Absence, Ginzburg, UFO Hunters, and Ersatz Academia

you know i hate people who post with a title or tag "random thoughts." come on, let's be real. who searches for "random thoughts" of other people. i mean yes, i would like to in real life, but not in a blog. this is one of those instances. well first i have been sick for a week, while i was trying to work. i traced down the major work on magnetized plasmas. it is "the propagation of electromagnetic waves in magnetized plasmas" by Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg. he is one of the great figures in soviet science, a nobel laureate and it hurts me so bad to see how short his wiki article is with respect to Tolga Yarman.

i always have this fetish with soviet physics and astrophysics (as dear Giulia) since Oktay Guseinov, a fellow collaborator and student of Zel'dovich who worked on x-ray pulsars and detection of black holes from binaries came to middle east technical university for a short time. not to mention our dear proffessor Aliev. during my bachelors degree i always tried to learn from Landau books and i still use them in my lectures.

the area of magnetized plasmas have progressed quite a bit during 70s and 80s after the slow 90 it again picked up late 90s with the interest in magnetars. of course i am talking about astrophysics not lazer science. but nevertheless, Ginzburg has this very clear picture and vivid explanation of plasma concepts. i am feeling thrilled with the joy of learning since my works topic in undergraduate was electromagnetics.

other than these, i have spent all my time watching history channels UFO hunters. yes! another stupid addiction in my life, the last thing i need. as i lie in my couch sick and spending my time watching public talks online about physics and astronomy in youtube, i did the mistake searching for nazi scientists. since i was reading this book on the history of kaiser willhelm gesselschaft during nazi germany. anyhow, behold i ended up with nazi ufos!



so the concept is not so bad, since they subject the evidence to the "scientific inquiry." unfortunately their starting point is biased so they end up with ridiculous claims, with their supposed "supportive" scientific data. it gives the viewers a good chance to asses in my opinion.

finally as i was going through the scientific explanations of ball lightning, i came with another self publicizing scientist in wiki.

Former researcher in SLAC Stanford, current businessman Mario Rabinowitz is using wikipedia as his personal webpage apparently. sad but what is more sad is that i need to do something about it and i am not doing it.

as the revolution comes to iran (but not as cheerful westerns expect), i procrastinate writing about it. but you can read what Zizek said about it and watch besiç (basij, the paramilitary force) beaten up.

learning gimp

after being ridiculed by Selçuk, i decided to learn to design and do it by gimp (since it is open source) and this is the first vector conversion i did from the well known dev-yol fist. dev-yol was the brigate rosse and rote armee fraktion analogue of turkey at the same time, their name means revolutionary path.



the choice of colors are very conscious.

cryptic update

today is the day i solved one of the major problems of my phd thesis.

after all this time of not writing, i decided to tune on to write this. and the worst part is i cannot talk about it. not only i am keeping myself anonymous, as if i am an important person, i am keeping my work secret, as if it matters. as if anybody cares about my blog or my work, or anybody will find this out in a search engine. for fucks sake only approx. 5 other person work on my topic in the world overall, and still i (we? i an my supervisor) need to be careful for our work not to be stolen.

so this blog is called marxists in space and yet i admit my copyrights, or worse intellectual property. in my mind, in a communist society information should be open (as in open source) and free (as in freedom). but nevertheless, the world of science is based on merit and i cannot ignore the existence of these concept just like communists consuming goods from capitalist production, investing their money and financing their future.

there is a well known cliche about the communist kid who has converse shoes and levi's jeans which comes from the "common" people as a criticism to show the idiosyncrasy of the marxists, inescapability from the market and the impossibility of communism. the basis of the criticisms are not only ill founded also what kind of communist the people expect us to be is uncertain.

probably an alien, who has nothing to do with the social comtemporary life. another reason why marxists should go to space.

hence why as a scientist who is critical of the ethics behind the meritocratic system of intellectual rights, which puts competition before collaboration, i practice the same values in order to not parish.

but other than that i want to show you!



this is a circular polarization spectrum, it is quantified by the ratio of stokes parameters. stokes parameters are basically the amplitude of a photon as an electroamgnetic wave. hopefully i will explain these things more in detail later. but nevertheless i am working on modeling of astrophysical objects and their spectra is the main diagnosis tool for us. this object very peculiar just by itself, have been modeled before, but reason for its high circular polarization has been unable to be untangled before. i have a quite good idea what is causing it, and i made some test. this all happened today around 19:00 pm, but i will present my hypothesis to my supervisor.

even if it is correct, the following precise modeling will be painstaking and tedious and life shattering. (ok i am a bit dramatic)

whitey on the moon

did you know everything that you wanted to say, but afraid to utter or more importantly you thought it was futile, has already been said by the artists of 68 generation.

i want to start with an artist who crossed paths with the 68 movement but more importantly he was a part of the black nationalist art. i am talking about the grandfather of hip hop, Gil Scott Heron.



i learned just yesterday he was the one who announced that the revolution will not be televised. a sentence often used in popular culture but seldom understood. maybe critics were right, revolution will be televised or even podcasted, but this did not stop the greek young activist to occupy a television channel to ask people to stop watching tv and go out.

intoduction to tolga yarman

kind of a sad weekend. the graduation of the dear friend Claudia reminds us that our phd years are transitory once again. considerations about the future and day dreams on exotic post graduation possibilities are mandatory, in these situations.

nevertheless it was a good week, and since through graduation, comes the disillusionment with the academia i am here to talk about our new past time activity Tolga Yarman. he is probably the biggest contemporary physics anomaly in the contemporary academia. Yarman is a professor in reactor engineering, but this doesn't stop his students to refer to him as a "physicist" (imagine! it has a symbolic value, a positive connotation!). not only due to the fact that he is supposedly a great lecturer but also he recently debunked general relativity -hold on- twice!

through publishing papers in non-peer reviewed conference proceedings and arXiv, he debunked general relativity and "showed" geometrical representation of gravity is unnecessary in explaining observables (like Mercur's precession, and gravitational redshift). these kinds of provocative science stunts are not unknown, especially if you are working on gravity, as my fellow phd student Peter noted, you get to learn about them through spam mails.

but the thing that was peculiar about Yarman is that he is notorious in publicity. right out of a feyerabendian distopia, Yarman uses every aspect possible to publicize his non-peer reviewed work. basically he had a press conference on december 2008 (call in turkish), and funnily enough a similar kind of press call happened one and a half year before in april 2007 (news in turkish). it turns out he didn't get enough attention hence the second conference.

he is currently self publicizing in wikipedia (by himself or through students) , so right now it is a great source to know what he and his "followers" think of himself.

"They have informed the public that the experiments achieved in November 2008 by Kholmetskii et al., in Minsk, clearly back up the approach architectured by Prof. Tolga Yarman, Prof. Metin Arik, Prof. Vladislav B. Rozanov, Prof. Alexander Kholmetskii, Prof. Garret Sobczyk, and Prof. Oleg Missevitch, thus disfavoring the General Relativity Theory, also allowing the quantization of the gravitational field, just like that of the electric field."

un-fucking-believably his reference to this paragraph is the press conference call of his current press conference. and the wiki article is a compilation of his recent "publications" and one turkish newspaper article.

if you are wondering why somebody would go in such an extreme for publicity, part of the answer lies on the fact that last year he tried to become the leader of the main opposition party in turkey the republican people's party (cumhuriyet halk partisi; chp) but failed. we can only assume that his ambition is still there, from his turkish homepage.

here are my critisms in sourtimes, in turkish unfortunately. but since he is continuing his notorious campaign i intend to give a through analysis in english here.

ersatz yuppie academia

a physicist is never devoid of reasons for procrastination (hail to phd comics!). sometimes it is even issues of academia itself. here is my new favorite buzz word

the ersatz yuppie academic

it is a social type named by the M.E.T.U. (middle east technical university and no they don't train suicide bombers) sociology professor Hasan Ünal Nalbantoğlu, as an analysis tool for ethics or more correctly "ethos" of academia.

he uses this social type as a signifier for some hilarious psychologism of the middle aged academics of today, whom got their phds in late 70s and early 80s, and now continuing their "industry of academic production" in the "knowledge market," let's say. running from one deadline to the other, from one conference to conference. and most importantly nalbantoğlu asks, "is this the 'the thing to do' (das Tunliche)?"

hence the term ersatz translates as substitute (sugar substitute, milk substitute, "i cannot believe it is butter" substitute etc., i like the term "çakma" for the turkish translation), and the yuppie comes from the industrious and pretentious nature of their practice. you can reach the turkish article from his page, here.

the discourse makes use of many discussions in the literature that i wasn't aware of before. here are preliminary list of them for myself and for my buddy Herr Viola.

most interesting and fundamental one seems to be Weber's 1919 work of Wissenschaft als Beruf. well reading from the original german is always fun but for the challenge-impaired there is also the Science as a Vocation version of it.

Lukacs is widely referred to also:
* Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen
* Prolegomena zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins

and last but not the least, of course Adorno:

* Das Schema der Massenkultur: Kulturindustrie (Forsetzung) [1942]
* Dialektik der Aufklärung
* Probleme der Moralphilosophie (1963)

"Ethik ist das schlechte Gewissen, das Gewissen über sich selber."

top quality cubism

a new street trend is out in turkey. not so much a graffiti but a scribble with the same hand writing on the numerous walls of istanbul reads:

"10 numara kübistim bacım..."



this roughly translates in american slang as, "i am helluva cubist, sister..."

you might guess "10 numara" means number 10 (out of 10). and bacı (nothing to do with baci for all the italians out there) means sister in a paternalistic/african-american slang sense. a turkish guy would call any female which he reveres, bacı. this ranges from female family members to a woman on the street to indicate there is no intent of courtship. basically it is a though guys term for a female.

the term cubism signifies anything high brow that do represent any kind of interest or understanding from the common public.

thus we have the motto of a post-modern plebian though guy, "i am helluva cubist, sister..."