Varia: Social Media and Nice Acronyms

Yesterday, it was my last lecture for Special Relativity class. I wasn't really satisfied how the class went and wished I have could prepare more but my mind was really elsewhere all this semester. Nevertheless, I was glad that I did something more than the last time I taught this course. Perhaps, if given a few more times teaching this course, I would come up with my own stable set of notes. After the class, we took some photos just for my keeping (see below).

I posted these on social media and seems to attract a lot of attention. I guess it was due to the young faces who are brave enough to take up such a technical subject.

My posts on the social media (FB) have been mainly on what I (or the group) do and what I think on some issues that I personally face. I would shy away from commenting unnecessarily particularly on controversial or viral issues. I don't intend to be a 'public intellectual' as some would like to be. However my postings are meant to be read by others especially close friends, students and staff. So is it attention seeking? Yes, in a restricted sense to a limited audience but I would be embarrassed to do anything more than that. I remembered a colleague of mine said to me that I should inform others of what I do so that people are informed but not for showing off. People are often repelled by the latter.  I have set up some private FB groups for students and staff if the postings are a bit sensitive or unsuitable for public display. I do open up public FB groups to announce some of our events and to show what we are interested in, say in Friends of QuEST.

QuEST is the acronym we made up for Quantum Explorations of Science and Technology. On FB, this is our private group and hence we set up Friends of QuEST for the public. It was originally named Qfizik, named after the website I hosted long ago between 1997 and 2015 before it went dead. One can go here to see some of the pages captured. Renaming it as QuEST is more eye-catching and perhaps symbolizes what we are trying to do. I was happy with this acronym but Quest has been used in other places (see here) like http://merlion-quests.neel.cnrs.fr/ (but we are earlier and theirs have an extra 's'). Before, QuEST itself we had EQuaLS, an acronym which I am pretty pleased with as well. The acronym is for Expository Quantum Lecture Series and as the name implies, it is meant for lecture events that we organized. Perhaps it also represents what we aspire to be, as equals to the many distinguished theorists out there. The event has unfortunately stopped due to lack of financial support and the loss of our mentor Prof. Syed Twareque Ali. In Goldin's memorial talk at Group 31 (available here), EQuaLS was mentioned. See also here for the obituary published in Journal of Geometry and Symmetry in Physics. So far, we never got the courage to do EQuaLS again and is very much a loss since our students and researchers had gained much from the presence of distinguished international speakers in EQuaLS.

Finally another acronym I'm pretty pleased to have made is MINDS for Mathematical Institute for Natural and Disruptive Sciences. It was one of the names suggested during our institute restructuring exercise but we never got to use it, but it would have been attractive for us. So far we are still retaining INSPEM. Perhaps MINDS can be realised elsewhere.

Putting up acronyms may sound trivial to some but to construct clever, memorable and meaningful ones are not easy. In some cases, the acronym may be undesirable e.g. PIG for Physics Interest Group. For the world of marketing, in fact, building up acronyms is indeed important - see "How to Build Acronyms That Spread Your Ideas Like Wildfire". In the end, what matters is what we actually do and the reputation that we build.