What’s interesting this week…

• xkcd’s Randall Munroe speaks at Google and Don Knuth shows up!
• Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste
• Why we should teach philosophy to kids
• dawkins says “happy newton day!”
• Save your OpenOffice.org docs to Google Docs and vice versa
• Top 10 New and Improved Apps of 2007
• Building the Zotero Commons
• Science Sensei 7
• Open Teaching, Learning & Certification
• The e-Primer on Open Content
• Sleep, Attention, and Memory: Not (Maybe) What You Thought
• Culture Speeds Up Human Evolution, Modern times causing human evolution to accelerate

This week in the arXivs…

• Cohomological analysis of the Epstein-Glaser renormalization
• Calabi-Yau crystals in topological string theory
• How to remove the boundary
• Dirichlet branes and a cohomological definition of time flow
• Parametrization and Stress-Energy-Momentum Tensors in Metric Field Theories
• Remarks on the notion of global hyperbolicity
• Mass Spectrum and Statistical Entropy of the BTZ black hole from Canonical Quantum Gravity
• Parametrization and Stress-Energy-Momentum Tensors in Metric Field Theories
• Dirichlet branes and a cohomological definition of time flow
• CLUSTEREASY: A Program for Simulating Scalar Field Evolution on Parallel Computers
• On a correspondence principle between discrete differential forms, graph structure and multi-vector calculus on symmetric lattices
• An Introduction to Bundle Gerbes
• Causal Set Topology
• Constructive use of holographic projections
• Integrability of Vortex Equations on Riemann Surfaces
• Zeta Function Methods and Quantum Fluctuations
• Les Houches Lectures on Strings and Arithmetic
• Vacuum and semiclassical gravity: a difficulty and its bewildering significance
• Universes out of almost empty space
• Deformation quantization of almost Kähler models and Lagrange-Finsler spaces
• Simple de Sitter Solutions
• Fate of gravitational collapse in semiclassical gravity
• The Nullstellensatz and Partitions of Unity
• The Cheewhye Diagram
• This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 259)
• Local Nets from 2-Transport
• Gell-Mann on Beauty and Truth in Physics

Today’s tidbits…

• Brasil adota fundo ‘para conter real’, diz Mantega ao FT: Brazil creates SWF to curb Real
• Open Source Society

Some interesting bits…

• ‘The Times’ aponta São Paulo como nova capital de negócios: Where cafezinho is the key to commerce
• Salaries of College Professors vs College Football Coaches
• The Man Who Imagined Wormholes and Schooled Hawking
• LHC: The Six Billion Dollar Questions
• Science Sensei 6
• How “Stairway to Heaven” Ruined Led Zeppelin
• Ten Excellent Online Apps For the Innovative Teacher
• Chimp beats students at computer game
• Elephants use mental maps to track family members

This week in the arXivs…

• Quantum Gravity Partition Functions in Three Dimensions
• Conformal Field Theory In Four And Six Dimensions
• Structural and Dynamical Aspects of the AdS/CFT Correspondence: a Rigorous Approach
• Introduction to AdS-CFT
• Conceptual Explanation for the Algebra in the Noncommutative Approach to the Standard Model
• Does the h index have predictive power?
• Symmetry, shape, and order
• The Plebanski action extended to a unification of gravity and Yang-Mills theory
• The geometry of thermodynamics
• A topos for algebraic quantum theory
• Semiclassical and Quantum Black Holes and their Evaporation, de Sitter and Anti-de Sitter Regimes, Gravitational and String Phase Transitions
• A Nearly Scale Invariant Spectrum of Gravitational Radiation from Global Phase Transitions
• On the Ambiguity of Spontaneously Broken Gauge Symmetry
• Algebraic holography in asymptotically simple, asymptotically AdS spacetimes
• Note on the Lattice Fermion Chiral Symmetry Group
• Loop quantization of spherically symmetric midi-superspaces : the interior problem
• Emergent rainbow spacetimes: Two pedagogical examples
• Analogue spacetimes: Toy models for “quantum gravity”
• Some remarks on Causality Theory and Variational Methods in Lorentzian manifolds
• General relativistic velocity: the alternative to dark matter
• A Modern Farey Tail
• Particle physics in the 60s and 70s and the legacy of contributions by J. A. Swieca
• Quantum Hamilton-Jacobi Theory
• McKay correspondence for Landau-Ginzburg models
• Explaining the Pure Spinor Formalism for the Superstring
• Definition and stability of Lorentzian manifolds with distributional curvature
• From Stationary Phase to Steepest Descent
• Wavelet methods in statistics: Some recent developments and their applications
• Towards an interoperable International Lattice Datagrid
• SAGE: open-source mathematics software
• Salaries of College Professors vs College Football Coaches
• Fortran faces the future at 50
• Look Around You
• One Geometry (Math Raps)

The reading level required of this blog…

Just for kicks:

Drogas e violência…

Só agora que eu tive a chance de assistir ao filme Tropa de Elite (veja também: Elite da Tropa (o livro que deu origem ao filme), Elite Squad, IMDB: Tropa de Elite, Site Oficial do Filme, Tropa de Elite: Brazil’s dark sensation, A Violent Police Unit, on Film and in Rio’s Streets, Film shows burned bodies and executions as real Rio). E, verdade seja dita, sempre que eu assisto filmes ou programas de TV, minha mente está num modo diferente, i.e., eu costumo não levar a coisa muito a sério — até porque, se eu quiser me informar sobre alguma coisa (qualquer coisa!), eu prefiro ir ler e estudar e tentar entender o assunto dum ponto-de-vista que eu considere racional (dado meus padrões pessoais).

Isso posto, eu gostaria de chamar a atenção para o seguinte artigo: How America Lost the War on Drugs (que conta com a participação de Peter Andreas, professor aqui na Brown).

Esse, de fato, é um dos melhores artigos (fora a literatura de Física e Matemática) que eu li ultimamente: detalhado (portanto, longo e cuidadoso), bem escrito, e extremamente recheado de insights.

Por enquanto, o que eu tenho pra dizer é: independentemente de “certos” ou “errados”, toda vez que se quebra a lei nessa questão do tráfico e do crime organizado (um baseadinho, um CDzinho pirata, etc), as conseqüências nunca são “leves” — muito pelo contrário. Portanto, se a lei é “boa” ou “ruim” [para a comunidade em questão], essa é uma questão diferente da obediência ou não da mesma — afinal de contas, nosso papel de cidadão é de responsabilidade civil ou não?!

[]’s.

Física no Orkut…

Pra quem tem conta no Orkut, e gosta de Física, vale a pena conhecer a Comunidade Moderada de Física: realmente, material de primeira qualidade.

Aqui vai uma seleção do que ultimamente há de melhor por lá:

• Brasil Ciência…
• Seção espacial Riemanniana
• Ensinar a competir…
• Wiki, Latex
• Formação de Doutores no Brasil
• Estamos formando bons físicos na pós?
• Outra candidata a teoria de tudo
• Entrevista: Marcelo Gleiser
• Estudante constrói super computador portátil
• Churasco de fim de ano aqui da comunidade

É isso aí: Diversão garantida!