Someone pointed out an amusing Google maps anomaly to me today involving two places near and dear to my heart. Here’s the result of a search for “chinese restaurant st. john’s road cambridge:”
Trinity Street Chinese Restaurant in Cambridge, MA?
This may be very confusing for those who live near Harvard square — the restaurant doesn’t exist. But note the phone number… +44 1223 358281. That’s a UK country code. Turns out Google maps is confusing the St. John’s St., Cambridge above with this St. John’s St., Cambridge:
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The theme started out in 1976 as electronic music, was set for brass orchestra in 1983, and was later reinterpreted and recorded for NPR by jazz musician Wycliffe Gordon in 1995. Meanwhile, lots of musicians have written and performed variations, some of which get played on air. The most “well-known” version (according to NPR) was performed and arranged by the Washington Saxophone Quartet.
Quire Cleveland recording a trixie. (That’s me on the left of the chorus.)
In the theme’s history, brass settings are the norm. However, my Dad recently got invited to compose some trixies in an early music style. He came up with some fun stuff and recorded it with Quire Cleveland, and some fellow faculty at CWRU. You can hear them all at the Quire Cleveland website — or just listen to All Things Considered!
The episode about theorists is unsurprisingly entitled Problems, and features a number of good moments, from signs at the LHC that read “Risk of Liquid Air,” to enormous chalkboards covered with Feynman diagrams, to the hilarious expressions of all-too-familiar grad student angst (“sometimes I almost want to give up everything”).
’Problems’ travels to Paris for a look at some of the theoretical work behind the ‘Eurostar’ paper. Gavin and his PhD student Mathieu explore the mathematics behind the behaviour of fundamental particles, and we have an update on the ‘incident’ which is holding up work at the LHC.
One of my favorite quotes is an observation that I didn’t fully understand until well into graduate school:
I think one of the hardest parts of research is not so much trying to solve a problem, as figuring out which problem you’re going to solve.
It’s absolutely true. The most exciting problems are simultaneously easy enough to be solvable, and hard enough to teach you something deep while you’re solving them. So far, for me, these have been hard to come by. My impression, based on the work that’s been done by my professors, is that a sense for the right problems is something you develop slowly over time, no matter how clever you are.
And as ridiculous and depressed as the poor Ph.D. student sounds in places, I completely understand what he’s feeling. The realization that theoretical physics is hard (and I mean real physics, not classwork), is something that comes in waves, and really only starts to hit in graduate school. It’s a little scary — you’ve got to grow up fast, or go do something else.
