Not so good on the details (update)

Another Nigerian scam made its way into my inbox this morning; some days are just more spam-filled than others. However, there was a paragraph in it that just screamed out for being shared:

NOTE THAT THIS TRANSACTION WILL STRICTLY BE BASED ON THE FOLLOWING TERMS AND CONDITIONS AS I HAVE STATED BELOW, AS WE HAVE HEARD CONFIRMED CASES OF BUSINESS ASSOCIATES RUNNING AWAY WITH FUNDS KEPT IN THEIR CUSTODY WHEN IT IS FINALLY REMITTED INTO THEIR BANK ACCOUNTS.A VERY GOOD EXAMPLE IS THE ONE OF MR. PETER HOPWOOD, . . . AND THE FORMER CHAIRMAN OF OMPADEC(MR PATRICK OPIA)WHOM WE WERE RELIABLY INFORMED THAT AFTER THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN BOTH PARTNERS IN WHICH HE WAS TO TAKE 15% OF THE MONEY WHILE THE REMAINING 85% FOR THE NIGERIAN OFFICIALS. WITH ALL THE REMAINING DOCUMENTS SIGNED,THE MONEY WAS DULY TRANSFERED INTO MR HOPWOOD'S ACCOUNT, ONLY TO BE DISAPPOINTED ON THEIR ARRIVAL IN NEW YORK AND WERE INFORMED THAT MR PETER HOPWOOD WAS NO LONGER ON THAT ADDRESS,WHILE HIS TELEPHONE AND FAX NUMBERS HAD BEEN RE-ALLOCATED TO SOME BODY ELSE.

That's right: the scammers are complaining that people are trying to scam them. This is a sign that (1) they're getting desperate not to have people go forward, (2) they're threatening people, or (3) someone was just plain stupid and actually paid out the money. Which is the most humorous, I'll leave to you.

Not so good on the details

Pretty much everybody by now has heard of---or has been solicited by---the Nigerian e-mail scam, which according to some reports is perhaps the third- or fourth-leading industry in the economy.

What is rather astonishing, though, is how far-fetched the plots seem to be: judging by the e-mails I've received, there are three main routes in the scam. One is the "dead dictator": some assassinated leader squirreled away some money, and a foreigner is needed to whisk it into the country. Another is the "fraudulent overbill": a committee has submitted a "claim" to the government that is substantially higher than the actual "bid," and a foreign investor is needed to claim the remainder of the money as a "contractor." Finally is the "foreign worker": a dead foreign national has left a truckload of cash in an account in Nigeria; a foreign next-of-kin is required to claim the money.

Personally, I think the last of these is the most preposterous---particularly when the worker in question is in a random occupation, such a sailor or an engineer. First off, what engineer or sailor---or other typical white- or blue-collar worker---would have $10+ million stashed away. More importantly, if you had that kind of capital, and you were a foreign worker, why wouldn't you invest it somewhere else, such as Switzerland?

I know sometimes that people are deceived even though it's clearly a case of "too good to be true." However, when you start looking and noticing that people are sending this spam to e-mail lists and requesting that this stay "confidential and top-secret," you realize how utterly absurd it is to think that you're going to reap anything other than sorrow and a smaller bank balance if you fall for this scam.

Two touchdowns and a field goal

That was the margin of victory in the 25-8 shellacking of the Marlins at the hand of the Red Sox last night.

How ugly did things get for the Marlins?

• Two Marlins pitchers were pulled out of the game--before the first out. Their ERA's shot up roughly a full-point each.


• The Marlins needed 91 pitches, and nearly an hour, to end the first inning.


• The Red Sox improved their season batting average from .294 to .297--in the first inning. (It was "only" .299 by the end of the game.)


• Johnny Damon needed just a HR to hit for the cycle--and Todd Walker and David Ortiz needed just a triple. Damon only went 5-for-7 on the night.


• The losing pitcher, Carl Pavano, apparently can't catch a break: he has also had the misfortune of being traded by Boston--for Pedro Martinez, and giving up McGuire's 70th homer.

Just about the only way to make this more entertaining would have been if it were Toronto or New York being on the receiving end, just like the Indians were the last time "Boston won by two touchdowns." [Even though it would cause Steinbrenner to spend another $25 million on Yankee payroll, watching his utter anguish and torment as the loss unfolded might have been worth it.]

Rube Goldberg, eat your heart out; or, More people with too much free time on their hands

Well, at least this one they probably got paid for.

If you haven't seen it yet, download and watch "The Cog" from Honda's UK division. It's a rather remarkable stunt, completed in a single take. However, the whole stunt required approximately five days of around-the-clock shooting, and 606 takes. You'd think such dedication would only be seen in cartoons (the intro to HomeStarRunner.com comes to mind), yet here is proof of what can happen when people are driven to perfection.

To be tenure-track or not to be tenure-track

Yet another issue to deal with in these late stages of my graduate career is where do I go next, and what's the best route to get there?

My goal is to become an academic, so therefore, at some point, I will obviously need to submit applications for tenure-track positions. However, I also plan to do a post-doc, to build up skills and learn about some new problems (whether or not they're actually in polymer science, my current field).

Now, this means that I have two options. One is to start the application process this year, try to land a position, and then do a post-doc. The other is to wait until I do my post-doc, then start hunting on the job market. While I'd be a stronger candidate during the post-doc, I agree with a friend of mine who suggested that having a tenure-track position lined up before the post-doc would put much less pressure on my post-doc experience.

So, I think what I want to try is to do a limited tenure-track job search--look at a few positions that are "dream jobs," and hope for the best. If it works, then I have a (more) stress-free post-doc, and if not, then at least I'll have most of the documents and materials ready for revision and submission.

Too much free time on their hands?

Apparently, the folks bringing us the Lord of the Rings trilogy, while getting Return of the King ready, had enough free time on their hands to cook up one of the most hilarious acceptance speeches of all time. This is even more so when you consider that the "winner" of the award is a CGI creation. This easily ranks with anything Pixar has come up with for "Catching Nemo," "A Bug's Life," or any other film. . . .

Worms take cover. . .

Apparently the Times of London felt some concern for the "underclass" dwellers in the vicinity of the All-England Tennis club in light of "Big Bang Day"---the matchup between Greg Rusedski and Andy Roddick (the only two people on the ATP who can impart 250 J of energy to a tennis ball). Their warning:

"Here is an important message for all worms resident in London SW19: please vacate the area immediately. You are about to be subject to a bombardment of unprecedented ferocity. We cannot be responsible for your safety."

It was definitely chuckle-worthy.

Strange bedfellows

Sometimes you see something that makes you wonder. In this case, a recent journal article I read thanked for financial support the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (I am not making this up!). Why any single funding agency should be supporting sumo wrestling, Noh theater, and condensed matter physics is beyond me.

In this case, I wonder if there's possibly a more bureaucratically messed up system than ours. . . .

Testing the teachers?

One of the great "successes" of the Bush Administration---or at least, what they'd like you to believe---is the "No Child Left Behind" Act. Its main provisions seem to be that states must institute reforms that are tantamount to vouchers, and administer expensive tests every year---but doesn't seem to do much in the way of aiding schools in improving primary and seconday education.

Now, one of the lesser-known provisions of the law seems to be causing problems: teachers must have a college degree for each advanced subject they teach. This means that in rural areas, where a teacher asked to teach math and physics must have separate degrees in mathematics and physics.

While I'm all for competent teachers, it is reasonable to say that advanced degrees are not always prerequisites for being a teacher. For example, I don't think I'd be too concerned if my kid's third-grade teacher didn't have degrees in American history or biology. So long as that teacher had a sufficiently broad "liberal arts" education [I wonder how much conservatives bristle at that particular term, and was trained as an educator, I think I'd be willing to let things slip. Or if the choice in a rural district is between a political science major teaching American history or no one teaching American history, I'm sure I'd rather have our citizens learn about our past than have yet another generation of Americans grow up ignorant not only of the world but of our own past. . . .

That the government seems to think loopholes and exemptions are only for the well-heeled and well-connected never ceases to astonish me.

So what's a baritenor?

I guess I should explain the site name by explaining the notion of a "baritenor," which doesn't really exist, but is the only good way to describe my singing voice. Basically, my voice has the flexibility to reach both the bass and tenor ends of the vocal spectrum, although it lacks the ring of a true tenor at the top and the authority of a bass (or even bass-baritone) at the lower end. However, it makes an ideal "middle voice," and has a rather large "conversational range." In short, I'd describe my voice as a solo baritone, but choral tenor: anything above a G pretty much has to be in falsetto, or else I will tire out really quickly; anything below a low F will basically have me standing there, looking artistic but not making much sound.

A few samples are available, thanks to my recent concert and recital appearances, of my baritone range (obviously you won't be able to pick out one voice in a choral tenor section). Here's the first song of Ravel's Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, and "Bright is the ring of words" from Vaughan Williams's Songs of Travel. A more "bass-like" example is the bass solo from Brahms's Neue Liebesliederwalzen. [Warning: the Brahms is in OGG format.] More MP3's are available, if readers are interested---just ask. :-)

Happy listening.

You'd better sit down for this one

Finally, after a multi-week saga, our new office chairs for my research group at MIT will soon be on the way. Why, one might ask, was a multiple-week saga required?

Well, simply put, fire codes. Office chairs to be used in schools and educational institutions in Massachusetts allegedly have to satisfy the California 133 fire standard, which apparently involves putting the chair in a burning room for 80 seconds and observing temperature changes and carbon monoxide emissions. It's a much tougher standard than what most office chairs satisfy (116/117, which just requires non-flammability of the fabric covering).

I use the word "allegedly" because even after all this time, my officemates and I are still not sure what standard actually applies to our circumstances. This is because no one we spoke to---not at MIT, at the Cambridge Fire Department, or even at the State Fire Safety Office (the people responsible for these regulations!)---could give us a succinct, unambiguous answer as to what standards actually apply in our case. [The rules are filled with ambiguities and subtleties---typical for government, alas.]

Of course, the net result of all this makes me wonder just how much money is wasted trying to satisfy needlessly complicated regulations, instead of simplifying the regulations or making it crystal clear what regulations apply where. . . .

Service cuts . . . er, Tax cuts for everyone!

At last, somebody cuts to the heart of the matter. Thomas Friedman's column in the Times this morning puts it best: whenever Bush says "tax cuts," what he really means are "service cuts."

Now, while very few people are in favor of more taxes, most Americans---that is, pretty much anyone who isn't going to be one of the lucky $100,000 beneficiaries of the latest tax cuts---would rather see deficit relief and more services provided by the government. And anyone who thinks that more services will be provided with this latest round of tax cuts is likely imitating an ostrich.

If the Democrats can frame the Republican treatment of the economy as a choice between "taxes and services," they might actually have a chance of going somewhere in 2004. But since the Democrats lately seem to have less tactical sense than a herd of lemmings, who knows.

Internet Innumeracy

Time reports this week that the "Can-Spam" act going through Congress this week would require individuals to opt-out with each individual company that wants to send them unsolicited e-mail. [Unsurprisingly, this measure has the support of the Direct Marketing Association, but that's beside the point at the moment.]

The problem is the number of e-mails that might be involved. In order to block every company in the country (23 million) from sending you unsolicited e-mail in a year (365 days), you wouldn't need to send about 600 messages a day; you'd need to send about 6000. Then again, considering the estimates are that five trillion pieces of spam will be sent out this year, that means every human on the planet would have to opt out of at least 800 times per year. That's a lot of clicks.

P.S. Is anybody else getting 3-4 messages a day in Korean?

Research: rigor v. results?

One of the comments that was made at my thesis committee meeting this past week was the notion that a lot of the research in chemical engineering is becoming very much qualitative. While the other members of my thesis committee (and I) took exception to that statement, I am beginning to see that the comment is very much accurate. In many parts of the field, "how much" and "why" isn't as important as "more" or "less."

There's a certain difference in the mindset of a computational scientist and an experimental scientist, I think. Although both need to show results that are "better"---either more accurate, or obtained more easily---the end-products are vastly different. Experimentalists have something to show for their work, some product or data. Computational scientists may not have a particularly interesting data set---it may do nothing more than reproduce already extant results in the literature. But, they may have a novel means of arriving at those results. Unfortunately, the tendency in ChemE seems to be that it is insufficient to show that new technology actually beats old ideas at what they do. Now, one has to solve *new* problems in the context of new technology---even when the algorithms and ideas are still very much in their developmental stages.

So, does this mean I'm out of luck as a chemical engineer? Perhaps, but that doesn't mean I'm completely screwed---it just means that in looking for jobs and faculty positions, I'll have to cast my net a little more widely than just traditional chemical engineering departments. . . .

The prodigal one

What do you do when you want to help someone, but that person just refuses to believe that anyone actually is trying to help?

I've been in an ongoing struggle for nearly two years trying to prevent someone from throwing away all hope of a decent future, yet this person seems hellbent on self-destruction. [Anyone who knows me well knows to whom I'm referring.]

Lately, he seems on the run from everyone, including people from school, friends, and family---except when he needs some money, and then he pleads yet another unexpected expense which has to be paid now. Yet, in return, when everyone who cares about him asks what he wants to do in the future, we hear nothing but a broken record: "I don't know what I want to do." Essentially, he's let the last two years slip by with nothing to show for them: no education, no real job, no accomplishments. It's not that he's unintelligent or incapable---far from it. He's one of the smartest people I know--he has simply been recalcitrant in using his talent to accomplish anything meaningful whatsoever. That's fine if you're a child or a teenager, but when you get to be an adult, you have to be willing to make your way in the world, and that seems to be a concept he has trouble with.

I'm beginning to wonder if the situation is, to quote Sartre, non-recupérable---that at this point, if there's anything that I can say or do which will reverse or even stem the tide in this horrible mess.

Not what it seems at first glance

So, it turns out that what I thought was a simple grab-and-go is apparently much more serious. It turns out that someone else's laptop was taken.

What gets us really riled up is that this happened just after we changed keys, which suggests that this is an inside job. The fact that someone at MIT is ripping off the laptops of students and post-docs who are not in a position to go about replacing them is not just frightening, it's downright revolting.

A hell of a day. . . .

Feeling aggrieved? Why should I be feeling aggrieved right now?

Perhaps it might have something to do with the fact that I've had one of the worst professional weeks of my life, and to top it off, I just found out that my (relatively new and pricey) laptop bag was stolen from my office last night. And now I've been stuck at MIT for the last hour and a half waiting for a CP to show up so that I can report it as stolen and start getting it replaced! [What sort of campus emergency takes more than 90 minutes to deal with?] The only consolation in all of this is that my laptop was nowhere near the vicinity of my laptop bag, and that the library books I had taken home the previous day were out of the bag. And the extended wait gave me time to get the ball rolling with respect to insurance claims.

However, what strikes me as odd---or at the very least, showing not much intelligence on the part of the thief---is that in an office in which there is tons of valuable stuff out in the open (textbooks, software, etc.), the only thing that was taken was my laptop bag. Granted, it's a nice bag, but did the thief really feel the need to steal the notebook of reprints that was in there as well? [Somehow, I can't envision a thriving black market for papers on polymer physics.]

What makes this all the more distressing is that the keys to my office were changed just a few days ago, so hardly anyone would have had a chance to get ahold of the new keys---which means that either someone left a door propped open when they shouldn't have, or someone working at MIT is responsible. Neither of these scenarios is particularly cheerful.