arXiv moderation

I submitted a paper to the arXiv the other day, and when it appeared I noticed the moderators had cross-listed it to some ridiculous pissant arXiv which I don't give a rat's ass about.

What's the problem? Clearly I get (a modicum) of extra publicity by cross-listing, so I should probably be indifferent to this. But I'm not. I think there are two reasons.

First, I suppose that every other physicist is a bit like me in how they see the arXiv. People who publish on hep-th sneer at people who publish on hep-ph, people on hep-ph sneer at those who publish on hep-ex, etc, so that people who work on the same area of me will think my paper is shit since I linked it to a shit arXiv.

Actually, I imagine everyone who publishes on hep-th sneers at everyone else, and I know that everyone, even passing marsupials who are mysteriously and briefly granted he understanding of science by a pissed up blue fairy and who happen to wander onto the arXiv while googling for "really good grubs to eat", sneer at physics.pop-ph.

Although I did just find this:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.2263

Genius.

The second reason, and this is the real one, is that it's sodding well rude to reclassify an article and not tell the author. I can't abide these pissing up the wall contests with other physicists, and that is precisely what arXiv moderation is. Some high-up with a "I've got more citations than you" attitude can do what he/she likes with your paper and they know it.

If these people had an ounce of humility or just base gregariousness left in their citation-hunting blasted souls, they would fire off a fucking e-mail and say "hello, we'd like to cross list your paper. Please respond before the next deadline if there's a problem."

If I had received such an e-mail I wouldn't have batted an eyelid. Yes, I would still have been doubtful about the necessity of cross-listing my paper to physics.yawn but I wouldn't have objected actively to it, and I wouldn't have become this irate.

Cannot stand impoliteness.

Conference blogging: LC2011

I'll be blogging from LightCone 2011 next week. For those who don't know about this conference, it's a pleasant enough event where a lot of people who work on very different topics get together and try to sell their stuff to disparate communities by saying, at some point in their alloted 30 mins, "which we can do in lightcone co-ordinates as so..."

There are also a hardcore bunch working on the very old, very hard, still unresolved, problems of lightfront field theory proper. Last year the conference was somewhat tediously dominated by Schwinger Dyson people (few of whom even pretended to care about the lightfront - shocking!) but that was due to the location and the organising commitee. Since we're on the home turf of the lightfront bigshots this year (the US), I expect a great deal of ADS/QCD stuff.

Oh yes, and it's in Dallas, Texas. Embolism alert... packing prozac now...

Your desk? It went out with SUSY.

Having just had my grant application rejected, I am in a slightly contemplative mood. The rejection is more annoying than anything else, for two reasons. First, because I now can't hire someone to take the load off, and second because it means I have to spend more time applying for other grants this year.

So, the future. Promise lurks on the horizon. It lurks like a huge shadowy something which could be an awesome uber-pancake covered in yummmy job-jam, but could also be the unemployment squid, its many tentacles flicking over the land, picking off postdocs and professors alike.

The deciding factor between pancake and cephalopod is the LHC. Theoretical physics is in a state. Despite the velociraptuous support from the higher ups, a lot of modern theoretical physics is not science. (As I've posted before, some explain this away by saying that "Modern physics has nothing to do with the Marxist definition of science". I'll let you ponder that one while I get back to the point.) The multiverse is not science, the anthropic principle is not science, and the SUSY apologists' escape route, that it can always be shoved up to higher energies, is worryingly reminiscent of something which isn't science.

Saying any experimental result, or lack thereof, can be shuffled into another part of the multiverse, preserving the sanctity of The String, is not science. I'm not going to bash string theory, I think it's a cool idea, but arguing that the multiverse is the only possible option just because strings led us there is very lazy, and dangerous, thinking.

I think I'm drifting. The point is, if the LHC finds nothing, high energy physics is going to be in trouble, and jobs are going to be even more scarce than they are now. But this is obvious to everyone involved. So why am I mentioning it.... if I had a point it has escaped me. Sorry.

Oooh, waffles....

The LHC - a big magnifying glass.

The Guardian explains why we haven't found the Higgs yet. Apparently the reason is that it is very, very small.

INSPIRE

So, INSPIRE beta might look a bit naff (note the heavily downplayed significance of citations? Interesting huh?), but thank god it's faster than SPIRES, which has of late become the search equivalent of an overweight sloth with a sore foot. When there's something really good on the TV.

For those who want to set up a "search keyword" in Firefox for INSPIRE, it seems a little tweaking is needed. Using the default "add a keyword" dongle in Firefox means extra typing. For example, if your keyword was "spires", then you would have to type

spires find a witten and d 2010

to get hold of Witten's work from last year. Alternartively, if you can't be bothered typing two keywords, and I know I can't, then use this as your bookmark:

http://inspirebeta.net/search?ln=sv&p=find+%s&f=

Note the adition of the "find" in there. Now you just need to type

spires a witten and d 2010

There. That's less typing.

Copy editing.

After the third version of my proofs were returned by Phys.Rev. without serious mistakes being corrected, I resorted to begging.

The mistakes were not mine, let's get that out of the way. What was accepted by the journal was 3.5 pages of nicely formatted and carefully checked LaTeX. What came back was, surprisingly, 4.5 pages of space gobbling elvish script which, after a cursory examination, was revealed to contain entirely different equations to the ones I had submitted.

No really. My Dirac matrices had been re-ordered. "p" had become "q". Subscripts had changed from "2,3" to "1,2". All inexplicable.

These kind of changes can presumably be explained by how copy editing works, but I'm honestly not sure. I presumed at first that these chaps were using LaTeX, but this is perhaps not the case -- I suppose its more likely that they "import" the TeX file into some kind of grown up proper publishing program (read "poorly designed, bug ridden, memory hogging Mircrosoft trash") which produces proper grown up printable pages (read "a mess of grossly ugly type and mis-spaced equations"). This import won't be perfect and presumably some equations have to be reformatted by hand.

Fine. So why don't the lazy buggers check what they have changed? Why don't they have, wait for it, both files open at the same time, and then move their eyes between those files to check if they are the same? Why not do that, which is, presumably, let's see, their job, rather than just guessing what should go into the equations and then sending it back to me so that I can whittle a few more months off my life with the added stress of having to do someone else's fucking job?

The next time I'm sent such a bucket of shite I'm going to ask "aps beacon" to pay me fucking overtime.

It is disputational death to convey the impression of superiority these days. You can't claim that one job is better than another for fear of being accused of intellectual discrimination. So let's clear that up too: nowhere do I claim that typesetters have an easy job. I am certainly not claiming that I could do their job -- I couldn't, I don't have the patience or a careful enough eye. But if I did have to do their job for a month, I'd at least be concientious enough to check that I wasn't so fucking lazy as to have actually turned someone else's effort into TRIPE.

Feckless, apathetic morons.

Maybe there are other explanations. If it's not incompetence or apathy, then maybe it's some kind of bad juju dark magic.

In which case I want it, because I could use that to scupper my rivals. With that:

Blessed be the mighty god Zarnax, lord of copy editors, I give praise to his name and humbly request he bestow his splendiferous talents upon me, so that I too may off-handedly fuck around with the science which someone else has poured sweating, irreplacable hours of their sodding lives into.

(Ah, I have a PRD proof waiting for me.... this should be a hoot.)

MUAH HA HA HA!!

P.R.L.! Wooo hooooooooo! Suck on that, crappy wrong over-paid professor type!

You should see the reviews. They are glittering.

The thorn in this particular rose is that the copy-editors are atrocious (I suspect they are in the employ of disgruntled rubbish professor physicist impersonator, either that or they're pissed at having to work over christmas). I'll talk about this shortly.