Open letter to Wedding Lens

Update later the same day:
The Wedding Lens emailed me back and addressed each of these issues: a technical problem had prevented the upgrade, and they gave me a partial refund. Thank you Wedding Lens!

The Wedding Lens doesn't provide an email address, so I'll address my concerns here.


Dear Wedding Lens,


As you can see below, I paid for an upgrade of our wedding album to Premium on Jan 17. However, when I go to "Video", on our album page, I get a message saying that video is not enabled because I do not have a premium album. See screenshot taken a few minutes ago above.
1) How can I identify what plan I am currently signed up for?

2) Why did my payment on Jan 17 not upgrade me to the premium plan?

3) What kind of refund can you offer, given that in the last two weeks, none of our guests have been able to upload their videos, and therefore we may never get their videos?

Thank you,

Wells Wulsin

visualizing data

Particle physicists spend a lot of time thinking about how to visualize large data sets. Here are
a couple cool examples of data visualization from other fields:

This 2010 census data is irresistible:
http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer

This map of Facebook connections is beautiful (and timely, given Time's choice for Person of the
Year):
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=469716398919

And here's a nice profile of TED star Hans Rosling:
http://www.economist.com/node/17663585?story_id=17663585&CFID=156801741&CFTOKEN=29469239
Matt Bellis used the Google Motion Charts software to make a really cool interactive chart of the
properties of heavy mesons. Ask him to show it to you sometime.

Enjoy!
Wells

physics jobs

Pretty interesting stats from AIP on physics job prospects:
http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/phystrends.html

* There are only about 200 faculty jobs per year at
(PhD-granting) universities:
http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/fall09d.pdf

* There are over 1000 physics PhD's granted each year, so the chances of
getting a faculty job are roughly 1/5 (200/1000):
http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/fall2005c.pdf

* You can make a ton more money in the private sector than in a
university. Doh!
http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/fall07e.pdf

The full listing is at:
http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/allflyers.pdf

the ADD generation

Great article in the Times about the distractions of the digital age:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/technology/21brain.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a2&pagewanted=print

It seems to me that the pervasiveness of technology opens a host of new concerns for parents and teachers for how to manage students' interactions with computers and cell phones.

Compared with today's youth, I'm a late-adopter of technology...I was 16 before I had an email address, 24 when I got my first cell phone. But still I notice that it has had an effect on the way that I think....web browsers mean that I can be much more easily distracted. A generation ago, TV was the only real distraction (you used it for video games too); now the computer has blurred the lines between entertainment and schoolwork. I think it's a big issue that we as a society need to pay a lot of (undivided) attention to.

size of the universe

This is something that really bugs me. No one talks about the real size of the universe. They talk about the age of the universe times the speed of light, which gives us about 13.7 billion light-years. See for example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21iUUe-W8L4
But CMB data constrains the size of the universe to be much larger than that. Really, the radius of the universe is at least 78 billion light-years. Clearly a lot of that is beyond our light cone. You can get this reference by googling "size of universe", but here are the key links.

Pop science version:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_monday_040524.html

And the journal article:
Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 201302 (2004)
http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v92/i20/e201302

The universe is much bigger than what we can actually see!

campaign finance

I can't say what the effect of the campaign finance decision by the Supreme Court will be. But it seems to me that there is a middle road between the two extreme positions on this issue. One side argues that corporations should be restricted in how much money they can spend on political advertising. The other side says there should be no restrictions. One third way on this issue is to allow unlimited expenditures by corporations on political advertising, but require that each ad conclude with, "This message was approved and paid for by Ford Motor Company," and the name of the company and its logo shown on the screen for say 5 seconds. It seems to me that that would preserve the freedom of speech guaranteed in the first amendment while also guaranteeing that viewers know the origin of any ad. We already have this requirement in place for ads run by campaigns; why should independent expenditures be exempt? (This would also apply to ads run by the parties.) I think that would protect against the most virulent kinds of attacks and force the discourse to stay somewhat civil.

An interesting article on this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/opinion/26baran.html?th&emc=th

shocking

Most surprising point in Isaacson's bio of Einstein. In 1938, a poll was conducted of Princeton students. They ranked as the greatest living person, in first place, Adolf Hitler. Number two? Albert Einstein. Just shows the level of anti-Semitism that existed here in America at that time.