This past two weeks…

Lately, things have been rather slow over here… i don’t intend this to be the case, it’s just been a bit overwhelming.

So, without further ado…

Science:

• The J/Ψ particle original papers
• Harrison’s Geometric Calculus
• Electric-Magnetic-Duality and Hodge Duality Extended to Differental Cocycles
• Convenient Categories of Smooth Spaces
• Gravity and its Mysteries: Some Thoughts and Speculations
• Quantum mechanics and umbral calculus
• Path integration and perturbation theory with complex Euclidean actions
• HIM Trimester Geometry and Physics, Week 1
• String theory and the crisis of particle physics II
• Uses of Chern-Simons actions
• Knots as possible excitations of the quantum Yang-Mills fields
• Angular Operators Violating the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
• Comment on “’t Hooft vertices, partial quenching, and rooted staggered QCD”
• E₈ Quillen Superconnection
• 285G, Lecture 10: Variation of L-geodesics, and monotonicity of Perelman reduced volume, 285G, Lecture 11: κ-noncollapsing via Perelman reduced volume, 285G, Lecture 12: High curvature regions of Ricci flow and κ-solutions
• A string field theory based on causal dynamical triangulations
• The Eastwood-Singer gauge in Einstein spaces
• How quantum is the big bang?
• Black holes in loop quantum gravity: the complete space-time
• The QED beta-function from global solutions to Dyson-Schwinger equations
• Quantum Knots and Mosaics
• Heisenberg algebra, umbral calculus and orthogonal polynomials
• Physical state condition in quantum general relativity as a consequence of BRST symmetry
• Sidney Richard Coleman
• Structures of Scientific Collaboration
• String Theory and M-Theory: A Modern Introduction
• Science without borders
• Theorems Into Coffee, Theorems Into Coffee II
• Quantum Mechanics in Your Face

General:

• Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live
• ‘De quem é a Amazônia, afinal’, pergunta ‘NY Times’, Análise: Três razões por que a Amazônia merece atenção, The Food Crisis and Amazon Deforestation
• Written in the skies: why quantum mechanics might be wrong
• Hauser and Morris on Science and Morality
• Brasileiro assume presidência da Federação Mundial de Saúde Pública
• Brazil facts of the day
• Na Amazônia está em jogo o futuro do Brasil, diz Mangabeira, Falta incentivo para preservar Amazônia, diz príncipe Charles, Amazon challenge
• Woman power at the LHC
• Bye Matlab, hello Python, thanks Sage
• Open science
• Scientists get training to run for public office, Opinion: Scientists need to toughen up and get involved in politics
• International workshop on science writing and broadcasting
• How the NSA took Linux to the next level
• The most extraordinary mathematician of the 20th century celebrated his 80th birthday, crazy and alone
• Gigante da América do Sul está acordando, diz jornal
• Patent Attorney On Why We Need To Rethink Intellectual Property
• The science behind the sitcom The Big Bang Theory
• The Tao of programming
• The Cost of Smarts
• In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?
• Brazil, India’s Citizens Are Greenest, Survey Finds
• git vs bzr vs hg: Distributed Version Control Systems: A Not-So-Quick Guide Through
• Grau de investimento do Brasil não é certificado de desenvolvimento, diz ‘FT’
• Wishing for an African Einstein
• The Roots of the Crisis
• Top 10 myths about the Ancient Romans
• OpenSolaris Indiana Released
• Brazil, Free Software and “Castrated Windows”
• Science Documentaries for Youngsters?
• We Need More Novels about Real Scientists

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.

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

Today’s tidbits…

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

The interesting bits of today…

• Shaolin: Temple of Zen
• Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law
• GNU PDF Project
• Oh, Tell Me the Truth About… the ODF Bust-Up
• Descoberta de campo de petróleo pode ‘transformar’ o Brasil, diz ‘FT’
• How to Get Things Done on Your Mac
• Brasil ‘será destaque’ em dez anos, dizem jovens em pesquisa
• What Do Brazil and Washington State Have in Common?
• Finally, MULTICS Goes Open
• India enters supercomputing race
• Research access project enters second stage
• Mathematics and Common Sense: A Case of Creative Tension
• A Comet bigger than the Sun
• Category Theory and Biology
• Lecture Search Engine
• China ranks second in S&T publication rates
• Creative Commons Discovers Dual Licensing
• Mathematical Curiosities in Futurama
• Are the Swedes Good at Everything?
• Why Public Denials May Only Fuel Conspiracy Theories
• Drupal Podcast: 50 Drupal Tips and Tricks
• Merkur “Vision” 2000 Double-Edge Razor 🙂

The interesting bits of today — last week…

• O(A) Look: Now There’s a Surprise
• Science Sensei 1, Science Sensei 2, Science Sensei 3
• Copa no Brasil poderá ser um caos, diz Financial Times
• e and π go on a blind date
• The Way It Woz, The Way It Should Be: Steve Wozniak on All Things Apple
• Learning of the day, Does the US need more scientists?
• Brasil cai em ranking global de competitividade
• Norway gives 17 million euros to protect the Amazon
• Extending Ubuntu Studio 7.10 For Everyday Work: The Perfect Desktop
• Information Aggregators
• Can a spam filter play chess?
• What is the Largest Know Star?
• There’s a science to CBS’ ‘Big Bang Theory’
• Seeing a naked singularity
• Tricks using PARI
• Drawing vs Reality (Amazing PICS!)

The interesting bits of today…

There are some quite interesting bits that came out today; here’s the list:

• Manifold — gravity bending action/puzzle game
• An Invitation to Higher Dimensional Mathematics and Physics
• DRM is Dead!

Quite a list, isn’t it?!

The first item is a little (flash? java?) game where the player has to create a ‘gravitational field anomaly’ in order to accomplish some tasks, e.g., jumping, avoiding sharp gears, etc. Quite neat! 🙂

The second deals with category theory in geometry and physics… but it’s a public lecture that Urs has to give. So, it’s “category theory made easy”! Maybe this can make some things more palatable to some folks! 😉

The last item is just self-explanatory: I’ll just sit and rejoice on Amazon’s probably best move… ever! 😎

Enjoy… 😈 !