Structural Incentives for Abusing PhD Students in Experimental Sciences and Engineering

When I was in graduate school and then for a few years afterwards (even though I had changed fields), I found it strange and fascinating that I and other friends who were in theoretical physics groups all seemed to have really good experiences on the whole (even while going through the normal day-to-day & month-to-month ups & downs of doing a PhD), whereas many (but not all) friends who were in experimental physics & engineering groups had noticeably more toxic & micromanagerial advisors who made those friends' PhD experiences correspondingly worse. For several years, I thought that it was simply an issue of the advisor's personality & mindset, because some friends earned PhDs from research groups whose advisors were much more kind & supportive, so on my own as well as when commiserating with friends who had toxic & micromanagerial advisors, I decried such toxic & micromanagerial advisors and expressed hope for cultural shifts that would reward experimental science & engineering research group leaders who could be more kind & supportive toward their graduate students.

Much more recently, at my current job, I have been working on a billable project that involves finding information for the client about building internal organizational trust, especially for encouraging productive conflicts of ideas. As I looked at those materials, I started to believe more strongly that kind & supportive advisors are exceptional in the experimental sciences & engineering despite being the ideal norm in other fields and that, unfortunately, research group leaders in experimental sciences & engineering may actually be structurally incentivized to behave in toxic & micromanagerial ways toward their graduate students. Moreover, I've come to believe that such structural incentives go beyond, though are compatible with, the idea that advisors who behave in toxic & micromanagerial toward their graduate students excuse or even defend those behaviors by claiming that their own advisors behaved similarly toward them and ascribing their own academic career successes to their ability to thrive when their advisors behaved in those ways toward them. (The latter point is essentially a career-specific manifestation of a cycle of abuse; it is often seen in abusive parenting when an abusive parent admits to being a victim of abuse by that person's own parents and claims to have come out of it "OK".)

The ideas underpinning these new beliefs of mine are related to each other and have many analogies in sports & sports management (the latter at least as far as I can tell as a layperson with respect to sports). I should note that these ideas are probably not new. The way that I am writing about them in this post is supported only by anecdotes from my own experiences as well as what I have heard about from relatives & friends, not by more rigorous data. Finally, as a reminder, all of these discussions only apply to the US (and maybe Canada, but I can't guarantee the latter). Follow the jump to see more about these ideas.

FOLLOW-UP: Learning and Making Sense of Differential Geometry in General Relativity

This post is a follow-up to the previous post [LINK] in which I tried to make sense of the mathematics of differential geometry, especially in the context of general relativity, and proposed notation that may be less confusing, more consistent, and arguably more powerful than traditional notation given the existence of a metric in general relativity. With similar motivations, this post explores how some of the ideas of electromagnetic (EM) theory may change on curved manifolds. Follow the jump to see more.

Learning and Making Sense of Differential Geometry in General Relativity

I have been out of the field of physics for over 5 years, didn't get to make use of my training in quantitative analysis too much in my previous job as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis, and make even less use of my training in quantitative analysis in my current job as a transportation planner at Cambridge Systematics. When I was doing work in my PhD in physics and when I was a student in school and college before graduate school, I enjoyed solving problems in math & physics and growing & applying my toolbox of quantitative skills, so since leaving the field, and especially more recently, I have felt a slight itch to recover some of those skills purely for my own personal satisfaction. To that end, I've resolved to learn or relearn some parts of math that I did not learn at all or to the full extent that I should have in college or graduate school (because I could ultimately manage my work in my PhD without knowing those things to that extent). Currently, I'm interested in learning differential geometry as well as complex analysis. It remains to be seen whether there are other topics in physics-relevant math that I become interested in; if they are, then I will certainly make an effort to learn at least a little bit about them. I've enjoyed learning these topics in math to broaden my knowledge & skills, and I've particularly enjoyed pondering definitions & rules of these concepts in math almost like a lawyer (which also makes this useful for my current job in a very indirect way, because my current job in part involves analyzing laws & regulations and creating intuitive explanations of them for public sector clients).

I can't guarantee that I'll write a blog post about every topic in math that I learn about. However, I am writing this post specifically about differential geometry in parts because I feel that I have learned the basic ideas in it in the context of general relativity to my satisfaction (which was my original goal) and because I have some questions/concerns that I have not been able to satisfactorily resolve based on what I have read in lecture notes or textbooks. This post is a way to further flesh out those questions/concerns. Follow the jump to see more.

There are a few conventions & assumptions to note throughout this post.

• The dimension of the manifold will generically be denoted \( N \). For most nonrelativistic physics, \( N = 3 \), while for most relativistic physics (including general relativity), \( N = 4 \); exceptions include constrained low-dimensional systems or different physical models that have different dimensions analogous to differential geometry.
• I will consistently use Einstein summation unless otherwise specified. This means that indices that are repeated with one as an upper index and one as a lower index will be summed; indices should never be present more than twice at all and more than once in the same (upper versus lower) position.
• Although the convention in general relativity is to use lowercase Greek letters for indices, I will keep things easier to read by using lowercase English letters for indices.
• The motivation of general relativity means that I will only consider differentiable manifolds and specifically smooth (infinitely differentiable) scalar functions or tensor components on them.
• The motivation of general relativity also means that I will only consider torsion-free connection coefficients that can be expressed in terms of the metric.

Disability, History, Wilderness, Natural Parks, and Urban Spaces (Part 3)

This post is a follow-up to a post [LINK] explaining my mindset toward the notion of "wilderness" and appreciation of natural scenery versus urban scenery in the US. (That in turn was a follow-up to a post [LINK] about an essay by the environmental history professor William Cronon regarding the delusional or dishonest way that many Americans & Europeans have come to see notions of "wilderness" since the 19th century.) This post, which was not part of my original plan for this series of posts, was motivated by a recent vacation that I took with my family to eastern Washington & northern Idaho (which together form part of the inland Northwest, along with eastern Oregon & southern Idaho). In particular, my family & I, with me sitting in my manual wheelchair being pushed by them, took hikes on trails, usually built on former freight railroad tracks, that were paved with asphalt which was as smooth as advertised (smoother than many roads and much smoother than many asphalt walkpaths, including in some other state parks that we visited in that region).

There were specific instances when hiking on those trails where I felt like I was being hypocritical or unduly entitled, possibly at least superficially in contrast to my views & beliefs that I have articulated in the linked posts preceding this post in the series. This post is an exploration of those sentiments of hypocrisy & entitlement. Follow the jump to read more.

Different Types of Wet Summer Climates in the Plains of the US

As I have cataloged climates of places around the world, starting with the contiguous US, in order to categorize them according to the climate classification system that I have in mind (which I alluded to in my previous post [LINK]), I have noticed that climates in the contiguous US which have wet summer halves of the year & dry winter halves of the year, especially those in the northern Plains states as well as in the state of Montana east of the Rocky Mountains, have dry winter halves of the year because of cold air coming from the seasonal system of high pressure from the settling of cold air over the Great Basin or directly from the settling of cold air to form a system of high pressure over those specific regions. However, these climates have wet summer halves of the year for different reasons in different regions. Again, I am not a trained climatologist or meteorologist; I can't guarantee that this information is accurate, and I can only say that my intuitions seem through my limited understanding to align with superficial aspects of more detailed explanations. Follow the jump to see the explanation.

Warmer Middle Latitude East Coasts than West Coasts in South America

Even though I published a post on this blog a few months ago [LINK] about my intuitions about climates of the world that do a much better job of explaining actual climates than any prior posts about climate on this blog (so I will not link to those posts within this one except for specific reasons) and therefore made me feel satisfied with my understanding of the climates of the world, there was one bit of dissatisfaction that lingered. At the end of that post, I alluded to creating a new climate classification system that would address some of the problems that I have seen in the Köppen & Trewartha climate classification systems. My specific problems with those climate classification systems are in the middle latitudes: at these latitudes, in the Köppen categorization, the climate type "Cfa" commonly found in North America almost never transitions within the same continent to the climate type "Cfb" commonly found in Europe, and in the Trewartha categorization, the Mid-Atlantic & Northwest regions of the US are assigned the climate type "Do" despite having extremely different climates (the latter particularly having noticeably drier & cooler summers, which the the Köppen categorization does a much better job of capturing). Even my modification of the Trewartha categorization didn't fully satisfy me, as there is still almost never any geographic continuity from the climate types "Dfak" to "Dfbk".

The actual new climate classification system that I have in mind will be the subject of a future post. However, thinking through my new climate classification system involved me looking at climate data from various places, and in that process, I saw that in the middle latitudes in South America, locations along the east coast have significantly higher annual average temperatures than locations along the west coast at the same latitudes due to having shorter & warmer winters. This is a significant contrast to the middle latitudes in North America & Eurasia (which are the only other continents that have significant landmass in the middle latitudes), where locations along the east coast have significantly lower annual average temperatures than locations along the west coast at the same latitudes due to having longer & colder winters. This can be seen in the following table of continents, latitudes, locations, and annual average temperatures.

Latitude (degrees)	Continent
	South America	North America	Eurasia
38	West: 11.5 degrees Celsius (Lebu, Chile) East: 14.0 degrees Celsius (Mar del Plata, Argentina)	West: 12.7 degrees Celsius (Bodega Bay, US) East: 13.3 degrees Celsius (Ocean City (Maryland), US)	West: 16.3 degrees Celsius (Sines, Portugal) East: 12.8 degrees Celsius (Sendai, Japan)
38.75	West: 12.3 degrees Celsius (Temuco, Chile) East: 15.4 degrees Celsius (Bahía Blanca, Argentina)	West: 11.9 degrees Celsius (Point Arena (California), US) East: 13.9 degrees Celsius (Rehoboth Beach, US)	West: 17.4 degrees Celsius (Lisbon, Portugal) East: 11.4 degrees Celsius (Minamisanriku, Japan)
42.5	West: 11.6 degrees Celsius (Castro, Chile) East: 13.6 degrees Celsius (Puerto Madryn, Argentina)	West: 12.2 degrees Celsius (Gold Beach (Oregon), US) East: 11.1 degrees Celsius (Boston, US)	West: 14.8 degrees Celsius (Pontevedra, Spain) East: 7.9 degrees Celsius (Tomakomai, Japan)
46	West: 7.1 degrees Celsius (Balmaceda, Chile) East: 13.2 degrees Celsius (Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina)	West: 10.8 degrees Celsius (Astoria (Oregon), US) East: 6.2 degrees Celsius (Sydney, Canada)	West: 13.5 degrees Celsius (Rochefort, France) East: 7.0 degrees Celsius (Wakkanai, Japan)
49.25	West: 5.8 degrees Celsius (El Chaltén, Argentina) East: 9.8 degrees Celsius (Puerto San Julián, Argentina)	West: 9.5 degrees Celsius (Tofino, Canada) East: 4.4 degrees Celsius (Eastport, Canada)	West: 11.0 degrees Celsius (Cherbourg, France) East: 0.9 degrees Celsius (Poronaysk, Russia)

That table shows that consistently poleward of 40 degrees in latitude, the west coast of South America is colder than the east coast of South America at the same latitudes, whereas the opposite holds for North America & Eurasia at the same latitudes (in the other hemisphere). Especially given that the warm current along the western edge of the Atlantic Ocean in the southern hemisphere turns away from the east coast of South America at a latitude of approximately 40 degrees even around the southern hemisphere summer solstice such that the water temperatures of 10-16 degrees Celsius at those latitudes are comparable to the water temperature along the west coast of South America at the same latitudes (in contrast to North America around the northern hemisphere summer solstice, where the water temperatures of 18-22 degrees Celsius along the east coast are much warmer than the temperatures along the west coast at the same latitudes) and given that the poleward tapering of the shape of South America means that the climates in that latitude range are dominated by the prevailing westerlies blowing throughout the year, this was a surprising result for me. Moreover, although the Gulf Stream being so warm even at the latitudes of Europe along with the seasonal system of high pressure from the settling of much colder air thereby being much stronger over North Asia compared to North America certainly amplifies the temperature difference seen in Eurasia, it does not fully explain this distinction, as the water temperatures along the west coast of North America at those latitudes are similar to those along the west coast of South America at those latitudes (in the other hemisphere). Again, I am not a trained climatologist or meteorologist; I can't guarantee that this information is accurate, and I can only say that my intuitions seem through my limited understanding to align with superficial aspects of more detailed explanations. Follow the jump to see the explanation.

Posting Less Often on this Blog Going Forward

Since I started this blog in 2009, I have been almost perfectly consistent in posting at least once every month on this blog, and even at times when I didn't have much to write about, I would think of something to write about so that I could continue my streak of posting. The one exception was in 2023 January, where my personal travel that month prevented me from posting in time (and I noted that in the post in 2023 February [LINK]). However, going forward, I see myself no longer holding myself to such a strict regular schedule of posting. This is for the following several reasons.

Internal reasons

There are a few internal reasons (in me) to consider. First, when I started this blog in 2009, I was in high school. I was in college during 2010-2014. During those years, my youthful energy surrounding the things on my mind and my enthusiasm about online engagement through blogs led me to post often, even when my posts weren't that well-formed. Since then, that enthusiasm & energy dissipated, so my frequency & volume of posts correspondingly decreased.

Second, in high school & college, I posted a lot of Linux distribution reviews and my takes on news surrounding free software, and this continued to a gradually decreasing degree over the first half of graduate school. In graduate school, especially around the middle, I read many nonfiction books, so I posted reviews of those books, and my youthful energy kept me motivated to read such books quite regularly. Around the end of graduate school and throughout my previous job at UC Davis, I posted about topics from physics & math, especially surrounding functional calculus, and these posts were interspersed with more introspective posts about my life as well as posts about moving away from popular cloud service & social media platforms. In the last couple of years of my previous job at UC Davis and slightly after that, I posted about my iteratively improving understanding of the Earth's climate. Now, I feel like I have said what I want to say about those things and learned & tried those things to my satisfaction, so I don't feel motivated to go further into those things for myself or for the sake of this blog.

Third, more broadly, my greater age now compared to the early years of this blog have led to a more calm & sedate mindset that makes me less motivated to post on this blog just for the sake of doing so. I find that my motivation to try some other things has decreased too, perhaps in part because of the traumas that I have experienced over the last several years (like being hit by a car [LINK]) and because of my current opportunity to fulfill my desire to live a quieter life where I don't have to hustle or live in suboptimal conditions just for the sake of my career. I am quite content to work at my current job, which I enjoy very much, to spend time with friends & relatives in my area and stay in contact with those farther away, and to take care of myself physically by eating right & swimming and mentally through introspection.

Internet-related reasons

Separate from my own internal motivations, there are a few reasons related to the Internet to consider. First, I have seen that most popular search engines on the Internet yield less useful information these days compared to several years ago because so much textual and even video content is garbage generated by artificial intelligence (AI). This both makes it hard stay motivated to post anything on the Internet (as a human) and makes me wary to post anything if my content will be used by AI in unpredictable or even dangerous ways.

Second, I had hoped that this may be of use to people who may come across this on the Internet. However, as almost all popular use of the Internet these days seems to be through social media platforms, especially Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, blogging seems to have been an abandoned medium within the Internet for a long time. I am satisfied maintaining my own personal diaries for my own use, so I won't necessarily miss posting things on this blog for that reason.

Third, the current political situation in the US is dire. Legal residents in the US are being forced to turn over their social media activity for the federal government to review for activity that may go against the government's foreign policy stances, per the Associated Press [LINK]. Arrests by federal officials have ensnared US citizens and have become arbitrary & seemingly without accountability, also per the Associated Press [LINK]. Even though I haven't posted much political content on this blog in a long time and even though I can't avoid the possibility that the government may arbitrarily punish me for posts from long ago going against the government's stated partisan beliefs, I don't want to increase my liability further by posting more.

Going forward

I will still post reviews of books that I read after I read them, though my reading of books has become less regular over time. If there are things that I ponder about physics, math, climate, or other things that compel me to write about them in this blog, then I will do so. Finally, I may post things about current events if I feel that such events compel me to no longer be silent in public.

With all that said, this post may be the last post on this blog, and even if it is not the last post on this blog, it may be close to the last post on this blog, with whatever post ends up being the last post on this blog likely not noting the fact of it being the last post on this blog. For whoever happens to be reading this, please feel free to peruse this blog, starting with its first post nearly 16 years ago [LINK]. I know that this blog has lost almost all, if not all, of its human readers over the last decade, but I do wish to express my sincere gratitude for every person in my life and every stranger online who read these posts and expressed support or constructive criticism.

Green's Functions and Violin Making

A few years ago, a friend of mine, who is a very accomplished player of the violin & viola and who is an amateur builder of violins & violas, sent me a video on YouTube [LINK] of the violin maker Peter Westerlund showing how to create violins (and violas, by the same logic and with only slightly different overall dimensions) that consistently produce sounds that people well-versed in European classical music judge to be of high quality. Many such people have praised the consistent warm & rich aural tones of violins & violas made in Italy by Andrea Guarneri around 1650 & Antonio Stradivari around 1700, yet it has been difficult for any violin maker to replicate such warm & rich tones in the violins that they have made, in part because there is little scientific consensus about the specific acoustic spectral qualities that make those violins so highly valued. Further complicating matters, as explained in a news article by Science magazine in 2017 [LINK], is the fact that many blind & double-blind studies have left musicians & keen listeners preferring contemporary violins over those made by Stradivari or Guarneri. Even if the instruments by made by Stradivari or Guarneri aren't consistently rated the best, they are rated very highly far more consistently than those made by other violin makers (though this may reflect selection bias in such tests), so there may be merit to considering how to replicate those instruments' aural qualities.

Traditionally, violin makers have carefully studied the exact dimensions, shapes, and materials used in instruments made by Stradivari or Guarneri and done their best to replicate them. However, the resulting aural qualities have typically been judged to be unsatisfactory. This is in various parts due to the effects of aging on the material components of violins (which generally cannot be artificially accelerated), one-off differences in instances of even the same materials used, slight deviations in the craftsmanship, shapes, or dimensions, and other factors that have yet to be explained. This motivated Westerlund (who is probably not the first person to come up with this method) to develop a method to reliably create instruments with highly consistent sounds even if they don't replicate sounds from instruments made by Stradivari or Guarneri per se. The method is as follows. Each violin or viola has a top plate and a back plate, and these are initially constructed separately, joined only later on corresponding sides of the ribs. For each plate, after getting the basic shape & thickness correct, the violin maker should further adjust the shape by tapping or rubbing the plate in various locations, ideally using the same tapping or rubbing motion with the same intensity every time. The violin maker should iteratively shape (by cutting or scraping) at & around those locations of tapping or rubbing and then continue to tap or rub at all locations, until eventually, the tapping or rubbing motion produces approximately the same tone at every location. Once that has been achieved, shaping of the plate is finished.

My background in theoretical & computational nanophotonics from graduate school, even though I was already a few years removed from that even by a few years ago (having changed fields to transportation research after graduate school [LINK]) when my friend shared that video with me, made me interested in trying to mathematically & physically understand why Westerlund's process is successful in creating instruments that have strong internal tonal consistency. However, I wasn't able to come up with a satisfactory answer until much more recently. Follow the jump to see more of my thinking about this, leading to the resolution.

More Quantitatively Founded Intuitions About Climates

My last post on this blog [LINK] about my intuitions for climates was over 1 year ago, in 2024. Since then, I have continued to read more about climates of the world. Later in 2024, I was particularly more careful to look at maps of mean surface-level wind velocities. This led me to start to carefully catalog the climates of the world and attempt to explain them based on mean surface-level pressures & wind velocities along with qualitative ideas about the differences between air masses at different temperatures & humidity levels. I felt satisfied doing so for Oceania as well as for Africa in the southern hemisphere. I did so for South America at the middle latitudes (which is entirely within the southern hemisphere) too, and I thought of continuing through tropical latitudes in South America, near-equatorial latitudes in Africa, and thereafter all tropical, subtropical, middle, and subpolar latitudes in the northern hemisphere. However, as I looked more carefully at these maps and compared them to actual climate data from various locations, I started to think that my understanding of these climactic processes is too limited, especially by my focus on qualitative understanding of surface-level phenomena, to be able to come up with accurate explanations. (Even looking back at the post linked at the beginning of this paragraph and even older posts linked within that post, I can see how many things I have said in those posts that I know now to be inaccurate.) Because of that, I shelved the idea of continuing with these detailed explanations until much more recently, when I started looking more carefully at maps of sea/ocean surface temperatures and at calculations of air density at various pressure levels, humidity levels, and temperatures. This made it possible for me to reinforce my intuitions about temperatures & precipitation distributions at various locations in the aspects in which they were correct and fix them in the aspects in which they were wrong. Thus, this blog post is meant to be that originally-intended compendium of explanations for climates in various parts of each comment in tropical, subtropical, middle, and subpolar latitudes (excluding Antarctica).

The sources that I used were many relevant pages from Wikipedia, the Columbia University interactive maps of mean monthly wind velocities [LINK] & mean monthly sea/ocean surface temperatures [LINK], the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecast static global maps of mean surface-level air pressures in different astronomical seasons [LINK] (though this website has very recently started displaying a warning that the maps are now out of date), and the OmniCalc air density calculator [LINK]. Again, I am not a trained climatologist or meteorologist; I can't guarantee that this information is accurate, and I can only say that my intuitions seem through my limited understanding to align with superficial aspects of more detailed explanations. Follow the jump to see these explanations.

Book Review: "Noise" by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein

I recently read the book Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein. I will refer to it as the current book, because it was written after the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman (one of the authors of the current book); I will refer to the latter book as the previous book because many concepts from the previous book are briefly reviewed in the current book, and as I reviewed the previous book in the post just before this one on this blog [LINK], I will sometimes compare some aspects of the current book to the previous book.

The current book introduces the concepts of statistical noise & statistical bias in human judgments, discusses the psychological biases that can lead to statistical biases & noise (of which statistical noise can be clearly seen even in the absence of clear information about statistical biases), demonstrates how statistical noise can lead to uncontrolled & large variations in human judgments in fields like criminal justice, medicine, forensic science, insurance claims adjustment, corporate hiring, and college admissions, explains the sorts of systematic techniques at individual & organizational levels that can be used to reduce noise in judgments, and discusses some tradeoffs that may be encountered when implementing these noise reduction strategies. The authors' discussion of many of the psychological biases that lead to statistical noise in judgments reviews concepts from the previous book, especially Systems 1 & 2.

When reading the current book, I found myself generally agreeing with the discussions of techniques to reduce noise in domains where the presence of significant statistical noise in judgments is broadly recognized as a severe problem. These techniques include aggregating predictions or evaluations that are made independently, structuring/sequencing discussions among people judging things so that their decisions don't affect each other through emergent group-based social dynamics, carefully accounting for base rates from external information when assessing various internal probabilities, and breaking up decision processes into smaller steps that are more clearly defined in their intent and in example decisions/anchors. It helped a lot that I had read the previous book first, such that even if I didn't remember every detail of every psychological bias presented in both the previous book and the current book, those things looked familiar upon reading them in the current book.

There were also a few new things that I learned from the current book. I learned about how the process of judgment feels so satisfying and infuses confidence into the person making the judgment specifically from the psychological signal of having completed the judgment, which explains why so many people who make professional judgments in many domains are so reluctant to turn their discretion over to more systematic rules or algorithms. I also learned about how simple models of human predictive judgments, when those predictive judgments are about specific outcomes, may do a better job at predicting the outcomes that are the objects of judgment than at predicting the judgments that humans would make, simply because those models lack within-person noise pervasive in human judgments.

However, my overall opinion of the current book was shaped more by the many major and minor (the latter to an appropriately lesser extent) criticisms of it. These minor and major criticisms as well as my concluding remarks will be presented in separate sections as follows after the jump; the spoiling of my concluding remarks is simply that I do not recommend this book to others.