Soccer: fast lane to dementia?

When I was 8 years old I would ferociously head heavy old leather soccer balls to the point of getting the nickname "Bullethead Smith", and this continued on as I was playing in central defense throughout my teens. After that the balls became lighter, I would say, and nowadays when I head a ball there is no shock whatsoever. But, as that fish in the restaurant aquarium tank in the Monty Python movie "Meaning of Life" said, when it saw its friend being eaten, reports like this "make you sort of think, don't they"?

Just wonderful

It was just wonderful to welcome my ex-boss, Martin Karplus to ORNL for the Wigner Lecture the 25th birthday celebrations of the ORNL Leadership Computing Facility last week.

87 years old, but still unbelievably sharp, and still working hard, he is still asking important questions in his research.

In my opinion he is among the most accomplished of the Nobel Laureates.

43 years of losing

Well, last weekend, my team, Amazingly Average, won the 2017 Knoxville Metro Soccer League Silver  tournament.

There I am, in the middle at the back, victoriously brandishing our champions T-shirt.

The last time I won a soccer championship was 43 years ago, when my high school team (Earlham) won the city cup of Norwich.
The 1974 City Schools team is below, with me, again in the middle,  of course,
holding the ball.

Since then I haven't won anything.

Played a lot, every year, but never won a cup. Not a sausage. Bugger all.

43 solid years of losing. Not sure I anticipated that in 1974.

Life, eh?

The Column of Nelson

Our hometown hero, he is (or, apparently, was).
Born in my county of birth, went to school in my city, then commanded the British Fleet that gave Napoleon a right good spanking at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 (where, romantically, he died).





You could always tell the difference between Napoleon and Nelson, because Napoleon held his only arm like this, whereas Nelson held his like that.(*).

Now, apparently, enlivened by the Confederate monument debate, people want to remove his statue from Trafalgar Square because he supported the slave trade. But in that case should we not also be pulling down statues of Mandela, who was a terrorist, and Gandhi, who was an anti-African racist, and Churchill, who said that 'Ghandhi-ism and everything it stands for will have to be crushed'  and Reagan, who supported genocidal dictators, and for that matter, shouldn't we be destroying everything Roman and the Great Wall of China (which killed millions, including a million workers  who were forced to build it)?

Go ahead if you want. I don't care. Pull down Nelson's column. I never thought much of worshipping politicians or the military and I'm not a great fan of statues.  But if so, pull everything  down, please (**). Just like ISIS did in Palmyra...

* quote from 1066 and All That
** I'm not being serious, of course.

2017 ORNL Futbol Game

Mentors versus Interns  it was. The Mentors always win, of course. We can't let those young punks get too cocky. So this time we were 3-2 down at half time and so we cancelled the second half due to rain. Now, in TN when you abandon a game before the second half it becomes invalid, meaning the result from last year (which we of course won) carries over and applies this year as well. So we won. And, anyway, as Budhu stated in the official FIFA match report, the rain 'prevented the greatest Mentor comeback in history'. So there.

Outrageous Theory

I arrived to start a PhD at the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble in September 1982 a day late (having missed the boat and been 'repatriated' back to England with just my passport and 2 pounds).   I soon found the ILL to be organized into 'Colleges' of which 'College 1' was Theory. It was lead by a brilliant chap called Philippe Nozieres and seemed to be full of theoretical physicists.

I didn't have much to do with them, but there were quite a few grumblings about the theory college over the years;  about them not talking much to experimentalists, being aloof, superfluous etc. ORNL doesn't have one.

But just before I was at ILL, from 1977-1981, Duncan Haldane was there for a postdoc. He did work on quantum-mechanical spin systems that was so outrageous that nobody believed it and it was impossible to publish in  a journal,  residing just as an  ILL preprint. This work was later found by neutron experiments to be correct, and was critical to Haldane winning the 2016 Physics Nobel Prize. If you want more details, Tim Ziman (who I had a wonderful hike in Alaska with) wrote about it here and the ILL wrote about it here.

I don't think the way the national labs, and science in general, are organized particularly fosters the kind of research Haldane did at ILL. But a  theory group could be a good idea, and perhaps DOE might like to consider setting one up at ORNL, after all?

Helmut Kohl

An alumnus of Heidelberg University who championed German reunification.  I never really understood why the West Germans were so keen on this, as it came at a high  economic cost.