Core dump…

For those of you that still remember the good old days of core dumps, here’s a post that follows that philosophy.

It’s been quite sometime since i last had a chance to put some content here on the blog, nor have i had time to expand on the interesting comments that have appeared and so on… time has been short lately.

In some sense, this is good news: research has really taken the best of me (as opposed to, e.g., some of the network management tasks that have plagued me in the not-so-distant-past ) — last week i gave a talk at Syracuse, and if all goes well, maybe i’ll be able to talk a bit about it here.

Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.
– The Wizard of Oz

Scientific:

• Geometric Quantization of Algebraic Reduction
• Motivic renormalization and singularities
• Accelerator Disaster Scenarios, the Unabomber, and Scientific Risks
• Success is in the bank
• The Bohr paradox
• Passing of a legend, John Wheeler 1911-2008, John Archibald Wheeler 1911-2008
• Amazing Collection of Physics Video Lectures (Quantum Physics/Mechanics, Field Theory, Applied Group Theory, General Relativity. Cosmology, and others)
• Generalized Berezin quantization, Bergman metrics and fuzzy Laplacians
• Cosmological perturbation theory near de Sitter spacetime
• Effective Field Theory for Inflation
• The saga of rooted staggered quarks
• Mixed Hodge Structures and Renormalization in Physics
• What really goes on at the Large Hadron Collider: Brian Cox on TED
• Is there a crisis brewing in the reporting of science in the media?
• Charges and Twisted Bundles, IV: Anomaly Canellation
• Janus Configurations, Chern-Simons Couplings, And The Theta-Angle in N=4 Super Yang-Mills Theory
• Supersymmetric Boundary Conditions in N=4 Super Yang-Mills Theory
• A note on Infraparticles and Unparticles
• Dangerous Liouville Wave — exactly marginal but non-conformal deformation
• Exact Statistics of Chaotic Dynamical Systems
• Introduction to Quantum Mechanics
• Quantum Geometry and Quantum Gravity
• Is Open Access Science the Future?
• Charges and Twisted Bundles, III: Anomalies
• Self-organized criticality in quantum gravity
• Towards A No-Loophole Bell-Type Experiment?
• 285G, Lecture 7: Rescaling of Ricci flows and kappa-noncollapsing
• A draft version of the blog book
• 285G, Lecture 6: Finite time extinction of the third homotopy group, II
• Multimedia and the Journal of Number Theory
• Comparative Smootheology, II
• After graduation, fewer foreign PhD holders remain in US
• RIP Ed Lorenz
• 285G, Lecture 5: Finite time extinction of the third homotopy group, I
• CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses
• Differential Forms and the Canonical Bundle
• This is what the Higgs boson looks like, Can the Tevatron find the Higgs?
• Big bang e grande explosão: mal entendidos em Física vol. I
• Physicists On Tape
• Rigid Surface Operators
• On the origin of the particles in black hole evaporation
• 285G, Lecture 4: Finite time extinction of the second homotopy group
• Sigma-Models and Nonabelian Differential Cohomology
• World Science Festival 2008
• Critical gravitational collapse: towards a holographic understanding of the Regge region
• Scales of science
• Locally Free Sheaves and Vector Bundles
• Non-Borel summable Phiˆ4 theory in zero dimension: A toy model for testing numerical and analytical methods
• Black hole thermodynamics from simulations of lattice Yang-Mills theory
• Quantum Fields on the Groenewold-Moyal Plane
• Particle Identifications from Symmetries of Braided Ribbon Network Invariants
• Lectures on Scattering Amplitudes via AdS/CFT
• A Pointless Model for the Continuum as the Foundation for Quantum Gravity
• Formalism Locality in Quantum Theory and Quantum Gravity
• A note on the quantum of time
• Building an AdS/CFT superconductor
• A locally finite model for gravity
• A Matrix Model for 2D Quantum Gravity defined by Causal Dynamical Triangulations
• The New Math
• Sheaves of Modules
• This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 263)
• Stony Brook Dialogues in Mathematics and Physics
• Quantum foam and topological strings
• April Fool
• 285G, Lecture 2: The Ricci flow approach to the Poincaré conjecture
• This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 262)
• 285G, Lecture 1: Flows on Riemannian manifolds
• From Pure Spinor Geometry to Quantum Physics: A Mathematical Way
• Ettore Majorana and his heritage seventy years later
• What Has Happened So Far
• Symmetry and Integrability of Classical Field Equations
• Topological higher gauge theory: From BF to BFCG theory
• Is Quantum Gravity Necessary?
• Magnetic Charge Lattices, Moduli Spaces and Fusion Rules
• Instantons beyond topological theory II
• Sidney Coleman QFT Video Recordings
• Anatomy of a Black Hole
• Nonabelian Differential Cohomology in Street’s Descent Theory
• Security is Mathematics
• Matrix universality of gauge and gravitational dynamics
• Equivariant symplectic geometry of gauge fixing in Yang–Mills theory
• This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 261)
• `What is a Thing?’: Topos Theory in the Foundations of Physics
• Geometry of the Standard Model
• IAS Conference Question Dump
• 18 Billion Suns : Biggest Black Hole in Universe Discovered
• The 50 Topcited papers from SPIRES in 2007

General Interest:

• Brasil tem perdido grandes talentos em matemática, alerta presidente da SBPC
• Brasil, nação evanescente?, artigo de Carlos Lessa
• Pistol Pete Maravich & the Invention of Showtime Basketball
• Serra da Cangalha Crater, Brazil
• News: Politically Correct: Why Great (and Not So Great) Minds Think Alike
• power discussion
• Pleasing Google’s Tech-Savvy Staff
• ‘Economist’ pergunta por que crescimento do Brasil fica atrás da Argentina
• 20 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex
• 10 Great Scenes from TV and Film Told Using Only Typography
• Like bash.org for bash shell-fu Command line tips and tricks
• The Secret to Happiness? Giving
• Larry Lessig’s Open Congress
• From GNOME to KDE and Back Again
• Biggest Unix Cheat Sheet
• Anatomy of a Black Hole
• Óleo de bacalhau reduz uso de analgésicos em casos de artrite, diz estudo
• Fracassado leilão da Cesp foi em ‘hora infeliz’, diz FT
• Movitz: an x86 Common Lisp OS
• Países ricos incentivam imigração de ‘alto nível’
• Membros da comunidade científica comunicam ao CNPq sua preocupação com o destino do comitê de divulgação científica
• I’m not against Windows; Unix just works better
• Search with privacy: What a concept
• Cresce número de imigrantes em busca do ’sonho brasileiro’
• Para empresário boliviano, Brasil é ‘terra de oportunidades’
• C++ is a language strongly optimized for liars and people who go by guesswork and ignorance
• Off-topic
• Tecnologia para muitos, artigo de Miguel Jorge, Sergio Rezende e Roberto Mangabeira Unger
• Infraestrutura deficiente será desafio para nova empresa aérea, diz ‘Wall Street Journal’
• Revolution OS — Documentary of Linux
• Excesso de carros = engarrafamento
• Learn Python in 10 minutes
• Xoopit Will Turn Your Inbox Into a Social Network
• Science: monkeys were the first doctors
• Emigração para os EUA perde ‘apelo’ para brasileiros, diz ‘FT’
• Linux: Too Much of a Good Thing?
• Keith Richards
• The 5 Most Ridiculous Lies You Were Taught In History Class
• Bird propõe ‘new deal’ alimentar com ajuda do Brasil
• Word of the Day: Zeitgeist
• Getting it on for science
• Everything should be code
• Asking Big Questions about the universe: Stephen Hawking on TED
• Memoize: a Python replacement for Make
• Waf: A portable Make and Autotools replacement in Python (15x faster than Scons, 3x faster than Autotools)
• Einstein can dunk
• Build a quad-core, 8-gig server for $900
• Soros predicts end of the road for cheap and easy borrowing
• Beautiful Handwriting, Lettering and Calligraphy
• Reader Piqued By French Mutilations
• The Thing About Git
• Five Words You Can Cut
• The Moral Authority Behind Intervention: Examining Sergio Vieira de Mello
• Penn and Teller subverting the old ‘pull an animal out of the hat’ trick by instead producing thousands of bees, including hundreds while ripping apart a stuffed rabbit — take that, kids
• Masters of the World — England > America > China?
• Physicists On Tape
• Richard Stallman Interview: How a hacker became a freedom fighter
• Tip #195: Bash
• Tip #192: Print a random shell-fu tip
• Soros describes the $45 trillion market in credit swaps (i.e. derivatives) as a “Sword of Damocles”
• Knuth on teaching calculus
• Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss Discuss Science, Science Education, Religion, Life, the Universe and Everything
• Open-source economics: Yochai Benkler on TED
• Brazil surprises markets with rate hike
• Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon by John Hemming
• Tip #216: Create a Terminal Calculator
• Grou.ps: All Your Collaboration Tools In One Place
• The Myth of the 30-Minute Meal
• 52 Million Brazilian Mini-Penguinistas
• Your genes are not your fate: Dean Ornish on TED
• 30 Adobe Acrobat Alternatives
• The Financial Crisis: An Interview with George Soros
• Princeton scientists discover exotic quantum state of matter
• Tip #232: Deleting difficult filenames
• KDE Desktops For 52 Million Students In Brazil
• Leaps of Faith
• Fruit flies trade lifespan for brain power
• Ten (mostly) false ideas about emacs
• How fast are you?
• Is Mathematics Discovered Or Invented?
• Donald Knuth Rips On Unit Tests and More
• Concrete Examples Don’t Help Students Learn Math
• Patron Saint of Computing on Free Software
• Why you aren’t Donald Knuth
• What Programming Languages Should You Know? (Less Fluff, More Stuff)
• The English language is not equipped for metric spaces
• An Interview with Brian Greene on the World Science Festival
• Bunch of Computing Video Lecture Courses (C, XML & Java, Algorithms, Functional Programming, and others)
• Super addictive magnet toy. The Neo Cube
• Cray, Intel To Partner On Hybrid Supercomputer
• 50 Open Source Resources for Writers
• The ABCs of securing your wireless network
• Lawrence Krauss & Natalie Jeremijenko on the Politics of Knowledge
• Economia brasileira vive ‘tempos de Carnaval’, diz jornal
• Larry Page on how to change the world
• Argentina vê de longe ‘golaço’ do Brasil na economia, diz jornal
• Sage: Open Source Mathematics Software: Can There be a Viable Free Open Source Alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab?
• Windows in Brazil Costs 20% of Per Capita Business Income
• Denzel Washington says inner-city schoolkids have to be reminded that scientists are more important than entertainers

That’s all folks!

[]’s.

Testing blogging from Emacs…

If this works, it shows that Emacs’ weblogger mode (see more at Blogging with Emacs) is working just fine!

Ultimate geekdom sorcery!

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Interesting bits of the week…

If you’ve done six impossible things before breakfast, why not round it off with dinner at Milliway’s, the restaurant at the end of the universe?
– Douglas Adams, “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”

• First coca find in Brazil Amazon
• MCT completa 23 anos de existência
• MCT cria Conselho Científico Consultivo sobre Assuntos de Cooperação Internacional
• Nova ação do CNPq vai investir R$ 36 milhões em jovens doutores
• From BFS to ZFS: past, present, and future of file systems
• Unscientific
• A Brazilian in Goa

This week in the arXivs…

• An Introduction to Topos Physics
• U.K.’s Royal Society Ventures Into Funding Start-Up Companies
• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
• Physicists slam publishers over Wikipedia ban
• 254A, Lecture 17: A Ratner-type theorem for SL_2(R) orbits

Today’s fortune and the interesting bits of the past two weeks…

But, for my own part, it was Greek to me.
– William Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar”

• Brazil exchanges in global party mood
• Brazil moves to top of emerging market index
• BRAZIL’S ECONOMY: The biggest emerging market, sort of
• BETTING THE FAZENDA: A different kind of risk-taking
• US diplomats ’should pay more attention to science’
• Indian government boosts science spending
• The Copyright Emperor Has No Clothes
• Creators of The Wire: “If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented.”
• The unlikeliest gangbanger
• Who’s Your City?
• Following Singapore’s Lead
• Creative collaboration: ideals and reality
• Mr. Gates Goes to Washington
• 11 Greatest Basketball Commercials Ever Made
• After a classic ‘rm -rf ~’ on ext3, Carlo Wood succeeded in recovering most of his data. Here’s how.
• Security guide to customs-proofing your laptop
• The University, the Next Multinational Corporation
• Brasil ’se tornou ator econômico de peso’, diz ‘The Guardian’: Inside Brazil
• March 14: PI DAY! But what is Pi?…watch the first minute, trust me., Happy Pi Day!, A non-trivial holiday
• Debian Cluster Replaces Supercomputer For Weather Forecasting
• Panel Finds Faults in America’s Math System

The last two weeks in the arXivs…

• Concepts of Symmetry in the Work of Wolfgang Pauli
• Axiomatic quantum field theory in curved spacetime
• Hitchin’s connection, Toeplitz operators and symmetry invariant deformation quantization
• Measure problem in cosmology
• The Classical Universes of the No-Boundary Quantum State
• Gauge-String Dualities and Some Applications
• Quantum Field Theory and Differential Geometry
• Les Houches Lectures on Constructing String Vacua
• xPerm: fast index canonicalization for tensor computer algebra
• Properties of the volume operator in loop quantum gravity: I. Results, Properties of the volume operator in loop quantum gravity: II. Detailed presentation
• Loop Quantum Cosmology: Effective theories and oscillating universes
• The Petrov and Kaigorodov-Ozsváth Solutions: Spacetime as a Group Manifold
• Three lectures on classical integrable systems and gauge field theories
• Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook
• Geometric Langlands from a TQFT perspective
• (Generalized) Differential Cohomology and Lie Infinity-Connections
• Mass scientific literacy, Questions
• The Harvard College Mathematics Review
• Alan Sokal: Sense About Science lecture
• Charges and Twisted n-Bundles, I, Charges and Twisted n-Bundles, II
• 254A, Lecture 13: Compact extensions, 254A, Lecture 14: Weakly mixing extensions, 254A, Lecture 15: The Furstenberg-Zimmer structure theorem and the Furstenberg recurrence theorem, 254A, Lecture 16: A Ratner-type theorem for nilmanifolds
• Learning to Love Topos Theory
• Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: a Rosetta Stone
• PCM article: Ricci flow
• PCM article: Function spaces
• Electric-Magnetic Duality on a Half-Space
• SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1)/Z6… wait, Z6?
• Adventures in phase space

This week in the arXivs…

• A First Approximation for Quantization of Singular Spaces
• Three lectures on classical integrable systems and gauge field theories
• Lecture notes on Chern-Simons (super-)gravities. Second edition (February 200
• Matters of Gravity, The Newsletter of the Topical Group in Gravitation of the American Physical Society, Volume 31, Winter 2008
• Do confinement and darkness have the same conceptual roots?
• From Dual Models to String Theory
• Topological Entanglement Entropy in Chern-Simons Theories and Quantum Hall Fluids
• Philosophical Transactions A: Maxwell 150 years on
• Interpreting the Hecke Algebra
• Something Certain About Uncertainty

Today’s fortune cookie and some randomly interesting bits…

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
– Fred Brooks

• Harvard podcast: Computer Science E-1: Understanding Computers and the Internet
• SP terá 3ª área metropolitana mais populosa do mundo em 2010, diz ONU
• Criminalidade está diminuindo no Brasil, destaca jornal dos EUA: Mayor in Brazil transforms ‘deadliest’ town: It has fallen from sixth to 298th on the country’s Violence Map
• Demanda doméstica alimenta crescimento do Brasil, diz ‘FT’: Domestic demand fuels Brazil’s growth — Brazil cracks down on Amazon loggers, Bovespa and BM&F in merger talks, Brazil’s secrets of big oil discoveries stolen, Higher ore prices bolster Vale bid for Xstrata, Byzantine taxes sap Brazil’s business spirit, Brazil’s progress, Business as usual in Brazilian credit markets
• Why isn’t University free?, Criticism is overrated
• The Pintadas Project
• Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits

The century of self…

BBC documentary by Adam Curtis: How Freud’s theories were used to try and control the crowd in an age of mass democracy.

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Part 3
4. Part 4

Enjoy… []’s.

Desaquecimento Global

Mario Persona falando sobre política global — alguém sabe dizer quem é o segundo maior produtor de armas do mundo?!

from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod

Experimental Philosophy…

from bloggingheads.tv posted with vodpod

Today’s fortune cookie and interesting bit…

Here’s the fortune cookie:

Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.
— Sam Brown, “The Washington Post”, January 26, 1977

As for the interesting bit: Architecture is politics: community building and the success of Wikipedia.

I found this post (by Michael Nielsen) quite interesting, but maybe not for the reason people normally would: I just thought the “thesis” of this post was something well known. What I mean is the following: a framework like Wiki, Zope/Plone, Drupal, etc, they all have different modus operandi, i.e., they were all designed to harness the power of the collective in slightly different ways. That means that each of these designs follows a different “policy” of community building; while some may think that every single user should have the same “weight”, some may adopt the policy of ‘roles’, where different groups of users have different tasks within the community.

This is not a judgement of value of these different frameworks. However, each of them imply certain “choices” that were made with a given “community building ideal” in mind. So, in this sense, it seems clear to me that the particular architecture of the software used should reflect the “politics” behind it.

But, maybe this is clearer to me because of all those years listening to RMS…

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Updated (24-Feb-08): This piece at Slate may have something to add to this discussion: The Wisdom of the Chaperones: Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy.

This week in the arXivs…

• Exact Isospectral Pairs of PT-Symmetric Hamiltonians
• Topologically massive gravity and complex Chern-Simons terms
• Thin tubes in mathematical physics, global analysis and spectral geometry
• Mathematical models of spontaneous symmetry breaking
• A note on canonical quantization of fields on a manifold
• Asymptotics and Hamiltonians in a First order formalism
• Why are solitons stable?
• Lurie on Extended TQFT
• Liveblogging: Jacob Lurie on 2-d TQFT
• Renormalized Quantum Yang-Mills Fields in Curved Spacetime

Testing Scribd…

Let’s see if this works… if so, i’ll come back in a bit to explain it better.

Scribd Poster 14-Nov-07.

Scribd has launched its iPaper solution. For more information about it, check out their Documentation.

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Atualizado (23-Feb-08): I believe i have found a solution to embedding Scribd/iPaper documents into WP. Check this out and see if it works :

from www.scribd.com posted with vodpod

The interesting bits of today…

• Is This the PDF Killer? Scribd Launches iPaper
• Run Linux inside Windows
• BBC programmes go on iTunes

Today’s calendar…

Feb 18 	Ernst Mach born, 1838, philosopher & optics pioneer
Feb 18 	Pluto discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, Lowell Observatory, AZ, 1930
Feb 18 	Yoko Ono Lennon is born in Tokyo, 1933
Feb 18 	Signing of the European Sole Deed, 1986
Feb 19 	Nicolas Copernicus born in Thorn, Poland, 1473
Feb 19 	Paul McCartney's "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" is banned in
	Britain, 1972
Feb 19 	William "Smokey" Robinson is born in Detroit, 1940
Feb 19 	Chaoflux (50th of the Season of Chaos)

Today’s fortune and the interesting bits of the past two weeks…

Firstly, the excuse for this hiatus in our current program:

BOFH excuse #172:

pseudo-user on a pseudo-terminal

Now…

• Ensino público de qualidade, artigo de Fernando Haddad e Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Um convite à boa educação, artigo de Maria Helena Guimarães de Castro, 200 anos de história, A introdução do ensino superior no Brasil, artigo de João Augusto de Lima Rocha
• Um lógico na ilha da fantasia: Pensador brasileiro com mais reconhecimento no exterior, Newton da Costa tem seus livros reeditados
• Shuttle Discovery from ISS, The Blackness of Space
• I’m a nude dancer trying to finish my Ph.D., Protect Yourself from Sexually Transmitted Intelligence
• SciBarCamp
• Inverse Symbolic Calculator 2.0
• The Free University
• Finally, a Web-based PDF Viewer That Does Not Suck
• 25 Incredible Skins and Tools for the Gmail Power User
• Running the Internet — All of It - on GNU/Linux
• The Best, Free Alternatives to Nero CD/DVD Burner
• The 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You
• Mobius Battle
• Jayme Tiomno e o mecanismo das interações fracas
• Penn and Teller Explain Sleight of Hand
• Intellectual property, automated contracts, and the free flow of information
• Surveys in Latin America find high interest in science
• Science and the Public

This past two weeks in the arXivs…

I was doing good with my blog and everything, being regular and all… but, as usual, all of a sudden, this snowball rolled over me. So, things ended up taking a two weeks set back.

Anyway, here we go… again.

• Quantum field theory in terms of consistency conditions I: General framework, and perturbation theory via Hochschild cohomology
• Is inert matter from indecomposable positive energy “infinite spin” representations the much sought-after dark matter?
• Lectures on instantons
• On Spectral Triples in Quantum Gravity I, On Spectral Triples in Quantum Gravity II
• Yet More Ado About Nothing: The Remarkable Relativistic Vacuum State
• Universe as a topological defect
• The time slice axiom in perturbative quantum field theory on globally hyperbolic spacetimes
• The Invar tensor package: Differential invariants of Riemann
• Topology change in causal quantum gravity
• Entanglement Entropy in Loop Quantum Gravity
• Mirror Symmetry, Hitchin’s Equations, And Langlands Duality
• Corfu 05 lectures - part I: Strings on curved backgrounds
• A String Field Theory based on Causal Dynamical Triangulations
• Positive mass theorems for higher dimensional Lorentzian manifolds
• Lectures on Anomalies
• Stochastic Gravity: Theory and Applications
• Reconstruction of manifolds in noncommutative geometry
• Breaking an Abelian gauge symmetry near a black hole horizon
• Invariant Lagrangians, mechanical connections and the Lagrange-Poincare equations
• Probability paradox II
• Equivariant DeRham Cohomology
• Quantum Field Theory, As Seen By Mathematicians
• 254A, Lecture 9: Ergodicity, 254A, Lecture 10: The Furstenberg correspondence principle, 254A, Lecture 11: Compact systems
• Chern-Simons States from L-infinity Bundles, III: States over the Circle, Smooth 2-Functors and Differential Forms, Construction of Cocycles for Chern-Simons 3-Bundles

Hopefully, I’ll be able not to drop the ball…

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Tomorrow’s fortune and a few interesting things…

It’s almost tomorrow and the Patriots just lost their one and only game this season…

So, here we go…

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when
you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
— Poul Anderson

Aside from that, here’s what was interesting this weekend:

• Science in the 21st Century: Science, Society, and Information Technology
• Em perfil, NYT chama Mangabeira de ‘ministro das idéias’: ‘Minister of Ideas’ Tries to Put Brazil’s Future in Focus
• 100 Photoshop Tutorials for Creating Beautiful Art
• José Leite Lopes (1918-2006) e a unificação das forças fundamentais

Enjoy the last 45min of today!

[]’s!

From the ‘n-Category Café’…

The folks at The n-Category Café wet my appetite today with 2 very interesting posts:

• Modular Forms; &
• States of Chern-Simons Theory.

The second one, by Urs, touches in a topic that i hold dear: Knot Theory and QFT — and how these are related to gerbes, and how 2-gerbes are the fundamental geometric objects in Chern-Simons. Urs provides a series of references in a very rational way. Computing the Configuration space (which he called “Space of States”) of certain QFTs has been in my mind quite heavily for quite some time now, including for Chern-Simons. However, the question I have in mind has more to do with Wilson Loops and how their combination is related to Knot Theory; more to the point, how would combination of Wilson Loops in different representations relate to [Spontaneous] Symmetry Breaking. This definitely needs a better explanation than what’s here… but, it’ll have to wait (i’m a bit late to meet some friends! ).

As for the first link, by John Baez, …, what can i say: Apparently Modular Forms show up in every interesting place nowadays! I had a vague idea about their appearance in Fermat’s Last Theorem but, given that they are related to Hecke operators, they also show up in Langland’s Geometrical Conjecture! And this is the part that really gets to me: the connections between Number Theory and Physics (specially Symmetry Breaking — as can be seen via a Higgs Bundle construction) have always seemed completely magical to my eyes.

Anyway, now I’m really late… more on this later.

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Physics, Second Life e a Educação Brasileira…

On the Second Life front, these 2 newspieces appeared today:

• Doing physics in Second Life: What is there for physicists in this virtual world?
• Second thoughts: Doing physics in Second Life.

I must confess that i’ve tought about this (to do physics in Second Life) many times. In fact, my mom gave me this idea way back in 30 May 2007 10:17:34 (BST). Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, Second Life’s support of GNU/Linux client’s is only in alpha stage. (If anyone has more info on this, i’d appreciate it. )

But, maybe it’s time that i try their MacOS client…

Now, changing gears…

Dois artigos interessantes sobre a situação da educação brasileira:

• “O calcanhar-de-aquiles da educação brasileira”; artigo de João Grandino Rodas
• “País ameaçado”; artigo de Cristovam Buarque

And, to sum up, National Geographic has a video about the carnival in Brazil: Video: Rio Carnival Honors Japanese.

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Update (01-Feb-08 @ 17:23h): Ainda falando sobre educação, esse artigo de hoje também é bastante interessante: <