- 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 2008)
- 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
Archive for February, 2008
27
Feb
08
This week in the arXivs…
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
24
Feb
08
The century of self…
24
Feb
08
Desaquecimento Global
Mario Persona falando sobre política global — alguém sabe dizer quem é o segundo maior produtor de armas do mundo?!
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… 
[]’s.
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.
22
Feb
08
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
20
Feb
08
Testing Scribd…
Let’s see if this works… if so, i’ll come back in a bit to explain it better.
Scribd has launched its iPaper solution. For more information about it, check out their Documentation. 
[]’s.
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 :
20
Feb
08
The interesting bits of today…
18
Feb
08
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)
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
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…
[]’s.
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!
01
Feb
08
From the ‘n-Category Café’…
The folks at The n-Category Café wet my appetite today with 2 very interesting posts:
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.
[]’s.
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.
[]’s.
Update (01-Feb-08 @ 17:23h): Ainda falando sobre educação, esse artigo de hoje também é bastante interessante: Alexandria – Revista de Educação em Ciência e Tecnologia.
Update (27-Feb-08 @ 07:33h): Mixed-reality conference.
01
Feb
08
This week in the arXivs…
- Chiral Gravity in Three Dimensions
- The inverse problem for invariant Lagrangians on a Lie group
- Extremal covariant positive operator valued measures: the case of a compact symmetry group
- XI Solomon Lefschetz Memorial Lecture Series: Hodge structures in non-commutative geometry
- Finsler and Lagrange Geometries in Einstein and String Gravity
- Loop Quantum Gravity in Ashtekar and Lagrange-Finsler Variables and Fedosov Quantization of General Relativity
01
Feb
08
Real Programmers…
Ah, the truth can be hilarious [sometimes]…
This is for the fans of anything else (but Emacs): Never forget C-x M-c M-butterfly!
01
Feb
08
Gödelian fortune of the day…
We interrupt this fortune for an important announcement…
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