CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-18 23:15:07 (6 comments, 3 reshares, 16 +1s)

Think the big banks should be broken up? See why you're in good company. We created this mini-documentary to showcase some of the many people calling to break up the banks. The first two minutes set up the argument, and the remainder shows person after person joining the bipartisan call to finally (once again) end "too big to fail."

Here's the breakdown:

0:07 -- Bill Moyers (PBS) and Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) discuss how little has changed since 2008.
0:27 -- Robert Reich (fmr Labor Secretary) explains why we need to break up the biggest banks
0:47 -- Sandy Weill (fmr Citi CEO) says why he wants the banks to be broken up
1:04 -- Byron Dorgan (fmr Senator) gives the history of breaking up the banks.
1:32 -- James Rickards (investment banker) lists the folks who allowed the banks to get big again.
1:41 -- James Komansky (fmr CEO,... more »

2013-05-18 22:43:30 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

A Cosmic Axion Background to explain excess X-rays from galaxy clusters
This paper that appeared on the ArXiv proposes an extremely intriguing link between questions in fundamental physics, early universe cosmology, and a longstanding discrepancy in the emission of X-rays from galaxy clusters.

An axion is a hypothetical particle that could be associated with a new degree of freedom, parametrizing the asymmetry of the laws of physics under left-right (parity) reflection. It was proposed in the context of the strong force, which appears exactly left-right symmetric despite accommodating departures from that symmetry, and with the weak force providing a stark demonstration that the laws can and do violate this left-right balance. Promoting this parity-breaking parameter to a dynamical field, the axion, provides an elegant explanation for why it seems to be exactly zero, when it has no... more »

2013-05-18 22:37:00 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

A Cosmic Axion Background to explain excess X-rays from galaxy clusters
This paper that appeared on the ArXiv proposes an extremely intriguing link between questions in fundamental physics, early universe cosmology, and a longstanding discrepancy in the emission of X-rays from galaxy clusters.

An axion is a hypothetical particle that could be associated with a new degree of freedom, parametrizing the asymmetry of the laws of physics under left-right (parity) reflection. It was proposed in the context of the strong force, which appears exactly left-right symmetric despite accommodating departures from that symmetry, and with the weak force providing a stark demonstration that the laws can and do violate this left-right balance. Promoting this parity-breaking parameter to a dynamical field, the axion, provides an elegant explanation for why it seems to be exactly zero, when it has no... more »

2013-05-19 02:08:58 (14 comments, 9 reshares, 17 +1s)

A Cosmic Axion Background to explain excess X-rays from galaxy clusters
This paper that appeared on the ArXiv proposes an extremely intriguing link between questions in fundamental physics, early universe cosmology, and a longstanding discrepancy in the emission of X-rays from galaxy clusters.

An axion is a hypothetical particle that could be associated with a new degree of freedom, parametrizing the asymmetry of the laws of physics under left-right (parity) reflection. It was proposed in the context of the strong force, which appears exactly left-right symmetric despite accommodating departures from that symmetry, and with the weak force providing a stark demonstration that the laws can and do violate this left-right balance. Promoting this parity-breaking parameter to a dynamical field, the axion, provides an elegant explanation for why it seems to be exactly zero, when it has no... more »

2013-05-17 22:54:06 (1 comments, 10 reshares, 23 +1s)

This is the prettiest 100 TeV muon I've ever seen...

In other news the +IceCube Neutrino experiment, basically a giant particle detector buried in the antarctic ice, is on Google+. Thats good because I'm extremely interested to see what the cosmos communicates to us with its high energy neutrinos, especially considering the intriguing 1 PeV events it reported recently, Bert and Ernie. 

2013-05-17 04:31:50 (5 comments, 6 reshares, 35 +1s)

http://fractal.io/

http://butdoesitfloat.com/And-it-occurred-to-me-that-these-must-be-holographic-viral-projections

2013-05-16 14:16:18 (5 comments, 4 reshares, 12 +1s)

The IceCube experiment in Antarctica observed two astrophysical neutrinos with energies around 1,000 TeV, naming them Bert and Ernie.

Sounds like something interesting is going on! They apparently don't seem easily explained with any known production mechanisms...

2013-05-15 22:41:22 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 14 +1s)

Hofstadter's Butterfly is a recursive structure in the allowed energies (x-axis) of an electron in a 2D lattice, for a given applied transverse magnetic field strength (y-axis) discovered by Douglas Hofstadter in 1976. It's famous for being an early, rare example of a fractal occurring in a quantum system (though the term "fractal" hadn't yet been popularized by Benoit Mandelbrot) and also due to its small role in Hofstadter's influential book on self-reference Gödel, Escher, Bach. Well, in 2012 this structure may have finally been directly observed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_butterfly
http://physics.technion.ac.il/~odim/hofstadter.html

From the Nature abstract: this complex spectrum results from an interplay between the characteristic lengths associated with the two quantizing fields, and is one of the first quantum fractals... more »

2013-05-14 19:59:46 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 1 +1s)

Reddit asks: Explain special relativity like you're Lil Wayne
Young money, cash money, takin' you to school
Ma real nigga' pimp Einstein
Jewish boy lookin' fly
Changed tha' whole fuckin' game back in 1905
Said no matta' how fast you movin'
Things stayin' tha' same
The laws of physics like the laws of the game
Jump in ma Benz, speedin' holdin' ma cup
Speed a'light still constant, this be fuckin' shit up
Like time dilatin' and thing gettin' smaller
like your limp ass dick, bitch fuck your observer
An' energy and mass they the same ass thing
like a bitch still a bitch, fuckin' pussy tha same
An' my boy go deeper in nineteen fifteen
Fuck all tha haters, change this shit up ageen'
Spacetime be curved, like a big ass ho
Makin' frames drag... more »

2013-05-14 03:04:41 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Two papers relating complex Chern-Simons theory to the M5 brane (2,0) superconformal worldvolume theory:

Complex Chern-Simons from M5-branes on the Squashed Three-Sphere
http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.2891
Clay Cordova, Daniel L. Jafferis (13 May 2013)
We derive an equivalence between the (2,0) superconformal M5-brane field theory dimensionally reduced on a squashed three-sphere, and Chern-Simons theory with complex gauge group. In the reduction, the massless fermions obtain an action which is second order in derivatives and are reinterpreted as ghosts for gauge fixing the emergent non-compact gauge symmetry. A squashing parameter in the geometry controls the imaginary part of the complex Chern-Simons level.

3d Chern-Simons Theory from M5-branes
http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.2429
Sungjay Lee, Masahito Yamazaki (10 May 2013)
We study 5d N=2... more »

2013-05-13 18:02:02 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

News on Closed Superstring Field Theory

You may have heard me mention before the observation that all of fundamental physics is governed by field theories of "infinity-Chern-Simons type" (ncatlab.org/schreiber/show/infinity-Chern-Simons+theory). In fact these field theories of infinity-Chern-Simons-type are precisely the boundary field theories of the "universal higher topological Yang-Mills theory" (ncatlab.org/schreiber/show/Higher+Chern-Simons+local+prequantum+field+theory), so everything is ultimately governed by that.

All of fundamental physics?? I hear you ask. Well, yes, a fairly impressive list of examples, in particular if all boundary conditions and domain walls and defects are added to the picture. Notably since the work of Zwiebach in the 1990s we know that closed bosonic string field theory is an example... more »

2013-05-13 00:56:27 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 15 +1s)

Searching for magnetic monopoles at LHC
The existence and exact properties of magnetic monopoles is a central question to address for a complete understanding of the fields that transmit forces. While some monopoles are likely much too heavy to discover at any collider experiment, a recent theoretical investigation estimated that a monopole associated with the electroweak force could be as light as 4-7 TeV, putting it within reach of discovery at the LHC. The MoEDAL experiment at +CERN will try to find it, when the LHC resumes collisions. I especially want to share the excitement about this whole topic because it is so intimately linked with the geometrical and topological meaning of these (gauge) theories that govern the fundamental forces.

Some basics about monopoles in gauge theories
Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism allows for two different, but interlinked,kin... more »

2013-05-10 23:42:35 (4 comments, 1 reshares, 15 +1s)

2013-05-10 13:14:20 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

+CERN facility makes first observations of short-lived pear-shaped atomic nuclei

A lopsided atomic nucleus may help to refine nuclear theory. The stubby pear shape […] may also be pointing towards new tests of particle physics that could reveal why matter became more common than antimatter in the early moments of the Universe…

Read the full article in +Nature News & Comment (http://www.nature.com/news/pear-shaped-nucleus-boosts-search-for-new-physics-1.12952) and another in +Physics World (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/may/08/nuclear-physics-goes-pear-shaped). [Aside: Worryingly, I haven't managed to find a preprint on arXiv or a copy of the paper on the CERN Document Server. I thought all particle physics papers were supposed to be open-access, or am I missing something?htt... more »

2013-05-10 06:07:25 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 9 +1s)

Leaving this here to watch later...

According to the description it looks like there are a lot of basics in the beginning and the actual quantum biology comes almost an hour in. But looks interesting.

2013-05-10 01:52:21 (1 comments, 5 reshares, 12 +1s)

Spectacular short by Polish director Damian Nenow. HD is necessary.

"Paths of Hate" is a short tale about the demons that slumber deep in the human soul and have the power to push people into the abyss of blind hate, fury and rage.

http://pathsofhate.com

2013-05-10 00:32:13 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

An informal review of current knowledge and speculation regarding production of neutrinos and other particles in gamma ray bursts, like the dramatic one last month. From what I gather, it has been somewhat surprising that the highly energetic neutrinos thought to be produced in such events have not been detected with the IceCube detector. But Strassler doesn't seem to know this material very well, and he's asking for more expert guidance, if anybody out there is in a position to provide it. Arxiv links are welcome.

2013-05-09 05:10:40 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 6 +1s)

Six Shin Bet leaders on the urgency of a policy change
There has been much more heat than light in the G+ discussions surrounding the reports, now confirmed, that Stephen Hawking will not be attending a conference in Jerusalem in protest of Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories. I tried to think what nugget of information might address that in the most productive way. This interview is one valuable piece that comes to mind.

Director Dror Moreh made a film called The Gatekeepers primarily revolving around all six former heads of the Israeli Shin Bet (the internal security force), and you can see some clips of it in the interview. They are speaking out about their serious concerns that their government has not acted to move away from the occupation in a meaningful way. Not since the years of Rabin, who paid for his moves towards peace with his life. 

I'm still... more »

2013-05-09 02:10:32 (81 comments, 16 reshares, 42 +1s)

Six Shin Bet leaders on the urgency of a policy change
There has been much more heat than light in the G+ discussions surrounding the reports, now confirmed, that Stephen Hawking will not be attending a conference in Jerusalem in protest of Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories. I tried to think what nugget of information might address that in the most productive way. This interview is one valuable piece that comes to mind.

Director Dror Moreh made a film called The Gatekeepers primarily revolving around all six former heads of the Israeli Shin Bet (the internal security force), and you can see some clips of it in the interview. They are speaking out about their serious concerns that their government has not acted to move away from the occupation in a meaningful way. Not since the years of Rabin, who paid for his moves towards peace with his life. 

I'm still... more »

2013-05-08 19:50:17 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 3 +1s)

A fascinating podcast on the history of written language. Its amazing to consider how many particular features of current writing systems had to be invented separately and once seemed like "brilliant innovations". For example, the idea of a space between words, or the idea of vowels.

Back in the days of the first written language, it took years of training to be able to utilize it. We've sure come a long way, but I couldn't help but think we've also regressed since its impossible for a normal person to read a bill passed by the US Congress, for example, and have a very clear idea of what it does. I think we still have lots of opportunities to reinvent our methods of communication in productive ways.

In general, EconTalk is a pretty awesome podcast. Definitely from a much more conservative/libertarian perspective on economics than myself, but I always feel I learn... more »

2013-05-08 00:17:31 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

Resonaances on inflation after the first Planck data
The CMB spectrum measured by the Planck satellite points to a perfectly boring universe: the vanilla ΛCDM cosmological model, no hint of new light degrees of freedom beyond the standard model, no hint of larger-than-expected neutrino masses, etc. However at the quantitative level things are a bit more interesting, as Planck has considerably narrowed down the parameter space of inflation. We may not be far from selecting a small class out the huge zoo of inflationary models.

Simplest models of inflation involve a scalar field with a potential. During inflation, the value of the scalar field is such that the potential is large and positive, effectively acting as a cosmological constant that supports a faster-than-light expansion of the universe. The potential should be almost but not exactly flat, so that the scalar field slowly... more »

2013-05-06 13:54:11 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 8 +1s)

I'm messing around with number theory and graphics in Sage. These aren't the greatest pictures of the Klein j-invariant, but they're fairly pretty and they're mine.

I started messing with it when a friend asked me if I knew the deep mathematical reason (only poorly explained in Wikipedia) why e^(pi * sqrt(163)) is very, very close to an integer.

It's approximately 262,537,412,640,768,743.99999999999925. This bizarre fact was the basis of a 1975 Scientific American April Fool's joke by Martin Gardner, who claimed that Ramanujan had proven it to be an integer. At the time, few ordinary folks would have even had access to the computing power to easily get all the digits before the decimal point, and those who did may well have been fooled by the digits after into thinking Gardner was telling the truth.

There are some others you can get from the formula... more »

2013-05-05 20:34:16 (4 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

+omegataupodcast on Chaos
This episode is about chaos, or more specifically non-linear dynamics and sensitive dependency on initial conditions. We talk to Harry Swinney and Michael Marder, both from UT Austin’s Center for Nonlinear Dynamics. We discuss the basics of chaos, the kinds of systems that exhibit chaotic behavior, fractals, the phase space and the strange attractor. We also discussed practical applications of chaos theory and Harry’s and Michael’s current work.

A pretty good discussion. The ever-awkward process of trying to convert mathematics to understandable words always seems to be an interesting and rewarding challenge. The page has lots of wiki links to facilitate further reading.

2013-05-04 00:31:13 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

Bright, Long-Lasting GRB Sets Energy Output Record

Last weekend (April 27, 2013), the Fermi and Swift spacecraft witnessed a “shockingly” bright burst of gamma rays from a dying star. Named GRB 130427A, it produced one of the longest lasting and brightest GRBs ever detected.

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/101944/bright-long-lasting-grb-sets-energy-output-record/

2013-05-02 03:29:17 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

Progress on the strong force: Its confinement, vacuum structure, and monopole condensation
Mother Nature has decided to take her sweet time in revealing any new physics to us during this first part of the LHC era, besides the awesome but completely unsurprising Higgs discovery. However, aside from any totally new layers which may be hiding in wait for us somewhere, there are some incredibly fascinating mysteries that remain even in the well-known theory of the strong force, quantum chromodynamics. The abstract definition of QCD is well-known, but turning it into a formulation that is fully useable and explanatory has proven to be a much greater challenge, with only partial successes to date. That is what this paper addresses in a possibly quite substantial and meaningful way, it seems to me. 

Among the things one would like to gain is a more complete analytical understanding of thec... more »

2013-05-02 03:17:07 (0 comments, 20 reshares, 16 +1s)

Weinberg, Dawkins, and the universe
This is a great discussion exploring all kinds of questions, especially touching on some points of contact between physics and the 'grand' religious or quasi-religious questions, including the issue of fine-tuning of physical constants, anthropic selection from a larger reality, what we know about the early universe from experiments, and what we think we know. Its clear from the thunder in the first few minutes that they've angered the Gods....

In case you weren't aware, Steven Weinberg is one of the main co-fathers of the Standard Model, a Nobel laureate, and wrote the book (all 3 volumes) on quantum field theory, so as someone very familiar with the currently most fundamental frameworks he's among the most trustworthy and well-prepared to discuss these matters.

One of the physical issues they tackle early on is... more »

2013-05-01 21:21:39 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 6 +1s)

A powerful way to prove a mathematical result (e.g. an identity of the form A=B) is to introduce a new object or concept (say C) and connect it in two different ways to the original problem.  For instance, if one can show that A=C and one can also show that C=B, then one can deduce that A=B.   More generally, one can introduce n new objects or concepts, and establish at least n+1 non-trivial connections between these objects and each other, or to the original problem; for instance, if one introduces two new objects C,D and three connections, two of which A=C, D=B are to the original problem, and one of which C=D is between the newly introduced objects, then one has again established A=B.

A typical example of this is the use of complex analysis methods to solve a real analysis problem, as per Hadamard's famous dictum  "The shortest path between two truths in the real domain passesthr... more »

2013-05-01 18:31:18 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Ed Witten, Ron Donagi: Supermoduli Space Is Not Projected
This looks like a very important work on the general properties of higher-order superstring amplitudes. If I can summarize it, the study of superstrings inherently involves supergeometry, that is, geometry with both bosonic and fermionic (anticommuting) coordinates. In particular, in the lowest orders of superstring perturbation theory we could afford to use the same basic technology of ordinary geometry, just supplemented with fermionic coordinates. However this paper seems to make clear that this is no longer sufficient for higher orders (Its a theorem for worldsheet genus g ≥ 5 and suspected to hold for g ≥ 3). There are inherently supergeometric techniques and ideas that inevitably become relevant in the study these higher-order amplitudes. The paper is very thick mathematically, but it seems to go to great lengths to introducethe co... more »

2013-05-01 00:54:25 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 4 +1s)

Presentation on the Javascript Event Loop, Penguicon 2013

2013-05-01 02:43:58 (5 comments, 7 reshares, 20 +1s)

Progress on the strong force: Its confinement, vacuum structure, and monopole condensation
Mother Nature has decided to take her sweet time in revealing any new physics to us during this first part of the LHC era, besides the awesome but completely unsurprising Higgs discovery. However, aside from any totally new layers which may be hiding in wait for us somewhere, there are some incredibly fascinating mysteries that remain even in the well-known theory of the strong force, quantum chromodynamics. The abstract definition of QCD is well-known, but turning it into a formulation that is fully useable and explanatory has proven to be a much greater challenge, with only partial successes to date. That is what this paper addresses in a possibly quite substantial and meaningful way, it seems to me. 

Among the things one would like to gain is a more complete analytical understanding of thec... more »

2013-04-24 01:46:28 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Quant turned OWS finance expert Mathbabe (Cathy O'Neil) wants you to protest Citigroup tomorrow.

2013-04-19 07:12:54 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

It looks like this may be coming to an end, which would be totally welcome. A really intense gun battle was recorded earlier (see link) after the one police officer was shot dead at MIT. According to the Boston Globe, the one guy in custody is a marathon bombing suspect. The other (the 'white hat' one reportedly) is still at large, but they seem to be closing in...

Streaming coverage from CBS: http://patdollard.com/2013/04/breaking-all-hell-breaks-loose-in-boston-explosions-gunfire-rock-watertown/

Also, a home-recorded clip of the gun battle: https://plus.google.com/109667384864782087641/posts/Dxz4K6ZG1FE

Boston emergency scanner again:
http://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/6254/web

2013-04-19 09:22:13 (4 comments, 6 reshares, 14 +1s)

Black holes, firewalls and macroscopic quantum superpositions
There's been a lot of new research on the quantum mechanics of black holes recently, especially due to an apparent contradiction identified by some authors called 'AMPS'. This paper I'm describing is one of the outgrowths of the ensuing debate, which is plenty interesting in its own right. A lecture on this question was posted here: http://bit.ly/11mUgj2

I will say beforehand, it seems to me like AMPS are probably wrong in the conclusions they draw from their paradox – I don't think there are any "firewalls", which are an artificial insertion whose sole purpose is to prevent information from passing into a black hole. Just like EPR, I think AMPS will probably be remembered for asking the right question to move the understanding forward, even if their conclusions weren't exactly right.... more »

2013-04-17 21:47:41 (14 comments, 2 reshares, 11 +1s)

Perhaps primarily due to the prominence of monads in the Haskell programming language, programmers are often curious about category theory. Proponents of Haskell and other functional languages can put category-theoretic concepts on a pedestal or in a mexican restaurant, and their benefits can seem as mysterious as they are magical. For instance, the most common use of a monad in Haskell is to simulate the mutation of immutable data. Others include suspending and backtracking computations, and even untying tangled rope.

Category theory is often mocked (or praised) as the be-all and end-all of mathematical abstraction, and as such (and for other reasons I’ve explored on this blog) many have found it difficult to digest and impossible to master. However, in truth category theory arose from a need for organizing mathematical ideas based on their shared structure. In this post, I want to give ab... more »

2013-04-19 04:08:16 (10 comments, 2 reshares, 6 +1s)

Here are a few resources on the AMPS Firewalls, starting with this lecture by Raphael Bousso: Black Holes: Complementarity vs Firewalls. Interestingly, this lecture from Strings 2012 last July is from shortly before he changes his mind to agree with AMPS. Yet it still seems to be a pretty good lecture, despite the fact that some insight may be missing. I'll try and collect a few relevant resources here. If you don't want to read the whole post, I think the Papadodimas-Raju paper may be the most directly important here, while Steve Hsu's may be the most independently interesting.

[AMPS] Black Holes: Complementarity or Firewalls?
We argue that the following three statements cannot all be true: (i) Hawking radiation is in a pure state, (ii) the information carried by the radiation is emitted from the region near the horizon, with low energy effective field theory valid... more »

2013-04-16 03:59:31 (2 comments, 6 reshares, 9 +1s)

Hacking Secret Ciphers with Python teaches complete beginners how to program in the Python programming language. The book features the source code to several ciphers and hacking programs for these ciphers. 100% of the proceeds from this book are donated to the +Electronic Frontier Foundation , +Creative Commons  and the +Tor Project.

Chapter 1 - Making Paper Cryptography Tools
Chapter 2 - Downloading and Installing Python
Chapter 3 - The Interactive Shell 
Chapter 4 - Strings and Writing Programs
Chapter 5 - The Reverse Cipher
Chapter 6 - The Caesar Cipher
Chapter 7 - Hacking the Caesar Cipher with the Brute Force Technique
Chapter 8 - The Transposition Cipher, Encrypting 
Chapter 9 - The Transposition Cipher, Decrypting
Chapter 10 - Programming a Program to Test Our Program
Chapter 11 - Encrypting and Decrypting FilesCh... more »

2013-04-16 02:21:31 (0 comments, 5 reshares, 12 +1s)

CDMS II on dark matter: Three WIMP candidate events
"The highest likelihood was found for a WIMP mass of 8.6 GeV and WIMP-nucleon cross section of 1.9×10−41 cm^2."
Despite the very small number of signal events, the difference between the signal and the background is pretty clear in this chart.

Some basics of the experiment: "The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) collaboration identifies nuclear recoils (including those that would occur in WIMP interactions) using semiconductor detectors operated at 40 mK. These detectors use simultaneous measurements of ionization and non-equilibrium phonons to identify such events among the far more numerous background of electron recoils....We discriminate nuclear recoils from background electron recoils using the ratio of ionization to phonon recoil energy (ionization 'yield'). Electron recoils that occur within∼1... more »

2013-04-15 21:14:05 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

...And I'm listening to the Boston emergency scanner: http://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/6254/web

2013-04-11 13:53:10 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

An interactive breakdown of the proposed federal budget.

2013-04-10 19:45:28 (12 comments, 4 reshares, 8 +1s)

For decades, geologists have thought that the mountain chains running from Alaska to Mexico were created from fragments of land scraped off a huge eastward-moving crustal plate, called the Farallon, that converged with North America and sunk below it over the past 200 million years or so. But a study published today in Nature1 suggests a different scenario. Arcs of islands, like those in today's western Pacific, may have piled atop one another, sinking and forming buried slabs. Then, as North America moved westward, it scraped off the tops of these slabs, raising mountains in the process.

2013-04-08 22:03:15 (28 comments, 245 reshares, 341 +1s)

Dirac: 1975, New Zealand (h/t to +Igor Khavkine) 
Dirac Lecture 1 (of 4) - Quantum Mechanics
Dirac Lecture 2 (of 4) - Quantum Electrodynamics
Dirac Lecture 3 (of 4) - Magnetic Monopoles
Dirac Lecture 4 (of 4) - Does 'G' vary? (Large Numbers Hypothesis)

These look like a total treasure. I've never heard Dirac's voice before, which is awesome by itself, but these also appear to be great lectures as well from what Ive seen so far. Take a listen to this giant of physics and co-father of quantum mechanics...

Funny, there is so much fuzz and distortion in the first minutes of the lecture they seem to give it a kind of 'quantum' feel. ;]

I also really like Dirac for being one of the earliest champions of the theorists's perspective (for lack of a better name) that I subscribe to, and whose best modern day proponent is Nima... more »

2013-04-09 05:16:12 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

A New Type I String in 10 Dimensions
This appears to be quite big: perhaps the second superstring revolution is still ongoing. There appears to be a new type of superstring, perturbatively identical to the Type I (open+closed) string but non-perturbatively inequivalent! ("perturbative" means "captured by the expansion in the coupling constant")

Given that the historical perspective of string theory has been one of quantizing a classical system, whereas the modern (and semi-elusive) understanding of M-theory indicates a fundamental importance of non-perturbative, inherently-quantum phenomena, I can see how such a string may have been missed for a little while. If it's true, this will almost certainly become a critical component of the knowledge and structure of M-theory, which is clearly still being unearthed.

As best I can tell, the article actually... more »

2013-04-06 22:12:14 (3 comments, 2 reshares, 8 +1s)

Some new numerical insights on the physics/mathematics of relativistic turbulence. This is related to "the most important unsolved problem of classical physics" according to Feynman and one of the million-dollar Clay Math Millennium Problems, along with the Riemann Hypothesis and quantum Yang-Mills theory. Perhaps a better understanding of turbulence in the relativistic context will be helpful or necessary to find a satisfactory understanding of turbulence in general....

"Our studies showed that Kolmogorov's basic predictions for relativistic phenomena must be modified, because we are observing anomalies and new effects," says Rezzolla. "Interestingly, however, the most important prediction of Kolmogorov's theory appears to be still valid", notes Rezzolla when referring to the so-called -5/3 Kolmogorov law, which describes how the energy of a system is... more »

2013-04-05 02:44:01 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

An interesting discussion with a neuroscientist about the BRAIN initiative, its possible goals, and the challenges defining the current state of the science. Despite the critical analysis, I have no doubt that the general idea is a great one and very much the kind of thing we should be involved in.

2013-04-04 05:38:59 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 12 +1s)

AMS on Dark Matter – While detailed facts regarding the nature of dark matter remain elusive, the ISS-based experiment has verified an excess of positrons up to 350 GeV, which could be indicative of some physical processes involving typical DM particles. With any luck, the continuation of this signal to higher energies could finally start to pin it down.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) is a general purpose high-energy particle physics detector. It was installed on the International Space Station (ISS) on 19 May 2011 to conduct a unique long duration mission (20 years) of fundamental physics research in space. The first AMS results reported in this Letter are based on the data collected during the initial 18 months of operations on the ISS, from 19 May 2011 to 10 December 2012. This constitutes 8% of the expected AMS data sample. The positron fraction, that is, the ratio of thepos... more »

2013-04-01 02:05:32 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 12 +1s)

+Lawrence Lessig: "Aaron's Laws – Law & Justice in a Digital Age"
This is an awesome lecture by quite possibly the nation's leading voice on institutional (lawful) corruption, and someone uniquely qualified to talk about Aaron Schwarz, whose short life is now intertwined with the nexus of issues he rightly focused on and fought for. It looks like the right time to post, since some worrying expansions of the CFAA will reportedly by advanced during a "cyber week" this April. The lecture starts at around 9:00.

Lessig forcefully argues for the moral necessity of a sense of proportionality in criminal sentencing, he rejects the dangerous conflation of physical violence with violating computer user agreements, and he passionately implores us to value one of our most crucial resources,  _Die Andersdenkenden,_ those who are willing to think differently.more »

2013-03-31 07:04:38 (21 comments, 107 reshares, 166 +1s)

The Inevitability of Physical Laws: Why the Higgs has to exist
This is probably the best introduction to particle physics I've ever seen. An awesome presentation of 'the big picture' from the particle theorist's perspective, proving that accessibility and depth are not mutually exclusive. I'm grateful to see these ideas presented in such a crisp way, because it allows for such a dramatically better organization of physical knowledge that more people (especially quantitative literates) should benefit from. 

Some basics: At the broadest level the 'inevitability' in the title refers to the rigid framework that results from putting together quantum mechanics with special relativity: quantum field theory. These two starting principles force many surprising restrictions on us from the start, for example, that every possible elementary particle must come from the... more »

2013-03-29 21:12:31 (5 comments, 4 reshares, 13 +1s)

Victory for open source and common sense: Texas court confirms you can't patent math.

2013-03-29 20:58:09 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 8 +1s)

Another turn of the revolving door: The NYT is reporting that Lanny Breuer – the federal prosecutor who oversaw the government's investigations into financial crime, including the infamous HSBC drug money laundering settlement – is transitioning to a major corporate law firm Covington & Burling, representing such firms as Blackwater, Halliburton, Phillip Morris, and others.

Theres nothing wrong with legally representing any Corporations of course, but there is a problem when we let people represent such firms and the US government, and pretending the two things aren't related to each other. If he can get a high-paying executive position right after leaving the government, then why not just let him hold both positions at the same time? The two aren't all that different.

We really need to really look into erecting some hard firewalls separating two distinct careertrack... more »