Name-dropping

Eric Hobsbawm on the British Communist spy Alan Nunn May (LRB, gated):

When [Nunn May] left jail at the end of 1952 after six years, the secret services did their best – although the witch-hunting hysteria was then at its height and despite worries about furious American reactions – to find him a reasonable scientific job. When this proved impossible, his transition was eased by the offer from what was claimed to be an ‘anonymous benefactor’ (via the vice-chancellor of Cambridge) of a support grant for two years. [...] Nunn May did not get a permanent post until 1961, when J.D. Bernal persuaded President Kwame Nkrumah of the newly decolonised state of Ghana to offer him a chair at his new university, under its equally unexpected vice-chancellor, Conor Cruise O’Brien.

(To file under "statistically improbable juxtapositions.") Article also contains an admirably evocative character sketch of Nunn May:

I recall him, shortly after his release, as a big, deliberately understated, friendly, shy, emotionally unattached man uncertain how to make his return to the world. Until his marriage he seemed at ease only with music. When he spoke about his life, as he was ready to, he radiated a melancholy but not quite resigned honesty. He knew he had drawn the short straw.

"It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange"

As the summer of writing papers yields to the fall of trying to find work, one is naturally much troubled by introspection -- which, in my case, is of a self-pitying and/or self-accusing kind that it's probably best not to inflict on others; hence the general hush. A few observations:

• There is much to be said for the theory that procrastination is self-sabotage. I suspect that I'm invested in telling myself that I've underachieved and in making this seem plausible on the merits. (The alternative, that one did one's best but still ended up mediocre, is much more dispiriting.)
• Wasted effort is character-building. (So is putting a lot of effort into something you know you'll never get good at; so are routine tasks that eat up a lot of your time.) I have avoided all of these to a large extent, and the consequent damage is a profound inability to get myself to work hard.
• In my case, part of the problem was that, by managing to avoid all teaching responsibilities, and not (e.g.) having a family to worry about, I managed to keep afloat relative to others -- workwise -- without doing very much. Had I been more driven and less indolent, I would have done more, and perhaps accomplished more; even if that effort had been wasted, I would have accustomed myself to long, concentrated spells of working. It appears to be easier to increase one's time at work than to increase one's efficiency: any obligation that caps work hours is a good thing.
• It is pointless to commit yourself to things that you're not up to -- however much you'd like to be up to them -- on the assumption that commitments really are binding on your future self. Your future self is more slippery than you give it credit for being. Your future self is also quite good at damage control.
• An almost-snowclone: "X's weaknesses are inseparable from his strengths." Depressingly true of most of us, I think. I often wish I were better with details than I am, but I think that if I had (ceteris paribus) that sort of mind I would be subject to the shortcomings of the detail-oriented people I see all about me. (This is partly a numerical thing: for some reason it is rarer to find physicists who are heedless of particulars than to find those who pay too much attention to them.)
• There is no such thing as bad luck. There is unreasonably good luck, and then there is the luck we deserve.

March meeting names, etc.

I was skimming the March meeting schedule during a particularly dull talk this afternoon, looking for amusing session and talk titles. (For obvious reasons this is a much more remunerative game at the MLA.) I am probably the wrong person to be doing this, being somewhat inured to the weirdness of many terms. For this reason the biophysics titles are a lot more amusing (to me) than the condensed matter ones. (Another piece of evidence: Alan recently pointed out that I had given a talk titled "Solidity and frustration in multimode cavities." This seemed a sensible and even drab title at the time...)

My favorite session title/concept was "Migrations of Physicists" -- it had talks by Russian, Chinese, etc. physicists etc. but I think the talks were meant to be anecdotes rather than studies. I couldn't attend as there was an actual physics session (well, 40-ish) at the same time.

Some others:

Sessions
Drowning in carbon: the imperative of nuclear power
Semiconductor growths [this one probably a typo]
Thermoelectric materials: skutterudites, novel and nanostructured materials
Gapless spin liquids
Macromolecular crowding effects in the cytoplasm
Functional gels
The corporate feel: atomic force microscopy in industry

Speakers with interesting names (a very partial list): Behtash Behin-Aein, Bonna Newman, Reza Farhadifar, Nigel Scrutton, Spiros Skourtis, Nicholas Economou, Thorsten Ritz, Stefan Blugel, Adilson Motter, Eric Pop, Yves Acremann, Christian Pfleiderer, Yoshinori Onose, Weida Wu, Laurent Bellaiche (the last five were all in the same session).

(Google Analytics is going to love this post.)

In other news we got the following excellent email from the Illini-Alert emergency system this morning (the entire thing was just a technical error, something to do w/ testing the alert system...):

subject Active Shooter/Threat

Active shooter at BUILDING NAME/INTERSECTION. Escape area if safe to do so or shield/secure your location.