Random Curiosities Blog

. Our new research work got accepted in the journal Scientometrics :  K.M.A. Aguana and R.C. Batac, Emergence of power-law statistics in the co-authorship networks of Philippine physics researchers, Scientometrics (2025).  Here are some thoughts and behind-the-scenes regarding the conceptualization, analyses, and delivery of the work.  Laying the foundation. I started working on co-authorship networks of Filipino authors in physics in 2017 together with my student Jasmine Abella (Jas). We began with the set of papers from the National Institute of Physics (NIP), College of Science (CS), University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD) [ 1 ] and, in the following year, we extended it to the publications of UPD [ 2 ]. Our analyses focused on the occurrence of Zipf's law, an empirical observation wherein the rank \(r\) of an observation is inversely proportional to its occurrence \(C\), i.e. \[\begin{equation}\label{eqn:zipf}C \propto 1/r = r^{-1} \end{equation}\] In our w...

  When I started my research career, the first thing that my mentors taught me is the importance of a logbook. We were all given research logbooks upon joining the lab; I was told that this was even part of the standard issue from the government (having been trained in a government-sponsored university) . We were told to keep them clean and organized. We were not supposed to white-out any mistakes in our entries. Most importantly, we were told not to tear off any page from the logbook. As my former supervisor once said, “What if your Nobel Prize-winning discovery, very revolutionary that you thought of it as a mistake, is actually written in that logbook? How would you stake your claim to the discovery if it was not recorded?”  Of course, as scientists, we are supposed to take down notes and record all of our observations. The tradition dates probably as far back as the ancient Greeks (well, the teachers themselves did not write their lessons, but their students took down note...

. After quite some time, I was able to publish a single-author work again. My paper on a sandpile-based model of earthquakes was accepted in EPL (Europhysics Letters) .  R.C. Batac, Clustering regimes in a sandpile with targeted triggering, EPL ( Europhysics Letters ) 135 , 19003, DOI:10.1209/0295-5075/135/19003 (2021).  This work is an extension of an idea that came to me during one of the discussions with my principal investigator during my postdoc work. Prof. Dr. Holger Kantz, himself an early researcher on discrete models of self-organized criticality (SOC), noted that the sandpile model, while exhibiting SOC, in fundamentally different from earthquakes, which are perhaps the most famous large-scale examples of SOC. Whereas earthquakes dissipate energy is bursts of correlated activity, the sandpile generates single-shot avalanches. When energy is depleted in a sandpile grid, it has to wait again before a new significant event can be generated.  Because of this, for t...

. Our new publication [ 1 ] just got accepted recently. The paper deals with the statistical distributions of the measures of spatial spreading of roads and building over the urban zone. I am very happy for my team, composed of Camille, Ardie, and Michelle, for this has been the culmination of year of their undergrad work. 😊 In this post, I would like to go back to the series of decisions that led me to do work on urban zones. I will also discuss some insights about our primary data set, which is the capital region of our country.  A view from the east of the Metro Manila region. Working on something new. In 2014, after my postdoc, I rejoined my former university and started my research group on complex systems. Back then, my main concern was in the discrete models of complex behavior, with particular application to natural hazards, which are large-scale nonlinear events in nature.  Going back to the Philippines, where studies on complex systems was (and still is) a relative...

.  Okay, so I admit that the title of my blog is a feeble attempt at making something that makes sense out of my initials. R andom C uriosities B log. Even I find it lame sometimes. 😜 But as a scientist, I am also well aware of the fact that my entire field (in fact, it can be argued that the entire collection of all human knowledge and all systematic human endeavors) originated from random curiosities.  We often use the question Why is the sky blue? (which, presumably, is one question that kids like to ask, but which I also find surprisingly unanswered or, worse, wrongly answered, based on the responses of my now-adult students 😐) to illustrate our natural curiosity about things around us. If you think about it, there is no practical benefit that will be gained from knowing the answer to that question. Humans can still live and go about their lives without really understanding the source of the sky's bluish hue. Other animals have z-e-r-o idea and z-e-r-o motivation to eve...

I am Dr. Rene C. Batac. I am currently an Assistant Professor from the Physics Department, College of Science, De La Salle University - Manila.  That is how I usually introduce myself. In cover letters for research works, formal emails to colleagues I have yet to meet, even in reference letters for students. I know. Plain and boring for a blog post. Probably not the best way to start.  Or, more accurately, to start over . Again. I have been blogging since 2006, and I have created blogs more than my fingers (and toes) could count. It started with my Filipino blog , channeling my rebellious and emo side (don't blame me; I was doing my undergraduate thesis and was heartbroken at the time 😅). It later on evolved into a record of random observations with simple life lessons, with the posts generally reflecting my current state of mind and heart at the time of their writing. Needless to say, I would write sporadically , sometimes just blogging for the sake of having an entry for an...