Guest Bloggers
drorzel | September 10, 2007Many thanks to Aaron and Nathan, my guest bloggers over the past few weeks-- they did a great job, and if anything probably raised the tone around here. If you've got an academic job opening, and aren't afraid of those blog-reading types, they're both looking for permanent positions... Hint, hint.
They both posted expressing amazement that I manage to find stuff to post daily, and, frankly, after three weeks away, I'm kind of wondering about that myself. I'll get back into the swing soon, I'm sure, but jet lag may keep me dopier than normal for a few days yet. Also, my posting frequency may…
bergman | September 9, 2007Well, Chad's back, and I guess that means that this guest-blogging stint has come to an end (free! I'm free!). I want to thank Chad again for the opportunity to play in his sandbox for a few weeks. I didn't get the chance to write every post I had planned. Real life -- or at least the closest academic imitation thereof -- does sometimes get in the way of blogging. Anyways, having seen it from the other side now, this blogging stuff isn't easy. I don't know how Chad manages to come up with two or more things to say every day, but I guess that's why he's the blogger and I'm the guest-blogger.…
bergman | September 8, 2007I remember the last time I saw the milky way. I was at my aunt's house in the foothills of the Sierras, and late at night the dense river of stars emerges. But that is still not the true milky way, or so I hear. And, in more urban areas, the detritus of our incandescent society reduces the night sky to an inchoate glow. This article in the New Yorker talks about the poorly designed night time illumination that has resulted in our current situation, and what can be and is being done about it.
(via Slashdot)
lundblad | September 7, 2007Ah, what loyal citizen of California doesn't remember singing the state song, I Love You, California, every morning. Or was it saying the Pledge...my memory's hazy.
The reason I bring up state songs is not to bring up the ill-fated campaign to make "Born to Run" the New Jersey state song (this town rips the bones from your back; it's a death trap, it's a suicide rap; we've gotta get out while we're young.) but rather to point out that the state I currently work in (but do reside in; I'm taxed but not represented, myself) has its own state song, Maryland, My Maryland! Astounding, jaw-…
lundblad | September 7, 2007I should probably sneak in a few posts before Chad gets back. It's been a hectic week, as the time came for my current experiment (as it does for all experiments) where one stops futzing around trying to make things better, and takes the actual data, with an eye to moving on. This means that you want good, clean runs with lots of attention to detail (as opposed to the semi-qualitative exploration of parameter space, when you're first seeing an effect), and the first thing life-wise that suffers during this phase is blogging.
But the second-worst blog post in the world is the why haven'…
bergman | September 6, 2007Now that I'm back in College Station, it's time to start getting applications ready for the great job search. I don't know how it is in other fields, but in math/physics, this generally involves three to four letters of recommendation, a CV, a research statement, sometimes a teaching statement and maybe an annotated bibliography. In high energy physics, we have the Theoretical Particle Physics Job Rumor Mill run by the now nonymous John Terning. In addition to listing offers and educated guesses at short lists, it also serves as a nice clearinghouse of positions. SPIRES, the APS, Physics…
bergman | September 5, 2007Steinn reports that the NRC has made its recommendations for NASA's Beyond Einstein program. The winners appear to be LISA, a gravity wave observatory, and JDEM, a competition of dark energy focussed satellites. Steinn has lots of links to the various projects. The executive summary of the report is availabe here (pdf).
I know next to nothing about these things, but from afar it always seemed like LISA was one of those neat ideas that was never actually going to happen. The basic idea is to put three satellites in orbit around the sun and bounce lasers around to measure gravitational waves.…
bergman | September 5, 2007Well, I'm back in Texas and just in time for Steve Jobs to introduce new toys I can't afford. At the risk of turning Chad's blog into an Apple advertisement, every time I pass an Apple store, it takes significant willpower to not walk out of there with a new iPhone. I find it endlessly amusing to load up my papers on the demo models -- yes, I am easily amused. A certain theorist was showing his off at Aspen, too. Well, you don't want a phone with your iPod? You can now get an iPod touch, WiFi included. 8 and 16 gigs. iPod Nano? Smaller with really tiny video. Old school iPods? 160 gigs now.…
bergman | September 3, 2007Happy Labor Day to everyone. I'll be traveling back to Texas, so no blog for me for a day or so.
bergman | September 2, 2007Because my team, the Forty Niners, aren't. Neither apparently is Michigan. On the other hand, my co-guest blogger is surely happy.
bergman | September 1, 2007The Principles proprietor is currently at WorldCon where the Hugo awards are given out. This year's winners are available (among many other places, I'm sure) at Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog. I wasn't a huge fan of Rainbows End myself. I did like "The Girl in the Fireplace", a Doctor Who episode. The writer, Steven Moffat, also wrote "Blink", this season's best episode.
bergman | September 1, 2007Taking a break from all this physics, I thought I'd talk a little about music and some related mathematical coincidences. One of the fundamental concepts of music is that of consonance and dissonance. Consonant things sound nice when played together and dissonant things do not. For example, if you play two Cs together on a piano (or your instrument of choice), it's a pleasing sound, but playing a C and an F# together sound unpleasant.
It could have been the case that what we find pleasing and displeasing on this simple level could be purely random, but our tastes align with a very elementary…
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 again…
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…
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…