Physics World’s Best of Two Thousand and Seven

The well renown magazine Physics World (~) published an article in their online news section a week ago, entitled “The Best of 2007″ [note: in order to be a little different, I spelled out "2007" ;)]

In it (which can be found here), they list the most interesting articles that appeared in the Physics World magazine in 2007. The intro is a very good summary of the year, so I thought I’d copy it here too:

It was the year that the first “commercial” quantum computer was unveiled, and 2007 also saw a flurry of research into the supersolid state of matter. Astronomers improved our understanding of the cosmos by zeroing in on the origins of ultra-high energy cosmic rays and providing the best-ever map of dark matter in the Universe. While the Nobel Prize in Physics – awarded for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance — demonstrated how investing in fundamental research could lead to rapid improvements in technology, the year ended on a sour note with some physicists in the US and UK facing significant cuts in their research funding.

The financial cut is indeed a very sad instance of this past year (more here).

To the list, I would also, however, add the ruling out of PVLAS axion, which, I think, was also quite important.

Holiday Presents Rush

Since we do not celebrate catholic Christmas, our “holiday presents rush”, as I shall relate to it, is generally not from 20th to 24th of December, but rather from 26th to 31st of December, and is intended towards the New Year — the holiday that we do celebrate. It is, in a way, a benefit, because we thus usually take advantage of all the discounts, related to boxing day.

What I realised yesterday is that I enjoy seeking presents for others. I spent a number of hours looking for a present for my fiancee and my mother. The present for my mother is specific: it is a China ink (or whatever it is called), and funny thing is that, as I visited about 7 stores to find it, I was called a “cute man” for doing that several times, because I was looking for something totally man-unrelated and I didn’t know the heck about it, yet I still was looking for it. The present for my fiancee is not revealed here for understandable reasons; but I hope she’ll like it. This present I trying to find for close to a month now, may be. So, even though, looking for presents may seem a bit of a pain in your funny body parts, it isn’t that for me at all (well, at least not at all of the times), probably because I always try have in mind this big, wide and beautiful smile of that person when he opens up the present.

I bought my brother some hockey equipment and decided to not wait until the New Year, but rather give him the present early, so we could go and try, while both of us have holidays. It was his first time on skates… So he fell a few times. Most of the times it wasn’t so bad. Except for one time: he fell right onto his funniest body part. And even though he said he enjoyed that night of hockey very much, I know how much it hurts, so I don’t know if this was a good present or not :) But with all the seriousness, it was a good present, no doubt — I could tell from the smile on his face.

What about Toronto Maple Leafs?

I would like to drop a word about how the performance of Toronto Maple Leafs, a hockey team in the NHL, looks so far.

As November appeared undoubtfully a complete disaster with a record of 4-6-3 (4 wins, 6 losses, 3 over-time losses), Leafs seemed to have had a comeback in the beginning of December with a 4 game winning streak, with one of the wins being a really good takeover the New York Rangers (a 6:2 win) and another being a complete knock-out to the Tampa Bay Lightning (a 6:1 win).

But no! Toronto is loosing again and loosing big time. For the past three weeks, Toronto had all of their games away — that’s 7 games. The hopes were high above the ceiling on bringing “all of them[, because] we’ve got to be greedy!” as Paul Maurice said the day before the team left for a long trip. As it turned out, the Leafs ended up with a 2-3-2 record, which isn’t as bad as one would imagine, unless one actually considers the play that Toronto shows lately.

The only person on the team who actually shows some (excellent) play is the main goalie, Vesa Toskala. He has done so much for the team already, by making an enormous amount of excellent saves and stops. If Toskala wasn’t on the goal, I am confident Toronto would loose almost all of the games, no doubt. But a goalie, although being one of the most important part of the team, cannot make the play all by his own. Firstly, a goalie can stop all the goals, but if the team hasn’t got any offense going, then no good. Secondly, a goalie can be puck-proof for only so much and if the team’s defense has apparent wide holes, then no goalie would be perfect enough: there are just certain types of shots that, no matter how brilliant the goalie is, they are definitely scoring ones, unless the attempts themselves are stopped by the defense.

As it has already been said, Toronto have got no offence going at all. The thing that startles me is that any time the Leafs try to make an attack and get into the offensive zone, they start making all these useless passes, which have no real logical smart combination behind it, and hence all Toronto ends up with is usually no shot on goal at all.

And it is actually clearly seen that Toronto haven’t got any combinations prepared for the game: I never have the feeling that one Leaf knows where the other one is, no clear passes, no clear break throughs, no organisation of play, no nothing, really. In terms of offensive breakthroughs, I think that the best player is Jason Blake. He often makes very nice and interesting moves to get through the defence and usually gets Toronto going. But I think the only problem is that he doesn’t yet feel the team (it is his first season for the Leafs), because any attack he gets to do — he usually does it either on his own or his passes are not understand as well as they must be.

Nikolay Antropov has started playing very rough lately, which I don’t encourage: hockey is a dangerous sport on its own — why make it even more dangerous. Other than that, Antropov plays very well, but I think he isn’t the player who can really start a very good attack (unlike Blake), but someone who can successfully finish it or boost it up. I don’t understand why I stopped seeing him in front of the net on the attacks — he now is there quite a lot more rare!

The last two games, Andrew Raycroft had to step up as a goalie, for Vesa Toskala had an small injury and was recovering. No hard feelings taken, but Raycroft is not an NHL player. He almost never catches the puck, but rather always rebounds it! All the time: rebound, rebound, rebound… And, of course, Toronto pays for these rebounds hard time — each time Raycroft does this ugly thing, the forwards surely take the opportunity to finish the play and they do. This way, Toronto lost in the overtime on Wednesday against the New York Islanders: in the overtime (with a rule of a golden goal or “sudden death” as they call it), Islanders attack, shoot on goal right at Raycroft, there’s a rebound, the same player shoots again and finishes the play and hence the game. And this is just one example.

All in all, what I think that Toronto really needs is to understand that passing around during an attack (especially during their power play) isn’t going to get the puck into the goal, whatsoever. If combinations don’t work, try just simply shooting on goal really hard and really sudden. All the combinations must be completely learnt and rehearsed, but at home, not during a match.

To conclude, I think all of this disaster in great amount lies on the shoulders of the head coach, Paul Maurice. The reason I am saying this is that most of the players are excellent if not brilliant: Mats Sundin, Nikolay Antropov, Jason Blake, Vesa Toskala, Thomas Kaberle — just to name a few. But they just can’t get the play going together as a team; there aren’t any combinations, there’s isn’t any well rehearsed play, there isn’t any necessary change of tactics during a game. On that last point, a remark shall follow. A lot of the games follow the same routine: Toronto starts the game as a dominating team, but then slowly the domination is pulled over to the other side. Why? Because the coach of the against team carefully looks at Toronto’s play and makes all the necessary corrections to his team’s tactics. We don’t see anything of this sort in Toronto’s performance. I don’t want to say that Paul Maurice needs to leave his position as a head coach, but if the team will continue performs as it does right now, then I think he will have to.

Sadly, I will be greatly and pleasantly surprised if the Toronto Maple Leafs will make the playoffs this season. Let’s hope they’ll do something about their play.

Go, Leafs! Go!

Dmitry Hvorostovsky and Moscow Chamber Orchestra performance in Toronto

I would like to write a short response on Dmitry Hvorostrovky’s and Moscow Chamber Orchestra performace, which took place on 29th of November at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto.

Here, you can find a short YouTube video of the similar concert that took place in Montreal a week or so before his performance in Toronto (Please note Show One Productions copyright).

This was the first time I ever heard him sing live, for I only had been enjoying recordings prior to that show. At first I was amazed by the power of the voice and beauty of the his singing. However, I quickly realised that the performance was not so impressive at all. I admire Hvorostovsky’s talent and his voice is truly one of the most marvelous baretones in the world, and hence perhaps this exactly is the reason of my feeling that he could do better. Much better.

In fact, in later into the show, he had to be given a microphone, because (as everyone felt this way) he wasn’t able to outsing the choir and the music. I believe this point should be very embarrassing for him. As simple as that.

I also had found out that during the entr’acte, he spoke of the audience as very “dry”. Well, I wouldn’t say so at all, because there were people who cried, there were people who brought flowers at multiple times, there were people who quietly sang along. So I think it was Hvorostovsky who was very “dry” in his performance, but definitely not the audience.

A much better job was done by the conductor of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, Constantine Orbelian. The orchestra performed very well and was very organised, accurate and precise.

But truly the best job that night was done by one of the personel of Show One Productions, Liana Dedina, who bravely handled an enormous amount of people and helped literaly everyone to get around the concert.

I would rate Dmitry Hvorostovsky’s performance in Toronto as 7 out of 10, where 2 points are attained solely because of orchestra’s brilliance and another 2 points are obtained solely and completely by the enormously hard work of Liana Dedina to make all of it happen at all.

“Sleeping Beauty on Ice” by St. Petersburg State Balet on Ice

I here would like to write a short review on the performace by St. Petersburg Balet, which I had the pleasure to enjoy on Friday, December 21st.

So, first, the performers: the skating was absolutely outstanding. The main characters in the show were evidentaly former athletes, as one could tell from all the jumps and spins they were able to do during the show. Perhaps the best skating in the show was done by the Prince Desire (Oleg Yagubkov), Carabosse the Wicked Fairy (Viacheslav Vodopianov or Kiril Silantiev — I wasn’t able to figure out who it was) and the White Puss and Puss-in-Boots (Marina Maslova or Vladislava Blagonravova and Danil Vedernikov or Sergey Golodnev — again, I wasn’t able to figure out exactly who they were). I’d like to remark that skating by Oleg Yagubkov (Prince Desire) was especially outstanding, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, for (as far as I have understood from my findings) he was a world champion in figure skating, when still competeing for the Soviet Union.

Second, the music: although there was no orchestra (which really is a disapointing feature of the theatre (Bluma Appel Theatre) and not the performance itself), one could still enjoy the marvelous music by Peter Tchaikovsky. The sound quality was great and so was the music.

Third, the plot: if you know the plot very well, then feel free to skip this paragraph. If you have never been to a ballet before, you would probably be shocked by how much information there can be communicated by only using moves, action, light, music and no words. The plot of the Sleeping Beauty is very involved. In short, it is divided into four parts [Warning! The plot give away follows]:

1. The Christening, where an infant Princess Aurora is being christened, while the Wicked Fairy, Carabosse, puts a spell on her that one day she will pick her finger and die. The Lilac Fairy promises that the young princess will only fall into a continuous sleep.
2. The Spell, where on her 16th birthday, princess Aurora dances with four suiters in the castle’s ceremony room in front of the King and Queen. At that time, an old lady crawls into the room, offers Aurora a spindle as a birthday gift and Aurora picks her finger on a hidden needle. The old woman reveals herself as Carabosse and everyone realise that the promised evil spell is coming to life. The Lilac fairy partially breaks the spell and the entire kingdom falls to sleep.
3. The Vision,where after many years, the Lilac Fairy shows a vision of princess Aurora to prince Desire, who instantly falls in love with Aurora and asks Lilac Fairy to be taken to the princess. He fights his way into the Palace, which is guarder by Carabosse, where he awakens princess Aurora with a kiss. They fall in love and vow to marry.
4. The Wedding, where the Court celebrates the marriage of the prince and princess, with special guests like Puss-in-Boots and the Red Riding Hood.

Fourth, the stage: The decorations were absolutely great; the walls of the Palace and the leaves in the forerst were very carefully drawn and with much detail. The constumes were one of the most remarkable aspects of the show (excellent job by Tatiana Zaikina, the senior wardrobe master, and Irina Nikolaeva, the senior makeup artist). The ice rink was evidently too small for the skaters, though; but they managed that obstacle with a perfect professional touch.

Fifth, the personel that helped make this show be held. An absolutely outstanding and grand job was done by the logistics and administration leader of Show One Productions, Liana Dedina. She was at the theatre everyday, during the show week, for 10 hours straight, never sit down, never rest, never eat alright, but always hard work and dedication.

All in all, I found the performance to be spectacular, well prepared and interesting and I definitely recommend the show. I would give it a 9 out of 10.

Eugene Astapov’s “Piano Trio number 2″

I would like to review a new piece by a young Russian-Canadian composer, Eugene Astapov, the Piano Trio number 2.

As it is always observed in almost all of Eugene’s pieces, the work is filled with sadness, restlessness and an uneasy and troubled state mind and soul. The very peculiar to all of Eugene’s work sounds of grinding, cracking and painful exhaustion of a soul forces the listener to somewhat open up and look at within himself.

There are several climaxes in the piece. Each time the listener slowly and gradually starts to be getting more and more restless and troubled, as if his soul tries to creep out of him. Each climax is then followed by a seemingly melodious and calm feeling, but the worrisome feeling is truly hiding just within this melodious part and is evidently heard, while being next to abruptly interchanged with an even greater weight of trouble.

Here’s what Astapov wrote about the piece himself:

My second Piano Trio was written in the memory of Mstislav Rostropovich, the great cellist. However, I did not try to describe his biography; it is just a piece which commemorates the life of a great musician. The piece is a single-movement composition consisting of melodious sections and extreme climaxes, as well tonality and atonality set in contrast to each other. The work concludes with an unresolved tritone, which is proclaimed a number of times to show its significance in this piece.

If there is an interest in hearing the piece, please let me know as I will try to arrange it.

P.S.: I’m not very good at reviewing musical pieces, am I? :D

Some News from My Headline

My exam session has successfully ended. Now I can share some of the thoughts that I wanted to share during, but lacked the time to.

First of all, I would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas (one on 25th December), which is very fast approaching, and a very Happy New Year, which is, in fact, approaching just as fast (at a rate of one second per second — I guess that should be correct, yes), finishing up with an orthodox Christmas (one on 7th January)!

Second of all, in the following few days I will be slightly modifying my website, adding some more information and reorganising it a little bit. So you might want to check it out later, too.

Third of all, I have just (that is, a few minutes ago) figured out that Moldavian Airport should really consider redeveloping their website (here). It’s true, the website looks extremely well done and beautiful, but it has just taken me some 6.5 minutes to load the front page, where I was able to browse for another 20-25 seconds, which was followed by website’s “internal error”, such that I had to reload the front page (another 5-6 minutes). At this, my internet is actually very fast (it really is). I think this is mostly because the website is at .md, while I am here in rain-snowy Toronto, but I still have hard time believing that that is the reason for those 6 minutes of wait. Moreover, even if that is so, then they should consider a “non-flash version” available.

I had had hard time believing that web designers would read this post, so I wrote them a feedback. I really do hope they will make a not of that, do you think?

Fourth of all, I had a pleasure of seeing the performance of the St. Petersburg State Ballet on Ice that had been visiting Toronto for the last four or five days (today was the last performance), with their Sleeping Beauty on Ice. My feedback will follow shortly. More information here. Here is a short YouTube video (Show One Production copyright) with some of the shots from the show.
Update: You can find my review here.

Fifth of all, in addition to the “fourth of all” point, a month or so ago I also had a chance to listen to the performance of Dmitry Hvorostovsky, the feedback on which shall also follow shortly. Here is a short YouTube video (Show One Production copyright, once again).
Update: you can find my review here.

Sixth of all, the Toronto Maple Leafs aren’t doing very well lately, even though they won yesterday night’s game at Florida. Yet again, details will follow next.
Update: Here is my discussion on what’s wrong with Maple Leafs’ play.

Seventh of all, I have had a chance to listen to new piece by a new young Ukranian (Russian? Canadian? Soviet?) composer, Eugene Astapov. Details follow.
Update: From our conversation, Eugene confirmed that he is indeed a Russian-Canadian composer. He insisted on being called thus :)
Update: My review can be found here.

… There’s more to come :)

Sad news: UK pulls out of plans for ILC

United Kingdom will no longer fund their research programme at the International Linear Collider. Well, this is really bad news, because they take away a candy from a low blood-sugar person: the research very much relies on the government. Nevertheless, the get such a big snap.

The news come from the Physics World (~) at the IOP (~), where they also say that

“the UK will stop investing in high-energy gamma-ray astronomy, withdraw from the Gemini telescopes, and cease all support for ground-based solar-terrestrial physics facilities”.

This isn’t nice at all! One other thing that bothers me is that they don’t realise that they won’t be able to simply ‘resume’ the project in a few years (which I’m sure they won’t) and hence all the money they’ve spent up to today are almost completely wasted. The saddest part is that after a few months they will see glorious results (in terms of their ‘pocket money’) of them saving a few million dollars every year by not supporting these research projects and they’ll like it! And therefore they will never resume the funding, unless ILC will discover something trully amazing (which it will, I think) and UK will not be there!

Update: As a contrast: The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has donated $200m for the TMT (Thirty Metre Telescope). Some good news, at last =)

About “Little Dorrit” by Charles Dickens

I am currently making a number of attempts at reading Dickens’ Little Dorrit. I must say that it is not that easy of job: I have been making these attempts for a second week now and I have moved only about 60 pages through the text! And even though I have a little bit of an excuse (it is exam period and hence I can pretty much only read while riding a subway) this is still exceedingly slow.

Note: Before making any further remarks, I shall warn the reader that I am not saying that the book is bad; on the contrary — I love it and there aren’t too many literature pieces that are much alike.

As it is probably very well known, Dickens is very descriptive. And by ‘descriptive’, believe me, I mean very descriptive! As an example, consider the following comparison: a ‘regular’ author would write “She threatened her son with a book in her hands”. But Dickens is not a regular author — oh, no! He would never write it in such a way. Instead, he writes:

She put two fingers between the leaves, closed the book upon them, and held it up to her son in a threatening way.

And this is a really simple example, the one that I could find by just randomly flipping the book open to write this post.

One other thing that astonished me was that the main character of the book — Little Dorrit — does not appear anywhere (not even a hint of her appearance) until page 54 (well, I shall correct myself: there is a slight mentioning of some young lady that works in the house — about two sentences, no more). Moreover, some first 40 pages, you find descriptions yet ever more! I have literally skipped a page or two a few times, because otherwise I felt that I was on the verge of putting the book away.

So I what I am trying to say is that the book is hard to attempt it is not a light reading. But the beauty of Dicken’s writing overwhelms, truly. For example, here’s a piece of how Dicken’s describes the look of one of the characters’ face:

I am
self-contained and self-reliant; your opinion is nothing to me; I have no interest in you, care nothing for you, and see and hear you with indifference — this it said plainly.

Right now I am fighting with a feeling (the instance of which has occurred to me two or three times by now) to give up “Little Dorrit”; but a few
factors restrict myself from doing so:

• It is a classics book and I wanted to read it since long ago — I simply cannot betray myself;
• By having had a pleasure of reading Dickens’ Oliver Twist, I now that Little Dorrit has got to be not worse (and possibly even better) and not brighter and possibly even darker);
• It promises to be extremely very well written, according to many. And in the ase that every one of them is wrong, I have got to check it for myself!

Building Genomes and Internet Censorship

I have read two very-very short articles, which I found quite interesting. To make a list:

1. Building Genomes, by Michael Brudno, The Arts & Science Review, University of Toronto, 2007, 4:2, page 21.

Brudno talks about the use of computers helps understanding of the human genome, specifically through the comparison between the genome of human beings with that of other species: “Many of the analysis of novel genomes have concentrated on how similar other species are to humans.” As an example, he says that human and mouse genome differ by about 40%; the difference between two humans is 0.1%, on average of course. The surprise came with the studies of the Ciona (which is a sea squirt) genomes, the result of which was an assemblage of “two similar, but different genomes”; the difference being almost 5%.
The conclusion was that “most organisms have two copies of the genome: one ingerited from the father and one from the mother.” So, the human genome from a father and that from a mother differ by 0.1%, which is minuscule enough to have been neglected by the scientists and believed to be a single genome.
Now, the scientists are attempting to build this genome, and in that order, they turn to computers and hence here are a few open questions, posed by Brudno: “how do we assemble two jigsaw puzzles which are only five percent different, but the pieces of which have become intermingled?” “How much variation is possible between two individuals from a single species and what are the biological processes that cause this variation”?

2.Internet Censorship Worldwide by Ron Deibert, The Arts & Science Review, University of Toronto, 2007, 4:2, page 38.

This isn’t actually too much of an article, but more of just a world map with some information, which illustrates national, governmental or other type of control over the world wide web. Deibert breaks the level of control into 4 categories, listed from least to most controlled: inderect, nominal, substantial and pervasive. As expected, China, North Korea, Pakistan and a few others were listed under “pervasive”, being the most controlled. However, I was completely surprised to see Tunisia on under the pervasive, too. To me, this country always seemed to be very liberal, quiet and tourist-oriented. If anyone has any more information or thought on that, I’d be happy to hear.
Other countries, such as Russia and Ukraine, were listed under “watchlist”, meaning they are to be investigated in the next short little while. My prediction is, of course, the pervasive level, would you agree? A number of European countries, such as Spain, Italy, Sweden and many others weren’t listed under any category and appeared blanck on the map — I wonder what can be said about them.