128. Melancholy
HEP-TH/PH — By Dmitry Podolsky on December 8, 2008 at 4:00 pm
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Dmitry Podolsky has got his PhD from Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He currently works as postdoc at Case Western Reserve University. He is also one of the editors of NEQNET.
Jim Kotsybar has just sent me his another poem, which I liked very much (as usual) and would want to share it with you. And yes, very often such a poem would reflect perfectly the mood of a physicist…
RARIFIED
by James Ph. Kotsybar
The physicist had reached the end
of equations he’d worked for years.
With the news, he called an old friend,
to invite him out for some beers.
When asked about the occasion,
He smugly announced he’d worked-out
the quark confinement equation,
beyond any shadow of doubt.
For strings of ev’ry dimension
his elegant math had held true;
no one could offer dissension!
When no response returned, he knew,
informed by silence on the phone,
how far he’d come to be alone.
10 Comments
How profoundly true! When one is (or a few hundred people are) something like 150 years ahead of the bulk of the world, they must surely face a dilemma whether it makes sense to try to be 160 or 250 years ahead.
And in many cases, so familiar to scientists beginning with Galileo, the silence is usually the more optimistic option.
When it is a few hundred of them, the situation is not that bad
Well, in the precise context of the poem, it is still bad because among the hundreds, only dozens like to drink several beers and to chat above them, and only a few of these if any are physically available.
If you impose any other correlated condition on sharing the excitement, beers, and some other values that happen to be unshared by the hundreds, you’re below 1 again!
I see now
On the other hand, as it seems, life teaches us that internet can help quite a bit with this issue
Internet is, of course, great, but the beer drinking over the Internet is still not quite perfect.
But try e.g.
drink://www.pilsner-urquell.cz/
You must use the newest browser, Google Gambrinus.
Dear Dmitry,
for my weak PSU – which is the likely reason for roughly weekly crashes – Chrome is better than Firefox because it is “even lighter” working.
It has almost all features you expect, except for add-ons etc. The biggest missing feature is autofill in forms (and searching through forms, like in blogger.com forms where I write postings – an annoying missing detail; it also translates the WYSIWYG into HTML in an awkward way in blogger.com). But it has much better ways to configure search engines – like “s find a podolsky” in the URL bar searches for SPIRES etc. – similarly for news.google.com, amazon.com, blogsearch, and dozens of others I configured.
I like all the Chromy QCD details like the dragging of tabs into separate windows, and vice versa. The mouse wheel bug for my mouse can be fixed by a patch.
There are various tiny bugs of the beta – for example, sending new mail at HOTMAIL doesn’t work. Not sure why exactly this bug appeared – maybe it’s deliberate from one of the two sides of the conflict.
Best wishes
Lubos
Dear Lubos
Actually, addons was the only reason I switched from Opera to Firefox, which is somewhat slower but so much more convenient in the end
Have you heard about Launchy? The latter is quite a tool, and I keep all my search engines configured in there.
Cheers,
Dmitry.
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