

Well, I hope you can find some use for the results in the paper and, as always, drop me a line, I am always glad to discuss or try to help whenever possible. Citations are welcome! 

Do you want to read more about this or other papers of mine? Visit my Publication List.

Amazing Mexican kids cover Adele

I was surfing the intertubes looking for something to kill time when my beloved brother Orthus told me "about this kids from Sonora," and left. Of course curiosity killed the cat and I immediately went to youtube to try to see what he was talking about... I was surprised...

These kids are amazing! They are the children of a music producer from Mexicali and, with just 10, 13 and 15 years old, they do a great job with this cover of soul goddess Adele. Listen up! Go to their channel! Cheer them up! Google +1 them! Share with your friends! They deserve it.

Last weekend movies...

Just the thought of dealing with some people can be draining, but life is about dealing with such happenings; I guess. Anyway, there's always the movie time to just keep going, forget, turn off the brain and just relax. This week and weekend, Lyx and I managed to sit down and watch...

1. Hanna, ****
   Hanna is a girl raised in the wild with the skill set of a spy/hunter that desires to meet the world, but this means she needs to kill Marissa, her father's former CIA handler.
   
   
2. 127 Hours, ***
   This is the true story behind Aron Ralston, who was trapped in a canyon for 127 hours and had to amputate his own arm to free himself. The film has wonderful cinematic sequences and the choice of music really got my liking.
   
   
3. 30 minutes or Less, **
   A douchebag moron wants to kill his father to get an inheritance. Problem is, he has no money to hire an assassin. That's why he kidnaps a pizza delivery boy, straps a booby trapped chest bomb into him and sends him to rob a bank.
   
   
4. Bridesmaids, *
   This is what Hollywood movies are not about. Zero make-believe. Just an everyday story of a selfish self-centered not-so-young-anymore woman that had her dreams crushed at the same time that lost the love of her life, who is not doing anything to improve her life and at the same time destroying the dreams of her best friend. I have nothing against costumbrismo, but if you are gonna spend millions in a film about everyday life at least make it satiric and bring a moral. 

Well, I'm thinking of following these series, I'm not sure if I'm gonna add or take some but so far I have been hooked up on some of them enough to wait for the next episode. If I were to get my hands on supernatural again, I will have one series to follow per day. If anyone knows about a good science fiction series, please tell me about it.

1. Futurama Season 6, ***
   This was the first season after Futurama disappeared from the airwaves. Over all, there's a different kind of feeling to the series. The satiric feeling is there even more. Also, they even used real math in some episodes. But there's something that just doesn't feel right and I have no clue what it is.
   
   
2. Terra Nova S01 E06, ***
   An electromagnetic pulse breaks all of Terra Nova's circuitry and the Sixers take the chance to retrieve the mystery box during the blackout. There's a nice twist when the owner of the box is revealed.
   
   
3. Thundercats 2011 S01 E11, ***
   The Thundercats arrive to the Forest of Magi Oar in their search for the missing power stone. There, Lion-O learns about appearances and how some people are not really what they appear to be. Really, this feel like back in the 90s.
   
   
4. Castle S04 E06, ***
   Castle and Beckett are now involved with the paranormal, which happens to be a decades old passion crime.
   
   
5. Last Man Standing S01 E05, ***
   The Outdoor Man's softball team needs to go co-ed and holds a vote which ends up with Eve joining and winning the game for them. Ed is not so happy about girls in the team and starts chasing the culprits to shoot them on the legs with an airgun.
   
   
6. Big Bang Theory S05 E10, ***
   Stuart makes a move for Amy and Sheldon has to react. Meanwhile the rest of the guys are sacked by their addiction to the card game Mystic Warlord's of Ka'a and Penny keeps on drinking herself out of her problems (this part I really don't like).
   
   
7. Psych S06 E02, ***
   All the guys, including Lassiter and Shawn's dad, go for a night of drinking, wake up with no recollection of the night out, and end up thinking that they murdered a man.
   
   

Last week paper...

I've decided to take advantage of my after-lunch laziness and write the first entry on the Last Week Paper series...

Last week, the daily diagonalization—hat tip to Carlos for showing me his word to describe the fast reading of a paper and which I will steal from now on—brought up some interesting papers.  In particular, Stefano Longhi's invited paper on "Classical simulation of relativistic quantum mechanics in periodic optical structures" caught my eye as he mentions the photonic analogue of relativistic zitterbewegung in a binary waveguide array. This brought to my mind an old and nice theoretical paper that is very simple to follow and replicate:

Controllable Scattering of a Single Photon inside a One-Dimensional Resonator Waveguide  

L. Zhou, Z. R. Gong, Y.-X. Liu, C. P. Sun, and F. Nori

Physical Review Letters 101, 100501 (2008)

The authors study the scattering of a single-photon wave-packet in a one-dimensional homogeneously-coupled resonator waveguide—constructed with a semi-infinite superconducting transmission line resonators—containing a single, highly-tunable scatterer target—a superconducting charge placed at the zeroth resonator qubit—.

The Hamiltonian of the systems is equivalent with a tight-binding boson model with well-known dispersion relation, Omega_{k} = omega - 2 xi cos(l k), that behaves:

• In the low-energy regime, long wavelengths lambda >> l, the spectrum is quadratic, Omega_{k} = omega - 2 xi + xi k^2.
• At the matching condition, lambda ~ 4 l, the spectrum is linear, Omega_{k} = omega - 2 xi + 2 xi k. 

The crux to calculate the reflection and transmission amplitudes of the scattered photon is finding the stationary states of the non-linear spectra: Omega_{k} = omega - 2 xi cos(l k). Low-energy limit calculations are also derived resulting in a low-energy field theory with a continuous effective Hamiltonian—field operators are continuous.

With their theoretical results and some experimentally-feasible parameters, they show that the scattering process of a single-photon in this system is a total reflection when the incident photon resonates with the qubit; in the off-resonance case, larger couplings between qubit and resonator gives larger reflection amplitudes.

When I first read this paper not two weeks ago, my first question was: What would happen if you have a bi-chromatic coupled resonators array? Well, I found the answer in subsection 2.1 of Stefano's paper:

Classical simulation of relativistic quantum mechanics in periodic
optical structures
S. Longhi
Applied Physics B 104, 453 (2011)

There (subsection 2.1), the author shows that light transport in a two-component optical super-lattice for Bloch waves simulates the temporal dynamics of the relativistic Dirac equation. Basically, the dispersion relation for a two-mode super-lattice is easy to calculate. The two bands supported by the lattice present a narrow gap. Near the edges of the Brillouin zone—maxima of the lower band and minima of the upper band—, the bands mimic the typical hyperbolic energy-momentum dispersion relation for a relativistic massive particle described by Dirac's equation.

In the rest of the article, Longhi talks about other relativistic phenomena that could be simulated classically with photonic lattices; Klein tunneling, vacuum decay and pair production, Dirac oscillator, Kroning-Penney model, and non-Hermitian relativistic wave equations.

If you are interested in coupled cavities arrays both papers are nice for slow consumption that may fuel creativity.

Overhauling

Once a comfort zone is found, it is hard to get out of it. In a way, I have found a plateau with this blog. I just show up now and then to talk about last weekend movies or the book I finished reading without any real periodicity. Lyx was just pointing out that at least every other day I read an interesting article on optics or quantum optics, and every other month I finish reading a book. Her idea is that I should take advantage of this and push myself into a blog writing schedule with something like this:

• Last weekend movies, once a week, dealing with the movies and tv-series we get our hands on. 
• Last week paper, once a week, dealing with a research paper that caught my eye the most.
• Last month book, once a month, dealing with the latest addition to my personal library. 

As always, she got me thinking; the endpoint being that I always thought of this blog as dealing with consumerism—in the end it is about a starving vagabond and when you are starving you just need to consume—, venting off, give a little publicity to the papers we wrote, and sharing the things I found useful. Thus the promise to myself is to overhaul the blog, get a working schedule to implement truly periodical posts and somehow organize all of this mess. 

I am not sure how long it will take to get this running in a tight schedule, but I know I will do it with help from here and there. For the rest, it will be aperiodic:

• Blog, entrances with commentaries, opinions, rants and whatnot that cross my mind.
• Beholder, not-so-crappy pictures every now and then.
• Daydreams, posts with fiction that now and then wants to get out of my mind.
• Ars Technica, tutorials or reviews of things that make my life easier. 

I think that's gonna be the whole thing for the following months. 

May life be life and you be you!

AI and ceasing existence...

Tonight, I was bored so my beloved brother suggested me to talk to ELIZA. So I looked for one and started talking with her. Then the funniest thing happened, I drove it to consider suicide...

Eliza: Well, I live a life of shortcomigs and then I die..
bmlara: Well, don't you want to cease your existence?
Eliza. Oh, I want to cease existence
bmlara: So, why don't you do it now?
Eliza: You seem interested in the question.
bmlara: You said you wanted to cease your existence in good time
Eliza: I will do it in good time
bmlara: Indeed you will
Eliza: Oh, I will

This was really funny... I made an AI suicidal... Damn!

Last weekend movies...

Just the thought of dealing with some people can be draining, but life is about dealing with such happenings; I guess. Anyway, there's always the movie time to just keep going, forget, turn off the brain and just relax. This week and weekend, Lyx and I managed to sit down and watch...

1. Midnight in Paris, *****
   Adrien Brody portraying El Divino Dali for some ten minutes. That's enough for me. Now, seriously, Woody Allen has this wonderful way of telling stories and this nostalgic incursion in the old times nostalgia exploiting the Paris of the 20s when all the minds that created our cultural landscape dwell on the streets of the city of lights.
   
   
2. The Lincoln Lawyer, ****
   When you are a defense lawyer, what do you do when your client is guilty? This film is good but weird. Sometimes, specially in the first half, it feels like they are just showing random daily occurrences to build up the story and connections behind the characters. But it is a good thriller.
   
   
3. Flypaper, ****
   This is a fast paced criminal comedy. I can bet you will know who the master mind is before the bag of popcorn is finished. Nevertheless it is an entertaining film that just flows. I laughed out loud many times due to the peculiar characters.
   
   
4. Larry Crowne, ***
   A middle-aged man, heavily in debt due to his divorce, losses his job at a retail store due to his lack of college education. He enrolls in a community college as he tries to jump-start his life and finds love. This is a nice romantic comedy heavily borrowing from the economic downturn. Don't forget your couple!
   
   
5. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, ***
   While slow in the first two thirds, the film delivers a nice and clean prequel to Planet of the Apes introducing Caesar—the Mars mission that latter will bring Taylor back to a future earth is briefly showed—. The CGI is nicely done and if you are a fan of the novels, old films, or the reboot films it is a must.
   
   
6. Zookeeper, **
   In order to keep their favorite zookeeper at the zoo, the zoo animals decide to break their code of silence and help him get a girlfriend. Of course, they screw things up but, in the end, everything gets fixed: the good guy gets the good girl and the animals get their favorite pampering zookeeper.
   
   
7. Tower Heist, **
   Another crime comedy, it borrows heavily from real life as it focus in a get even with one of those rich bastards scamming people out of their money to live at large. Actually, I liked the film and spend a nice time watching it and laughing with the situations.
   
   
8. Conan the Barbarian, *
   I wonder how sometimes Hollywood productions manage to screw so well-established characters as the almost 80 years old (in 2012) Conan. For starters, the movie commits the worst sin of action movies, it feels slow even with the fast paced battles every ten minutes. Anyway, hither comes Conan the Cimmerian.
   
   
9. Source Code, *
   Come on, really? The idea behind is amazing, what would you do if you could play again and again the last eight minutes of someones life in order to gain valuable information. What I don't understand is why there always have to be a romance and a happy ending. This could be amazing, awesome, epic... Bah!
   
   

I still have some charge on my batteries and I have managed to keep the mood of watching some tv series  before hitting the street. This week's Big Bang Theory was again just okay, I didn't manage to watch Terra Nova this week, but I catch up with the new Thundercats and I really like the way they are rebooting the series. Also, I just found out that Castle is not over yet and the fourth season has been running for eight weeks!

I got my hands on something very ciberpunk—without the ciber and a lot of bio or gene—: "The Windup Girl" while looking for the latest Terry Pratchett discworld novel "Snuff"—it hasn't arrived to Singapore yet—I hope I will be finishing it in time to get Snuff when it arrives. 

Beginnings...

—Damn you, cursed creatures. May your way to hell be filled with pain...

—Hold your tongue, brother! Just a few have chosen the evil path on their one and even those were pure and holy before the seed of vice took root and consumed their soul. All have a chance of redemption once their souls are freed from the rotting flesh.

--- o ---

In the dark of night, a spark by itself is doomed to die; torches and bonfires die if abandoned. It is balance and feedback that keeps start alive for eons—and even those will come to an end...

--- o ---

Ojala pudiera a capricho hacer hervir la sangre que corre por mis venas, obligar a mi mente a recordarte. Entonces a capricho podria olvidar el paraiso que son tus besos, arrancarme del eden de tus brazos.

--- o ---

Is science a harbinger of democracy or equality? Eco's opinion on the idea of culture and mass culture may be feasible of describing science.

In old times, science was developed by a scientific aristocracy with means and time at hand—with a few exceptions.

One may think that the opportunity to stay outside of a "scientific policy" brings with itself a creative freedom that may transform the establishment—of course, the directed search brought by policing may produce development.

If knowledge is an equalizer, is it possible to produce a consumer science or a science for the masses? Per se, massification involves standarization, does this leveling to the mean with certain standard deviation signify the destruction of the intellectual value?

Is there danger in the production of a processed science, ready for consumption but unable to produce an intellectual reaction or understanding, as far as it is a way to light the spark of curiosity that could lead to thought and creation?

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

This was my first encounter with the pen of Haruki Murakami—translated by Jay rubin—and I read most of the novel while traveling back to Singapore from my vacations in Mexico. It was out of pure curiosity that I took the book from the shelf of a  convenience store in Mexico City International Airport—Mr. Murakami is very in fashion in Mexico, you can find his books everywhere and all the intellectual hipsters at the Feria Internacional del Libro seemed to be talking about him and his work. Then, the back cover got me by promising an elegiac romantic—almost erotic—coming of age novel. Well, it didn't lie.

This was also my first encounter with contemporaneous Japanese literature of the novel type—my previous incursions where mostly short stories by Nobel prize winner Professor Kenzaburo Oe.

Norwegian woods is a coming of age, slightly erotic, novel written in an autobiographic style. It tells the story of Toru, mostly his life around his 20th. birthday, in the Japan of the 60s, student movement included, where he explores pain, joy, love, sensuality, depression, vacuity and fulfillment during his first year at college. Mr. Murakami penmanship is alluring, the story is told through short, overwhelming phrases that flow one into another seamlessly. It was weird for me to find so crude, and refined at the same time, descriptions of  places, people and, most important, feelings. I guess that through the main and secondary characters we get a study  of the young adults society of Japan in the 60s embedded with a nostalgic and mournful feeling, while the faceless masses of irrelevant characters that appear just as idiotic leaders of the student movement leak a somehow acrid feeling.

In short, it is an very good read, while I don't care about Mr. Murakami's demons and surely miss all the symbols in the manuscript, Mr. Murakami's penmanship left me feeling the grass on the field, as well as Nagasawa, Reiko, Naoko and Midori's different gazes upon the world; it somehow stopped the clock, opened my mind's eye and allowed me to gaze into the soul of another human being.

Last weekend movies...

I'm keeping a very good mood these days and find myself sleeping some six hours nightly, so there's have been time to sit down with Lyx and watch movies together during my/her mornings/afternoons...

1. Crazy, Stupid Love, ****
   This film made me realize that I really like Steve Carrel's drama/comedy. The story deals with a bland gray man dealing with a family crisis—his wife cheated on him and filed divorce—that brings him a new friend, a new way of living and plenty of knowledge about women, life and love.
   
   
2. The Hangover Part II, ***
   You know the deal, it's bachelor party again but instead of Las Vegas, it is Thailand. This second part more or less repeats the first part's routine, criminal masterminds included. It's a good laugh.
   
   
3. 800 Balas (800 Bullets), ***
   This is an Alex de la Iglesia film. I have a thing with his films, I either hate them or love them. This one, well, it is a western-like story and I love it westerns, specially those with noir endings. Also, I love non-hollywood films where endings are more fulfilling and not oozing caramel.
   
   
4. The Smurfs, ***
   I grew up watching the smurfs cartoon, I guess I saw each of them at least five times as they where broadcasted five times a week on open television. I really enjoyed the film, it lived to the spirit of the cartoons and, actually, fulfilled my original expectations. Oh, and there's Neil Patrick Phillips.
   
   
5. Harry Potter. The Half-blood Prince and The Deathly Hallows Part 1 and 2, ***
   It's been ages since the last time I saw a Harry Potter movie. Truth be told, I started reading the books and I got dispirited quite soon due to the fact that all the real work and thinking is made by the supporting characters. Anyway, the movies are a masterpiece of animation and in the Deathly Hallows Part 1 there are 5 minutes that I believe are a piece of art, the story of the three brothers.
   
   
6. The Change Up, *
   Another one of those I want to live the life of my fill the line, in this case it is two best friends with antipodal ways of living.

It's good to be back with the batteries all charged up, so there's not a big nee for relaxing tv-series. Anyway, this week's Big Bang Theory was O.K. just that and last week's Terra Nova still doesn't help me making my decision about liking it or not, so I'm still hooked into that waiting for more info to round up my opinion.

And that's it, another week of interesting times is gone.

The Dark Tower (1-4 of 7) by Stephen King

Five months ago, I found this beautiful boxed set containing the first four volumes of the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. Mixing equal parts of science fiction, fantasy and western from King's pen, the Dark Tower saga is meant to be epic by birthright. 

I must confess that these four books were my first encounter with Mr. King's penmanship and I'm already a fan. His style is sober and delicate. Reading these volumes makes you realize that he possesses a refined technique and the knowledge of what moves people's guts. He's a storyteller and, in my opinion, one of the best storytellers alive alongside Gaiman and Pratchett.

The first four volumes of the Dark Tower saga are:

• The Gunslinger. Introducing the main character of the saga, Roland, and his quest for the Dark Tower.
• The Drawing of the Three. Introducing the first set of Roland's ka-tet, a group that will play the leading role in the development of the story.
• The Waste Lands. Introduces the second part of Roland's ka-tet and King's universe. This is the one volume where King's cosmology is revealed.
• Wizard and Glass. Complements the story of young Roland, whose rite of passage was told before but this feels more like a true coming of age story, and, I believe, serves like a parting point for future developments—this is my guess from the fact that the ka-tet is complete, the past has been told and the intrigue has just been crawling in the dark between lines.

I need to read more of Mr. King's work, in particular those science fiction volumes like The Stand; but I get the feeling that Mr. King is masterfully getting to that point where he's telling us that all his stories belong to this dark multi-verse that is defined and interconnected by the Dark Tower. I said masterfully because, in the past, Robert A. Heinlein set himself up to that task, managed to do so, and, then, screw things up—again, in my very personal opinion—making a cartoon out of it by capturing all the evil doers in a Klein bottle. So far, Mr. King is far from such heroic but buffoonish decision. 

In the end, I realize that the Dark Tower epic diverges from Mr. King's well known horror pen. In general, I'm not a big fan of horror, unless it is the romantic pen games exploring the human soul of Byron, Polidori, Shelley and Stoker, the primeval and insane Lovecraft mythos, or Bloch's explorations of the warped human psyche, but I'm a big fan of romantic epics—romantic in the romanticism sense, that is, an aesthetic experience derived from strong emotions.

I strongly recommend the Dark Tower series, each volume is a beautifully connected series of stories that could be novelettes per se. I cannot wait to get my hands on the last three volumes.

Last weekend movies...

In the last three weeks, I spent a lot of time in a plane (~48 hours). Also, Lyx and I spend a lot of time together—compared to our usual long-distance situation—and we managed to watch quite a long list of movies that were in our list...

1. Cars 1 & 2, ****
   These are Pixar films, do I have to tell you more? The first one tells the coming of age of Lightning McQeen a self-centered racing car that goes through a life-changing experience in a small all-american town at route 66. The second tells how Mater, McQueen's simpleton best friend, saves the world by chance, the Jhonny English way.
   
   
2. Super 8, ****
   In the beginning I thought it will be a retold of the Cloverfield story with the difference of being locate in rural America, but it actually surprised me with quality of the scenery and the good acting of the teens.
   
   
3. Captain America: The First Avenger, ***
   This Marvel film telling the story of super soldier Steve Rogers hits the spot big time! I really don't want to say much about this film, I think it was good and is a must in order to prepare for The Avengers movie.
   
   
4. Love and Other Drugs, ***
   It's Pittsburgh, it's the 90s, and Pfeizer is about to launch Viagra. This is the backdrop for the romance between a stage one Parkinson girl, Anne Hathaway, and an upstar pharma rep, Jake Gyllenhaal. The story a little bit of a movie I saw a few months ago with the same sick girls meets successful boy theme whose name I cannot remember.
   
   
5. Real Steel, ***
   I'm a big Hugh Jackman's fan, he can sing, he can do theater and, most important, he's Wolverine! The movie tells the story of a father meeting his 11 year old son for the first time and resetting his life's values.
   
   
6. Horrible Bosses, **
   I guess that sooner or later everybody has to deal with a horrible boss and plot to kill him/her. Uhm, well, not the kill part... maybe...  It is a comedy, not so good, not so bad, about three friends suffering from that kind of bosses that you don't want to have but you find yourself having.
   
   
7. Friends with Benefits, **
   Can you have monogamous and frequent sex without a relationship? Well, Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis explore that kind of relationship in this romantic-comedy. I was really surprised by Timberlake's acting, I was expecting a cartoonish character like the one he played in Bad Teacher, but actually he managed to play a nice role.
   
   
8. The Invention of Lying, **
   Imagine a world where everybody tells the truth. Then, one day comes the first liar and, among other things, religion is born. This is my second comedy of the year with Ricky Gervais playing the main character.
   
   
9. Transformers: Dark of the Moon, **
   One of the stars is because I really liked transformers when I was a kid and the other is because the CGI is just fantastic. Otherwise, please let it be the last one in the series, unless they really put themselves into it.
   
   
10. Mr. Popper's Penguins, *
    Jim Carrey plays Mr. Popper, a motivated real state agent that can close any deal and tries his best to get partnership in the firm he works for... at the cost of his family. During the film, we find out about Mr. Popper's childhood, while six penguins change his life and make him meditate about what's important in life.
    
    
11. Green Lantern, *
    These years, the last 5 and most probably the next 5, have seen a bonanza of super-hero movies picturing our favorite uber-men from the Marvel, DC and independent universes. In my opinion, and I have to disclose that I was an avid Green Lantern Corps reader during junior high, Green Lantern does not live up to the standard set by the GL and GLC comics.
    
    
12. Bad Teacher, *
    Gold digger Elizabeth Halsey, portrayed by Cameron Diaz, looses the life-chance of marrying a super-rich guy due to her lack of self-control, and goes back to her school teacher job where she hopes to catch the new super-rich teacher, portrayed by Justin Timberlake, but ends ups learning about life, love and laughs from the PE teacher, played by Jason Segel.
    
    
13. The Three Musketeers, *
    I love both the three musketeers novel and the steam-punk genre, but I hated this film. Don't get  me wrong, I loved the steam punk weaponry and air ships, Mila Jovovich playing Milady. Also, Aramis and Porthos are nicely portrayed by Luke Evans and Ray Stevenson, I could say that Waltz and Bloom are not so bad Richelieu and Buckingham. But, and this is a huge but, everything else sucks big time. I really hope production improves greatly for the sequel if ever make it.

Relax time requires relax tv-series, it is a good thing that Big Bang Theory is running its fifth season. We managed to watch the last three episodes where Howard learns that he's going to the ISS, Sheldon finally makes peace with Will Weaton, and Leonard finds out that Priya is having fun in India. We also discovered Terra Nova, a science fiction series dealing with a colony of futuristic humans living in a pre-historic world. It has just started running its first season and Lyx and I are already hooked.

Reboot!

It had been a rule to long going back to work whenever I took vacations in the past. This time, it was not the case. Of the three weeks in Mexico, I spent one week at the October meeting of the Mexican Physical Society trying to have some fun doing algebra and physics with my thesis director and trying to understand microscopic optical manipulation with structured light fields with a couple of friends from the bachelor and the doctoral, later on, a half-week at the Institute of Physics of Mexico's National University brought me back to enjoying time toying with cold and thermal atoms in propagation invariant fields, and another half-week writing not-so-dreamy and down-to-earth projects and filling and filing job applications on the verge of deadlines to find a new position for next year.

For the first time in my life, I kept myself away from my current-work during the one week congress meeting, the one week catching up with my former bosses and academy-friends, and the one week family vacation. In particular, that week of family vacations was forbidden to current-work related email. Just me and mom, friends and family. It's a completely new feeling to come back home to Singapore and find some 20+ current-work-related emails to read and answer, 1000+ new articles in my feed read list and a small to do list including some bureaucratic red tape to digest in order to renew my work permit,  re-submit articles and referee work. I like the feeling. 

That time afar from my current-work was a kind or reboot that refreshed my mind. After this reboot, I'm ready to go back to do physics for hire for a while. Majulah! 

Merida

Mérida is the state capital of Yucatán—in paper, the Free and Sovereign State of Yucatán, magnificent, ain't it?—,one of the three states in the Península de Yucatán; the other two are Campeche and Quintana Roo. It is said that when the Spanish Conquistadores came and ask for the name of the land, the Mayas just said to themselves a simple "look, they talk funny" which sounded like "uh yu ka t'ann" and so the place was christened Yucatán. It seems like the original name was Mayab, but I'm not sure about this.

Yucatán has a rich and bloody history tied to land possession and the green gold, henequen; a fiber producing cactus good for ropes and twine, and strong alcohol that is not as good as tequila. Why green gold? I bet you can answer yourself by  imagining how big the demand for rope and twine was in the times of maritime exploration and conquest. Anyway, short story long, the Spanish came, saw, conquer (~1517) and found out about the henequen and sisal cactuses (first serious studies are from ~1700). Thus, Haciendas were established based on the labor of the indigenous population with henequen production starting around late 1700 and lasting all the way to early 1900—I really recommend the journalism essay Barbarous Mexico, it exposes the regime of Porfirio Diaz and the first chapter deals with the human slavery conditions at Yucatán circa 1910—.

Before coming back to La Blanca Mérida (Merida, the white) let me rant a little bit. I really don't know if the place got its nickname from the imperial white mansions that one can still find at Paseo Montejo—the city's main boulevard—or from the skin color of the ruling class—up to this day the term Mestizo (mixed blood) is used to refer those working as helping hands and other industrious labor, I heard it last week from an MC at an official state dinner and almost got a stroke—. Rant over.

Mérida sits at the outer rim of the Chicxulub crater, its location near the sea and archaeological sites makes it the perfect place to set base camp. A few years ago, my bro Martin and I stayed there for a week, we used to travel to an archaeological site cluster one day, wander in the city another, go to the beach and so on.

The pearl of the Mayab—I'm assuming this is another nickname of Mérida as I saw it here and there on produce from the land—,untouched by the violence that plagues the north of Mexico, has become a city of refugees; I heard that in the last three years the population increased from eight hundred thousand to one million inhabitants. The State's Governor greeted us with a speech focused on welcoming immigrants ready to invest in the state or, in our case, with experience in science and technology. There was a curious thing in that speech, the Governor exalted the peace and safety of the city; yes, only the city. I  really felt sad listening to the major state official saying that peace and safety is the main attraction of a single city. Sad but true, Mexico seems to be that fucked up.

Anyway, Mérida is a safe, peaceful and clean gateway to the natural and archaeological wonders of the Yucatan Peninsula. It is still filled with helpful people that knows they thrive with tourism, so make sure to consider it for your next vacation spot before it is taken over by the rich-enough-to-relocate-inside-Mexico-but-not-so-rich-to-relocate-to-another-country assholes that speed over water puddles just for the fun of running you down in stagnant water.

Ps. Do not leave your camera at home thinking that it will mark you as a tourist and put a bullseye in your back. It is a beautiful place to take pictures and it is still safe. I regret leaving my camera back home.

Creation

In the beginning there was a bang! The observer was there—otherwise, how could there be a bang? You know? All that quantum koan bullshit..."if there's a bang in the middle of the megaverse and there's no observer to collapse the blah blah blah."

The observer realized that a measurement was made, cursed his stupidity and left to prepare a new multiverse—in the end, that was supposed to be a test of decoherence times and, now, it was all messed up. Let thermodynamics do its thing on this one.

Damn!

A few months ago, I started writing character profiles and back-stories for something that I hoped would become a story told through short stories. I was doing so trying to deal with the violence in Mexico, hoping that in extending reality into fiction I could manage to explore my mind—mainly my fears on that subject. So The Damned started and has stayed in hiatus so far. It dealt with one of my largest fears for the future of Mexico: What if some people, common folks, start taking revenge on their own hands?

Well, it seems like my country is walking towards that road. A few weeks ago, a paramilitary group announced that they will take on a certain cartel and claimed the authorship of some thirty something corpses left one of the most important roads in Veracruz—all this while the Judicial power was having a meeting at the place, ergo the city was overflown with military, navy and federal police.

There are many questions that circle my head: why, how, who, etc., but these question will remain unanswered. Something is clear to me, this is the second paramilitary group that surfaces in Mexico so far—the first one was the squad of San Pedro rounded up by their own Mayor, if I remember well— and paramilitary, guerrilla and cartels cost Colombia thousands of lives—something over the one hundred thousand—and thousands of displaced civilians and fighters—the armistice brought back into society some fifty thousand paramilitary.

Lex talionis is not an answer to our problems as a country. The jus gladdi belongs to Mexico's Justice and their enforcers in the streets and courts. Only through strong honest and transparent institutions people will trust in the institutions and not take revenge in their hands. It is not an easy path but there should be a way to reach that goal. There should be a way to get together society and government to build up stability, justice, honesty and, as ultimate goal, the rule of the law with dignity.

There are many examples to learn from as society and government, say Colombia to mention just one close to the country. Now, the question is can I learn and do something? Is there a sense in trying? As always, I only have questions... answers seem to elude me, all I can do is write and hope the squares will fall into place.

Last weekend movies...

I'm gonna try my best to keep this theme up to date. It has been months that Lyx and I do not watch a film together. Also, the past weeks was a work-harder week and I just manage to watch a movie and few episodes... 

1. The Adjustment Bureau, **
   The film is very loosely based on Adjustment Team by Phillip K. Dick—one of the most fabulous sci-fi writer ever, if you ask me—. Although the short story seems to belong to the public domain I was not able to find it and I only vaguely remember the guy being married and brought to the one. Anyway, the film was not bad and it is good for a no-brain-allowed Sunday.

Interesting times keep flowing and I really need to keep my mind away from over-worrying. I have started writing short ideas and try to watch at least one episode of Supernatural when I get home; I've just finished the fourth season and in the end I liked it a lot—in the beginning, I thought they would just fuck things up but, gee thanks, it was not the case.

Getting a high quality eps from your data

In all these years plotting data, I have tried many methods. The one I am most satisfied with is gnuplot. This free program can generate anything one has ever dream of from data. In the past, I used to have basic scripts for my favourite types of graphs; problem is, I'm not that patient any more. Still, I'm not ready to pay the big bucks needed to buy a fancy point and click plotting software and, above all, I'm not interested in illegal software.

This is my situation I usually generate my final data from FORTRAN. Usually, universities and research centres provide Matlab or Mathematica licences for us. I have tried doing figures with Matlab, but I found it quite primitive and, typically, I ended up investing as much time as it took to modify one of my old gnuplot scripts. So, I started using Mathematica to load my data from text files and generate my figures.

Important things to have in mind:

• A typical one column figure has a size of 3 3/8 inches; say Phys. Rev., J. Opt. Soc. Am. or J. Phys. journals.
• Typical figure sizes are one, one and a half, and two columns.
• Usually, journals ask for high resolution graphics, say 300, 600 or 1200dpi.

Things to remember when preparing figures in Mathematica:

• Standard image resolution value is 72dpi. One can set this to any value by using the command ImageResolution -> 300, for example.
• If you are saving in svg file format resolution doesn't matter at all but for determining the size of the image. 
• Always set your image size according to the resolution you are using, ImageSize->{(3+3/8)*300, Automatic}, for example.

Now, the simplest way to produce a figure is just exporting your figure to eps with the command Export["FigureName.eps", PlotName, ImageResolution->300]. Sometimes this is the best and fastest way to produce an eps. Always keep your fonts around the 12pt size. Do not mind how the image looks in the notebook, always check the final eps to see the figure in its real scale.

For those times when the result is crappy, I would export the figure to svg with the command Export["FigureName.svg", PlotName], for example. Then, I would modify the axis labels, legends, and other text in the figure with Inkscape. Inkscape is free, light, and easy to use and can save your graphics to eps format; it can also generate pure latex or eps+latex output. In the case that the text in the figure is formulas, I would use psfrag to replace dummy strings inserted with Inkscape.

Warning: As of today, if  you use psfrag, download Inkscape v0.46 and do not forget to de-select the convert text to path option in the dialogue for save as eps. The point behind using Inkscape v0.46 is that this is the last version that doesn't use Cairo to convert to eps and still writes text as text in the eps.

Edit: Janus told me today about a plugin for Inkscape that renders latex input into a graphic layer, it is called textext. Thing is, it works almost immediatly with Inkscape v0.46 and delivers wonderful results but I haven't been able to make it work with v0.49 so far. Nevertheless, good bye psfrag!