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)