To the Fair Fluke!

Captain Ahab put the spyglass down on the ship\u27s table with a grunt of satisfaction. There was no doubt about it; the indistinct pale shape on the starboard horizon was Moby Dick. Was his long search at an end? Hastily he uncorked a bottle of rum and poured its contents into a tumbler. Raising this in the direction of the distant whale, he murmured to himself A toast - to the fair fluke

What Will They Think of Us?

One day, hopefully in the far-distant future, an archaeologist may come across the ruins of our American civilization that it had been. In order to do this, he may attempt to analyze the words and phrases that we used. For example, he may discover that George Dewey, an admiral in the U.S. Navy, is reputed to have said at Manila Bay, You may fire when ready, Gridley. And he may also discover that William Prescott, a Revolutionary soldier, said at Bunker Hill, Don\u27t fire until you see the whites of their eyes. As these two quotations are clearly at variance with each other in determining the proper time to fire at an adversary, he may conclude that the American people were split about 50-50 between the laissez-faire attitude of Admiral Dewey and the considerably stricter requirements laid down by Mr. Prescott. Or did the rules change drastically, depending on whether one was on land or at sea

The Strong Vs. The Weak

In the English language, verbs are divided into two groups: the strong and the weak. Weak verbs are those which simply add the letters ED onto the basic verb in order to form the other principal parts; an example is the verb WALK, WALKED, WALKED. A strong verb is one which changes its spelling in order to form the three principal parts; an example is the verb SING, SANG, SUNG

The Perils of Literal Translation

It is well known that all languages have their own peculiar idioms. Reckless translation into foreign languages can sometimes have unfortunate, and sometimes funny, consequences. This fact is amply illustrated by the following story. An engineer had once devised a program which would enable him to translate between any two languages on earth. He described his program at a technical meeting, and in order to demonstrate its power, he had a computer loaded with the new program. After describing the program, he asked the audience to suggest a phrase for him to ask the computer to translate. Someone suggested the phrase out of sight, out of mind . The engineer punched this into the machine, and then asked someone else in the audience to suggest a language that he might translate to. Someone suggested Russian. He loaded that into the machine, punched the Go button, and waited. The machine whirred for a few moments, and finally announced that the translation was such-and-such (in Russian)

Mrs. Malaprop, The Ad(Wo)Man

Webster\u27s unabridged dictionary (Third Edition) defines a malapropism as a usually humorous misapplication of a word or phrase; specifically, a blundering use of a word that sounds somewhat like the one intended but is ludicrously wrong in the context. The term is derived from Mrs. Malaprop, a lady in Richard Sheridan\u27s 1775 comedy, The Rivals, noted for her misuse of words

Proof of Rounding by Quenched Disorder of First Order Transitions in Low-Dimensional Quantum Systems

We prove that for quantum lattice systems in d<=2 dimensions the addition of quenched disorder rounds any first order phase transition in the corresponding conjugate order parameter, both at positive temperatures and at T=0. For systems with continuous symmetry the statement extends up to d<=4 dimensions. This establishes for quantum systems the existence of the Imry-Ma phenomenon which for classical systems was proven by Aizenman and Wehr. The extension of the proof to quantum systems is achieved by carrying out the analysis at the level of thermodynamic quantities rather than equilibrium states.Comment: This article presents the detailed derivation of results which were announced in Phys. Rev. Lett. 103 (2009) 197201 (arXiv:0907.2419). v3 incorporates many corrections and improvements resulting from referee comment

Non-Fermi liquid angle resolved photoemission lineshapes of Li0.9Mo6O17

A recent letter by Xue et al. (PRL v.83, 1235 ('99)) reports a Fermi-Liquid (FL) angle resolved photoemission (ARPES) lineshape for quasi one-dimensional Li0.9Mo6O17, contradicting our report (PRL v.82, 2540 ('99)) of a non-FL lineshape in this material. Xue et al. attributed the difference to the improved angle resolution. In this comment, we point out that this reasoning is flawed. Rather, we find that their data have fundamental differences from other ARPES results and also band theory.Comment: To be published as a PRL Commen

NOTCH1 (Notch homolog 1, translocation-associated (Drosophila))

Review on NOTCH1 (Notch homolog 1, translocation-associated (Drosophila)), with data on DNA, on the protein encoded, and where the gene is implicated

Factorised Steady States in Mass Transport Models on an Arbitrary Graph

We study a general mass transport model on an arbitrary graph consisting of $L$ nodes each carrying a continuous mass. The graph also has a set of directed links between pairs of nodes through which a stochastic portion of mass, chosen from a site-dependent distribution, is transported between the nodes at each time step. The dynamics conserves the total mass and the system eventually reaches a steady state. This general model includes as special cases various previously studied models such as the Zero-range process and the Asymmetric random average process. We derive a general condition on the stochastic mass transport rules, valid for arbitrary graph and for both parallel and random sequential dynamics, that is sufficient to guarantee that the steady state is factorisable. We demonstrate how this condition can be achieved in several examples. We show that our generalized result contains as a special case the recent results derived by Greenblatt and Lebowitz for $d$-dimensional hypercubic lattices with random sequential dynamics.Comment: 17 pages 1 figur