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!

Changes related to lists of Papers, Books and Movies

As you can see, I have been unable to keep posting what I am reading/watching in the last month. I have realized I was using a time consuming format for this end. I have just decided to try twitter to list whatever I'm consuming as soon as I'm consuming it, so if you want to know what I am reading or watching please use the tweet box at HambrientosVagabundos.org or follow me in twitter: @BMRodriguezLara

Here, I will keep posting my unpredictable rants and even more unpredictable musings. Sometimes, when I find a paper/book/movie that really amazes me, I will post about it here.

Thank you

\B

Preacher

The old man came into town in silence, bent by the weight of a hiker's backpack and set camp in the remains of the old university. After a couple of days, he emerged with a heavier looking backpack and a tote bag filled with books. Then, he spoke at the town's market.

They said anarchy came with the riots and those were brought by the drought, famine and general collapse of the economy but I know that's a lie we tell ourselves to rationalize our existence. Truth is, a false anarchy started  when everybody else became just a tool for personal gain and success. We told ourselves: money is needed to eat, to dress, to have fun and find happiness; nobody ever thought you cannot eat money. The search for happiness was lost and that of power, wealth and fame substituted it at large. The inner self diluted by the wash of pose. True anarchy would have been deliverance, instead the false anarchy of vacuity and personal delusion took hold with every inch gained by the dream of greed. True anarchy would have been better: in the sense of liberating freedom and inner peace. Instead the vice circle of selfishness reinforced itself and brought us here. There's a way out but... Could you trust me?

He didn't even look around, just got down from the old soapbox, took his stuff and walked away. 

Latex with Adobe Illustrator

I have been a linux user for a long time but last year I bought a laptop with a digitizer screen and the lack of good results in linux made me switch to Win 7. In the last year, I have learned that a lot of GPL software is ported to Windows and the switch is not painful at all. Problem is that the last update in one of my favorite page editing software: Inkscape has made my figure editing work flow (I never thought I would use this word) stall a little. So, I decided to give Adobe Illustrator a try as CS education is not so expensive. 

Basically, I need to add latex formulas to Illustrator, there's a nice script to do so here. I encountered a minor problem with this script; it seems like page frame is no longer the last element in the pdf compiled by pdflatex. Thus, the formulas generated by the script and imported into Illustrator were lacking the first element and had a full A4page frame. 

The script file is efficiently commented and a quick look into it brought me to Line 66:

for( var i=grp.pageItems[0].pageItems.length-1; --i>=0; )

After a few iterations, I found that the page frame is now the first page item and so the final modified line is:

for( var i=grp.pageItems[0].pageItems.length; --i>=1; )

This fixed my problem and now I have complete latex formulas in Illustrator with just the minimal frame around the object.

I hope this solves your issues too.

Last week papers (20th week of 2012)

From May 6th to 12th, 2012, a complete mess of a week with no time for small talk about the papers. Sorry...

Published

• "Transformation design method for quantum states" by  De-Hone Lin, Physical Review A 85, 053605 (2012).


• "Testing the equivalence between the canonical and Minkowski momentum of light with ultracold atoms" by Wen-Zhuo Zhang, Peng Zhang, Ru-Quan Wang, and Wu-Ming Liu, Physical Review A 85,  053604 (2012).


• "Quantum entanglement in nanocavity arrays" by T. C. H. Liew and V. Savona,  Physical Review A 85 ,  050301(R) (2012).


• "Mechanical Evidence of the Orbital Angular Momentum to Energy Ratio of Vortex Beams" by C. E. M. Demore et. al.,  Physical Review Letters 108 ,  194301 (2012).
    

Preprints

• "Quantum phase transition in the Dicke model with critical and non-critical entanglement" by L. Bakemeier, A. Alvermann and H. Fehske, arXiv: 1204.4974v1 [quant-ph].