Back in the summer

I realise things have gone pretty quiet around here. It turns out having a baby takes away pretty much any spare time you thought you had.

I still have big plans for this blog and as the number of times I'm wide awake at 3am decreases I can see the light at the end of the sleep deprived tunnel. So I'm planning to have a quiet relaunch in the summer when I'll hopefully get some regularity back.

See you soon.

Journal Club: A New Blog

I've just started a new blog www.scmjournalclub.org. It's definitely in what you'd call the beta phase right now. I will certainly be changing the layout and gradually adding more permanent content over the next few weeks.

Contributions welcome to submissions@scmjournalclub.org.

While I do sometimes get a bit technical, Kinetically Constrained is hopefully of interest to people inside and outside of the field. The idea for the journal club is that it is aimed at people working in the area of soft matter and statistical mechanics. In particular I want it to be useful for postgraduate students who would find it helpful understanding papers they may have found a bit impenetrable otherwise.

How it will all work will hopefully evolve. I hope one day enough people check it out that the following scenario happens. A PG student presents a paper as best they can that they might be having trouble understanding. A comment thread follows and the problems get sorted out. Everyone wins.

I also suspect that hundreds of journal clubs happen each week in different universities. While I understand people might not want this to be public, for those that don't mind they could put their presentation on SCM journal club where it can benefit even more people.

To kick things off I've started with a recent paper on the arXiv by Andrés Santos on one of my favourite topics – hard spheres.

Brief Summary
In liquid-state theory the hard sphere equation of state is of particular importance because it is a fantastic reference system for a whole host of molecular and in particular colloidal liquids. The hard sphere equation of state (EoS) tells you what pressure you need to compress a your spheres to get a given density. With an analytical form for the EoS one can calculate any thermodynamic property one desires.

Percus-Yevick (PY) is a way to close to the Ornstein-Zernicke (OZ) equation – an exact relation between correlation functions – and is usually solved by either the compressibility route or the virial route. You’re basically choosing how your approximation enters. Here Santos has taken a different route, following the chemical potential, and it gives a slightly different closure to OZ.

Carnahan-Starling is an incredibly simple EoS for hard spheres which is in common use (fluid phase). It can be written as a 1/3-2/3 mix of the compressibility and virial PY routes. In a similar way Santos writes a 2/5-3/5 mix of compressibility and chemical potential routes and gets a similarly simple expression – which is ever-so-slightly better than Carnahan-Starling.

I'm more than happy to take contributions. I think it's nicer if people say who they are but I'll hold back the name if that's the barrier to submitting (provided it's not an anonymous destruction of a rival's paper). You can submit via submissions@scmjournalclub.org. For interested regulars I can look into direct posting via blogger.

Less ill

My spritely return has been a bit slower than I thought. However, thanks to the lovely people who work in the Dutch medical system I'm pretty much back.

Long winded post on the thermodynamic limit coming very shortly, then a follow up on ergodicity that I've been toying with. I've also got a new spin on the criticality videos that demonstrates the renormalisation group in action – I'm really really pleased with this video. Oh, and I'm at a conference next week so I'll round up some of the nice talks. There are a couple on critical Casimir forces so I may be compelled to put something down about that.

So lots coming up.

been ill

Apologies for yet another reader-losing break in posts. I've been ill. Nothing terrible, but I'm not getting as far down my priority list as I might otherwise.

Hopefully a spritely return in the next few weeks.

Back from the dead

Can't remember the number of times I've said I've been away because I've been busy, but this time it'll be different. Well it probably won't be different, it looks like I'm destined to be an inconsistent blogger!

It's now been three months since I arrived in the Netherlands for my new job and I'm enjoying it a lot here. The pace is much faster in the group than I'm used to but I'm enjoying the buzz of lots of interesting things getting done. Now I'm more settled I'm hoping for a spectacular return to blogging - there's certainly enough to talk about here!

The Dutch are good at science

In general the Netherlands has a fantastic history in the sciences. I was watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos the other day (best telly ever made), he loved the Netherlands it would seem. There's a whole episode where people dress up in pointy hats and reenact bits from Dutch scientific history.


I'm no historian so there's no point making a huge list. Some notable greats though include Cristiaan Huygens, famous for the wave theory of light, he worked on telescopes and even the pendulum clock. The microscope was invented in the Netherlands, allowing the Antonie van Leeuwenhoek to discover "a universe in a drop of water".

What about statistical mechanics?

Closer to the focus of this blog, the name Johannes van der Waals is never far away. His theories allowed us to begin to understand why matter undergoes phase transitions.Two names that are important for us here in Utrecht are Peter Debye and Leonard Ornstein.

Peter Debye is another one of those names that just seems to pop up all the time. It's littered through my thesis because of his work on phonons. Debye was professor at the university of Utrecht for a very short time. I believe the university didn't deliver on his startup money so he left. The picture is from our coffee room in the Debye Institute.

As well as working in the Debye Institute I also work in the Ornstein Lab, after Leonard Ornstein. For me his name is most famous from the Ornstein-Zernike relation in liquid state theory, however, I think he did a lot of varied stuff. He followed on from Debye at Utrecht in 1914 where he remained until 1940. Ornstein was Jewish and at the beginning of the war was dismissed from his position at the university. Only six months later he died. Seems to me it should be the Ornstein Institute, anyway, we also have his picture up.

Enough history

So the Dutch weren't too bad at science. The living ones aren't too shabby either. So hopefully lots of interesting things to be posted in the coming weeks.

Meeting is good

Once again I find myself making some excuse as to why it's been over a month since my last post. My first reason is I'm finishing up my current postdoc. My other reason is I've been doing lots of travelling. This is much more exciting as I've been finding out more about all the cool soft matter / stat-mech work that is going on in the UK. Some of which I will blog about in time. I've also learned that half the people in soft matter in the UK have worked at some point in the Netherlands, which is handy because I'm moving to the Netherlands!

Getting to the point

All this travelling is related to the topic I wanted to get to today - the value of meeting. I was started off thinking about this thanks to Alice Bell's article in the THE on the value of the seminar. Here Alice calls for seminars to be posted online, something I agree with very much, as a way to reach more people (and to improve the standard a bit). From my experience I've had to use hundreds of pounds of grant money touring the country giving the same seminar. While I value that experience - meeting the people in the groups, direct interaction and so on - it's a shame that people at other universities can't see the talk as well.

Of course if people knew it was online they may not turn up, but hopefully not. I might start sticking mine up here.

The more efficient way of way of reaching many like-minded academics is of course the conference. A good conference can do wonders for your creativity and enthusiasm, it can give you an instant snapshot of the state-of-art and you can meet future employers/collaborators.

But they can be a bit stuffy and long. And expensive. So I'd like to fly the flag for a third kind of academic interaction, the informal science "retreat". Not long ago we had our annual Cornish Soft Matter weekend. A small group of physicists and chemists from a couple of universities got together for a more relaxed meeting. Talks were projected onto a sheet, we were sitting on sofas or the floor, and the start of a talk would be delayed due to people making a last minute cup of tea (usually this was me). All this in a really nice setting.

The demographic was largely PhD students and postdocs, and everyone had to give a short talk. If it overran, fine, if people had questions they'd asked them right away. Students were encouraged to ask as many questions as possible and academics resisted the urge to tear anyone to bits with their sharpened critical skills.

Scientifically it's great. I got to hear from the people who make all these synthetic colloids that I always cite. Their concerns weren't always about phase diagrams or dynamic arrest, sometimes it was simply how much stabiliser or chemical X do I need to get the polydispersity down. These are problems I don't usually get to hear about and it's particularly nice to get it from the people at the coal face.

Because the atmosphere is more relaxed you can give a different kind of talk. In a conference you're so worried about being jumped on that you tend to take out all the personality from a talk, all the wild speculation and, well, then fun side of science. Here we could kind of let rip. If we wanted.

Socially it is also a good thing. It's easy to get a little isolated with your own little problem, especially when your doing a PhD, so it's nice to mix a bit. Science, like most jobs, requires a degree of networking. While I hate this word and all that it implies, these informal gatherings are a much better way to get to know people than conferences. People at conferences are always trying to look smart and generally suck up to the established professors. Makes me shiver just thinking about it.

A snappy conclusion

The main thing that made this meeting nice was the atmosphere. I highly recommend anyone to organise something similar if it's possible. Sure, it was no Copenhagen, but the science was good and it helped create that sense of being in a scientific community.

While it's not free it's a lot cheaper than a conference. I guess you don't need to go all the way to Cornwall but it is nice to get out the department for a couple of days - especially when you usually sit at a desk all the time.

New domain

I've taken the domain name, kineticallyconstrained.com. For now don't change anything as the exact address might move about a bit. I haven't quite worked out what sub domains to use blah blah blah.

Eventually I plan to put some permanent content and develop the site a bit. For now, to be honest, I'm mostly testing that the RSS feed is still working!

It's been a while

But I'm planning a dramatic comeback - just as soon as I've sorted my next job!

I've got some more critical-scaling stuff in the pipeline, some nice crystallisation videos and it may be time for some chat about self-assembly seeing as I'm now officially a self-assembler (self-assemblist?).

So don't delete Kinetically Constrained from your RSS reader just yet!

Comment Spam Filter

If this is true:

Blogger Buzz: New Comments System on Blogger

Then it will halt my planned relocation to Wordpress. It's just in the nick of time. It's not enabled for me yet but as soon as it is I'll be switching off the moderation in favour of a spam filter.

UPDATE: In true Blogger fashion they've managed to arse this up. The spam filter only comes on when you enable full comment moderation. The whole point of a spam filter is that I don't want to moderate comments! I want them to go straight on the blog unless they look like obvious spam.

I'm beginning to wonder if any of these people actually run their own blog. Wordpress migration preparation continues...

UPDATE Nov 2011: As far as I'm concerned comment moderation is fixed, blogger has been humming along nicely for me for a while now.

Comment spam

I'm getting killed by comment spam at the moment. You'd really think Google would be better at stopping it but I don't want to get into that. Anyway, given I don't have as much internet access at the moment I can't mop up the spam quick enough so for a little while I'm going to have either moderation or require openid signing in. It's a shame because I really want to keep comments open.

Update: login didn't work so for now it's bloody moderation.

Update 2: Constantly catching comment spam. Wordpress has a facility to block comments with more than one hyperlink. I'm seriously looking at moving the site over.

Conferences

Seems like it's been a very long time since I've posted anything. This is mostly because things have been a bit of a blur recently preparing a paper, a talk and a poster for some up coming conferences. As soon as conference season is over I'll be back on the regular posts.

The science poster is a bizarre and demoralising ritual. You know that hardly anyone will see it (at one of my conferences there will be something like 500 posters), but you daren't not do it properly just in case. So you spend days putting this thing together, £30 getting it printed, only to have hundreds of people walk straight past it. Who knows, maybe you can catch one or two people who will write down a reference.

Anyway, this is what I'm going to be standing in front of next week, I think it's quite pretty:

It occurred to me that I haven't really blogged about my own work (is it not done?) but I'll start doing so when I return. In the meantime, it's all on the poster!

On the off chance anyone is going to Brno next week then come and find me and say hello.

Help with twitter name

What do you think this blog's twitter feed should be called?

KineticallyConstrained is a bit long (will hurt the retweets)
KineticCon?
KConstrained?
Kinetically?
KinCon (taken)
TwittersPointlessDontBother?

So many important decisions...

Do you like my new header?

OK, so I'm no Banksy, but I do like green. I'll probably be playing around with themes a bit over the next few weeks.

Hopefully the header captures how "kinetically constrained" can apply to complex statistical systems and that sort of stuck feeling that I can never quite shake off. Look at me full of bollocks, maybe I can get on Newsnight review or something.

First Post

Welcome to my new blog. I haven't quite worked out what to do with it yet but I think it's good to have a blog, the internet's already full of useless crap so this isn't going to make it any worse.

Right now I'm writing my thesis so I doubt I'll be putting much on here but when I do I suspect it'll mainly be based on the two things: physicsy stuff and statistics stuff. The former should be mainly positive (things I think are really interesting) and the latter will be mostly negative (ranting about stats-abuse). I guess we'll see how it goes.