Out West

By | | , , , ,
19 Comments

Well, yesterday I handed in my grade sheets for my courses, so I’ve finished all undergraduate teaching duties for the calendar year! Time now to turn to all those things that have been piling up waiting to be done. Eventually, this will mean research, but in between there are various tasks, from writing letters of recommendation to reviewing grants, fellowship applications, and more.

Mostly, I just want to disappear for a while. Leave the planet for a bit and go walkabout, like I did last year’s holiday season. That might happen, but I have to be partly available for a little while for a number of duties. Either way, I need to get out of the old mode, and into the more contemplative one. In order to begin the resetting, I decided to hide away from campus entirely and in the afternoon visit one of my other offices… the beach.

I had some errands to run out in Santa Monica, such as picking up my boots from that great boot repair place (where I’d dropped them off to get stretched a bit… the miracle repair I told you about before had resulted in them a bit stiff and slightly tighter on the slopes, and so I thought I’d try a stretching of a few days), and so this fit well. I figured I’d just stay there until the evening.

I have a love-hate relationship with Santa Monica. It sometimes annoys me a lot, and seems to be a place that is so squeaky clean that all the flavour of real life has been drained out of it, to be replaced by mostly smugness…. but at other times, I’m very happy with it, since it has a number of gems that I like a lot.

If the truth be told, one of the main reasons that I like to go over there is the tarts. Click to continue reading this post →

Twin Peaks

By | | ,
9 Comments

Yes, in other words, tonight and tomorrow night are the maximum event rates for the Geminids, the meteor shower that originates from the direction of the constellation Gemini. From Gary Kronk’s site, I borrowed this diagram that shows roughly where to look:

geminids radiant

So as you can see, you’re popping out to look in a Easterly direction, more or less, and after about 9:00pm you should get some results. There’s some more information here at this site.

You’ll recall from a number of earlier posts on meteor showers that I’ve mentioned that they are caused by the Earth passing through the debris field of a comet. The Geminids are somewhat different. Well, yes and no. They are actually passing through Click to continue reading this post →

LaTeX Spoken Here!

By | | , ,
151 Comments

This is a test of LaTeX on the site*.

The first equation I shall try is the following (for more on unpacking this equation and its meaning, see this post and links therein):

[tex]u{\cal R}^2-\frac12 {\cal R}{\cal R}^{\prime\prime}+\frac14({\cal R}^\prime)^2=\Gamma^2\ .[/tex]

Yay! It works. I have implemented it in the comments too. So now we can have a new, sharper tool for our discussions and arguments.

Click to continue reading this post →

How To Make It Stop?

By | | ,
24 Comments

Ok, I know that in a post a while ago I said:

I don’t know about you but I melt each of the (very few these days) times I receive a real letter, by post…

So you’d think I’d be delighted with this pile (it is more than three layers deep – and I’ll get at least this many again over the next month or so):

letters

Well, yes and no. What are they?

Click to continue reading this post →

The Good Ol’ Days of Perimeter

By | | ,
9 Comments

I was looking over at Bee’s tasty Kokosmakronen (macaroon) post earlier and spotted a picture of her Perimeter Institute mug. I have one of those also, given to me as my thanks for giving some lectures on string theory to some graduate students there last year.

What I wondered at the time was whether they stopped making the mugs from the good ol’ days of Perimeter. Back when they were housed in that lovely funky building with the interaction room that also contained a pool table, disco ball, industrial coffee maker, and fully stocked open bar. Yep. Those were the good times…way back in 2001/2002 I think. Now they’re in the impressive new building, with tons more people, oodles of facilities, chefs, etc. Nice and all, but much more…. corporate-feeling. Less artisanal… I’m getting misty-eyed. And I was only visiting for a few weeks!

Anyway, I thought Bee (and maybe one or two others) might like to see one of those stylish mugs from those days. So I took a shot of the one in my office that I’d kept ever since that early visit:

Click to continue reading this post →

An Apple Pie Process

By | |
24 Comments

It is time for another detailed Asymptotia visit to the kitchen.

Not many days after I showed you that phase diagram for pastry making, Thanksgiving day showed up, and I found myself making an apple pie to take over to have with friends for dessert. Making a pie is a very fulfilling kitchen endeavour that is remarkably simple at the core. The bonus is that with a bit of practice the results are often delightful. Let me show you what I mean.


pie crust phase diagramThe summary: You do various “processes” to move around the phase diagam, as with any phase diagram in physics. A phase diagram depicts the various states your working substance can end up in as a result of changing the conditions. Like H2O being able to be ice, steam, water, depending upon things like temperature and pressure. In physics, doing various processes to change your temperature and pressure might involve pushing on pistons, adding energy in the form of heat by applying flames with a bunsen burner, etc.

Here, we will be doing processes relevant to the kitchen. The aim is to find the right path across the amusing phase diagram above (click for larger; origin: Lab Lemming; finding the wrong path is not good since you end up with inedible junk… most paths are irreversible). Anyway, find the right path …and soon after you get to eat something like this:

apple pie

Motivated? Now for the details:

Click to continue reading this post →

Strange Phenomena

By | |
25 Comments

men at workThere seems to be an intermittent problem or problems with the asymptotia site. I don’t know what it is. From time to time you’ll get a blank page served to you instead of the actual blog. I have not had time to diagnose the problem. I probably won’t get time to do so until tomorrow.

So if you get onto the site, then click onto another page within the site and get nothing…. hit reload, and/or maybe again in five minutes or so. If writing a comment and it does not take you back to the blog after you have hit “submit”… Use the “back” buttoon to go back to the page where you prepared the comment (your text should still be there) and try again later. Sorry about that.

If you happen to know what the issue might be, or spot a pattern that you think might Click to continue reading this post →

BBC Publishes Onion Article?

By | | , ,
25 Comments

nullity demoWell, what else can it be? It is not April 1st, so my only explanation is that it is an Onion article that somehow was picked up by the BBC. What do you think? It reads exactly like one, right down to the picture of the pleasant bearded academic at the board, the well-scrubbed English schoolchildren, and the quotes from the children. The only thing missing is the page with the three heads (whose names and occupations change every week) making comments on the story. (Be sure to watch the video links of the demo too!)

This is the sort of science/mathematics reporting that I usually expect to read in the Click to continue reading this post →

Masterclass

By | | , ,
30 Comments

You’ve possibly been following my efforts over here to discuss and explain the several weaknesses in Smolin’s and Woit’s arguments and positions, and why the current “string debate” is all an overblown (and media-fueled) fake controversy. (See for example the series of posts entitled “More Scenes From the Storm in a Teacup”, the last three especially, (links: I, II, III, IV, V, VI); use the search engine for other instances.)

I’ve no idea what the effect of these discussions has been. Woit recently said “my views haven’t changed at all”, and so has covered his ears and dug his heels in, while Smolin has written some sort of response on his website. I don’t hold out much hope for them, but I do hope that readers of these discussions can see that there’s been a fair amount of wool pulled over their eyes, to say the least.

What to do? What more to say? Whatever more I say, I cannot say it all any better than Joe Polchinski, a true master from whom we’ve all learned so much physics. Read his review in a guest post over on Cosmic Variance!

-cvj

No More Guilty Secrets?

By | |
5 Comments

You don’t have to feel quite so guilty when you next thumb through the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. (Yes you – you know who you are.) Environmental groups have been protesting their (specifically, the parent company Limited Brands) practices for a long while – they produce about one million catalogues per day, printed on virgin paper, including paper from forests that came habitats of endangered species such as the caribou in parts of Northern and Western Canada. The good news is that they have now committed to stop using virgin paper, and use a significant component of recycled paper for the catalogues, in addition to stopping the use of the paper from endangered habitats. From an article in Reuters:

The company’s catalogs will use either 10 percent recycled paper or 10 percent new paper from sources certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as having been produced in an environmentally sustainable manner.

You can read much more about the result at ForestEthics’ site.

Ok, back to your lingere shopping now*.

-cvj

Fatal Attraction

By | | ,
11 Comments

galex graphic black holeThere’s a new paper coming out telling of the observations (over two years) of the swallowing of a star by a black hole from beginning to end. There’s no nice picture showing this, I’m afraid – the picture to the right (click for larger) is an artist’s impression (see description below). The team, led by Caltech’s Dr. Suvi Gezari, used the Galaxy Evolution Explorer and data from Chandra and some ground based telescopes, to track the ultraviolet radiation emitted from the star as it was consumed by the hole.

From the NASA/JPL press release:

Click to continue reading this post →

Supporting the Alternatives

By | | ,
8 Comments

Many of us received a letter today from the Editorial office at SISSA about supporting not-for-profit journals like JHEP (Journal of High Energy Physics) and some of its siblings. Why? Simply put, the other journals seem to be less about the science and more about the money. We discussed this a lot in my field back way back when JHEP was starting out, and several physicists switched to JHEP -pointedly turning their backs on Nuclear Physics B for example- as a group. Basically, you do the research, submit it to a journal, and they sell it back to you and your institution at extortionate prices. Better, they get you to contribute to doing their job by doing all the typesetting, reviewing of other mugs’ papers, etc. In fact, most of their work involves just raking in the money, as far as I can tell… So people moved to a model which was more about distributing refereed work for people to read, making heavy use of cost-savings involved in using electronic communication and distribution. Below I reproduce the letter I received from Marc Henneaux and Hector Rubenstein about this matter*. I’ll be interested to hear your opinion.

One thing I am concerned about is the relative weight of physics vs other fields – how much of a difference will this make to science publishing at large? What else can we do to change things? Take some areas of Biology for example. Elsevier (who publish Nuclear physics B, for example) probably makes a huge amount more money out of them than physics, if you take into account the large number of colour figures, etc, (and the associated page rate) that go into a typical publication. Might it be that progress by Elsevier (and other publishers) in reforming their economic model to be a lot more fair might be less speedy until we get the Biologists (and other fields) to support their own versions of the alternatives? Biology journals run for the sake of the subect and not the money? Perhaps this process already has begun? I do not know. Does anyone? Last time I talked about this to a prominent biologist, they seemed to be under the impression that online distribution of published work (particularly online pre-print distribution like hep-th that I know is slightly different but not unrelated) was akin to hanging out in internet chat rooms, and said so explicitly…. but this was before Nature and others started doing their major online work, so perhaps attitudes have changed…. Thoughts?

Anyway, here is the letter:

Click to continue reading this post →