catdynamics | November 26, 2007He could buy his own 1% share in Gemini!
This, btw, confirms my belief that a secret cabal of astronomers will take over the University of California in its entirety in the near future.
I, personally, will welcome their new starry overlords.
catdynamics | November 22, 2007thankfully it is friday, and we pose a big question to the Mighty iPod:
is it a correct simple theory of something?
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: Torna a Surriento - Three Tenors
The Crossing: Fashion - David Bowie
The Crown: Venus in Flares - Half Man Half Biscuit
The Root: Nobody Home - Pink Floyd
The Past: Bought Me A Cat
The Future: Jólasveinar Ganga um Gólf - Barnakór
The Questioner: Song of Encouragement - Half Man Half Biscuit
The House: Krummi Krunkar Úti
The Inside: Wasted Reprise - Pearl Jam
The Outcome: Der Vogelfanger bin ich - Mozart, Magic Flute
"A…
catdynamics | November 22, 2007for all practical purposes we can do most physics under the assumption that space-time is locally flat
but it isn't.
Locally space-time has some curvature, but that doesn't matter so much.
Globally, there is also an issue, since we seem to live in a universe with a positive cosmological constant, and going off to infinity is not going to get us to a nice flat Minkowski space.
Technically, this confounds a lot of assumptions in physics, where it is assumed that there is some asymptotic flat space, over there somewhere, where everything is well defined, cleanly separated.
In practise, this…
catdynamics | November 20, 2007Can you, in fact, add ordered sets of unlike things?
One of the main objections to Lisi's simple theory of everything is that he cavalierly sets up ordered sets of mixed quantities - under the broad heading of they are all Grassman numbers
In particular, his connection puts in both fermions and bosons, which is generally not allowed - unless you do it under a super Lie algebra, or some other extended scheme, where you include an extra operator, that basically allows you to do this.
But, it is NOT actually true that you can not mix unlike variables in doing addition or multiplication of…
catdynamics | November 19, 2007The blogosphere is a-twitter over surfer dude paper modestly titled An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything by Garrett Lisi
Just maybe he is onto something, but it is way overhyped
And so it is.
Lisi's homepage (currently severly slashdotted) and wiki
There is extensive discussion at Backreaction, here and some followup here
Woit also has something to say, as, of course, does Lubos
Sean, uncharacteristically, declines to comment, sensible chap.
So, like a fool, I tread there.
I was asked to nicely. It is late, and I may be doing some re-edits of this over the week, it is not a trivial…
catdynamics | November 19, 2007Sun Microsystems to put 10,000 servers in a box in a Japanese coal mine
I kid you not
"Sun and a consortium of other businesses are going to lower self-contained computing facilities into a no-longer-used Japanese coal mine. The goal is to create an underground data center that will use up to 50% less power than a ground-level data center, the vendors claim.
(h/t Muhahhahaaaa)
The coolant will be ground water and the site's temperature is a constant 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit) all year, meaning no air-conditioning will be needed outside the containers. This reduces the energy…
catdynamics | November 19, 2007Snowy morning
fingers numb
large hot coffee
on the run
Loose lid pops
liquid flows
keyboard fizzles
so it goes
Fortunately my many "to do" lists soaked up the main pool of coffee, which seems to have saved the cpu and disk.
There are advantages to a messy desk.
I think I will use this as a reason to reinvent myself, since I no longer know what "to do".
And I'm locked out of my desktop until I get a new keyboard.
Bonus.
Wouldn't ya know it.
Campus computer store is closed for a week for stock taking.
Bastards.
And for some ineffable reason Apple has not put an Apple Store in town...
Anyone…
catdynamics | November 18, 2007Nuclear Mangos says US aid on Pakistan nukes did not include PALs
There have been news reports that the US provided ~ $100 million assistance to Pakistan over the last few years to "secure" their nuclear weapons, and there was some speculation as to whether this included providing them with Permissive Action Links.
Apparently not
The armscontrolwonk concurs.
Not good, messy.
Since Pakistan is not an NPT signatory any US help risks being seriously illegal, and if the US was providing physical security or protocols, rather than something like PALs to block unauthorized detonation, then the US…
catdynamics | November 18, 2007When there was a channel on television that showed music videos...
...nothing but. New and interesting, old and familiar. Brilliant it was.
A news headline channel, 24 hour per day, continually updated news headlines from around the world.
No opinion. No celebrity. No talking heads.
Very handy. It was trusted.
I remember bookstores that sold books.
Coffeeshops that sold coffee.
It was hot and black and liquid. You could have milk or sugar.
I remember when sending unsolicited commercial e-mail was the ultimate sin you could committ on a network.
When string theory looked like a promising…
catdynamics | November 16, 2007WebMD stirred up the news recently when they drew attention to recent fatal cases of the common cold.
Specifically, the CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report feature on Ad 14
Adenovirus is one of the common respiratory viruses that cause the "common cold" (which is really a catch all for generic symptoms caused by several different viral infections).
Or, if you prefer, it causes "'flu like symptoms", which are not at all, typically, like actual influenza symptoms, which tend to be a lot more severe than most people think when they "come down with "the 'flu".
There are about 50 strains (…
catdynamics | November 16, 2007Penn State engineers have come up with an interesting twist on fuel production, coming up with a cell that very efficiently produces hydrogen
Here is the NSF headline press release on this
The cell uses microbial fermentation of acetic acid to generate hydrogen, but with a twist. Oh, and the technique also works (not as well) for cellulose, which is the prima plant waste material we all would like to find something useful to do with.
A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words:
Click for high-res version.
Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation
The basic idea is one of…
catdynamics | November 16, 2007Chad, inspired by Mark's contradictions, asks for peoples' favourite dubious proofs.
Dave contributes some classics, but
Astronomers excel at dubious proofs.
Mathematicians despair of "physics proofs".
They lack rigour, shall we say. Often such trivia as uniqueness, or even existence are omitted, and we proceed with "whatever works".
My favourite, which I recently used in class, is a variation on the Ansatz (dumb things always sound better in foreign languages).
I derived a a set of evolution equations to first order, noted that by inspection they were formally an insoluble set of coupled…
catdynamics | November 16, 2007Joyous Happy Sunny Day!
Billy Bragg Podcast #8 is up: Waiting For the Great Leap Forward
In which Billy and Wiggy discuss the making of "Workers Playtime".
Yay.
catdynamics | November 16, 2007I. Hate. Proposal. Season.
Even mini-proposal season...
So, as we rush to the bus stop through the snow, clad in t-shirt and sneakers, we ask...
Oh, Mighty iPod, modulo the Vagaries of Fallible Panels, what will the Fate of Our Proposals be, this season.
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: Getting Into Something - Alison Moyet
The Crossing: It Must Be The Place (Naive ) - Talking Heads
The Crown: Valentine's Day is Over - Billy Bragg
The Root: If - Red Hot Chili Peppers
The Past: Stir It Up - Bob Marley
The Future: Pabbu Segir
The Questioner: Lost John - Lonnie Donegan
The…
catdynamics | November 14, 2007Froomkin at the WaPo catches Bush making a signing statement.
Bush made another of his curious signing statements to the DoD 2008 appropriations bill
"This one says: "The Act contains certain provisions identical to those found in prior bills passed by the Congress that might be construed to be inconsistent with my Constitutional responsibilities (sections 8005, 8009, 8012(b), 8034(b), 8052, 8082, 8085, 8089, 8091, and 8116, and the provision concerning consolidation under the heading 'Operation and Maintenance, Defense Wide'). "
Here is the text of the bill
and section VIII
Bush has done…
catdynamics | November 14, 2007so... does anyone know if signatures drawn using Adobe Illustrator, or equivalent, count?
yes it is mini-proposal season and the e-mails and faxed are humming
I actually played with illustrator to see if I could do a convincing signature writing with a mouse - couldn't quite pull it off and was reduced to finding a working scanner - we've gone rapidly from The One Precious Scanner, too scanners littering every desktop, to The One Precious Scanner Which Still Works
Funny that
'cause scanned sigs pasted into PDFs count, which seems slightly risque, espcially given federal agencies proclivity…
catdynamics | November 14, 2007Kaguya images rock!
Bonus added earthrise video
Click for hi-res
wide angle view
all the new images