lundblad | August 31, 2007A little while ago, intrepid reporters from the Baltimore Sun dropped by my lab to investigate the newsworthiness of a paper (also on the ArXiv) that had just been published, about which I might talk a little bit before Chad gets back. Surprisingly, the article actually got published, complete with photo and great quotes.
I'm tragically not in the picture, as I was gone that day, but also wasn't an author on the paper; the data were taken last summer, before my arrival, which gives you an idea of the delay in this business between data, writing, and publishing. Highlights from the…
bergman | August 31, 2007If you're on the west coast tonight and are willing to stay up late or wake up early, you have the chance to see the Aurigid meteor shower. This shower is fairly unique because it arises from a comet with a period of around 900 years. Some people have even claimed that there's a chance this could be spectacular, but these predictions are often wrong. After the disappointing Perseids, I'd love to be able to stay up for this one, but I'm still on the east coast. Ah well. Maybe some other shower.
lundblad | August 30, 2007A long time ago, all you needed to think about and record the data you were interested in was a pen and some vellum, and maybe a few candles and a trusty manservant. Somewhere along the line, the chart recorder got invented, and when combined with the oscilloscope and those awful scope cameras, a whole new world of data recording and storage was available. Having one's own ENIAC was pretty helpful, too, especially once manservants (and really, all of bored-noble-of-means science) became gauche.
These days we're a little bit more sophisticated. Computers are indispensable parts of…
lundblad | August 29, 2007I'm here to depress you a little.
First off, we have the upcoming anniversary of Katrina, about which Jane Dark has a tough tale to tell:
The abandonment of a great city to time and tide is indeed both symptom and mark of empire on its downhill slide; it bears noting as well that pathetic, delusional and desperate regimes are equally an indicator of this decline.
I'm interested in what she has to say, but Ozymandias references are sooo AP English. She also disses on Stardust here, but I'm not touching that with a ten-foot Worldcon program.
Second, we have gender issues in physics…
drorzel | August 29, 2007Back in 1998, when I was here for three months working outside of Tokyo, I made a trip down to Kamakura, which was the capital (or at least the seat of power) for a century or so, around 1200. It's a beautiful town, full of great old temples, but it was a pissy, cold, and rainy day when I visited.
Yesterday, Kate and I went back. And again, it rained-- it was a light drizzle when we left Yokohama, but a solid downpour when we were visiting an Inari shrine up in the hills. Apparently, I am not meant to see Kamakura on a clear day.
Anyway, having trekked down there, we saw most of the sights,…
lundblad | August 29, 2007But he's not cooler than me. Which is one of the things I thought of several times while reading Spook Country, his new novel. If you don't want the long version, here's the gist: it's decent, he's still pretty good, buy it in hardcover, move to Vancouver, buy a Powerbook, learn Mandarin, get hooked on benzos, run a startup involving art, and find yourself some new cocktails to drink.
Minor spoilers ahead, but no big ones.
I really wanted to love this one. Gibson's of course been a big part of my life since I was a wee one; Neuromancer is one of the few books I've been…
bergman | August 29, 2007Since I have control over this blog for a little while (and where is my co-guest blogger anyways?), I figure I ought to use it in my own self-interest. Towards that end, the Austin City Limits music festival is coming up soon, and, as usual, I only recognize a small portion of the bands playing. What should I go see? The lineup is here, and the schedule is here, here and here.
Right now I'm leaning twoards penciling in The Killers in the vain hope that they can pull off a decent live show, The Ike Reilly Assassination, Andrew Bird, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Arcade Fire, Regina Spektor, The…
bergman | August 27, 2007I remember back when I was in high school and came across lists of the greatest mathematicians ever. They almost always included Archimedes, Newton and Gauss. Sometimes Euler made it in. I knew who these guys were, but every once in a while, there was this guy I had never heard of, Alexander Grothendieck. I with pretty much no idea what he had done until I hit graduate school where I began to appreciate his contributions to/invention of modern mathematics. I'd like to talk a little about a philosophical aspect of his work here. I don't know the history so well, and I'm sure all these ideas…
drorzel | August 26, 2007One great link, while I'm posting things: rice paddy art in Inagadate:
[B]y precisely planting four varieties of rice with differently colored leaves in fields their ancestors have farmed for centuries, the people of Inakadate Village have this year grown remarkable reproductions of famous woodblock prints by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). And this is no cheap gimmick -- the images from the artist's "Fugaku Sanjurokkei (Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji)" on the 15,000-sq.-meter paddies are nothing if not spectacular in both their scale and detail -- even as every day brings them nearer to…
drorzel | August 26, 2007(I'm not sure what the right counter word for digital photos would be, but physical photographs would be flat things, so we'll go with "mai"...)
The post title pretty much says it: I have taken 1,000 pictures thus far on this trip. We're now in Yokohama, staying in an absurd room on the 62nd floor of the Landmark Tower, and we spent most of the day poking around in Tokyo. But the important thing is those thousand pictures, and here's a cheap reader contest:
How many picture will I have taken by the end of this trip?
Leave your guesses in the comments. The person who comes closest to the…
bergman | August 26, 2007The title of this post is a famous question (posed, for example, by Joe Polchinski) which is modeled after an even more famous question by Ken Wilson, "What is Quantum Field Theory?". I certainly can't answer the first question, but Wilson's question now does have a widely agreed upon answer (which is sadly not well presented in a popular literature that continues to repeat old myths about regularization) which I will mention a bit later
What I would mainly like to do, however, is to answer the much easier question, "What is string perturbation theory?" But before getting to that, let's talk…
bergman | August 25, 2007For those of you willing to stay up late, there will be a total eclipse of the moon on August 28 visible to various extents over most of the western hemisphere and some of east Asia. The show is a little late for me (some might call it early) as I'm on the east coast right now, but if you're up for it, enjoy. After the jump are two photos I took of a total lunar eclipse on 10/27/04:
drorzel | August 25, 2007Saturday, we did a swing through northwest Kyoto, where there are a whole bunch of famous temples with gardens, spanning pretty much the full possible range. They range from the dry rock gardens (karesansui, according to Google) at Ryoanji to the faintly preposterous Golden Pavilion at Kinkakuji, which is, as the name suggests, covered in gold leaf.
We also got pretty much the full range of tourist experience-- we started at Daitokuji, which was pretty much empty (a couple of big tour groups came through one of the subtemples, but we were just about the only people in the other three), and…
drorzel | August 24, 2007No update yesterday, because we went to Nara, about an hour away by train, and hurried out to get an early start. Thursday was a light day, anyway-- the highlights were a visit to Nijo Jinya, which is a preserved Edo-period inn for feudal lords visiting Kyoto, and includes a number of slightly over-the-top security features for their protection. It's open by appointment only, and the tour is conducted in Japanese, but our hotel arranged a translator for us. Actually, there were two translators and a half translators, because there was another pair of foreigners on the tour, who had also…
bergman | August 24, 2007Or, "Stealing Chad's Ideas: First in a Series".
When you write 'log', do you mean base 10 or base e? What field do you work in?
Update: Or base 2 for you CS-types.
lundblad | August 24, 2007I'm off to Denver for a long weekend; two friends of mine are getting married (both PhD scientists, and exemplars of the two-body problem: one's doing a postdoc at Princeton, the other at MIT...) I get to wear a tux, which is nice, because no one looks bad in a tux. In fact, a tux makes all guys looks hot. I wish I owned one myself, or more properly, got invited to more events that would make owning one even remotely sensible.
I have a couple half-days to kill while I'm there...any recommendations for things to do in Denver when you're there?
Fiction for the plane: (I'm bringing some…
bergman | August 23, 2007As I mentioned earlier, I'm currently attending the Simons Workshop in Mathematics and Physics at Stony Brook University. The weather finally warmed up today, and we relocated to Smith Point Beach to hear Juan Maldacena tell us a bit about AdS/CFT and gluon scattering. If you're looking for a precis of the talk, I'm afraid I'm not going to give it a try, but I'll commend you to the paper if only so you can read about the beautiful wire frames.
This is actually the second workshop for me this summer. Before coming here, I had the opportunity to spend three weeks at the Aspen Center for Physics…
lundblad | August 23, 2007Some things I've noticed lately:
Anton Zeilinger (Vienna) has a blog. It's in German, but that shouldn't be a problem, right?
I found that out at Michael Nielsen's place, where he's started blogging again after a little hiatus.
In an effort to improve on my bibdesk+bibtex+folder-full-of-local-pdfs system, I've been playing around citeulike, Papers, and Nielsen's Academic Reader. Papers is crippled for physicists by its sole reliance on PubMed for metadata, but shows a lot of potential. I'm also definitely curious to see where Academic Reader goes as it grows; as it's being developed…
lundblad | August 22, 2007Lest this blog turn into a one-trick pony, let me tell you what I did today that's of a little different flavor.
I epoxied some stuff onto some other stuff. More importantly, I calculated a band structure.
This amazes me. Sure, all you squa^Wsolid-state types out there do this every day, over your cereal even, and (in some cases) just have it done for you by the undergrad, but I'm an AMO physicist. I haven't calculated a band structure since I first made sweet love to the Kronig-Penney potential back in the warrens of LeConte and Campbell, guided by the two-who-are-one, Cohen and…
drorzel | August 22, 2007(These regular updates are brought to you by the loaner laptops in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency, and the fact that jet lag has me waking up at 5 every morning, well before the restaurant opens for breakfast. They may or may not continue from Yokohama when we get there, but for now, it gives me something to do that won't disturb Kate's sleep...)
I've reproduced this title from memory, so I may have dropped a syllable or two. It refers to a scenic path running between the general area of Nanzen-ji and Ginkaku-ji, where the Silver Pavilion is located. The phrase is translated as "The…