Science After Sunclipse

Currently Reading

Category: arXiv

Jean-Daniel Bancal and Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, "Steady-State Dynamics of the Forest Fire Model on Complex Networks" (arXiv:0911.0569). Many sociological networks, as well as biological and technological ones, can be represented in terms of complex networks with a heterogeneous connectivity pattern. Dynamical...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 2:13 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Currently Planning to Read On a Rainy Day: AdS/CFT Edition

Category: Statistical mechanics

A couple months ago, Harvard's Sean Hartnoll gave a series of lectures at CERN about applications of gauge/gravity duality to condensed-matter physics (1, 2, 3, 4). Now, a set of notes based on these lectures is available on the arXiv...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 5:30 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Currently Reading: Neural Dynamics as Critical-Point Fluctuations

Category: arXiv

M. B. Kitzbichler et al. (2009). "Broadband Criticality of Human Brain Network Synchronization" PLoS Comput Biol 5, 3: e1000314. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000314. Self-organized criticality is an attractive model for human brain dynamics, but there has been little direct evidence for its existence...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 5:03 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

A Personal View of Eigenmodes

Category: Plectics

The night before last, I fell asleep on the sofa in my home's art gallery. (How I ended up living in a place which has its own art gallery is a story for another day, as is the reason why...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:16 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

New Scientist Editorial Efficiently Dashes Hopes of Effective Communication

Category: Physics

The story so far: New Scientist magazine publishes an issue with a heartbreakingly sensationalist cover, and biology experts across the Blogohedron get up in arms. (See Sandwalk, Ecographica, Evolutionary Novelties and Genomicron for sample critiques of both cover and content.)...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:11 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Physics Makes a Toy of the Brain

Category: Neuroscience

Can physics tell us about ourselves? To phrase the question more narrowly: can the statistical tools which physicists have developed to understand the collective motion of large agglutinations of particles help us figure out what our brains are doing? If...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:06 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

On the arXivotubes: Spatial Ecology Edition

The evolution and ecology of spatially distributed populations is a confusing field to study, since nobody seems to be fully aware of the work which other people are doing. In a way, this mirrors the systems being studied: spreading a...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:29 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The Necessity of Mathematics

Category: Astronomy

What we need, and what we're missing.

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:36 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Friday Video: The Mechanical Universe Demo

Here's computer-graphics guru Jim Blinn narrating a demonstration reel of the animation used in the esteemed television series The Mechanical Universe (1985). This Caltech production turned a freshman physics course into a video experience covering Newtonian mechanics, introductory calculus, electromagnetism,...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 5:20 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks