So, you want to do science, uh? (Rants to Young Scientists Part I: Citations)

Sometimes, I wish someone had made that statement and followed with some advice, real world advice. I mean, Medawar's "Advice to a young scientist" was great in convincing me science was about inquiry, patience and common sense —the well-known adage of  1% inspiration and 99% perspiration— but, after a few years into the academia, I wished someone had told me about the dark side of research: citation engineering, steering and hiding just to mention some examples. I mean, all these lay inside the gray area between ethical and unethical behavior and a simple search brings up discussion forums on the topic in all the scientific communities from social to natural sciences.

I guess, right now, it is my frustration talking: I have seen a couple of recently published articles related to our late work that doesn't even bother to cite us even when we have introduced some basic concepts or techniques on the topic, our manuscript was published at a major journal and, also, a simple scholar search brings out our papers on the top of the list.

I'm curious about the motivation behind these practices. Discarding those cases when there's truly no knowledge about the previous work and results have been re-derived from the start — t happens, believe me—, I can imagine that some guys are so worried about fame and recognition, that they try to bring their work and only their work into the playground to increase the visibility of their papers above similar results from other groups. Some other guys may wish to engineer their metrics by increasing the citations to this or that paper, even in cases unrelated to the matter at hand, in order to fulfill requierements of evaluation agencies. Or maybe I'm completely wrong and don't understand the motivations behind us, human beings. 

So, you want to do science, right? Well, it's the best job you will have if you are into it. It's not as logical, ethical and "pure" as you would expect. Shit happens even in the ivory tower of academia but the good things is that the nice ethical guys are more than those in the gray side of the ethical/moral spectrum. The best part is: it depends on you to keep it that way. Cite, cite truthful, cite well. Sometimes your superior will have the last word —been there— just don't go down without raising the point, that will get you an explanation about how it is not unethical or amoral engineering or steering citations —it's up to you to buy it or not, I didn't—.

Sorry, we're open!

Hello world,

I have decided to come back online to seek catharsis. You see, I have been recently appointed Investigador Titular A at the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica (INAOE). I am a newbie to the rat race of tenure track positions so I did the most stupid thing I could have thought about: Start developing old ideas, trying to collaborate with well established researchers, get a couple of students and, basically, try to publish or perish... Bad idea.

Why, would you ask. Well, it happens that I am also getting married next May.

In short, I have put myself in the most crazy situation I have ever put myself into in my life. Now, I am co-responsible for two doctoral students, teaching a graduate class, trying to publish some papers, searching for a good idea to write a grant due to the end of February, taking care of a friend's house, traveling to and fro for wedding matters, and screwing up things now and then.

For example, I just realized I got an awful typo in the last equations of our latest prepint! I completely forgot to type the interaction terms! 

Sooooo...

It's time to keep doing what I have done all this time, Prepare lectures a week ahead, try to finish projects well ahead of deadlines, and add some rules like fixing a precise hour for meetings with the doctoral students and working at most with two research projects at a time. Also, I need to let go and that's why I'm back.

Sorry, we're open!

Fear...

Fear is an emotion caused by a perceived threat (real or imaginary).

Fear is a kind of survival mechanism, an automatic response that prepares mind and body for the unknown; a really bad unknown. 

Fear, reigned, may lead to acts beyond our idea of human capabilities or, unreigned, to crushing anxiety crippling life at the innermost sanctuary of the mind. 

I had never felt fear living in Mexico. Now I do and I'm not even in my homeland. No more than five years ago, the sight of a random guy walking aimlessly the parking lot during the wee hours just made me think of a dude smoking a cigarette or waiting for his friends to keep the party on; now, it kept me looking through the window for the half hour the dude was there, searching for security's phone in the emergency sheet at the door and wondering where the fuck was the security guard whose snoring bothered me all the nights before that night. 

I never thought I would get to that. I never thought I would stop taking the overnight bus home to visit mom or giving up driving uncountable hours by day or night during vacations. I gave those up no more than five years ago. 

I know what it is to live a normal life with normal fears and that's either in the so far untouched center of Mexico (Puebla and Queretaro seem to be the less conflictive) or far from this beautiful country. Sad but true.

Fuck fear!

Latex in Inkscape 0.48

Last time I installed my favorite GPL drawing tool Inkscape, I had to install old version 0.46 instead of new 0.48 because the latex app was not working in the new one. Well, today, being the stupid me with the memory span of a goldfish, I wondered why I had the old and not the new version of Inkscape and, finding no reason for being such a backward computer user in my 5 second memory span, proceeded to update it. You can imagine the result, I was unable to edit latex on any of my figures.

I found this blog with a solution to the problem of latex in Inkscape 0.48, actually it is a very simple solution, and everything is working fine now. The blog is called La Consigna, it is very helpful as it has a lot of technical solutions to issues that a matlab, latex user may find in his daily use/abuse. 

Simulating life...

Today, I found a short story by Frederic Pohl about the mechanical simulation of life through persona impressions on mechanical constructions for marketing research, "The tunnel under the world" written in the 50's. It remind me of another two short stories, "They" by Robert A. Heinlein and "Time out of joint" by Phillip K. Dick, with similar theme: life as a simulation. I am not sure which one was the first, my bet would be Heinlin's "They" as he is the oldest of the three—I think it is something like: Heinlein 1900s 1907, Pohl 1910s 1919, and Dick 1920s 1928. I would be surprised if They, The Tunnel under the world, and Time out of joint is not the published order of the stories but there's always wikipedia or google to check. I'm lazy to do it now  Yes, they short stories came in that order—. Anyway, it seems like the idea of life as a simulation has been recurrent since the early 40s up to our modern era (Matrix, The 13th floor, Abre los ojos, etc.).

Thanks to having so much free time and wikipedia, I've just found that there exist such a thing as a "simulation hypothesis" studied by some philosophers like Nick Bostrom or David Chalmers—funny, both sound very Swedish—. Chalmer's paper sounds less technical as it's embedded in the Matrix phenomenon, while Bostrom's comes right from a philosophy journal.

Well, I leave you those links and works there while I start reading some philosophy to see if I can understand something out of it.

I, the DSRL dummy: HDR for high contrast situations

Most of the time, I get to a very nice place in the wrong moment; say, the day before yesterday I went for a walk in downtown Singapore and when I found Fort Canning's navigation beacon the sky was filled with clouds and the sun was just behind the light house. At that point I knew that any picture I tried to take will be crappy:

Fig. 1: Forth Canning Light (f/7.1, 1/500s, ISO 100, 20mm, no processing).

As you can see there's lot of over- and under-exposed sections and I should just delete the image as my developing skills will surely make it worse than it already is. 

High Dynamic Range to the rescue. I was trying to figure out a way to shoot the picture without a gradient neutral density filter when my tripod fell to the groud. Wait! Why do not take advantage of the new dent in the tripod and try to shoot a HDR image to try and make a better picture? As my grandmother says: You cannot have everything in life, I was waiting for the sky to part a little and get some blue sky on the composition but my patience was just 20min. long and this is what I got:

Fig. 2: Forth Canning, ±2eV in 5 steps, Software: Luminance, Algorithm:Mantiuk'06.  

As you can see, the composition of under- and over-exposed frames allows for a still which is better than the one before; for instance, you can actually see all the elements in the image. The settings for this HDR still frame are Mantiuk '06 algorithm with Luminance HDR CF:0.3, SF: 2.0, DF:15. 

I tried all the algorithms that come with Luminance HDR and Mantiuk '06 was the one that suited my eye the most in this situation. I tried going bananas and creating a higher contrast image and this alien-looking thing came out with everything maxed up (CF:1, SF:2, DF:99):

Fig. 3: Same as above different algorithm's parameters.

In the end, I am happy the new dent in my tripod led to an idea that ultimately worked out for me this time but I think I will try to get a set of graduated neutral density filters as well.

Pros: Able to shoot a balanced clear sky picture.
Con: Need to shoot at least 3 frames to cover the contrast range.

Happy Shooting!

Ponte en los zapatos del otro...

It seems that Mexico is going back to the one that my parents knew, a country where "desaparecidos" are a common occurrence. The difference is that back in my parent's time the kidnapper was the government only, now the role is taken by both government and criminals.

It is a good thing that at least now there's freedom of speech and press and people ready to go to the streets and media to talk about it:

"Ponte en los zapatos del otro" (Get in each other's shoes) is a campaign by "Movimiento por la Paz" (Movement for Peace) to bring into our minds the fact that forced disappearances—a commonplace occurrence during the strong days of the party dictatorship—are coming back to our times—it seems they never stopped—but they are now committed by both government and criminal organizations.

I do not commune with the slight feeling that the open war on drug cartels should stop that the video seems to give due to the last phrase of Sicila's part but I believe that peace, due process and reign of law should be guaranteed in Mexico. 

Last minute pontification: I used to hear a lot: "tenemos el pais que merecemos" (we have the country that we deserve) but we should aim to  "construir el pais que queremos" (build the country we want). Sometimes, I am ashamed I left, then, I remember why I left. Corruption should be battled at all levels, starting at the self. It is amazingly embarrassing that such things as a state official carrying 25 millions MXP in cash pass by almost no pres coverage, no legal consequences to the state government  and no civil reaction to such things (note from Spain's El Pais, here). 

I, the media consumer...

The life and times of a starving vagabond is many things and nothing at all. It is an attempt to practice English, which allegedly is my second language. Sometimes it is a conduct to free my shoulders through cathartic ranting or disjointed—but therapeutic—narrative. Most of the time, it is just about post-consumption impressions.

While the starving part of the blog's title comes from a story of two close-friends (cousin Shaggy and I) driving through Mexico without much money and eating boiled potatoes and eggs, cheese and hard bread for one week, it also reflects my urge for consumerism and consumption of narratives in any given media format. I hunger for stories presenting diverse points of view that may—or, most probably, not due to my intrinsic stupidity—widen my perspective on the condition of being human.

Being human is so amazing, so different: there's almost 7 billion different ways of being human in the present; plus some three or four billion death ways of being human since the beginning of homo sapiens. Can a single individual experience the whole spectra of humanity? My answer is no, being human is a conjunction of the person, his/her ideas and actions, people interacting with him/her (with their ideas and actions), surroundings and the succession of random events that, all together, I come to call life.

In recent years, I have become a consumer of other people's points of view and have got it with mine. Curiously, I have started to find more and more taxing—and kind of useless—to be in social gatherings where there are so many people that makes it impossible to have a true dialogue leading to the exchange of opinions. I find myself leaving parties with small pieces of information from this or that person and end up reconstructing a story that has my point of view inherently embedded. I want to learn what you think about love, honesty, ethics, vengeance, religion, death and whatnot. I don't want to reconstruct your ideas through dilute and disjoint one minute burst of conversation and end up creating what I think is your narrative from my point of view. I rather read, listen or watch them whole in media. Thus, my consumerism—my desire to gather and collect enormous quantities of information—is born.

Trying to turn my consumption of media for the better, I use it to practice my English and synthesis skill. I'm not trained in aesthetics nor semantics, thus my reports on the consumed works are nothing but online dumps of impressions left on me by them—and a sorry excuse to use English in a non-scientific context—. Anyway, I hope the Last Weekend Movies or Last Month Book series of posts help you choosing a film, tv-series or book to kill time with.

Vacations... what do to with them?

I never know what to do with my vacations. I usually never take them and I usually get bored after a few days or even hours whenever I have to take them without having something in mind

Waking up late... check

Cleaning the house... check

Watching a movie while having breakfast... check

Chat with Lyx... check

Get bored and checking the arXiv, physics and optics journals for new papers... check

So, you see. I can even bet that before the day is gone I will be doing a little bit of algebra here and there now that I found something that caught my eye in today's listings at the arXiv.

Days off, those I can handle. It is easier to think of 18 waking hours to do whatever you want: sit at home to read a book, go downtown to take some photos, go to the cinema, all of the above. Vacations, well, vacations for me used to mean getting a one-month train pass and hop from city to city coach surfing at my friends' places for three or four days at a time; getting into the car alone or with family/friends and drive for a whole full month to hidden places; or grabbing the backpack, meet my friends at some interesting and wide area with hitchhiking and backpacking potential and spend a full month moving around the place trying to get to know it. Now, that requires a little bit of planning but not really that much, in the end you just have to figure the general area that you want to visit and that's all.

Today is the first day of my 28 day vacation. I'm supposed to be off the office until February 29th. and I have no clue what to do with it. I'm just taking the days because I cannot cash them in before my contract ends the 3rd of March. I have just one vague idea of what I want to do: Angkor Wat but that's it. I wish Lyx, Andre or Martin where here to just go over a place and start moving around until there's no Wat  left un-sighted or pagoda un-visited from Vietnam to Singapore—uhm, maybe that's way too much—.

Anyway, I'm too lackadaisical to get the visas to Vietnam and Cambodia. Most probably I will start doing my typical working day routine to overcome this ennui.

If you are looking for information about what countries require a visa for Mexicans, I found in the intertubes was this page that is photographically organized and this page that is alphabetically organized.

If you know about some beautiful place (not a beach!) in South Pacific Asia that doesn't require Mexicans a visa to travel there, please post it in the comments, I will be thankful.

Epiphany

I am lucky to have met Lyx and even luckier because she choose me to share her life. 

If there's something I have to be grateful and hopeful about in this end/begin of the year, it is having Lyx at my side. She is an angel carrying a message of love and optimism, she has the patience, perseverance, faith and heart of a saint that motivates, refreshes and keeps the light bright in my darkest hours. I am sure that for every time I have wanted to look at her with murder eyes, she has had at least ten reasons to murder me and walk free but she has never looked at me with something short of a smile. 

There are things I fear, becoming sclerotic is one of those, I have never being afraid of change and yet year by year, independent of the place or time, I have developed routines that allow me to isolate my feelings and thoughts. Lyx came, saw and conquer breaking these routines without knowing. It always brings me a smile to remember our first days together exchanging music and quotes from this or that band and book that I had never heard about. Later, when we had to live in different continents, she introduced our long distance movie weekends that have kept going on for the last two years with films that have made us laugh, cry and, most important, get closer and closer. 

She is a valiant woman, I admire her. When I couldn't go back to Mexico for Christmas in 2010 she traveled for the first time out of Mexico and U.S. and came all the way to Taiwan. I was dumb enough not to book my HSRT ticket with advance and got to the airport half an hour late, there she was, all smiles, not a speckle of anger on her. 

She's strong, steadfast and optimistic while I am weak, explosive and realistic and many times i wonder how we have found that fine balance that keeps us going without stepping on each other toes. Mostly it is because of her. She has a way to accept and moderate things, to get together ends that sometimes seems opposite to each other. 

I guess she has to suffer my non-optimistic view of the world, always trying to be prepared for this or that while, at the same time, tying to get the most out of the present because you never know what will happen in a few hours. And I say I guess, because she has never complained while it seems like I am the opposite. 

She has become my love and my life and I am thankful to God for putting me in her way and made her look my way. I am lucky and thankful to be at the side of this strong, brilliant and hard working woman that has no peer to be compared to and has to suffer this fool more often than every now and then.  

Thank you God and gracias vida for your love.

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!

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!

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.

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.

Solution to the Landau–Zener problem via Susskind–Glogower operators

Phys. Lett. A 375, 3770-3774 (2011) 

In this paper, we try to show what happens when you consider the Jaynes-Cummings model in the case of a linear time-dependent detuning between the two-level system and the field.

Experimental systems: I have my heart on circuit-QED, it is the simplest thing I can think of and our result may be helpful for modular processes. A more complicated model may or may not be of relevance in BEC physics.

Our major result: By using a right unitary transform involving Susskind-Glogower operators—these are the ones introducing the right unitary characteristic—it is possible to show that the Hamiltonian is exactly solvable; specifically, the Hamiltonian is diagonalizable in the Fock state basis of the field. Moreover, the time evolution for the Hamiltonian can be written in an exact closed form given in terms of solutions to Weber Differential Equation, which are related to the exact solutions to the Landau-Zener-Majorana-Stuckelberg problem. 

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

Minor results: It was curious for me to find out that in the case where the rotating wave approximation cannot be made it is still possible to diagonalize the Hamiltonian in the two-level system basis. Then, one can do numerics for small number of photons in the field. 

I was surprised to find that it was very simple to write a script that generates code to solve a system of some thousand coupled differential equations. 

The Physics: (Everybody always asks me about "the physics", so far I still don't have a clue what that question is really about but here's an attempt to an answer) Just for the sake of giving an example, in the article we present the physics in cases similar to those dealt by Landau, Zener and Majorana, to obtain the transition probability at the end of times for a system initially in the ground state at the beginning of time. Basically, the number of photons in the quantum field enhances the coupling between the two-level system and the field; this you can see at the level of the right unitary application.

Curious things: I learned the following,

• Majorana worked on the problem and published his results at the same time than Landau and Zenner. His formulation is closer to a full quantization of the Rabi problem. I found this while reviewing the literature on the topic.
• Stuckelberg worked in the problem, I haven't been able to get my hands on his paper so I have no clue what he said about the problem. I found this while attending the QIPC Zurich 2011 and someone gave a talk and mentionend the Landau-Zener-Stuckelberg-Mechanism.
• I should read Wikipedia at least once before finalizing a paper because in its entrance for Landau-Zener it clearly states the cites to Stuckelberg and Majorana's works.

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

Luggage

If you have to box in your life, how many boxes would you use? My answer: None. I need a small backpack and a small piece of luggage or a rucksack to pack all my clothes, and that's all.

I remember the first time I got out of Mexico, I had two huge pieces of luggage with me. All kinds of clothes. Spring, summer, winter clothes; light, medium, heavy jackets; raincoats. The whole works. That was ten years ago. Right now I'm packing for a one week trip and the realization hit me: all my clothes, all of them, may fit a small piece of luggage, a little bit packed but the one piece only. Ten years and seven different places I have called home later, my life fits a small backpack and all my clothes, winter, summer, spring, a small piece of luggage. 

I'm happy with that, I never thought to come close to live an almost nihilistic vagabond life. It has been a long way from hoarding mostly irrelevant goods to live with just enough to cover basic needs and one or two hobbies. I have come to truly enjoy that. What saddens my heart is not being able to see often all the family and friends I made along those years and places.

The Semantics/Philosophy Chat (as started by Yip): Loyalty versus Fidelity

A few months ago, a good friend of mine, Yip, posted the following question: 

What's the difference between between loyalty and fidelity?

Of course, being the equable wise-man that he is, Yip had already an answer for the question and, surely, was only looking for the joyful semantic, or most probably philosophical, argument. Having the sweet tooth for semantics, as it is way simpler than philosophy, I dared to bring my piece into the conversation. 

Caveat emptor: These are my sole musings without referring to a classical source. In other words, most probably, this is completely useless. 

In Spanish, the words are easier to distinguish than in English: Lealtad versus Fidelidad. They come straight from the Latin, the first from Legalitas and the second from Fidelitas, which derive from Lex and Fides; law and faith, respectively. Law is usually derived from a social covenant which all parts abide by good-will and, not necessarily but ideally, towards the common-good, while faith is derived from a sacred covenant. I would say that, for practical purposes, the first is based either on respect or, in the worst case, balanced retribution, read fear, while the second is fiduciary, that is, it is  based on trust/faith, I would even go as far to say that it is independent of the object of trust/faith, as in one way blind observance that comes with religious faith—I, the polarized autistic that I am, usually restrict my common use of fidelity/faithfulness to religious/absolute-truth matters only.

Of course, after the exchange, a second question came from my noble friend,

Who or What's to be the object of Loyalty or Fidelity?

I was fearing this one. In English it is quite simple, Fidelity is mostly used as the degree of exactness in a copy, and the equivalent Faithfulness is only used in the context of religious faith or marriage. On the other hand, Loyalty is used to express trust on someone or something ranging from nation to a brand. The same can be said in Spanish. So, my fear was not from this exact question, as the uses are clearly distinguished, but from the implications of Loyalty.

My problem comes from this. It is hard for me to understand even the simplest concept: Loyalty to a sovereign nation. I understand it (loyalty to a sovereign nation, in my case México and the country I live/work at the time) as abiding to the social contract trusting that it will be fulfilled by good-will or, else, enforced by the institutions of such society. My problem is that I cannot conceive loyalty as being born from fear of the law. I have the feeling that loyalty obeys a lex talionis, as does respect and trust; that is, a retribution law where loyalty/respect/trust is given in exchange of loyalty/respect/trust. I believe—I use the word believe because I cannot prove it—that loyalty out of fear is as fleeting as infatuation was in my high school days.

So, what do you think? Is loyalty tied to trust or respect? Can it be born from fear or, in my opinion, even worse, bought? I cannot foresee many implications, the ones I can see come in the form of the past dictatorial rule, mainly leading to world war the second, where common-good—a false common-good so far—is imposed rather than worked out. Sadly, that seems to be always the case in human society; with the possible exception of modern times Nordic countries and Germany where economic development has been supported upon the development of human rights.

As a side-note, I am a sucker for good-will and philosophy since someone—most probably one of my aunts—read to a young, easily impressed version of me this phrase attributed to  Aristotle: "I have gained this by philosophy: That I do without being commanded what others do from fear of the law"—it was later chiselled into the rock inside my head by continuously playing civilization ever since my college days; one thing is for sure,  it was the leading factor behind my reading of philosophy books in my aunt's library, and the continuous debate with the Jesuit seminary students that taught the social action classes in high school, but that's another story—. 

Luke 9: 3-5, 10:3-6

He said to them, “Take nothing for the journey, neither walking stick, nor sack, nor food, nor money, and let no one take a second tunic.4Whatever house you enter, stay there and leave from there.5And as for those who do not welcome you, when you leave that town, shake the dust from your feet in testimony against them.


---o---


Go on your way; behold, I am sending you like lambs among wolves.4Carry no money bag, no sack, no sandals; and greet no one along the way greet no one along the way.5Into whatever house you enter, first say, Peace to this household.6If a peaceful person  lives there, your peace will rest on him; but if not, it will return to you.