An Email I Never Got From BYU

One thing about changing schools during our education is that we get to see how different departments, schools and states handle basic stuff. Having only ever attended BYU before starting graduate school it was a slight adjustment starting school at UNC. Looking back I realize that the BYU physics department, and BYU as a whole is very "official" for lack of a better word (some would call it "up tight" or "autocratic"). At BYU any email sent out to faculty, staff and students had to first be submitted to committee, reviewed, "queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters." OK maybe not that bad but it was a process.

At UNC we have a department list-serv (actually we have several, I think I am on 5 or 6) where anyone in the department can send an email everyone else in the department, without prior approval. I won't share any of the more interesting (or in need of censoring) emails that I have gotten, but I did recently get an email that I would never get at BYU, for many different reasons.

Subject: flooding

"people in the basement should be on the lookout for water
during this heavy rain. the chance will get worse over time
it is going to rain hard until Friday. let me know if you see water
in the floor."

First, it doesn't rain in Utah, and if it does it is nowhere close to the rain we get in North Carolina. Second, at BYU the custodians are the ones that typically keep track of things like this, not the grad students. It would seem that at UNC this would fall under "building maintenance" which is separate from "housekeeping", thus the custodians could not do anything about it even if they noticed because of union, accounting, and organizational rules (gotta love socialism!). Third, no capitalization, and at least one grammatically incorrect sentence.

This little email was a simple reminder of some of the basic differences between BYU and UNC (and I would venture most other places).

The Go Programing Language?

It appears Google has created a very interesting programming language. Here are the highlights I care about:

1. Has array slicing. (This is the only advantage Fortran has to C in my opinion.  Slicing makes some mathematical routines soooo much easier to code as well as vectorize.)
2. Google claims it runs essentially as fast as C/C++ code.
3. It compiles much faster than C/C++.
4. Has garbage collection.
5. It was built from the ground up to be a parallel language.  The "Go routines" run concurrently.
6. In addition to slicing, it has a lot of Python features like dictionary type objects. (You all know, other than speed, Python is the greatest language on earth.)
7. In addition to 6, it was designed to feel like a dynamic language like Python but again have the speed of C.
8. It claims it is very memory safe and has built in features to prevent stack overflows.
9. It's open source.
10. It's Google!

If Google has actually created a language that is as fast as C but has a feel similar to Python with array slicing I am about ready to convert today.  Especially if doing parallel programming is straight forward.

Slashdot article here.

Here is a video showing how fast it compiles code. (This is scary fast. I wonder how they engineered this given how much time and effort is to making good C compilers.)

Doing Math In Your Head

Some of us have impressed others which the kind of math we can carry out in our head.  However, this guy takes the cake.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

Some people consider the death penalty cruel and unusual, and others think things like Joe Araipo's Tent City, an outside jail in the Arizona desert that gets up to 120° where inmates have to wear pink underwear, us unusually harsh.

However, in the Philippines inmates are being forced to do choreography for songs by Micheal Jackson and Queen as seen below!  

Just when are people from the Philippines going to rise up and say enough is enough?!?!  Criminals are people too!!! (They even made a few of them wear tutus for the queen video.)

BYU Students May Not Be As Nice As You Think

In almost all sports there is some level of technically illegal contact that regularly occurs. In football defensive backs and receivers commonly bump, grab, and push each other. In basketball the line between a charge and a blocking foul is razor thin. In soccer there are some hard tackles and even the occasional hand to the face or gut. All of this, however, is put to shame by this clip from a women's soccer game between BYU and New Mexico.

So as it turns out BYU athletics might not be as saintly as originally thought. Next time you play soccer at BYU (or New Mexico for that matter), wear a helmet and wrap yourself in bubble wrap.

Statistics on Grad School and Getting a Job

When I (someday) graduate from CU and receive my doctorate, I will be the first person in my family to do so. We have had a small army of Nelsons with Masters degrees and one law degree that I know of, but as far as I know no one before me has gone for a PhD. Since this career path is something I have never seen in my family, I am always very curious to know more about it. I would like to know things like what kind of job I'm likely to have after I graduate and what the job market is like. I imagine that anybody reading this blog as a grad student or undergrad wants to know the same thing.

To answer these questions, I recommend talking to people who have done it. Their experiences cannot be reduced to data, so get them in verbal form. However, as a physicist, I much prefer looking at data over trying to average people's life-stories. Luckily, the American Institute of Physics has a wealth of statistical information on their website. So here's what I have found by running my own little analysis of their data. All of these conclusions will be drawn from data from 1998 to 2008 (or 2006 in some cases). I used a decade worth of data because I felt it was a good compromise between getting trends that are valid today and giving enough averaging time to make this valid for the next 4-6 years (when I hope to be in the graduating/job finding phase). Here's what I've found (in no particular order):

1. For physics PhD programs in the US, on average, per year, there have been 2,519 incoming students, 12,358 enrolled students, and 1,222 PhDs awarded. If you assume a constant dropout rate per year, that means that it takes on average 7.6 years to graduate, 10.01% of students dropout per year, and on average only half of those who start a PhD program will finish it. Those numbers vary by about plus or minus 10% on any given year, except the graduation time, which varies by plus or minus 2 years.
2. The number of incoming graduate students in American programs is growing by an average of 3.3% per year, while the number graduating is growing by 1.0% per year. By comparison, the percent growth in full-time equivalent (FTE) physics faculty has done the following:In on average, the number of FTE faculty is growing by 0.67% per year for PhD-granting departments, and roughly twice that (1.36% and 1.38%, respectively) for Masters and Bachelors departments. The general trends look like this:

I was thinking about drawing some conclusions, but instead I think I'll let you draw your own. Comment away on what you think this all means.

A Republic of No-Confidence

I am personally a fan of a republic as a form of government. I don't understand governmental economic policy and its implications or the ins and outs of international diplomacy anywhere near well enough to make educated judgments about these important issues and frankly I don't want to. I find a lot of the details boring, frustrating, and tedious. Instead, I try to understand the broad issues and then vote for men and women who have the intelligence to understand those issues and whose broad opinions agree with mine. In essence, I don't want a pure democracy, I want a republic.

Couple that with the fact that something like 75% of people in the US will rate themselves as having above average intelligence or decision-making ability and the fact that Congress has an approval rating hovering around 25%, and you get this fun little fact: a Rassmuson survey showed that 51% of Americans rate their understanding of healthcare reform as excellent or good, while only 31% rate their Congressman's understanding as excellent or good.

That means that at least 20% of Americans believe that they understand a major piece of legislation better than the man or woman they elected specifically to understand and evaluate these sorts of issues. Note that this question wasn't asking if people agreed with their Congressman's opinion of the bill - only whether or not they understood it.

How do you have a republic where the citizen have little to no confidence that their elected officials are qualified to do their jobs?

Domestic Partnerships, Housing and UC Irvine

At UC Irvine, it turns out, you cannot live with a member of the opposite sex on campus unless you are either married or officially domestic partners.  That's right, here even heterosexuals can enter domestic partnerships. (I am trying to refrain from saying some joke about how homosexuals should fight this in order to protect the sanctity of domestic partnerships, but I will pass. Maybe call it proposition 8^(-1)?)

Anyways, given that it is way too expensive to live off campus here, people are actually are willing to enter official domestic partnerships in order to split the rent with their friend who happens to be a coed.  In fact, one of my friends just did this today in order to move into a cheaper apartment.

It's amazing what economics will drive people to do!  These partnerships are legally binding and therefore have all the ties that makes.  My friend, and I am assuming he wasn't joking, went so far as to create a prenuptial agreement.  (That's right, "In California, Registered Domestic Partners may also enter into a prenup.")

All to save money on an apartment!

The Future Preventing The LHC From Working?

Two authors, Holger Nielse and Masao Ninomiya, have been cooking up a crazy theory which can be read in detail from their articles here, here and here.

Basically, they put forward the idea that perhaps the reason we keep failing to find the Higgs boson is that something from the future is stopping us from doing it.  From their latest article:

This previous work was concerned with looking for backward causation [noting] bad luck for large Higgs producing machines, such as LHC and the never finished SSC (Super- conducting Super Collider) stopped by Congress because of such bad luck, so as not to allow them to work.

So, in other words, perhaps the "bad luck" of the SSC being stopped by congress and the more recent bad luck in getting the LHC working comes from causing originating from the future.

Dennis Overbye has this puts it like this:

[Perhaps] the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather...“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,”

Now, I know of scientists that think this is such crack-pottery that they are furious such papers have been successfully posted on arXix.org.  This is really crazy stuff.

But, if it is forever the case that potential Higgs producing machines have such bizarre bad luck at least we will have one theory why. :)

My Problem with Health Care - or - The $12,000 Baby

Recently I had two experiences that coincided with each other and quite frankly, proved the point of the other. Both dealt with American Health Care. The first is that my wife had a baby (several months ago) and over the past three months we have been receiving and having to pay the bills from having a baby. Fortunately (this is odd that I am saying this and I will explain why in a moment) we had insurance, so insurance covered most of the cost, but we were also left with a hefty bill. For some it may not be hefty but on a grad student's salary it came out to approximately one month's salary. The second experience that I had was that I recently read an article in The Atlantic magazine about American Health Care. It is a fairly long article, but definitely worth the reading. It gives an interesting, and very honest, assessment of the American Health Care industry. I won't comment too much about the article, it speaks for itself, but I will say that after reading it I could see several things about health care in my own experience with a new baby that were mentioned in the article. Basically it left me convinced that the current American Health Care system is fundamentally dishonest in its method of payment (not in its level of care), which breeds all kinds of problems and burdens everyone with ridiculously expensive health care (or prohibitively expensive). From this I have concluded that the only way to fix the problem (i.e. paying for health care), or to really reform health care, is to burn the entire system to the ground and start over.

I offer two practical solutions to reform health care:

1.First, Prevent employers from providing health care benefits to their employees. Exceptions can be made for high risk occupations, such as coal miners, fire fighters etc.. But do university professors, attorneys, sales clerks and bag boys really need health insurance through their employer?

For those who object and say it makes perfect sense to provide health care through an employer, I ask, does your employer also provide auto insurance, home insurance or gas insurance? (Gas insurance, what is that? See below.) Does your employer contract with a grocery store to provide you with groceries? If the answer to these questions is no, then why should they pay for health insurance? You only expect them to do it because that is the way it has been done for many years. It does not mean it is a good way of paying for health care.

The benefit of this is that individuals are wiser with their own money. If they have to pay for their own insurance, they will make absolutely sure that it is the cheapest option out there. Because I am a graduate student I am automatically enrolled in the TA/RA health plan with the University. In other words I really don't care (or even know) how much my department is paying for my health insurance. But if I had to pay my own, I would make absolutely sure that it was as cheap as possible. My wife and son are not automatically covered under my plan, we have to get our own insurance and we found that it was cheaper to use a different plan rather than adding them onto mine (about $1000/year cheaper, which is about 5% of my annual salary. That's quite a difference.). So imagine the effect if everyone payed 5% less of their annual salary for health insurance.

2. Second, have health insurance only cover catastrophic health care, things that require hospitalization or special extended care, including elder care. These are the major costs of health care. To understand why I say this consider this example. Every time you go to a gas station you have to pay for your own gas. Now imagine instead of actually paying for your gas you contract with a third party and pay them a flat rate per year to get gas from certain suppliers. Each time you fill up you also have to pay a percentage of the total price, but you have no control over the price and you cannot negotiate the price. As a matter of fact you cannot even find out what the price of the gas was until the third party sends you a bill in the mail two weeks later. Any gas station you visit unconditionally refuses to quote you a price until you have actually received the gas and are notified of the price by the gas insurance company. If you insist on paying for your own gas and refuse to use one of the gas insurers then the gas station will arbitrarily raise the price of the gas by 250% (I'm not making that number up) and then inform you of the price and offer to negotiate the price with you, but only after you have already taken and used the gas. If this sounds insane to you, then I ask, why should we do the same with health care? We have have auto insurance for accidents, not for common maintenance and gas. Why not do the same for health care?

If you argue that we can't this because health care is so expensive, then I respond, the only reason why it is so expensive in the first place is because the system (we, ourselves) made it expensive.

These solutions may be simplistic but at least they are a start. So why did I decide to go on a rant and offer these ideas, well that brings me back to my first experience that I mentioned. I am convinced that it should not cost $12,000 for a baby to be born in a hospital, even if it is a very good hospital. It doesn't make sense, nor do I think it is honest, for an institution to say, "The total cost will be $12,000. But because you have insurance we will knock off $6,000 from the price and after they pay up you will only have to pay $1,400. Doesn't that sound good? Because if you didn't have insurance you would have to pay the full $12,000. Thank goodness for insurance *smile* *wink*." (Actual prices used. I rounded to the nearest $100.)

Babies are precious but $12,000 for 3.5 days in the hospital is dishonest.