The celebrity physicist

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Charles Day

My wife and I have just returned from a vacation in my native Britain, where we indulged, as usual, in one of our guilty pleasures: buying the celebrity magazine Hello.

Unlike People, US Weekly, and some other celebrity magazines, Hello treats celebrities—especially royals—with respect and reverence. The approach pays off. Celebrities willingly grant the magazine’s writers and photographers access to their homes, weddings, vacations, and other aspects of their lives.

A typical issue of Hello contains about 150 glossy pages. Filling them each week with fresh news about (mostly) British celebrities might seem challenging. But in 21st-century Britain, celebrity status is conferred not just on famous actors, flamboyant millionaires, and victorious athletes. Participants in reality TV, wives or girlfriends of soccer players, and comedians whose heydays are long past also merit Hello‘s editorial attention.

Indeed, part of what fascinates me about Hello is that, somewhat incongruously, even celebrities whose achievements are modest are subject to lavish photo spreads and detailed, irony-free writeups. The 27 May issue devoted four photo-packed pages to Nell Andrew, whom Hello describes as “a model and exercise guru” and “former I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me out of Here! star.

Physicist Brian Cox and Doctor Who actress Jenna-Louise Coleman posed for the cameras at this year’s Arqiva British Academy Television Awards.

That same issue happened to coincide with the magazine’s 25th anniversary. One of the articles documented the celebratory party that was held at the Wallace Collection, an art museum in London. Rod Stewart, John Cleese, Joan Collins, and Sarah, Duchess of York, were among the guests. And so, too, was the physicist, popularizer of science, and rock musician Brian Cox.

Although I was surprised to see Cox in the pages of Hello, I shouldn’t have been. Besides being a member of the ATLAS team at the Large Hadron Collider, Cox is also an engaging and prolific broadcaster. His clear, direct style and enthusiasm for physics comes across on radio and TV. He’s even been credited for a dramatic increase in the number of British students who want to study physics.

I don’t know whether Cox seeks celebrity and enjoys its perks or whether he puts up with it in the name of science. But it doesn’t matter. Even though celebrities are hardly normal citizens, the fact that the readers of Hello see a physicist in the company of supermodels, boxing champions, and other mainstream celebrities helps—paradoxically—to make physics seem less arcane and more attractive.

Cox’s success makes me wonder if any of America’s gifted popularizers of physics should follow his example and embrace celebrity—for the good of science, if not for the parties.

“Supercomputers are awesome and why I love what I do!!!”

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Charles Day

This essay by Charles Day first appeared on page 88 of the January/February 2012 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, a bimonthly magazine published jointly by the American Institute of Physics and IEEE Computer Society:

My title comes from a comment made on Physics Today‘s Facebook page by Fernanda Foertter, a physicist who programs high-performance computers for a biotechnology company.

Although Foertter’s computational science background lies mostly in molecular dynamics simulations of polymers, her comment was about this post I wrote on colliding galaxies:

Here’s a great example of using computer simulation to help interpret observations. Jennifer Lotz of Space Telescope Science Institute and her colleagues modeled pairs of galaxies merging into each other. Stills from her movies were then compared with Hubble images of galaxies that looked as though they had just merged or were about to merge. The comparison yielded a new, more accurate estimate of the galaxy merger rate.

Until I encountered Foertter’s enthusiastic outburst, I hadn’t thought of supercomputers as being inspirational. As a science writer, I’ve seen plenty of stunning simulations of exploding supernovae, wiggling proteins, and other phenomena. I’ve written about climate calculations that gobbled up weeks of supercomputer time. Several Nobel Prizes, I know, have been awarded for work that required the services of high-performance computers.

But now I’ve come to realize that supercomputers are not just useful, they’re glamorous, too. What’s more, their awesome power could be used to encourage schoolchildren to think about careers in computational science.

To see what I mean, consider what is perhaps the most ambitious, most glamorous field of physics: particle physics. When I was in high school, I read Nigel Calder’s The Key to the Universe: A Report on the New Physics (Viking Press, 1977), which I found in my local library. There within its pages, in accessible prose accompanied by photos and diagrams, was the quest to discover the ultimate constituents of matter and the laws that govern their behavior.

Back in 1977, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator was Fermilab’s Main Ring, whose circumference and maximum collision energy were 6.4 km and 400 gigaelectronvolts. The current record holder, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, is 27 km in circumference and is designed to reach 7 teraelectronvolts. When the LHC ended its latest science run in October, it had smashed together 7 × 10¹⁴ protons and antiprotons.

To me, supercomputing—or high-performance computing, if you prefer—is the particle physics of computational science. The world’s fastest computer, K, consumes 10 megawatts of electricity to carry out 8 × 10¹⁵ floating-point operations per second. The problems that K and other supercomputers are programmed to tackle are among the toughest and most important in all of science, such as understanding Earth’s changing climate and figuring out how 10¹¹ interconnected neurons form a thinking human brain.

As I write this column, Supercomputing 2011 is being held at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. I was glad to see that the meeting’s education track has 19 talks altogether, including one entitled “Parallel: HPC Overview” by Charlie Peck and his colleagues.

Attending a lecture or class is still work to a student, no matter how interesting the topic. But reading a captivating book is play, and therefore more likely to fire a student’s imagination. I’ve just looked on Amazon for an inspiring book on supercomputing. I couldn’t find one.

Dress for physics success!

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Charles Day

Twelve years ago I edited a feature article for Physics Today entitled “So you want to be a professor!” Having recently landed a tenure-track job at San Diego State University, the article’s author, Matt Anderson, wanted to share his job-hunting experiences.

Among the advice that Anderson offered was this paragraph on what to wear to a campus interview:

When trying to decide what to wear for the interview, it is probably better to err on the side of being a little overdressed. For men, I recommend a comfortable suit and tie. The female candidates I conferred with generally wore suits—either a skirt-suit or pantsuit—stockings, and low heels. Although physicists generally dress casually, I urge you to look sharp. It is better to stand out a little because, after all, you are the candidate and people should know it! If you’re still uncertain, a good idea is to observe what the well-respected scientists wear to conferences. They generally dress in a style known as “business professional.” For my interviews I brought two outfits: a suit for the day of the colloquium, and a shirt and tie combo for the other day. Also, wear comfortable shoes! You will be on your feet for two days straight.

Fashion and levels of sartorial formality haven’t changed significantly since Anderson wrote his article. Indeed, modish men’s suits continue to follow the slim silhouette that Hedi Slimane introduced in 2001, soon after he joined Christian Dior to become the fashion house’s creative director for menswear. Women’s clothes also fit more closely than they did in the 1990s, when Giorgio Armani’s soft, loose style predominated.

The always well-dressed James Bond takes a moment to check the latest postings on cond-mat. I found the picture on Matt Spaiser’s engrossing blog, The Suits of James Bond.

Whether we like it or not, the fashions of London, Milan, Paris, and New York do influence our expectations of what it means to be well dressed. In a recent post to the blog Marketing for Scientists, Marc Kuchner asked image consultant Kasey Smith the question, How is a scientist supposed to dress? Her principal advice: Your clothes should not be baggy.

You could take your clothes to a tailor shop, or when you buy new clothes have them tailored to fit you. Men know this already. Men’s clothes come with the hems not even in there. They know that they have to mark the hems. Women just think that clothes should fit them off the rack, but that’s not true either. Just like men have to do these alterations, so do women.

Of course, interviewing for a job and giving a talk—two occasions when one might dress up—are not what most scientists do most of the time. Nevertheless, says Smith, even casual clothes should look neat and presentable.

I rather like the typical indifference of physicists to their clothing. We wear what we like when we like. What matters is our work, not our appearance. On the other hand, given that physics is one of the highest expressions of human civilization, and given that our collective image helps to attract (or repel) young people, we should perhaps pay attention to Smith’s advice.

Computing hell

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Charles Day

“Let us always keep before our mind’s eye an overheated and glowing stove and inside a naked man, supine, who will never be released from such pain. Does not his pain appear unbearable to us for even a single moment?”

Thus wrote the 15th-century theologian and mystic Denis the Carthusian in his tract about the Last Judgment, De quatuor hominis novissimus. When I encountered the passage in Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919), another, more recent book came to mind: Iain M. Banks’s science fiction novel, Surface Detail (2010).

The novel’s action takes place in our galaxy in AD 2970. By then, technology has reached the point that a person’s consciousness can be recorded and inserted into virtual, simulated worlds—including hells of such fiendishly imaginative gruesomeness that I’ll refrain from quoting a description. Some of the galaxy’s species support the hells as an effective means to discourage bad behavior; others decry them as a moral outrage. To settle the hells’ disputed existence, the various interested species have agreed to abide by the outcome of a vast simulated war game.

Virtual, simulated worlds have been featured in science fiction for some time. My first encounter with them—and perhaps yours, too—was in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). The novel’s complex, thrilling plot involves two powerful and resourceful artificial intelligences and a cast of drug-addicted hackers, former special operations soldiers, plutocratic industrialists, and cyberpunk ninjas.

Gibson favored a mostly metaphorical description of computed reality. In Permutation City (1994), Greg Egan delves in more technical detail into the philosophical questions of simulated afterlives. Presciently, in Egan’s near-future world, computing power is available in abundance via the cloud. With such resources, Paul Durham, a computer scientist and entrepreneur, proposes to create a self-sustaining virtual world where scanned consciousnesses can live for eternity.

In reality, though, how likely is the prospect of scanning a consciousness and uploading it into a virtual world? Human brains contain 10¹¹ neurons that form 10¹⁵ interconnections. Storing a static map of something that big isn’t beyond current technology. CERN has already amassed 2 × 10¹⁷ bytes of data from the Large Hadron Collider.

The bigger technological challenge, I think, lies in generating the map in the first place. Conceivably, neuroscientists could discover a modest set of principles that embody how our brains are networked, obviating the task of mapping individual neurons. But if they can’t, every neuron and synapse would have to be located. Super-resolution techniques such as Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM) and Photoactivation Localization Microscopy (PALM) can already map fluorescently tagged molecules with a spatial resolution of a few tens of microns, but only—so far—in samples just a few millimeters thick.

Although it’s not physically impossible, like faster-than-light travel, or physically impractical, like Star Trek–style teleportation, brain mapping remains scientifically out of reach, but comfortably within the realm of science fiction. As for Denis the Carthusian, he reported making mental excursions into purgatory, during which he received revelations and conversed with souls. That experience is not unlike a Neuromancer hacker “jacking into” cyberspace and meeting avatars.

This essay by Charles Day first appeared on page 104 of the January/February 2013 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, a bimonthly magazine published jointly by the American Institute of Physics and IEEE Computer Society.

Steampunk physics

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Charles Day

I met my first steampunker two years ago at San Diego Comic-Con International. She wore a leather corset over a full, striped skirt, had red, white, and yellow contact lenses in her eyes, and wielded a Gatling gun made, I presumed, of light plastic but painted to look metallic. I introduced myself, flashed my press badge, and asked if she minded fielding a few questions.

Steampunk, in case you didn’t know, is an increasingly popular subgenre of fantasy and science fiction. Its authors extrapolate the capabilities of Victorian technologies, such as steam locomotives and hot-air balloons, far beyond historical limits, yet the societies they depict remain more or less Dickensian. Although steampunk eschews interstellar travel, sentient robots, and other futuristic staples of science fiction, technology still serves as the principal plot stirrer.

Members of the League of S.T.E.A.M. posed for me in the San Diego Convention Center during last year’s Comic-Con International.

My Comic-Con interlocutor, it turned out, liked the aesthetics of steampunk far more than she did its literary or cinematic expressions. The clothes and accoutrements are not especially difficult to buy or make. What’s more, whereas steampunk clothes are as visually striking as a superhero’s skin-tight costume, they are generally more flattering and practical to wear.

Given its prominence in Victorian science, physics turns up in steampunk novels, sometimes underlying elements of their plots. Stephen Baxter’s Anti-Ice (1993) follows the technological, economic, and strategic impacts of a material, anti-ice, that releases copious amounts of energy when warmed. Like its real-word inspiration, nuclear energy, anti-ice ends up being weaponized by the country that discovered and monopolized it— in Baxter’s novel, Great Britain.

In James P. Blaylock’s Lord Kelvin’s Machine (1992), the hero, Langdon St. Ives, uses a time machine invented by the famous physicist of the book’s title. And in Ian R. MacLeod’s The Light Ages (2003), the Industrial Revolution begins in England, as did the momentous original, but a century earlier, in 1678, when one Joshua Wagstaffe discovered a magical and useful substance called aether.

Of course, anti-ice, Kelvin’s time machine, and aether are all fictitious, but can one do real, worthwhile, and innovative physics today with Victorian equipment?

Heat exchangers and tree leaves

Three years ago I visited Eric Cornell’s lab on the Boulder campus of the University of Colorado. After he’d shown me his cold-atom experiments, the Nobel laureate took me to a large room, stood by a drum-shaped piece of equipment that looked as though it belonged in a brewery, and then described a fascinating low-tech experiment.

The equipment was a heat exchanger that converted waste heat in the form of warm air into mechanical energy then electrical energy. Given that the goal of Cornell’s heat exchanger is to harvest low-grade waste heat, it’s unlikely that a Victorian physicist would have seen a need to build one like it. Perfecting various engines that created waste heat as a by-product was a higher priority. Still, it’s conceivable that James Joule (1818–89), if he’d set himself the same goal, could have devised a machine similar to Cornell’s.

Of course, unless they’re performing a historical reenactment, modern physicists do not deliberately limit their equipment to museum pieces. Even so, if you browse general physics journals today, it’s possible to encounter investigations that a Victorian could plausibly have carried out.

My favorite recent example is a paper that appeared last month in Physical Review Letters. Kaare Jensen of Harvard University and Maciej Zwieniecki of the University of California, Davis, determined the distribution of leaf size versus tree height for a wide range of seed-bearing trees. By modeling the trees’ vascular network as a hydraulic pump for distributing chemical energy, Jensen and Zwieniecki could account for the distribution’s characteristic shape, notably its well-defined upper and lower bounds.

Although their theoretical analysis invoked the modern concept of microfluidics, the physics, as far as I could tell, would have been familiar to Lord Kelvin (1824–1907)—the real one, that is.

Gaming in meatspace

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Charles Day

One evening earlier this summer, I was enjoying a martini at a hotel bar in San Francisco’s SoMa district. Although I’d brought an engrossing book to read—Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace—I looked up now and then at the bar’s TV to watch the Miami Heat strive to nullify the Boston Celtics’ large early lead in game four of the NBA East finals.

During a commercial break, I became transfixed by a trailer for what seemed like an exciting new horror movie. Humans and zombies were fighting each other in a dark, empty New York and a bright, crowded Hong Kong. To catch the scenes of mayhem, the camera swooped, panned, and zoomed with unnatural agility and speed, greatly intensifying the thrills.

It turned out the camera work was unnatural. The trailer was not promoting a Hollywood movie, but an Xbox and PlayStation video game, Resident Evil 6. My long-held disdain for video games had been challenged!

The first video game I encountered was Space Invaders, which appeared in one of my hometown pubs around 1980. In case you’ve forgotten or never knew, the game’s object is to shoot down an armada of alien spacecraft, each depicted within a 16- by 16-pixel grid. But crude graphics weren’t what put me off Space Invaders and its descendants. Rather, I couldn’t see the point of acquiring the skill needed to win: the ability to press the controller’s buttons quickly and accurately. I still don’t—even to play Resident Evil 6 on a 1920- by 1080-pixel monitor.

Besides making me reconsider video games, my chance encounter with computer-animated zombies made me wonder why I’ve recently come to enjoy playing board games, despite the gulf between the games’ typically rich scenarios and their manifestly artificial boards. In Railways of England and Wales, for example, players vie to build the most profitable rail network between a limited number of major towns and cities, just as their historical counterparts did in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign.

The state of play during a game of Railways of England and Wales. The image comes from BoardGameGeek, where you can find a description and review of the game.

Although the board and accoutrements of Railways of England and Wales are somewhat cartoonish, I and my fellow players Jan, Kate, Kevin, Stacy, and Ty borrowed money, laid down track, bought rolling stock, and transported goods with gusto. The locally brewed beer and home-pulled pork served by our hosts, Stacy and Ty, added to the enjoyment.

So why do I prefer playing at railway barony on a cartoonish board to shooting zombies on a realistically rendered street? Paradoxically, when it comes to human behavior, Railways of England and Wales seems more realistic than Resident Evil 6. Whereas real railway barons schemed while sitting in chairs and looking at maps, “real” zombie hunters should be running outside and shooting weapons. The first activity resembles its corresponding game; the second doesn’t.

But even if I don’t succumb to the attraction of playing video games, I’m affected by their popularity. You are, too. In an article published last year, Martin Hilbert and Priscila López determined that video games consumed 42% of the world’s capacity to store information in 2007, up from 5% in 2000. Video games’ share of total CPUs grew at a similar rate, from 5% in 2000 to 25% in 2007. Your next home computer could be optimized for Resident Evil 6, whether you play the game or not.

This essay by Charles Day first appeared on page 88 of the September/October 2012 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, a bimonthly magazine published jointly by the American Institute of Physics and IEEE Computer Society.

Zapping zircons

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Charles Day

Fans of Physics Today's Facebook page occasionally send me messages, most of which are requests for more information about something to do with physics. The one I received on Monday was no exception. A fan from Jordan wanted to know about research in “gemstone treatment.”

Not knowing what he meant, I Googled the phrase, which led me to a website touting the value of untreated gemstones. Some gemstones, I found out, are routinely subjected to heat, chemicals, and even ionizing radiation to change or improve their appearance.

To achieve its so-called super blue color, this topaz has been bombarded with high-energy electrons from a linear accelerator.

Not having heard about the irradiation of gemstones, I investigated further. One of the first documents I came across, thanks to Wikipedia, was Charles Ashbaugh’s “Gemstone irradiation and radioactivity,” which appeared in the winter 1988 issue of Gems & Gemology.

When he wrote the article, Ashbaugh was an engineer at UCLA’s nuclear energy laboratory. His article is worth reading—not only for its review of how both natural and artificial radiation sources alter the optical properties of gemstone minerals, but also for its tutorial on radiation (the sidebar on the various radiation units, with its analogy to sun bathing, is exemplary!).

If you’re like me, you probably knew that amethysts, emeralds, and other gemstones owe their colors to the dilute presence of impurities. Ruby, for example, consists of an aluminum oxide (Al₂O₃ crystal) doped with chromium atoms. From Ashbaugh I learned that irradiating a gemstone with gamma rays, high-energy electrons, or neutrons transmutes the impurities, thereby changing the wavelengths absorbed by the crystal. Naturally pale blue topaz can be turned a deep “super blue.” Colorless zircon can be turned pink.

As you might expect, irradiation could make a gemstone radioactive. In 1988, when Ashbaugh wrote his article, the regulatory status of irradiated gemstones in the US was confusing, inconsistent, and subject to state and federal jurisdiction. It was easier for a US jeweler to legally obtain irradiated gemstones from abroad than from the US. The regulations are clearer now. In fact, now that there are more irradiated gemstones on the market, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission felt the need last year to issue a fact sheet, whose summary succinctly states (in bold font):

The NRC believes irradiated gemstones currently on the market are safe.
The NRC has not requested that jewelers take these stones off the market.

Does irradiation diminish the allure or value of gemstones? Not for me. For one thing, a perfect diamond crystal consists of identically arranged carbon atoms. If you could make one in the lab, it would be identical and indistinguishable from a perfect natural crystal. Structural perfection, not naturalness of origin, is a crystal’s paramount property.

What’s more, it doesn’t matter to me whether a tourmaline acquired its color through millions of years’ exposure to natural radiation emanating from the surrounding rock or through a few hours’ exposure to 1.17- and 1.33-MeV gamma rays from a cobalt-60 source.

Ashbaugh’s article is illustrated with several photographs of beautiful, gleaming gemstones in a variety of colors—which prompts another question: If you can make, say, a deep red gemstone by irradiating any one of several naturally transparent, colorless crystals, does it matter which crystal you start with?

The answer could be yes—if you care about how much a stone sparkles. Whereas a natural emerald’s refractive index is 1.6, an irradiated green diamond’s is 2.4. Until a crystal’s refractive index can be engineered, I suspect diamonds will remain the most prized gemstones.

As for the Jordanian Facebook fan who wanted to learn about gemstones, it turned out he was really interested in crystal healing. I couldn’t help him.

Standards rule OK

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Charles Day

My title comes from the chorus of a song on the Jam’s second album, This Is the Modern World (1977). Written by the band’s singer and guitarist Paul Weller, the song is a bombastically ironic attack on the enforcers of social conformity.

But if Weller were not a socially conscious rock musician and instead were a computational scientist, he might have still chanted, “Standards rule OK!” For without standards in hardware, software, and data formats, our work would be less efficient and less effective.

I first appreciated the importance of computer standards when I worked at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in the early 1990s. My field, x-ray astronomy, was just three decades old at the time. The first pioneering missions could detect only a handful of bright objects. But their successors—among them the European Space Agency’s European X-ray Observatory Satellite (EXOSAT; 1983–86) and NASA’s Einstein Observatory (1978−82)—observed thousands of x-ray emitting stars, galaxies, and other cosmic objects. Then came Germany’s Röntgen Satellite (ROSAT; 1990−99) and Japan’s Ginga (1987−91), which added to that swelling collection.

Because spacecraft telemetry is limited by bandwidth, the data gathered and beamed to Earth by satellite observatories are packaged in efficient, instrument-specific formats—15 altogether for the instruments carried by the four spacecraft listed above. In contrast with the diversity of telemetry formats, the figures that embody the data’s scientific content (and ultimately appear in research papers) typically come in a smaller set of generic flavors: images, spectra, and light curves.

Creating those figures entails background subtraction, binning, filtering, and other generic tasks. In principle, the software that, say, Fourier-transforms a data stream from EXOSAT‘s Medium Energy instrument could do the same for a data stream from Ginga‘s Large-Area Counter. But the raw formats are as different as Dutch and Japanese. If the same software is to work with data from those and other missions, the data must be translated into a common format. And that format must be flexible enough to accommodate new instruments.

My former colleagues at GSFC duly picked such a format: flexible image transport system (FITS). Originally developed for optical and radio data, FITS makes extensive use of headers and keywords. Like XML, FITS is extensible. Whenever a new detector technology comes online, new keywords and data structures are defined within the FITS framework. Granted, someone has to write an instrument-specific program that translates telemetry into FITS, but no one has to take on the more onerous job of rewriting data analysis software.

When I left GSFC in 1997, astronomers there and elsewhere used three software programs to analyze their data: Xspec (for spectra), Xronos (for light curves), and Ximage (for images). Now, 14 years later, they’re still using the same three programs for data from observatories that launched years after my departure.

FITS made its public debut in 1981 in a paper in Astronomy and Astrophysics. On 30 November of that same year, the Swedish pop group ABBA’s eighth and final album The Visitors became the first recording available on a new format, the compact disc. Although CD sales are waning, it remains a durable standard—at least I hope so. I have six Jam CDs.

This essay by Charles Day first appeared on page 96 of the September/October 2011 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, a bimonthly magazine published jointly by the American Institute of Physics and IEEE Computer Society.

The irony of Craigslist

Posted on November 23, 2012 by Charles Day

“The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24-hour-a-day access to kiddie porn. People . . . they don’t write anymore, they blog; instead of talking, they text. No punctuation, no grammar. LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo communicating with a bunch of other stupid people in a protolanguage that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English.”

Thus rails Hank Moody, the central character of Showtime’s TV series Californication. Hank writes novels—or used to write them. Having moved from New York to Los Angeles, he suffers through the first season unable to write a sequel to the novels that earned him critical acclaim. Ironically, the occasion of the rant, an interview on a radio show, was prompted by Hank’s recent success as a blogger. His interviewer points out the seeming hypocrisy: “Yet you’re part of the problem, I mean you’re out there blogging with the best of them.” “Hence my self-loathing,” replies Hank.

But are Instant Messenger, Twitter, and other modes of modern communication really impoverishing our language and weakening our powers of expression? I don’t think so—in fact, quite the opposite. Novels, editorial cartoons, stage plays, and other old forms have survived the advent of radio, TV, and the internet. Far from stifling or impairing established forms, new media provide new opportunities.

Consider, for example, the literary output of Johnna Gattinella, a 31-year-old writer from Santa Rosa, California. Somewhere on Gattinella’s body is a heart-shaped tattoo featuring the name of her husband, Roy. Gattinella photographed the tattoo and posted the picture to Craigslist along with a fake personal ad. “Calling all Roys or Troys or Leroys,” the ad began, “I was with a Roy before, but it didn’t last as long as my tattoo. Getting the tattoo removed is not something I want to do, plus I’m so accustomed to bellowing ‘Roy’ out in bed.”

Gattinella recounted the heartfelt responses her ad elicited in an interview with the New York Times: “A lot of men took the photo of the tattoo and put it in Photoshop and then altered it with their names or different variations of it.”

It turns out Craigslist is a fertile new outlet for aspiring writers. The ease of posting and its large readership make for a cheap, ready platform. But Craigslist, like other means of telecommunication, has another, more subtle attraction: its lack of irony.

The messages that appear on the screens of our computers and phones nearly always mean what they say. It’s as if the involvement of sophisticated engineering in delivering and displaying messages imparts an engineer’s penchant for talking straight. Why else append to an email message, if not to make sure your recipient really understands that you’re joking? Evidently, the risk of a misunderstanding—one that could provoke anger in a coworker or a boss, perhaps—is too great.

But if your message is a joke, as Gattinella’s was, and if you don’t flag it as such, your readers’ expectation of earnestness, heightened by the medium, is ripe for artistic appropriation. Craigslist served not only as her satire’s target, but also as the satire’s means of prosecution and the site of its publication.

Gattinella posted her fake ad for more than her own amusement. The replies form the basis of My Year on Craigslist. It’s not a podcast, blog, or YouTube video, but a book.

This essay by Charles Day first appeared on page 88 of the March/April 2008 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, a bimonthly magazine published jointly by the American Institute of Physics and IEEE Computer Society.

The computation of poetry

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Charles Day

My nadir as a programmer happened in grad school. I’d written a Fortran program to calculate the column density of a stellar atmosphere—at least, that’s what the program was supposed to do, but it had a bug. Fortunately, the VAX I was using had a chatty, helpful compiler that told me where the bug was and what was wrong—sort of.

The trouble was that even when I printed the code and stared at the recalcitrant line, the bug remained hidden. In the end, I finally saw my error: I’d spelled “GOTO” with two zeros instead of two Os. The characters are next to each other on the keyboard, and when printed, they looked almost identical. The error was trivial—even funny—but it soured my view of programming forever. Now, as a writer and editor, I reassure myself that writing is so much more forgiving than coding. If a word doesn’t fit, I can pick another. English is much more flexible than Fortran.

But one form of literary endeavor, poetry, shares some properties with programming. “Predict” has several synonyms, for example—including foretell, prophesy, forecast—Shakespeare picked “prognosticate” for his 14th sonnet:

Or else of thee this I prognosticate:
Thy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date.

Unlike the alternatives, “prognosticate” fits the rhyme and meter. It also echoes a four-syllable word that appears near the beginning of the poem (“astronomy”).

The English sonnet is nicely balanced between form and function. Its 14 lines, typically in iambic pentameter, can have any one of several rhyme schemes with strictures light enough to inspire poets to artful, not forced, contrivances.

But some poetic forms in other languages are difficult to follow in English, the top of my list being cynghanedd. This centuries-old Welsh form stipulates the order in which consonants should appear within lines. Gerard Manley Hopkins, an English poet who learned Welsh, wrote cynghanedd-like lines, but not in full accordance to the rules.

Which makes me wonder: Could a computer be programmed to write cynghanedd in English (or German, for that matter)? What would such a feat mean? If a reader couldn’t tell the difference—that is, if our computer bard passed a Turing test—would it matter?

And then there’s the authorship. Whoever programmed the poetry generator must know and appreciate the rules and subtleties of cynghanedd, so whatever art and skill a computer cynghanedd might show lies as much in the program as in the poem itself. Freed by the power of computation, you could conceivably invent poetic forms so complex that only a computer could write in them.

These speculations aren’t wholly whimsical. Just as a particular poetic form might stipulate rhyme scheme, meter, length of lines, length of poem, and, yes, the pattern of consonants, so, too, might an accurate, complete model of human consciousness. What would it mean if only a computer could follow those rules?

Cynghanedd example

One form of cynghanedd requires repeating the order of consonants in the first and second halves of a line, as in this example from Tudur Aled (c. 1465–1525):

Os marw bun, oes mwy o’r byd?
Mae’r haf wedi marw hefyd.

If the girl dies, what’s left in the world?
Summer has died as well.

Some leeway is allowed for rhyming.

This essay by Charles Day first appeared on page 96 of the November/December 2007 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, a bimonthly magazine published jointly by the American Institute of Physics and IEEE Computer Society.

The Dayside

THE DAYSIDE is the blog of Charles Day, Physics Today’s online editor. His short essays range all over the physics landscape and beyond.

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