Musings Archives

MathML in Chrome (February 12, 2023 11:02 PM): At long last, Chrome supports MathML.
Fine Structure (October 17, 2022 9:00 PM): Something I never knew about the spin-orbit coupling
HL ≠ HS (July 15, 2022 12:34 PM): … in twisted class-S theories at genus-0
Monterey and Samba (April 11, 2022 1:48 AM): Time Machine remote backups are borked
Spinor Helicity Variables in QED (January 8, 2022 11:47 AM): Spinor helicity variable and canonical quantization for spin-1/2 and spin-1.
Cosmic Strings in the Standard Model (March 21, 2021 12:27 AM): Prompted by some posts by John Baez, a little calculation with an unsurprising result.
Entanglement for Laymen (January 6, 2020 2:30 PM): I keep getting asked …
Instiki 0.30.0 and tex2svg 1.0 (February 28, 2019 2:21 PM): A new release, with support for Tikz pictures
Brotli (February 15, 2019 9:47 AM): Another WebServer-related post
Python urllib2 and TLS (December 27, 2018 11:28 AM): In which I discover that you can’t trust python to do the right thing…
Responsibility (February 24, 2017 6:13 PM): The quantum theory of the relativistic free particle
MathML Update (December 4, 2016 2:56 PM): Native MathML rendering in Safari
Coriolis (June 14, 2016 4:40 PM): The Coriolis Effect on Syfy.
BMiSsed (January 10, 2016 11:39 AM): I’m confused about Hawking-Perry-Strominger.
Asymptotic Safety and the Gribov Ambiguity (June 19, 2015 3:11 AM): The Gribov ambiguity means there are no global gauge slices for gravity, either.
Action-Angle Variables (May 12, 2015 11:49 AM): How to generalize the construction of action-angle variables to symplectic manifolds which are not cotagent bundles?
Smoke Signals, Morse Code or … ? (December 18, 2014 3:14 PM): A privacy issue fails to get a real response.
Wikipedia (October 25, 2014 1:19 AM): MathML on Wikipedia
Shellshock and MacOSX (September 27, 2014 12:58 PM): Compiling a new Bash seems to be the only salvation
Golem V (August 19, 2014 3:05 PM): A new Golem, and a new home.
Questions (February 24, 2014 9:30 PM): What to ask when campaign workers call
Lying (February 22, 2014 3:55 PM): Undergraduate lab is evil.
Naturalness Versus the Weak Gravity Conjecture (February 11, 2014 8:32 PM): Some comments on a paper by Cheung and Remmen
Audiophilia (February 7, 2014 12:27 PM): On the perils of not controlling all your variables.
The Bus Stop Problems (December 28, 2013 4:42 PM): Evan Soltas poses some puzzles.
Halloween 2013 (October 31, 2013 10:23 AM): Wendy Davis Pumpkin
Zombies (August 24, 2013 2:10 PM): Now, where’s my shovel?
Maybe this time … (August 6, 2013 10:59 AM): In which the protagonist tries to read an LQG paper, which purports to have something to say about AdS/CFT.
I lost (June 27, 2013 11:59 AM): I lost my bet with Tommaso Dorigo.
Uncertainty (September 16, 2012 12:27 AM): Some meandering notes on measurement in Quantum Mechanics
Bringing the Web to America (July 24, 2012 11:57 PM): Paul Kunz versus WJS bullshit.
Astral Pain (July 8, 2012 11:28 AM): Rails still can’t do Unicode.
Normal Coordinate Expansion (June 1, 2012 8:12 PM): Old notes belong somewhere I can find them.
Mrs. Adler Lies! (April 7, 2012 2:39 AM): Such a sweet looking old lady…
Spring Break (March 14, 2012 1:04 AM): Stuck in College Station
Daya Bay (March 8, 2012 11:41 PM): θ_1,3 and a pet peeve
G₂ and Spin(8) Triality (January 27, 2012 2:09 PM): Fun with Spin(8) and G₂.
Higg Non-News (December 20, 2011 5:04 PM): An analysis which would improve the recent Higgs search results
Vivian Distler 1965-2011 (December 19, 2011 4:55 PM): So long, Viv.
Jitter (November 19, 2011 11:46 AM): OPERA’s clock jitter and a riddle
Happy ~~Halloween~~ تحرير ليبيا (October 31, 2011 11:46 AM): Pumpkin 2011
The Fat Lady Sings (October 4, 2011 5:27 PM): Cohen-Glashow bring down the curtain.
DPF Dissertation Award (July 20, 2011 11:10 PM): APS DPF announces new award for dissertations.
Shoah (May 1, 2011 10:08 PM): Updated shoah web page.
Alice! (November 17, 2010 11:31 PM): First scientific paper from the ALICE collaboration
A Bit of Undesired Excitement (September 28, 2010 3:25 PM): Automatic weapon fire on the UT campus
Instiki 0.19 (September 28, 2010 12:44 PM): Finally …
Going Galt (September 21, 2010 10:44 AM): Piling on…
Figures (September 5, 2010 4:34 PM): SVG with MathML to PDF
Still a Few Bugs in the System (August 31, 2010 8:06 AM): A message from the future?
Supertheory of Supereverything (August 30, 2010 1:18 AM): More music videos
Conservative “Physics” (August 9, 2010 5:44 PM): Counterexamples to Relativity
Fermions (August 5, 2010 11:50 PM): A little summary of some aspects of Distler-Freed-Moore
Redeemed (July 10, 2010 10:09 PM): Climbing Castle peak
Crib Notes (June 27, 2010 9:17 PM): Oh no! NOT Lisi, again!
Third Time’s the Charm? (May 25, 2010 2:02 PM): Tribulations updating Instiki for Rails 2.3.8.
Death and Resurrection (May 7, 2010 1:02 AM): Introducing Golem IV
HD Failure (April 21, 2010 2:08 AM): Crash and Recovery
Pure Spinor Signature (March 27, 2010 2:47 PM): Pure spinor query.
Coupling to Supergravity (March 3, 2010 8:53 PM): Some notes on Komargodski and Seiberg
WYSIWYG SVG Editing In Instiki (February 12, 2010 1:55 AM): Instiki+SVG-Edit
Haiku (December 31, 2009 10:55 AM): Code as poetry
Instiki 0.18 (December 28, 2009 11:12 AM): Announcing the latest release.
GraviGUT (December 21, 2009 11:23 AM): Another bad idea …
MarsEdit (December 20, 2009 11:19 AM): Finally ditched ecto.
So Much For the Concept of “Tree Graph” (December 14, 2009 10:35 AM): Simply-connected?
Wave (December 8, 2009 5:49 PM): MathML and Google Wave
MathML in Webkit (November 4, 2009 11:23 AM): Thanks to Alex Milowski
@Font-face (October 31, 2009 7:19 PM): Experimenting with downloadable fonts.
JHEP3 (October 6, 2009 12:40 AM): Griping about the JHEP article class.
Fun with (i)tex (October 5, 2009 11:24 AM): Implementing \mathrlap{}, and its cousins, in itex2MML.
Surface Waves (September 18, 2009 12:29 PM): More elementary hydrodynamics. Why? ‘Cuz it’s fun.
The Sound of One Physicist Wailing (September 16, 2009 1:44 AM): On sound waves.
Spires (August 6, 2009 4:32 PM): A site-specific browser for high energy theorists.
Musical Interlude II (July 10, 2009 10:40 PM): More musical tidbits.
Instiki 0.17 (June 20, 2009 4:55 AM): Just in time for Strings 2009
Synchronicity (June 19, 2009 12:03 AM): Like Freddy Krueger …
When in Rome … (June 18, 2009 7:23 PM): Social networking.
Akulov-Volkov Redux (June 18, 2009 7:12 PM): Die, Akulov-Volkov, die!
Penrose Diagram Follies (June 17, 2009 12:44 PM): One of my pet peeves
Draining the Swampland (June 9, 2009 4:45 PM): Not so easy, I’m afraid…
Musical Interlude (May 31, 2009 1:27 PM): Random pleasing notes.
Adams Operations (May 26, 2009 12:00 AM): K-Theory operations, spelled out.
α to Ω (May 25, 2009 8:37 AM): Search engine showdown.
Fun (With) Video (March 2, 2009 10:17 AM): Fantastic fingering ferrofluids.
Temptations of Mathematical Structures (February 5, 2009 11:46 AM): What’s relevant for Physics?
Takeover (February 4, 2009 11:42 PM): Merging with the main line of Instiki.
Lurie II (January 23, 2009 1:16 AM): A romp through higher category theory.
New beginnings (January 21, 2009 2:07 AM): Jacob Lurie on Extended TQFTs, I.
Instiki News (January 20, 2009 12:14 AM): An new Instiki for a New Year.
It’s a New Day (January 19, 2009 11:16 PM): Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye.
As Only The Onion Can… (November 5, 2008 9:18 AM): Still can’t catch a break…
Unretouched (November 1, 2008 12:50 AM): Halloween pumpkin, 2008.
Theorem Environment (October 18, 2008 1:34 AM): An extension to Instiki.
Cool Hand at the Tiller (October 8, 2008 12:29 AM): A little bit of substance from tonight’s debate.
Planet Hopping (September 26, 2008 12:21 AM): From Venus to Mars.
3D Mirror Symmetry (September 22, 2008 10:25 PM): A little review of 3D Mirror Symmetry, with the vague excuse that it has something to do with Braden et al.
Tidbit (September 15, 2008 10:47 AM): Bounds on (S)CFT central charges and the viscosity bound.
My Dinner with Garrett (September 14, 2008 11:39 PM): By popular demand, another post on this stuff.
Blogging is the New Black (September 10, 2008 12:03 AM): A talk on “Blogs, Wikis, MathML: Scientific Communication in a New Century”
A Soft Pion Theorem (September 9, 2008 6:08 PM): A soft pion theorem from Arkani-Hamed et al.
Our Pathetic News Media (August 25, 2008 12:15 PM): Lying with statistics.
Instiki + IE7 (August 20, 2008 12:49 AM): Fixed a long-standing incompatibility between Instiki and IE7+MathPlayer.
Noncommutative (August 2, 2008 3:14 AM): On the “Noncommutative” Standard Model/
Best Fit (July 31, 2008 4:34 PM): Latest Tevatron data and a best fit for the Higgs mass.
Wall Crossing (July 30, 2008 3:48 PM): Gaiotto et al on the wall-crossing formula of Kontsevich and Soibelman.
T-Duality and Dual Superconformal Symmetry (July 21, 2008 11:43 PM): Berkovits and Maldacena explain the T-duality underlying Alday-Maldacena.
A Clean Break (July 13, 2008 12:45 PM): Israel going all-electric vehicles.
I’m Baaaack (July 12, 2008 11:43 PM): Back from the salt mines.
CalDAV (June 14, 2008 5:39 PM): Taking Apple’s Calendar Server out for a spin.
Bagger-Lambert Again (June 10, 2008 11:30 PM): A little destructive field theory.
Polls (June 7, 2008 1:36 AM): Polling data for the November elections.
Not Forgotten (June 1, 2008 10:59 AM): A revived comment thread on an old post might be of interest to someone.
Gadgets (May 27, 2008 10:03 AM): My new Dick Tracy watch.
‘Sploit (May 22, 2008 8:59 AM): Security vulnerability in iCal, and a pet peeve of mine.
Instiki Updates (May 19, 2008 10:56 AM): HTML5lib sucks.
Superconnections for Dummies (May 12, 2008 12:01 AM): A brief review of Quillen superconnections, and an introduction to the “Schreiber” superconnection.
Late Night Musings: Bug Girl Edition (May 11, 2008 1:20 AM): Mail order vermin.
Around the Blogs (May 6, 2008 11:01 PM): Random stuff.
Faulty Memory (May 2, 2008 12:41 PM): Stuck bit.
Gauge Mediation (April 17, 2008 2:33 AM): Meade, Seiberg and Shih
Corruption (April 13, 2008 11:07 PM): A corrupt .knit file in BZR.
Dinosaur (April 12, 2008 11:42 AM): MathML and SVG come to HTML5.
April Fool (April 1, 2008 1:41 PM): A new version of utphys.bst. Better late than never.
Bagger-Lambert (March 26, 2008 11:37 AM): A maximally-supersymmetric, superconformal gauge theory in 2+1 dimensions.
Google Summer of Code (March 21, 2008 5:06 PM): Bring MathML to Safari, and get paid.
Fiscally Conservative (March 16, 2008 4:27 PM): Who’s really better for the Economy?
Phun with Rails (March 15, 2008 9:43 AM): An XSS vulnerability in Instiki.
Exceptional F-Theory. (March 10, 2008 9:34 AM): GUTs from intersecting 7-branes.
Battery (March 9, 2008 10:11 PM): A workaround for NewerTech batteries.
ERGE (February 21, 2008 11:54 PM): When Exact Doesn’t Mean Exact.
foreignObject (February 4, 2008 2:49 PM): Taking the new Firefox out for a spin.
Opera and MathML (January 31, 2008 12:00 AM): A rant.
Asymptotic Safety (January 30, 2008 10:43 AM): Why, oh why won’t someone do the relevant computation?
Extremal CFTs (January 29, 2008 10:26 PM): Yet more on 2+1 gravity.
Effective Field Theory of Inflation (January 4, 2008 3:06 AM): An effective Lagrangian analysis of single-field inflation.
Living In a Fool’s Paradise (January 3, 2008 9:06 PM): Why I hate REXML.
Instiki and Rails 2.0 (December 23, 2007 9:52 PM): Shiny.
Bricolage (December 13, 2007 11:52 PM): A picture’s worht a thousand words.
MTOS (December 12, 2007 10:09 AM): The long and winding road.
AdS/CFT and Exceptional SCFTs (December 10, 2007 2:44 AM): Aharony and Tschikawa check a conjecture of Argyres and Seiberg.
A Little More Group Theory (December 9, 2007 11:17 PM): Lisi again???
QGP on the Lattice (December 3, 2007 11:55 PM): Computing transport coefficients for RHIC physics on the lattice.
So Long, Sidney (November 22, 2007 1:49 AM): Sidney Coleman, 1937-2007.
A Little Group Theory … (November 21, 2007 11:50 PM): Mania in the physics blogosphere.
S-Duality for N=2 (November 14, 2007 12:10 AM): Argyres and Douglas on some “exceptional” dual gauge theories.
Leopard (November 13, 2007 11:56 PM): Not a complete vale of tears.
Two Tech Topics (October 31, 2007 11:53 PM): Fonts and APIs.
Sanitizing SVG (October 28, 2007 11:50 PM): Thinking about safety.
SVG in MathML in … (October 22, 2007 11:40 PM): On mixing SVG and MathML.
5 Years (October 19, 2007 2:29 PM): The honeymoon is definitely over.
Maloney on 2+1 (October 18, 2007 11:52 PM): Maloney on the phase structure of 2+1 gravity.
Why I Love Mark (October 16, 2007 10:26 AM): On the pithiness of Mark Pilgrim.
Gluino Masses (October 15, 2007 11:10 PM): Choi and Nilles on the pattern of gaugino masses emerging from string theory.
Mirror Mediation (October 9, 2007 11:51 AM): Conlon on a “new” SUSY breaking mediation mechanism.
LaTeX Macros (October 4, 2007 2:51 PM): LaTeX macros for Istiki’s LaTeX export.
Talk: Orientifold and Twisted KR Theory (September 28, 2007 12:26 AM): My talk from the Durham LMS conference.
Twistor Yang Mills (September 27, 2007 12:22 AM): Belatedly Boels et al.
svn+ssh:// and svnX (September 26, 2007 11:20 PM): svn+ssh HowTo
S5 Themes in Instiki (September 6, 2007 10:57 AM): Choice is good.
XSS 2 (September 2, 2007 1:55 AM): Security is a journey, not a destination.
Suboptimized (August 31, 2007 11:33 PM): Making Ruby work reliably on my G4 iBook.
MHV (August 22, 2007 6:40 AM): Deriving the MHV Feynman rules.
Sicko (July 30, 2007 8:17 PM): Thanks to Tommy Douglas.
Cancellations (July 28, 2007 6:32 PM): More on N=8 supergravity.
Brouhaha (July 27, 2007 11:37 PM): They nearly lost me …
WebKit and MathML (July 26, 2007 11:28 AM): Still waiting.
A Plea (July 18, 2007 9:51 AM): A allergy to the theory of von Neumann algebras leads to a call for help.
Topological Quantum Computing (July 17, 2007 10:32 AM): Strange bedfellows.
Filched (July 6, 2007 2:23 PM): On riding the Madrid Metro.
Beyond the MSSM (July 5, 2007 11:36 AM): Things I didn’t blog about, but would have.
Desolé (June 29, 2007 5:48 AM): Death and resurrection.
Remains of the Day (June 27, 2007 1:44 AM): You get what you pay for, here at Musings.
Witten on 2+1 Gravity (June 26, 2007 5:50 AM): AdS/CFT and the Chern-Simons formulation of 2+1 gravity.
Strings 2007, Part 1 (June 25, 2007 10:30 AM): Madrid, Madrid…
Bloggy Matters (June 17, 2007 11:07 PM): Open Source Movable Type, and my $0.02 on HTML5.
Tunnelling branes (June 6, 2007 12:31 PM): Enhanced decay of false open string vacua.
Bit Flip (June 5, 2007 11:29 PM): On the fragility of software.
307 (May 25, 2007 4:27 PM): I need to get out more.
Froissart Follies (May 21, 2007 1:27 AM): The Froissart bound on the total cross section ain’t worth a hill of beans, when gravity (or other massless fields) are in the game.
Rewrite Magic (May 20, 2007 11:12 PM): On using mod_rewrite’s RewriteMap directive for fun and profit.
So much for Unicode! (May 6, 2007 6:36 PM): Slashed letters (the Dirac operator, etc) in itex2MML.
Boltzmann Entropy (May 3, 2007 12:45 PM): Teaching Physics-for-poets.
SVG Redux (May 2, 2007 10:04 AM): Announcing the SVGfix plugin.
AdS/Neutron Stars (April 27, 2007 10:03 AM): Domokos and Harvey on a phase transition in nuclear matter.
Effective Field Theory and Gravity (April 26, 2007 11:21 PM): A bound on the number of e-foldings of inflation.
SVG Comments (April 26, 2007 1:44 AM): Kicking it up a notch.
Instiki and Atom (April 13, 2007 7:59 PM): Instiki, Atom, inline SVG, and John Baez.
Decoupling N=8 Supergravity (April 9, 2007 1:49 AM): Green, Ooguri and Schwarz.
10.4.9 (April 8, 2007 11:24 PM): Not so smooth.
Sacrificial (April 4, 2007 11:02 PM): A Passover story.
Split Real Forms (March 22, 2007 12:25 PM): Adding to the media frenzy.
Validator Face-Off (March 16, 2007 10:52 AM): Validating XHTML is, apparently, harder than it looks.
The Standard Model Landscape (March 12, 2007 1:45 AM): Arkani-Hamed et al construct a rich family of vacua for the Standard Model coupled to gravity.
BZR Feeds (March 11, 2007 11:41 PM): BZR Atom feeds!
S5 (March 1, 2007 4:38 PM): All about S5 support in Instiki.
XSS (February 26, 2007 6:41 PM): A vulnerability in in Instiki (and, more generally, in Rails).
新年快乐 (February 18, 2007 1:50 PM): Happy Chinese New Year!
In the Can (February 17, 2007 11:59 PM): I can’t believe I drank the whole thing (actually, I didn’t).
Instiki Update (February 15, 2007 9:33 AM): New site for my MathML-enabled Instiki project.
Primer (February 13, 2007 1:52 AM): A review of Michael Dine’s book.
Tensor Modes (February 6, 2007 11:10 PM): Liam McAllister on tensor mode fluctuations in string inflation.
itex2MML 1.1.9 (January 29, 2007 3:22 AM): Mostly bugfixes.
Barbarians at the PAC (January 27, 2007 11:43 PM): Premier of the new Philip Glass opera.
Gravitational Leptogenesis? (January 25, 2007 9:15 AM): Alexander et al claim to find a new mechanism for leptogenesis during inflation.
Tech Week (January 24, 2007 11:56 PM): Dear Edwina, the musical.
Shorter Charles Murray (January 19, 2007 10:09 AM): Never should have clicked on that link…
One Thing Led to Another … (January 17, 2007 11:43 PM): New software for a new year.
MTValidate 0.5 (January 12, 2007 11:15 PM): A new, FastCGI-compatible, version of the MTValidate plugin.
Full Disclosure (January 5, 2007 6:12 PM): A serious MovableType security vulnerability.
Choptuik and the Pomeron (January 2, 2007 3:33 AM): Álvarez-Gaumé,Gómez and Vázquez-Mozo make a bold proposal.
TeX Macros (January 1, 2007 11:59 PM): Calling all TeXnicians!
The Year in Spam (December 31, 2006 11:59 PM): 1000% growth: something to boast about.
Instiki (December 23, 2006 11:50 PM): Going for a ride with Ruby-on-Rails.
Blogs vs Wikis (December 21, 2006 8:52 AM): Research blogs, research wikis and math.
The Frozen North (December 12, 2006 10:42 AM): Brrrrr … MathML!
The Beginning of the End (December 5, 2006 11:46 AM): HTML-safe generation of embedded MathML.
Bulletholes (November 25, 2006 2:33 AM): Henri Sivonen bursts my bubble.
Dalí Thanksgiving (November 24, 2006 3:57 PM): Holiday snaps, eh?
Bulk Validator (November 19, 2006 7:19 PM): Bulk XML validator for MacOSX and other operating systems.
Segal on QFT (November 16, 2006 4:37 PM): Graeme Segal on QFT.
Localized (November 11, 2006 11:19 PM): Some background notes on Frenkel Losev and Nekrasov.
del Pezzo (November 3, 2006 11:32 PM): A bit on the Verlinde-Wijnholt construction of Standard Model-like gauge theories on a D3-brane at a del Pezzo singularity.
Candidate (October 29, 2006 11:05 PM): Kinky for Governor.
The Role of Rigour (October 21, 2006 11:07 AM): Don’t trust strangers bearing Theorems.
Rehren Duality (October 16, 2006 3:07 AM): AQFT and a heterodox version of AdS/CFT?
MathPlayer 2.1 Beta (October 15, 2006 11:57 PM): Become a Beta tester!
LazyWeb Chiral Symmetry Breaking (October 6, 2006 11:02 PM): A LazyWeb query on ‘t Hooft Anomaly Matching.
MathML in HTML5 (October 3, 2006 9:52 AM): Roger Sidje tries something new…
Security (September 29, 2006 11:59 PM): You had me worried there, for a while …
Venus (September 8, 2006 3:22 AM): As the eagle-eyed among you may already have noticed, Planet Musings is now powered by Sam Ruby’s Venus. What…
Crikey! (September 4, 2006 11:59 AM): Too busy with other stuff to finish the several half-written blog posts on my computer. So, instead, I’ll point you…
Networking (August 24, 2006 11:49 PM): Microsoft invades.
Coupled (August 21, 2006 2:50 AM): On deformations of tensor products of CFTs, and their AdS duals.
Empire (August 17, 2006 7:10 AM): Yet another MathML-enabled blog, hosted here on golem.
Whew! (August 12, 2006 8:43 PM): Well, at least we beat Turkey!
I Give Up (August 9, 2006 10:32 AM): Making my SVG figures work in Mozilla’s built-in renderer.
Chiral Symmetry Breaking (August 7, 2006 1:43 AM): On the Sakai-Sugimoto model.
Science in Service of … (August 6, 2006 9:42 PM): Sign seen in the window of a New York dry cleaner: Your clothes can be tested for shatnes by the…
More AdS/QGP (August 1, 2006 11:53 AM): J/Ψ suppression at RHIC and AdS/CFT.
Off-By-One (July 31, 2006 11:13 PM): A recently-fixed Apache bug saves my bacon.
Energy (July 20, 2006 12:37 AM): The Aspen Energy Forum.
MovableType 3.31 (July 19, 2006 7:19 PM): The upgrade was far from smooth.
Traffic Patterns (July 11, 2006 12:18 AM): Entertain or inform.
Entropy of Extremal, Non-SUSY Blackholes (July 10, 2006 4:36 PM): Emparan and Horowitz on the entropy of nonsupersymmetric dyonic blackholes.
Still Broken After All These Years (July 3, 2006 12:27 PM): On not eagerly awaiting MovableType 3.3.
DeThreaded Comments (June 29, 2006 11:47 PM): A Javascript solution for dethreading comments.
The LQG Landscape (June 25, 2006 12:53 PM): Smolin on coupling field theories to LQG.
Metastable Vacua (June 19, 2006 11:09 AM): Dynamical SUSY breaking made “easy.”
itex2MML 1.1.5 (June 18, 2006 11:17 PM): itex2MML 1.1.5 and some musings on MathML in HTML5.
Topological T-Duality (June 10, 2006 12:06 AM): In a recent post, I talked a bit about what the mathematicians call “Topological T-Duality.” I posed the question…
Planetary Style (June 9, 2006 11:58 PM): Styling tips for a river of Physics news and for MathML.
Planet Musings (June 6, 2006 9:28 PM): Introducing Planet Musings.
Around the Blogs (June 4, 2006 3:37 AM): Random stuff from random places.
I Can’t help Myself … (June 2, 2006 2:23 AM): itex2MML 1.1.3.
itex2MML 1.1 (May 29, 2006 10:44 AM): An new version of itex2MML, chock-a-block with new features.
AdS/Au-Au II (May 27, 2006 12:41 AM): Herzog et al on damping of heavy quark motion in the quark-gluon plasma, from AdS/CFT.
Bug in Crypt::OpenPGP (May 26, 2006 9:25 AM): Crypt:OpenPGP falls down on the job.
Technical Difficulties (May 20, 2006 11:23 PM): Maxing out my process limits.
AdS/Au-Au (May 18, 2006 11:45 PM): Jet quenching parameter from AdS/CFT.
Connections (May 16, 2006 11:58 PM): The major Telecoms feel the heat.
Actions for Self-dual Gauge Fields (May 13, 2006 3:12 AM): Moore and Belov on self-dual gauge fields.
Mo’ Better Bounds (May 12, 2006 11:36 PM): More on our bounds on WW scattering.
That’ll Teach Me (May 5, 2006 2:45 PM): More on accessible equations in PDF
Geometry of the MSSM (May 1, 2006 2:20 AM): The Veronese surface make a surprising appearance in a subsector of the MSSM.
Colbert on a Tear (April 30, 2006 11:57 PM): Truthiness at its best.
Leitner in the Darkness (April 28, 2006 11:52 PM): Frederick Leitner does some MathML-related things.
Remember (April 25, 2006 8:34 AM): Yom HaShoah, today.
Atom Torture Test (April 18, 2006 8:08 AM): Five tests of Atom feedreaders.
2+1 D Yang-Mills at Large-N (April 10, 2006 8:02 PM): More from Minic et al on large-N 2+1 D Yang Mills.
SRP Telnetd for MacOSX Tiger (April 8, 2006 11:56 AM): Problems with SRP telnetd on MacOSX Tiger.
New AccessKeys.js (April 3, 2006 1:41 AM): A new version of Accesskeys.js fixes a bug and an incompatibility with IE/6.
MINOS (April 1, 2006 3:24 PM): MINOS releases first data on neutrino oscillations. Plus some sceptical words on vacuum birefringence.
Polarization (March 31, 2006 2:09 AM): Komatsu on WMAP 3rd year data.
Ben Domenech, Innumerate (March 22, 2006 7:52 PM): A million here, a million there, pretty soon you’re talking billions…
Numerical Calabi-Yau Metrics (March 21, 2006 6:49 PM): Simon Donaldson: Calabi-Yau metrics in QBasic.
Housecleaning (March 18, 2006 4:45 PM): Feeds come, feeds go …
itex2MML 1.04 (March 17, 2006 12:32 AM): The trouble with eating your own dogfood is that, when you bite down on some gristle, there’s no one else…
WMAP Results (March 16, 2006 1:44 PM): WMAP year 3 highlights
Avatars of Nonlocality? (March 10, 2006 6:36 AM): In which our hero tackles the paper of Adams, Akani-Hamed, Dubovsky, Nicolis and Rattazzi.
ArXiv Trackback Policy (March 5, 2006 11:38 PM): Wading into the controversy about the trackback policy at arXiv.org.
Disclosure (February 25, 2006 10:16 PM): On private data in publicly-released corporate emails.
Innumeracy Watch (February 17, 2006 5:06 PM): Richard Cohen flaunts his.
Camino 1.0 (February 16, 2006 11:41 AM): … and it finally supports MathML.
Koszul-Tate (February 15, 2006 11:50 PM): Grassi and Policastro on Pure Spinors.
Rubes (February 6, 2006 8:53 AM): More on the Republican flight from Science and Reason.
The People Garden (February 5, 2006 10:33 AM): “The People Garden,” a musical at the Zachary Scott Theater.
Behind the Horizon (February 4, 2006 3:26 PM): Hong Liu, on probing blackhole singularities in AdS/CFT.
Ghost D-Branes and Renormalization (January 28, 2006 1:29 AM): Interesting discussion over at Cosmic Variance.
Gravity is Weak (January 20, 2006 10:26 PM): Some comments on a recent paper by Arkani-Hamed, Motl, Nicolis and Vafa.
More on Accesskeys (January 15, 2006 4:12 PM): A clever Greasemonkey script from Gez Lemon.
Dem Bones (January 11, 2006 11:06 PM): On the vocabulary of 5 year olds.
Editable Accesskeys (January 8, 2006 11:54 PM): Accesskeys are a very nice mechanism for making your website more accessible. You can define a set of keyboard shortcuts…
It’s Time to Speak of Serious Matters (January 7, 2006 2:33 PM): Congressional Research Service: the President flagrantly broke the law. He promises to continue doing so. What now?
41-38 (January 5, 2006 12:08 AM): UT takes the Rose Bowl to become National champions.
CDT (January 2, 2006 3:35 AM): Some thoughts on Causal Dynamical Triangulation models.
Bye Bye, Raoul (December 22, 2005 4:46 PM): Raoul Bott was a huge influence on my life. I learned Differential Geometry from him, in a reading course…
Creeping Up on the MSSM (December 22, 2005 4:28 AM): Diaconsescu et al on gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking in String Theory, and Arkani-Hamed et al on SUSY at the LHC.
The Sorry State of Spambot Writing (December 21, 2005 11:31 PM): RFC 2616: is that too much to ask?
Shredding Party (December 19, 2005 11:50 AM): We had to destroy the Constitution to defend it.
That’s Better! (December 18, 2005 1:03 AM): Unlike Apache 2.2.0, 2.3.0-dev does work on MacOSX 10.4. And I attempt to puzzle out “smart” filtering.
Apache 2.2 (December 15, 2005 3:30 AM): Upgrading to Apache 2.2 on MacOSX.
2+1 D Yang Mills (December 12, 2005 12:51 AM): Leigh, Minic and Yelnikov on the glueball spectrum of 2+1 D Yang Mills.
Exotic Instanton Effects (December 9, 2005 11:43 PM): Beasley and Witten on exotic instanton effects in heterotic string theory.
Cable Fun (December 8, 2005 11:53 PM): I’ve been a Time-Warner Roadrunner cable modem subscriber for many years now and, generally, the service has been decent, if…
Twisted N=4 SYM and Special Holonomy (December 3, 2005 12:13 AM): D3-branes, manifolds of Special Holonomy, and twisted N=4 SYM.
Redistricting and the Payola Deficit (December 2, 2005 3:18 AM): So it DID violate the Voting Rights Act… !? Who knew?
Wireless (November 22, 2005 2:42 AM): Laptop + Bluetooth + cell phone = connectivity anywhere.
Squashed Bugs (November 21, 2005 12:41 AM): Yamashita Makoto fixes MathML bugs in Mozilla/Mac.
Swampy (November 14, 2005 10:28 AM): More thoughts on the Swampland.
Trackback Spam II (November 8, 2005 2:32 AM): Still being hammered, after all these months.
Staring at the Tea Leaves (November 7, 2005 11:50 PM): The Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, and a light Higgs.
Spider Spamming (November 4, 2005 1:36 AM): Spammers exploit search engine spiders.
There be Dragons (November 2, 2005 1:48 AM): MovableType, MySQL, and Unicode: a trainwreck in the making.
Nekrasov on Pure Spinors (November 1, 2005 11:50 PM): Nikita on pure spinors
Boo! (October 30, 2005 2:14 PM): Trick or Treat, 2005.
Patience is a Virtue (October 28, 2005 2:38 PM): Landing the big fish.
CDO and Pure Spinors (October 26, 2005 4:30 PM): Urs on Nikita on pure-spinors.
Shih on OSV (October 21, 2005 3:21 AM): Shih and Yin compute some blackhole entropies.
OpenID (October 20, 2005 11:58 PM): I’ve been playing around with implementing OpenID here on Musings. PGP-signed Comments, which we’ve been offering for a year and…
Expectations and Reality (October 14, 2005 10:50 AM): Reflections on 3 years of blogging.
Thaler (October 12, 2005 12:15 AM): Jesse Thaler brings enlightenment and software to Austin.
Banned (October 11, 2005 9:46 AM): The strange case of Nossom Slifkin.
Helling Wades In (October 11, 2005 8:30 AM): Robert Helling does Loops ‘05.
5766 (October 3, 2005 6:33 PM): לשנה טובה ומתוקה תכתבו.‏
4 Steps (October 1, 2005 2:31 AM): … to Better MathML in Mac/Mozilla.
You Can’t Always Get What You Want (September 29, 2005 10:19 AM): Back in the saddle again.
itex2MML 1.02 (September 25, 2005 10:25 AM): Announcing itex2MML 1.02 and a Ruby port.
Unpleasantness (September 23, 2005 3:26 PM): When “exact” doesn’t really mean exact.
itex2MML 1.0 and AbiWord (September 15, 2005 9:19 AM): Announcing itex2MML 1.0, the frontend of AbiWord’s equation editor.
arXiv Physics Reorganization (September 8, 2005 2:14 AM): Reorganization of the Physics arXivs.
Trackbacks in the Chronicle (September 7, 2005 11:02 AM): More on Trackbacks and the arXivs.
New itexToMML Plugins for MovableType and ecto (September 2, 2005 1:17 AM): New versions of my plugins for MovableType and ecto.
Motivation (September 1, 2005 2:37 AM): The last best hope of quantum gravity: a précis of the introductory lecture in my String Theory class.
Trackbacks and the ArXivs (August 24, 2005 4:50 PM): The e-print arXivs go trackback-enabled.
PDF Accessibility (August 23, 2005 1:22 PM): Pdftex, Design Science, and Joe Clark on accessible PDF.
Designing the 5th Dimension (August 23, 2005 1:40 AM): A little bit of AdS/CFT-based QCD phenomenology.
Editable Equations in Keynote (August 19, 2005 4:15 PM): Keynote, LaTeXit, the LinkBack plugin, getting equations into your presentations.
The Best Bagels (August 11, 2005 1:36 AM): St. Viateur Bagel Bakery does e-commerce.
Surprises (August 8, 2005 4:53 PM): We physicists tend to use ordinary English words, like “energy” or “field” in unconventional, technical ways. Mostly — even…
Noncritical M-Theory? (August 6, 2005 1:59 AM): Hořava and Keeler on “noncritical M-theory.”
The Forces of Darkness (August 3, 2005 3:56 AM): Apple put DRM in the Kernel. But will it stay there?
Credit Where Credit is Due (August 1, 2005 9:54 PM): Krauthammer on Evolution and Intelligent Design.
Not All There (July 28, 2005 2:15 AM): On vacation.
Cheers and Raspberries (July 22, 2005 3:16 PM): Sean Carroll, over at Cosmic Variance has posted a non-string theorist’s “defence” of string theory. It’s a little absurd that,…
Atom 1.0 (July 22, 2005 2:26 PM): New Atom 1.0 feed.
Advice to the Young (July 19, 2005 9:54 AM): Free advice, worth every penny you paid for it.
Cosmic Variance (July 18, 2005 8:45 AM): Bring out the heavy hitters. Sean Carroll, JoAnne Hewett, Clifford Johnson, Mark Trodden and Risa Wexler have started a WordPress-based…
Strings 2005 Wrapup (July 16, 2005 3:23 PM): Glad that’s over with…
Day 4 (July 14, 2005 10:30 AM): Strings 2005, day 5.
The Cobbler’s Children (July 13, 2005 8:41 PM): Day 3. Puff… puff …
If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Toronto (July 12, 2005 10:05 AM): Strings 2005, Day 2.
Playing Catchup (July 11, 2005 11:08 AM): Strings 2005, Day 1.
Intellectual Bankruptcy Watch, II (July 8, 2005 9:45 PM): I wrote a while back about the intellectual relativism and anti-scientific *-scepticism that has, in recent years, become the norm…
London Calling (July 7, 2005 10:51 AM): For my friends and colleagues in London….
Squaring the Circle (July 5, 2005 9:56 AM): Squaring the circle in the Poincaré plane.
Broken Object Support (July 3, 2005 12:00 AM): Longtime readers of this blog know that I strive to use the best available technology to deliver resolution-independent (to the…
In-In (July 2, 2005 3:55 AM): Steve Weinberg on radiative corrections to cosmological perturbations.
Trackback Spambot (July 1, 2005 12:05 AM): The Zahariev brothers: trackback spammers extraordinaire, or dumb as posts?
Here a Pod, There a Pod (June 28, 2005 12:18 PM): iTunes 4.9 is out, with its previously-announced support for podcasts. The podcast directory at the iTunes Music Store is very…
Topological G2 Sigma Models (June 27, 2005 1:24 AM): de Boer et al on topological sigma models for G2 manifolds.
Baghdad Bob’s Revenge (June 26, 2005 2:54 AM): First as farce, then as tragedy.
Oh, Obama! (June 20, 2005 12:39 AM): Barack Obama continues to shine as the most impressive politician that either party has produced in a long time. Read…
Reconnection Probability (June 19, 2005 12:51 AM): Much of the recent resurgence of interest in cosmic strings has to do with the possibility that such strings…
Open WebKit (June 17, 2005 12:01 AM): Amid all the kerfuffle about Apple moving to Intel processors, one important piece of news got underplayed. WebKit1, the system…
Ricci Flat (June 16, 2005 7:06 PM): Matt Headrick and Toby Wiseman have finally come out with their paper on Ricci-flat metrics on K3. I’ve talked…
Apache and Tiger (May 15, 2005 7:50 PM): Apache 2.0.x + MacOSX 10.4 = :-( . But a patch makes us happy
A Thin Veneer (May 6, 2005 3:16 AM): It’s Yom haShoah. Time, again, to reflect on the events of 60+ years ago, and what they mean for us…
MT Admin (May 2, 2005 12:09 PM): Converting the MovableType Administrative interface to “real” XHTML.
Too Polite (April 29, 2005 12:34 AM): Problem with my comment-feed corrected. And the “smartest man on Earth” joins the Frist Filibuster.
Google Blows Me Away (Again) (April 28, 2005 8:28 AM): First it was Google Scholar. Now it’s Google Print. Search for “todd class”, and find hits like this….
Weird (April 24, 2005 2:13 PM): Last night, I had a dream. The plot doesn’t matter much. But, at some point, one of the characters drew…
WebDAV (April 18, 2005 9:23 AM): On the joys of WebDAV.
itex2MML 0.13 (April 17, 2005 1:25 AM): Thanks to feedback from users, another release of itex2MML, the commandline filter for turning a dialect of TeX into MathML.
Supercritical (April 12, 2005 12:00 AM): Supercritical strings
Wormholes (April 11, 2005 12:51 AM): Lenny spends a week in Austin.
Fruitbats II (April 6, 2005 10:30 AM): Dumb and dumber: more ravings from the Discovery Institute.
The Flight from Science and Reason (April 5, 2005 5:21 PM): Fruitbats from the Right take flight.
itex2MML 0.12 (April 3, 2005 1:35 AM): Grab the latest version of itex2MML.
BF (March 30, 2005 8:46 PM): Stephon Alexander’s proposal to relax the cosmological constant sends our hero on a journey through BF theory.
Sweetness (March 29, 2005 12:02 AM): Watching the “Lesbian” episode of “Postcards from Buster.”
Superhorizon Fluctuations and Dark Energy? (March 28, 2005 1:42 AM): Flanagan takes a crack at Kolb et al.
New itexToMML for WordPress 1.5 (March 21, 2005 11:07 AM): Finally, mathematical weblogging in WordPress! itexToMML updated for WordPress 1.5.
Liveblogging From SidneyFest (March 18, 2005 1:57 PM): A Festschrift for Sidney Coleman.
SVG Plugin (March 16, 2005 7:45 AM): Firefox/Windows requires a plugin update.
The Blackhole of Chapline (March 14, 2005 8:40 PM): George Chapline’s surreal Harvard Physics Colloquium.
Breaking Out All Over (March 13, 2005 12:17 AM): Lisa Randall has a blog, too!
M ∩ Φ (March 12, 2005 1:57 PM): A philosophical question from Eric Forgy.
Daddy Links, Mommy Links and AutoLinks (March 7, 2005 9:25 PM): Google AutoLink and Larry Summers tackled in the same post? … Priceless. You go, girl!…
Goodbye, Hans (March 7, 2005 6:28 PM): When I was a postdoc at Cornell, I had the misfortune of having Hans Bethe’s office located between mine…
Small Blackholes (March 6, 2005 12:43 AM): Dabholkar, Kallosh and Maloney on quantum-corrected blackholes.
Signs of Life? (March 5, 2005 11:15 PM): Hopeful signs about the STIX Fonts Project.
Scheduling (March 4, 2005 10:09 AM): No, I’m not going to be at SXSW.
Cole Cr#% (February 27, 2005 9:45 AM): Juan Cole is an indispensable source of information and insight into the situation in Iraq. He really knows the country,…
Conversations with Greg (February 27, 2005 1:59 AM): Greg Moore was in town for a few days, and we had — as always — some very interesting…
Reinvention (February 23, 2005 4:28 PM): The 9 year old reinvents subtraction… or … Why aren’t there more women in Physics?
Internationalization and Trackbacks (February 17, 2005 1:04 PM): In which our hero gets fed up with gibberish Trackbacks and takes matters in his own hands.
Coming Soon to a Hard Drive Near You (February 16, 2005 3:27 PM): Once upon a time, a megabyte was a lot of data. In 1989, when Joanne Cohn first started emailing preprints…
Words to Live By (February 13, 2005 12:42 AM): “Don’t fire a gun while you’re driving a car.” — my 9 year old daughter, admonishing her 4 year old…
Berkovits Update (February 11, 2005 11:43 PM): More on the pure-spinor superstring.
MathML News (February 8, 2005 10:34 PM): New itex2MML, MathML::Entities hits the big time, Math fonts and Mozilla/Mac and new weblogs on the block.
Who Do You Trust? (February 5, 2005 12:41 AM): PGP-signed Comments and rel=”nofollow”
Multiloop Amplitudes (February 4, 2005 12:30 PM): Yet more D’Hoker and Phong. And I attempt to penetrate the mist surrounding a paper of Nathan Berkovits.
Trackback Spammers (February 1, 2005 5:57 PM): Blocking automated trackback spammers.
Linear Deficit (January 29, 2005 1:49 AM): Why can’t we teach our students linear algebra?
Can’t Complain About the Weather (January 27, 2005 12:29 AM): NOAA XML weather forecasts on my sidebar at last!
Another MT Mail Exploit. (January 25, 2005 2:20 AM): The MovableType Comment/Trackback/… system (which uses email to notify the blog owner of newly posted comments/trackbacks) is vulnerable to being…
rel=”nofollow” (January 22, 2005 1:27 PM): Our policy on rel=”nofollow”, explained.
A Brief History of Golem (January 20, 2005 2:01 AM): Three generations of computer, one domain name.
Unbesmirched (January 17, 2005 12:17 AM): Via Luboš Motl, I learn that Bill O’Reilly says he’s a Harvard alumnus Take it from this Harvard alum. We’re…
Loop Review (January 17, 2005 12:04 AM): Nicolai, Peeters and Zamaklar have done a yeoman’s job of reviewing Loop Quantum Gravity for the unitiated. As Luboš recounts,…
A Model for the Landscape (January 14, 2005 1:02 PM): Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos and Kachru have a very nice paper in which they provide a simple field-theoretic model for Landscape-ish…
Confession (January 9, 2005 12:29 AM): Converting named entities to numeric character references.
Reconnection (January 8, 2005 1:21 AM): Hashimoto and Hanany on reconnection of D-strings and vortex strings.
Santy Worm (January 3, 2005 3:12 PM): Recently, golem has been peppered with attacks by the Santy Worm, which exploits a vulnerability in phpBB 2.x. Those who…
Airhead (December 31, 2004 1:14 AM): Somehow, Ann Coulter consistently succeeds in making Jessica Simpson sound like Harold Bloom: To The People Of Islam: Just think:…
Topological M-Theory (December 31, 2004 1:12 AM): Why is it so hard to formulate?
The Pace of Innovation (December 17, 2004 3:40 PM): Spambot authors take a cue from the crapflooders and make MT users cry.
Fixing What’s broke (December 14, 2004 12:13 AM): Lies, damned lies and Social Security.
Kibble Deficit (December 13, 2004 1:30 AM): Are cosmic strings overproduced in string cosmology? The Kibble Mechanism undermined.
Ill-formed NOAA (December 7, 2004 6:49 AM): In which our hero learns to write a simple SOAP client and learns the full horror of foul weather.
Almost Hairless (December 6, 2004 1:50 AM): To no one’s great surprise, but to the consternation of some, the blackhole no-hair theorem does not hold in…
Posner’s Big Adventure (December 6, 2004 1:08 AM): Kieran Healy has some fun at the expense of the new Becker/Posner blog. I’ve gotta say that the first two…
Minor Updates (December 1, 2004 12:09 AM): Minor updates to minor software.
Splitness (November 28, 2004 12:18 AM): A bit of background to all this stuff on the higher genus superstring measure.
Dark Exoticism (November 25, 2004 12:08 AM): Sonia Paban points me to a recent paper with a very heterodox view on Dark Matter. The jumping off…
More D’Hoker and Phong (November 22, 2004 2:58 AM): Let’s pick up our discussion of D’Hoker and Phong with their followup paper on the genus-3 superstring measure.
Poke a Stick in it (November 21, 2004 11:54 PM): Politics? No thanks. Let’s talk XHTML MIME types.
Chiral Superstring Measure (November 20, 2004 2:03 AM): D’Hoker and Phong rewrite the genus-2 chiral superstring measure.
Citation Index (November 18, 2004 1:20 AM): The 600 pound gorilla tackles scholarly citation indices.
X-tirpation (November 15, 2004 2:58 AM): The X-philes get trimmed down to size.
Oh, Ornette (November 15, 2004 1:20 AM): In a porkpie hat and powder-blue suit, he shuffled gingerly onstage. At age 75, the lion of “free jazz” seemed…
A Fearful Symmetry (November 10, 2004 12:08 PM): Longtime readers of this blog will know that I think that discrete symmetries (particularly, those that suppress proton decay…
Four More Years (November 3, 2004 9:22 AM): The people have spoken and, by a margin of 3.7 million or so, have chosen their pumpkin. Yes, it’s…
Trick or Treat (October 30, 2004 11:17 PM): It’s up to you ……
Roundup (October 28, 2004 12:31 AM): Around the blogs: Matt continues his excellent review of Lattice Gauge Theory, with a post on the classic paper…
Regime Change (October 26, 2004 11:55 PM): I previously linked to Eminem’s searing new single, Mosh. Well, now the video has been released. Directed by Ian Inaba…
Accessible Popups (October 24, 2004 1:10 AM): Fixing an obscure usability bug with multiple event handlers.
Ad Hominid Arguments (October 19, 2004 12:20 AM): The Anthropic Principle and Evolutionary Psychology.
Small Pond (October 18, 2004 11:13 PM): Matthew Nobes on improved lattice actions.
Error Reporting (October 14, 2004 11:03 PM): Hunting bugs in itex2MML.
Brand New Blog (October 12, 2004 4:31 PM): All Luboš, all the time.
Bush on a Wire (October 10, 2004 12:01 AM): When technology fails.
Horse Race (October 8, 2004 9:22 AM): Web Services meet election polling data.
Cosmic Strings (October 7, 2004 1:21 AM): A review of Tom Kibble’s review.
Who the heck are you? (October 6, 2004 12:46 AM): In the debate, Dick Cheney lambasted John Edwards for his spotty attendance record in the Senate: Now, in my capacity…
Gross, Wilczek and Politzer (October 5, 2004 8:21 AM): 2004 Nobel Prizes in Physics.
More Browser Stats (October 3, 2004 2:02 AM): Analyzing our browser stats is a sure cure for insomnia.
Another View (October 1, 2004 1:23 PM): Another interpretation of the large-N gauged harmonic oscillator.
BPS Droplets (October 1, 2004 10:54 AM): Lin, Lunin and Maldacena characterize all 1/2-BPS AdS×S supergravity solutions in terms of a free fermion quantum mechanics problem.
La Ronde (September 28, 2004 1:03 AM): (with apologies to Arthur Schnitzler) Having swept aside my earlier prudery: My laptop is now paired with my bluetooth headset…
Collinear (September 27, 2004 2:31 AM): A lot of people (myself included) got very excited by the fact that perturbative N=4N=4 super Yang-Mills amplitudes seemed…
And now B2 (September 26, 2004 12:23 AM): itex2MML comes to B2evolution.
Best. Spam. Ever. (September 19, 2004 3:44 PM): Paging Tom Ridge!
Skype (September 17, 2004 5:47 PM): In which our hero takes a spin with skype, the hot new VoIP application.
Spin Chains (September 15, 2004 1:40 AM): Catching up on integrable spin chains and anomalous dimensions in gauge theory.
Billboard (September 6, 2004 1:04 AM): Most of the billboards around the UT campus feature alcohol and/or scantily-clad women. But one austere black-on-white billboard on…
Labour Day (September 6, 2004 12:12 AM): This is, perhaps, the last Labour Day of the Bush presidency, so it behoves us to look, once again, at…
Topological Vertex (September 3, 2004 11:09 AM): A mathematical formulation of the topological vertex.
Building a Better Mousetrap (September 3, 2004 10:20 AM): Henri Sivonen has a templating system. Maybe some good will come of it.
MT 3.1 (September 1, 2004 11:16 AM): As you may have noticed, we’re now running MT 3.1. Most things work, but Search is somewhat screwed up at…
pdfTeX and Figures (August 28, 2004 12:59 AM): TeX with EPS and PDF figures: happy together at last.
MathML in ecto (August 26, 2004 11:11 PM): Gotta love those text filters.
Ecto 2.0 (August 21, 2004 1:52 AM): The new beta has some really nifty features.
Faith Restored (August 12, 2004 10:34 AM): In which the Medium Lobster explains the error of my ways.
Request (August 12, 2004 1:31 AM): Calling all itexToMML users … !
We Have a Winner! (August 2, 2004 1:13 AM): When the cat’s away, …
Photos from Aspen (August 1, 2004 12:49 AM): Get yer Aspen photos here.
The President Answers his Critics (July 30, 2004 10:17 AM): Funny, funny stuff from Will Ferrell.
Blackhole Production (July 29, 2004 9:33 AM): Comparing the prospect for producing TeV-scale blackholes from cosmic ray neutrinos and at the LHC.
No Information Lost Here! (July 22, 2004 11:35 AM): Hawking creates a tempest in a teapot.
Hair of the Dog (July 20, 2004 11:06 AM): Back in Aspen.
Dick Cheney — The Remix Version (July 20, 2004 10:30 AM): It’s getting increasingly hard to tell the parody from the reality these days. Maybe I should stop trying.
“Fixed” (July 13, 2004 10:26 PM): When “FIXED” doesn’t really mean fixed.
LHC (July 9, 2004 7:42 AM): A visit to CERN leaves me slack-jawed.
Strings 2004: a Day Late and a Dollar Short (July 2, 2004 4:52 AM): What? You were expecting me to post every day?
Trackbacks and MTStripControlChars (July 1, 2004 2:57 AM): Just when I thought it was safe to enjoy Paris, a new version of MTStripControlChars is called for.
Strings 2004, Day 2 (June 29, 2004 11:37 AM): In which our hero slowly succumbs to the grinding pace of 11 talks/day.
Strings 2004, Day 1 (June 28, 2004 5:08 AM): Live blogging from Strings 2004.
Delays (June 26, 2004 2:17 PM): Storms in Dallas, papers from the Arxivs.
Back From the Dead (June 24, 2004 11:27 AM): The new old iBook.
We’re Number 17! (June 19, 2004 8:27 PM): Fun with Google searches.
Forcing Comment Previews (June 16, 2004 9:59 AM): Introducing the MTHash plugin, and a reliable way to force Comment Previews.
Higgs Up (June 11, 2004 12:06 AM): D0 reanalyze their data, and push up the top mass.
Hot Tech (June 6, 2004 3:01 PM): Better living through gadgets.
Bogdanorama (June 5, 2004 8:18 PM): The long wait is over. More fun from the Bogdanov brothers.
itexToMML News (June 3, 2004 12:43 PM): itexToMML 0.8: better handling of block-level tags, more text filters, and an update for WordPress.
Review of Large-N Duality (June 2, 2004 1:05 AM): Marcos Mariño’s Chern-Simons Theory and Topological Strings: read it now.
Movin’ On Up (May 29, 2004 10:48 AM): MT 3.0 and a new iBook.
High Energy Supersymmetry (May 27, 2004 12:59 AM): Arkani-Hamed and Dimopoulos propose high-energy supersymmetry-breaking, in the context of the Landscape.
Now More User-Friendly (May 26, 2004 11:45 PM): A new version of the MTValidate plugin, with new, more “user-friendly” error messages.
Rampant Paranoia (May 24, 2004 1:46 AM): Jason Harris goes all paranoid on us…
WordPress 1.2, MathML Goodness (May 22, 2004 9:04 AM): WordPress 1.2 has been released. Here’s my itexToMML plugin for WordPress.
Remote Exploit for MacOSX (May 19, 2004 1:56 AM): help://… and disk://.. URIs are handled unsafely in MacOSX, leading to big problems.
del Pezzo (May 17, 2004 2:13 PM): Seiberg Duality is one of the mysterious and wonderful features of strongly-coupled N=1N=1 supersymmetric gauge theories to have emerged…
Best $20 I’ve Spent in a While (May 16, 2004 9:16 PM): I took the family kayaking on Town Lake today. We paddled past groups of turtles basking in the sunlight. We…
Brouhaha (May 16, 2004 3:11 AM): MT 3.0 was released this week, and the announcement was greeted with an unprecedented furor. No longer would MT be…
So it’s Come Down to This (May 8, 2004 1:11 AM): From Mazar-i-Sharif to Guantanamo to … , we’ve seen this one coming, haven’t we? We’ve just been in denial.
Digging up the Landscape (May 3, 2004 6:28 PM): Much excitement has been generated by the work of KKLT. At least for one class of compactifications down to 4 dimensions (F-theory backgrounds with fluxes) we seem to have the physics which lifts the degeneracy of the moduli space under good control. I say seem, because there are some important gaps, one of which got filled today.
Write-In (May 1, 2004 3:44 AM): Professor Lorenzo Sadun is a write-in candidate for Congress in the Texas 10th Congressional District. How sad that it has come down to this.
itex2MML 0.8 (April 29, 2004 12:04 AM): A small update to itex2MML. This one covers ellipses.
Nima² (April 28, 2004 1:14 AM): One of my favourite young physicists, Nima Arkani-Hamed, was in town today. He gave two talks. One was about…
Internationalization (April 24, 2004 1:46 AM): Say you want to tag some text on a web page as being in a language other than the main…
Erdős Number (April 23, 2004 11:00 PM): What’s my Erdős number? Should I bid on the opportunity to secure a better one?
Never Again! (April 18, 2004 10:28 PM): Tomorrow is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Time, once again, to tell a survivor’s story.
The Discretium (April 17, 2004 12:44 PM): A long philosophical ramble about String Theory, the Landscape, the Anthropic Principle, and other things that go bump in the night.
MTStripControlChars (April 14, 2004 11:19 PM): Introducing the new, improved, MTStripControlChars plugin.
Firebombed (April 10, 2004 12:12 AM): My old elementary school was firebombed this week. Something about “revenge” for the death of Sheik Ahmed Yassin.
sci.physics.strings (April 8, 2004 11:17 AM): In which the protagonist finds a gem in the vast wasteland that is USENET. Also, a handy NNTP to RSS gateway script.
אין מפטירין אחר הפסח אפיקומן (April 6, 2004 12:38 AM): A “different” Passover Seder.
Joint Appearance (April 4, 2004 9:28 AM): So, is Condi Rice really Frau Farbissina?…
Muddle (April 2, 2004 2:32 AM): MathPlayer 2.0, and the State of the Art with respect to Math on the Web.
User Experience (March 26, 2004 12:01 AM): A MovableType bug, SVG, Atom, and a NetNewsWire bug.
Fine-tuned (March 25, 2004 12:30 AM): We all learned on our grandfather’s knee that supersymmetry required a light Higgs. Back then, this was a cheering thought, for it meant that we would not have to wait too long for the Higgs to be discovered. The years passed, and the experimental lower bound on the mass of the Higgs crept slowly upwards. We now know that it must be heavier than 114 GeV or so. Scott Thomas was in town the other week, and gave a very nice colloquium, explaining how serious the situation has become for the MSSM.
TypeKey (March 20, 2004 10:47 AM): A discussion of Six Apart’s new, centralized Commenter Registration Service.
Counting Points (March 16, 2004 11:19 PM): An answer to Urs Schreiber’s question about Calabi-Yau manifolds, defined over finite fields.
Core Dump (March 13, 2004 10:24 PM): Some random computer notes on installing Crypt::OpenPGP, my experimental Atom feed, making the Feed Validator happy and OpenSSH 3.8p1.
Number Theory and Physics (March 13, 2004 4:00 PM): There’s a conference going on here at UT on Number Theory and Physics Victor Batyrev, Philip Candelas, Daqing Wan and Dave Morrison are giving a series of lectures on the connections between Calabi-Yau Manifolds, Mirror Symmetry and Number Theory.
No More Sore Thumb (March 12, 2004 8:59 PM): A fix for OpenPGPComment.
Ultra Deep (March 11, 2004 8:42 AM): Picture from the Hubble Ultra Deep-Field Survey.
A-Maximization (March 11, 2004 2:58 AM): I haven’t talked about the a-maximization proposal of Intriligator and Wecht, nor the interesting followup papers by Kutasov and collaborators. But the recent paper by Csaki et al reminded me.
<link rel="pgpkeys">, Sean Carroll and Atom (March 9, 2004 8:50 AM): <link rel="pgpkey"> is catching on. Here’s how to make it better. Sean Carroll has a blog. Too bad I can’t syndicate his feed.
Notes on Comment Authentication (March 4, 2004 10:15 AM): More on PGP-signed comments.
PGP-Signed Comments (February 28, 2004 2:40 PM): On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. In one way, that’s great. If you want to be anonymous, there’s…
itex2MML 0.7 (February 27, 2004 12:42 AM): Yet another release of itex2MML. Many thanks to Bob McElrath for a boatload of improvements. “|” and “\mid” now both…
Ketchup isn’t a Vegetable (February 25, 2004 1:23 AM): It’s a Durable Good. For the most part, I’ve avoided posting about the sorry excuse for “Economic Policy” that is…
Book List (February 24, 2004 9:59 AM): Ed Felten asks his readers for a “top-five” list of books in Science and Technology — books one might might…
Don’t GET it! (February 21, 2004 1:42 AM): Quite by accident, I discovered that one can post comments to MovableType blogs using HTTP GET requests (instead of the…
Free Texts (February 17, 2004 12:14 PM): [Via Bitácora de matemáticas] an amazing collection of Mathematics texts available free over the Web. To that, maybe I should…
Headrick (February 16, 2004 12:05 AM): We had Matt Headrick visting last week. He gave a really nice talk about his work on on the…
Cursing One’s Tools (February 15, 2004 10:31 PM): I’m trying to write a talk in Keynote. As I noted when the program first came out, it is ridiculously easy to do all sorts of wizbang animated effects. But the stuff that I actually care about, like mathematical equations, is an incredible annoyance.
MathPlayer 2.0 (February 10, 2004 3:59 PM): The latest beta of Design Science’s MathPlayer plugin for IE/Win is out. This free plugin brings MathML support to Internet…
Not So Hot (February 9, 2004 12:30 AM): This PhysicsWeb article reports on the buzz being generated by a recent paper on astro-ph. According to the authors, the…
Three Card Monte (February 7, 2004 10:05 PM): I’ve been pondering why I find the discussion of Thomas Thiemann’s recent paper over at the String Coffee Table so disturbing. Finally, Thiemann’s latest comment made it all fall into place for me (emphasis added):
MathML News (February 2, 2004 10:38 PM): In the Sisyphean task of implementing the conversion of LaTex symbols to MathML Named Entities, here’s another update to the itex2MML executable used by my plugin.
30 Seconds (February 1, 2004 1:05 AM): Apparently, CBS, in its corporate wisdom, won’t air their ad during the Superbowl. But that’s no reason for me not…
What Will They Think of Next? (January 30, 2004 11:03 PM): I have no idea what the crapflooders are up to these days. They’ve gone on to greener pastures, or easier…
Not in Kansas (January 30, 2004 1:16 AM): There’s a lively discussion over at the String Coffee Table of a recent paper by Thomas Thiemann on a new,…
Hold Onto Your Wallet (January 29, 2004 1:48 PM): It’s amazing that it’s taken this long. Gangs of criminals are stealing ATM card numbers and PIN number right from…
Sick and Twisted (January 25, 2004 2:11 PM): I had lunch yesterday with Matt Mullenweg. We talked about my recent run-in with the crapflooders, the state of XHTML,…
Functions Online (January 22, 2004 9:08 PM): A new resource from Wolfram Research: functions.wolfram.com is sort of an online Abromowitz and Stegun. Very handy, when you’re in…
Never a Dull Moment (January 22, 2004 4:50 PM): I came back from a really interesting talk on the future of neutrino-mixing experiments (yes, they actually hope to measure…
One Down (January 21, 2004 10:40 PM): So I finally did get visited by one of the Crapflooders. Phil was visited by the same fellow earlier in…
New Fractional Branes (January 21, 2004 12:28 AM): Very interesting paper today by Ashok, Dell’Aquila and Diaconescu. They construct a new class of boundary states (D-branes) on Landau-Ginzburg…
Comment Throttle (January 18, 2004 10:15 PM): So it turns out that the latest fad among the script kiddies is crap-flooding MovableType blogs with thousands of randomly-generated…
itex2MML Plugin Update (January 16, 2004 12:33 AM): I’ve updated my itex2MML plugin to version 0.7. It fixes a bug where some people were getting an error of the form …
Campaign Link (January 14, 2004 2:12 AM): I was a little aghast when I saw the latest entry in my Technorati Cosmos sidebar. Bush2004 doesn’t sound like…
MT Courseware (January 10, 2004 12:20 AM): Liz Lane Lawley has a decided to adapt MovableType for use as CourseWare. Here’s an example of one of her…
Blogspam Update (January 9, 2004 8:55 AM): More thoughts on Comment Spam and some dark musings on Trackback Spam. Update: patch for MT 2.66’s broken XHTML support.
Axiom of Choice (January 8, 2004 10:37 AM): To choose one sock from each of infinitely many pairs of socks requires the Axiom of Choice, but for…
:hover Craft (January 4, 2004 4:03 PM): The brilliant Peter Nederlof has found a JScript hack to enable CSS :hover behaviour on arbitrary elements in IE/Win. Since…
itex2MML Plugin Update (January 1, 2004 1:51 PM): A minor update to the itex2MML executable, used in my plugin. I added a few more MathML entities.
New Years Menu (January 1, 2004 2:10 AM): Happy 2004!
Feedback for Urs (December 30, 2003 1:50 PM): One of the things about a new medium is that it will almost inevitably find new, unanticipated, uses. I’m excited…
Happy Holidays to all! (December 27, 2003 2:06 AM): Holiday Greetings from Fort Funston, CA.
Snap, Crack and Spam (December 26, 2003 12:33 PM): A quite frightening story about the increasing sophistication of spammer/crackers [tip 'o the hat to Gary F]. It’s been clear…
Acronym Patch Update (December 20, 2003 3:19 PM): Yet another update to Henrik Gemal’s acronym plugin for MovableType, meaning yet another update to my patch, which offers improved handling of acronyms and abbreviations.
Black Box Voting (December 19, 2003 2:27 PM): Finally, there’s a site devoted exclusively to the electronic voting scandal.
Don’t Bitch and Moan! (December 17, 2003 7:25 PM): File a bug report, you dork. That’s what I shoulda done. I’ve grumbled about the bugs in the rendering of…
Do the Twist (December 16, 2003 9:03 AM): Everyone’s all a-titter about Witten’s latest, which appeared today. He studies Maximal Helicity-Violating amplitudes (n−2n-2 gluons of one chirality…
Hot Coffee (December 15, 2003 11:15 PM): I’m proud to announce a new blog, The String Coffee Table. It’s a group blog by five young string theorists….
Historical Contingency (December 13, 2003 12:16 AM): Thomas Dent’s comment on my previous post reminded me of an anecdote.
Flashback (December 12, 2003 1:39 AM): Hitoshi Murayama was in town this week, and gave a talk about some decidedly nonstandard alternatives to the Higgs content…
Ultra-Geek (December 12, 2003 1:05 AM): Speaking of rather exclusive clubs, the dozen or so people who use my utarticle.cls LaTeX class-file may be interested in…
The Few, the Proud (December 11, 2003 11:48 PM): Another MathML-enabled weblog on the block: Bitácora de matemáticas. Antonio Luis Martínez Rico joins a rather exclusive club. Yuan-Chung Cheng’s…
Trojan Horse Referer Spam (December 7, 2003 12:29 AM): If you run a website, you may have noticed some “unlikely” entries in your Referer logs, from what are apparently…
Buffer Overflow in Rsync 2.5.6 (December 5, 2003 9:04 AM): Apparently, there’s a heap overflow vulnerability in rsync 2.5.6 (the version that ships with Panther) and earlier. This is a…
Marolf on Entropy Bounds (December 3, 2003 11:33 PM): Don Marolf was in town this week, and talked about his work with Sorkin on Entropy Bounds. The Bekenstein…
Gottesman & Preskill (December 1, 2003 1:53 AM): Dan Gottesman and John Preskill have a nice little paper which seems to be a quite devastating critique of…
Hot Lava (November 29, 2003 12:16 AM): For one project I’ve been working on recently, I’ve had recourse to some wonderful online mathematical resources, courtesy of Neil…
Baby Eaters (November 28, 2003 12:00 AM): Back in January, The Independent published a cartoon which played heavily on the medieval anti-semitic Blood Libel for effect. The cartoon has just won first prize in the British Political Cartoon Society’s annual competition.
DHCP Vulnerability in MacOSX (November 27, 2003 12:24 AM): Here’s a fun one: a remote root hole in MacOSX, just in time for Turkey Day. It’s not a “new”…
More MT Spam Vulnerabilities (November 23, 2003 9:57 PM): I think we got us a theme going… Remember insecure formmail scripts? How very 1990s, eh? As if comment spam…
If You Can’t Beat 'Em (November 22, 2003 10:03 AM): Speaking of spam, here’s a site to restore your faith in humanity….
Comment Spam II (November 17, 2003 10:29 AM): No, I haven’t (yet) received any more since I took action. But, as predicted, the spammers have become more diversified in their techniques, so it’s time to bring other webloggers up to date.
Kind of Blue (November 15, 2003 1:10 PM): With Bluetooth phones, Bluetooth keyboards and mice, even Bluetooth luggage, we’re bound to see more security advisories of this sort…
Stanford Old Home Week (November 14, 2003 12:36 AM): We have both Keshav Dasgupta and Scott Thomas visiting from Stanford this week. Keshav gave a very nice talk…
Clam (November 11, 2003 12:17 AM): Another benefit of the 24 hours spent trying to get sendmail working again after upgrading to Panther.
Hagedorn (November 9, 2003 5:14 PM): While I was doing those endless recompiles, I was very much enjoying reading Aharony et al’s paper on the phase structure of large-N gauge theories.
… Because It Feels So Good When I Stop (November 8, 2003 2:44 PM): Yesterday morning, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade Golem to Panther. Things were going fairly swimmingly. The installation…
Spamming Spammers and Their Spamming Scams. (November 4, 2003 9:57 AM): This morning I received the following email Dear blog owner, My name is David. I’m developing a blog about spam:…
Panther Upgrade (I) (November 3, 2003 12:15 AM): I upgraded my iBook to Panther this weekend. Once I’ve figured out all the pitfalls, I’ll try upgrading Golem. In the meantime, here are some of the geeky things I’ve uncovered.
Dark Matter Flowchart (October 30, 2003 9:34 AM): The experimental situation in cosmology has undergone a mini-revolution in recent years. But, theoretically, many things remain as murky as…
Updates (October 29, 2003 11:13 PM): Henrik Gemal updated his Acronym plugin for MovableType, to version 0.5. So I, in turn, had to update my patch, which adds support for abbrs and other righteous aspects of marking up abbreviations.
Miscellaneous (October 28, 2003 9:40 AM): Blogging has been light over here at Musings. But I have not forgotten about y’all. Dvali and Kachru have…
If It Ain’t Broke … (October 20, 2003 9:36 AM): An innocent attempt to “improve” the Comment-Entry form had the effect of disabling comments over the weekend. This was not an anti-spam tactic.
Camino and MathML (October 18, 2003 7:23 PM): As previously announced, Dave Haas’s MathML-enabled build of Camino is out and works with this blog (as well or poorly as any current Mozilla build on MacOSX).
Peas, Carrots, Beans (October 17, 2003 11:59 PM): My daughter brought home the following problem from her 2nd grade math class: You have 10 pots in which…
Software Monoculture (October 15, 2003 10:02 AM): A lot of the blogs I read have been deluged in recent days with robots posting comments. I got a…
Viva Camino! (October 15, 2003 7:49 AM): The official Camino project seems to be more-or-less moribund. But Dave Haas has picked up the baton and is providing…
Nature Fumbles the Football (October 12, 2003 4:26 PM): A while back, I noted that some people are taking seriously that the WMAP data on fluctuations in the CMBR show “too little” power in the low multipoles (l=2,3). This week’s issue of Nature flogs a purported explanation.
Browser Stats (October 10, 2003 2:02 AM): I know the readership of this blog is not exactly a typical cross-section of blog readers generally, let alone of…
Skyrme Fun (October 8, 2003 12:40 AM): More on the discovery of the “pentaquark” resonance and the Skyrme Model.
Perl 5.8.1 and MovableType (October 5, 2003 2:10 PM): You may have noticed the mess on this blog on Thursday/Friday. It was caused by my upgrading the Perl installation…
OpenSSL Vulnerability or Opportunity? (October 1, 2003 11:14 PM): Vulnerability in OpenSSL, job at Apple.
Statistical Innumeracy (September 29, 2003 11:11 PM): The science fiction writer H G Wells predicted that in modern technological societies statistical thinking will one day be as…
Happy 5764! (September 28, 2003 8:34 AM): A New Year’s greeting.
You Can’t Buy Publicity this Bad (September 26, 2003 8:15 AM): The Boston Globe reports that the RIAA has dropped its lawsuit against Sarah Seabury Ward, a 66 year old sculptress…
Old and New (September 24, 2003 5:21 PM): My previous post on Dvali and Kachru’s recent paper stimulated a lot of interest. I got into a really wonderful physics conversation with Konstantin Savvidis of the Perimeter Institute and with Sonia Paban down the hall.
Mozilla Sucks (September 24, 2003 1:45 AM): Sometimes I get depressed about this whole weblog thing. On the authoring side, it’s just about as good as I…
I’m Melting … (September 23, 2003 8:50 AM): Okounkov, Reshetikhin and Vafa have a paper out today in which they relate the Gopakumar-Vafa conjecture for the Partition…
I’m My Own Grandpa (September 20, 2003 12:53 AM): Anne van Kesteren is horrified to learn that (according to the DTD) <a id=”Grandfather”> <del id=”Father”> <a id=”Son”> I’m My…
When it Rains, it Pours (September 18, 2003 9:46 AM): No, I’m not talking about Hurricane Isabel. Yesterday, it was OpenSSH. Today, it’s Sendmail with a new version to patch a security hole.
OpenSSH 3.7.1p1 (September 16, 2003 9:11 PM): OpenSSH 3.7.1p1 was released today. It patches a potential security flaw. There are some allegations that there is actually an…
Quasar Dance (September 13, 2003 1:23 AM): Just caught a performance of the Brazilian Quasar Dance Company, performing “Lend Me Your Eyes”…
All That’s Old is New Again (September 11, 2003 3:56 PM): Dvali and Kachru have written a paper, in which they try to resuscitate “Old Inflation.” Their idea is to have the inflaton dynamically trapped at a saddle-point of the potential.
<abbr>, <acronym>, Accessibility & Automation (September 10, 2003 2:26 AM): A tutorial on marking up abbreviations and an MT plugin which makes the job easy.
What’s Up in the GST (September 9, 2003 11:23 PM): One of the topics we will be covering this semester in the Geometry and String Theory seminar, that I…
Secrets of SVG (September 3, 2003 7:59 AM): How to get SVG images to rescale automatically, along with the text in the browser. This is the path to resolution-independent web design.
Disappearing Content (September 2, 2003 5:06 PM): <rant> I just happened to fire up IE 5.2 (MacOSX), and looked at this web site. The GIF image of the Asymmetry Data from BELLE in this post was simply missing!
Sincerest Form of Flattery (September 1, 2003 12:02 AM): Howard Dean and his supporters are nothing, if not clever, as demonstrated by this riff on Apple’s Switch campaign. I…
R.I.P. Osirusoft (August 30, 2003 12:25 AM): One of the best of the RBL services I use to filter mail on Golem went dead this past week, victim — I now learn — to a massive DDoS attack.
Baghdad Café (August 29, 2003 11:06 PM): Is it a sign of progress that new Iraqi blogs (genuine, as far as I can tell) are springing up…
Another Approach to Comment Validation (August 28, 2003 2:16 PM): Sean at agresticism is playing around with using XML Schema for comment validation (in VBScript, of all things!). His setup…
More MathML Entities (August 27, 2003 8:43 AM): Someday, I should go through the list of MathML entities and make sure that itex2MML has conversions from their (La)TeX…
Belle de Jour (August 27, 2003 12:22 AM): There’s recent data from BELLE indicating beyond-the-Standard Model sources of CP violation.
Fair and Balanced (August 23, 2003 11:51 AM): The ruling has, rightly, been reported all over the blogosphere. but I’d like to add my voice to the chorus…
The March of Technology (August 22, 2003 8:58 AM): Back when Evan Goer did his XHTML 100 survey, it was depressingly clear that sites which did XHTML correctly were…
Déjà-Vu All Over Again (August 22, 2003 2:58 AM): A decade ago, Matrix Models and noncritical string theories were the rage. Due to the work of Dijkgraaf and…
Fit to Print (August 20, 2003 1:38 AM): I created Aural and Print stylesheets for this blog. Safari has a problem with the latter. But Dave Hyatt is too busy fending off Dave Winer.
DSL Hell? (August 18, 2003 12:13 AM): Twice in the past couple of months, I’ve had the opportunity to use a residential DSL service (one from Covad,…
Dutch Education (August 18, 2003 12:00 AM): Anne van Kesteren has been educating me about my incorrect usage of CSS in this blog. In XHTML the <body>…
Technorati Plugin Patch (August 17, 2003 9:07 AM): Adam Kalsey’s Technorati 1.0 plugin is out. It fixes many of the bugs I’d previously complained about. Unfortunately, it still needs the following patch…
It’s a Wonderful World (August 13, 2003 12:30 PM): The world is weird and wonderful place. A few recent bits of evidence: Tool-making crows. Not bad for a brain…
I’m a Thief (August 11, 2003 6:39 PM): We’re renting a condo in Solana Beach, California for the week. After settling in, I flipped open my laptop and…
MathML and Accessibility (August 11, 2003 12:47 PM): Recently, I joked that, whatever my efforts to make these pages Accessible, no Screen Reader in existence could handle MathML….
Numb (August 8, 2003 12:30 AM): I’ve been in a bit of a state of shock these past couple of days. I wasn’t sure I could…
Vote Early, Vote Often (August 4, 2003 2:30 AM): In the wake of the Florida Debacle of November 2000, there has been a headlong rush to replace paper ballots…
Leave the Country, Lose Your Songs? (July 28, 2003 12:38 PM): I haven’t yet succumbed to the allure of the iTunes Music Store. While nice in theory, I’ve been wondering how…
Brad’s Epiphany (July 27, 2003 3:05 AM): I’ve lamented before the sad spectacle that Andrew Sullivan has become in recent years. But Brad DeLong nails it: Andrew…
Not So Smart (July 25, 2003 11:07 AM): Despite my entreaties in the past, Jon Gruber’s SmartyPants still attempts to process MathML elements (with the predictable disastrous results)….
Location, Location, Location (July 25, 2003 3:04 AM): Here’s my office at the KITP (on a less foggy day and minus the construction, which is currently causing…
When Metadata Goes Bad (July 21, 2003 2:31 AM): Metadata is one of those buzzwords that cause some people to swoon, and others to grit their teeth whenever it…
Defence Department (July 16, 2003 10:32 AM): The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is,…
KITP (July 15, 2003 1:14 AM): I’m at the KITP for the Geometry, Topology and Strings program. This week’s lecture lineup consists of Mike Hopkins and…
Let Sail (July 11, 2003 4:01 PM): Several times in the past, I’ve gotten emails from Paul Ginsparg, demanding to know who “X” at UT Austin was,…
Hacks (July 10, 2003 11:54 AM): Feeling mischievous? Let the boys from MIT inspire you….
Not in Kyoto (July 10, 2003 11:24 AM): Scheduling prevents me from being at the Strings Conference in Kyoto this week. But I can live vicariously over…
Hack the ScreenSaver, Zap the PMU (July 6, 2003 1:00 AM): Apparently, the password-protection of the MacOSX screensaver is vulnerable to a buffer overflow. Presumably, this is a flaw in the…
Accessibility (July 4, 2003 1:09 AM): I decided to see if this blog could pass some basic accessibility tests. Since 1998, Federal Agencies have been required…
Photoproduction of Exotic Baryons (July 2, 2003 12:56 PM): Interesting news out of Jefferson Lab (better known as the home of CEBAF). There’s a report of the existence…
The Spam Legacy (June 29, 2003 12:03 PM): This is a slightly convoluted tale of spam and the troubles it causes. SMTP AUTH is the standard for Authenticated…
No Lawnmowers (June 26, 2003 9:07 AM): That’s one of the long list of prohibited items in your checked luggage. With self-service check-in now standard, my conversation…
Random WWDC Thoughts (June 25, 2003 10:10 AM): Watched Steve’s WWDC Keynote and, after the RDF wore off a bit, here are my thoughts: The G5 is a…
Safari 1.0 (June 24, 2003 10:05 PM): Safari 1.0 is out. Pretty darn good for a 1.0 release. It is not without CSS bugs though. Three happen…
Gukov on Knots (June 24, 2003 1:30 PM): One of the most celebrated connections between math and physics is the relation between knot theory and 3D Chern-Simons…
Mouthpiece (June 19, 2003 10:05 AM): A while back, I blogged about the RIAA’s support of efforts to develop Trojan Horses, DoS Attacks and other nasties…
Career Options (June 15, 2003 6:00 AM): Sometimes, it just doesn’t work out, and you find yourself, at midlife, needing to retool. Maybe there’s a company out…
La Musée L’Apres Midi (June 15, 2003 5:57 AM): I spent my last afternoon in Israel at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. They had Retrospectives of works by…
Spam Comments (June 13, 2003 3:00 AM): This blog received its first spam comments today. The offender now has the dubious distinction of being the first IP address on my blog’s blocking list.
I Hate Being Scared (June 11, 2003 12:49 PM): I hate saying , “Hmmm. Maybe I’ll take a taxi to Tel Aviv University, instead of hopping on the train.”…
OmniWeb and WebCore (June 7, 2003 4:39 AM): The OmniGroup have release a public beta version of Omniweb 4.5. The new Omniweb uses the same WebCore KHTML-based rendering…
Gödel (June 7, 2003 3:44 AM): The postdocs, Drukker, Fiol and Simon, here at Weizmann have put out a paper on a possible stringy resolution…
Unwired (June 2, 2003 11:02 AM): (5/31/2003) So I have five hours to kill in the Continental Terminal at Newark Airport. You’d think that this spanking…
I am So Depressed! (May 29, 2003 11:31 PM): My bag was stolen from my office today. I don’t know when, or how. I was in the office pretty…
Last Minute Upgrades (May 29, 2003 4:03 PM): It never fails … Whenever I’m about to depart on a trip. Apache 2.0.46 was released to fix a DoS…
Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel (May 28, 2003 10:12 PM): There’s much that I should be doing right now, but this was too funny to pass up. Those pesky “serious”…
Serve it Up! (May 26, 2003 1:25 AM): Serving your blog as XHTML 1.1 with a MIME-type of application/xhtml+xml.
itexToMML Updated (May 20, 2003 10:12 AM): The itex2MML Text Filtering plugin has been updated. There are changes to both the MT plugin and the itex2mml executable…
Text Filters for Comments (May 19, 2003 12:47 PM): Allow a choice of Text Filters in your Comment-entry form.
Faster MT Rebuilds (May 14, 2003 1:10 PM): Zippy! [Tip 'o the hat to Phil Rignalda.]…
Alas, a Trott (May 12, 2003 4:16 PM): Alas, a Blog has converted to MovableType. Among other juicy things, this means their RSS feed now works properly, as…
Biophysics Blog (May 12, 2003 2:08 PM): There’s a new blog on my blogroll. It belongs to a chemistry grad student, Yuan-Chung Cheng, at MIT. Looks like…
Bullet-Proofing II (May 11, 2003 9:08 AM): More bullet-proofing tips to ensure your blog is valid XHTML
The Price of Liberty (May 9, 2003 9:13 AM): Eternal Vigilance? Yeah, there’s the ticket. I was about to go to bed last night, when I got an email…
He’s Baack (May 8, 2003 11:58 AM): Salam-Pax , the Baghdadi blogger (or so he says) is back online with a humongous post. Fascinating reading. It’s great…
I Came, I Saw, I Validated (May 7, 2003 11:09 AM): Evan’s little essay has exploded like a cluster bomb on the geeky end of the blogosphere. It, and the more…
Bill Bennett and the Central Limit Theorem (May 6, 2003 10:23 PM): Brad DeLong is appalled by the Voloch Conspiracy’s credulous acceptance of (or, even willingness to entertain seriously) Bill Bennett’s assertion…
Decline and Fall (May 5, 2003 2:33 PM): The RIAA continues its slow slide from lobbying to legal thuggery to outright criminality. Presumably, having spent all this money…
Validating Comments (May 3, 2003 11:31 PM): Run comments through the W3C Validator before posting. The first in a series of “How-To” articles on MovableType.
Big Stick (May 2, 2003 10:08 AM): As we all might have guessed, the RIAA has settled out of court their suit against the 4 University students,…
Bye Bye, CC! (May 1, 2003 11:45 PM): As Dan Bricklin has pointed out, and as is discussed here and here, Article 5 of the Creative Commons License…
Charming, Strange Exotic (April 30, 2003 10:08 PM): BaBar is reporting the observation of a narrow J P=0 +J^P=0^+ resonance of mass 2.32 GeV/c 2c^2. I haven’t…
Objection Overruled! (April 30, 2003 9:52 PM): My, but this blog has taken a techno-geeky tilt… Anyway, Phil Ringnalda recently objected to serving XHTML as application/xhtml+xml. He…
Yummy, Yummy Tag Soup (April 29, 2003 10:48 AM): A while back, Evan Goer said of this blog that Jacques Distler may well be the only person on the…
Survivor (April 29, 2003 12:13 AM): Today is Yom haShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. In honour of the day, I’m putting up a link to this page…
Leeches (April 27, 2003 2:44 AM): I was very puzzled by Phil Rignalda’s recent complaint about Trackback AutoDiscovery, and I said as much. But then (ironically,…
Hertog, Horowitz and Maeda (April 27, 2003 2:09 AM): I’m somewhat confused as to what to make of the recent paper by Hertog, Horowitz and Maeda. The physics…
Standard Bearer (April 25, 2003 10:22 AM): Seems I’m on a Standards rant. Following on Evan Goer’s musings on the widely-held sentiment that the W3C’s recent work…
The Beast (April 23, 2003 4:22 PM): AP: I mean, should we outlaw homosexuality?Santorum: I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts….
Splat! (April 23, 2003 9:08 AM): If I’m going to be The Lone Man, I can’t very well let bozos who stick control-characters (hex 80 to 9F) in their RSS feeds spoil my validation, now can I? I patched the mt-rssfeed plugin to strip control characters. …
The Lone Man (April 20, 2003 10:37 PM): I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Honestly, this stuff is not as hard as it looks! But, on…
Poincaré Proven (April 19, 2003 2:19 PM): The New York Times reports on Grisha Perelman’s papers (I, II) which claims a proof of Thurston’s Geometrization Conjecture,…
DOM da DOM DOM (April 18, 2003 10:11 PM): In a previous rant, I complained that cookies were broken on this blog. I was angry enough that I was…
The Root of Affliction (April 13, 2003 1:09 AM): Tonight was my night to prepare the horseradish. The recipe books (or so my wife tells me; I haven’t looked)…
Why not sue Google, ya pansies! (April 12, 2003 12:22 AM): The RIAA lawsuit against 4 college students barely registered on my radar. Ho hum, a bunch of college kids caught…
Gilbert, Sullivan and Lehrer (April 10, 2003 11:39 PM): Back when I posted the lyrics to Xena; or, The Warrior Princess, one of our students came to me rather…
Daily Dose (April 9, 2003 2:09 AM): Digby brings to our attention a Salon article on the ever-hilarious Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. Stewart skewers the prevailing media…
Danger, Danger, Danger! (April 9, 2003 1:47 AM): You have been warned….
Now with 75% fewer <div>s! (April 8, 2003 12:07 PM): Blogging has been light as of late. One of the reasons is that I’ve been doing a major site-overhaul. “What?”…
From One, Many (April 8, 2003 11:42 AM): Been meaning to make some comments about this, but just hadn’t gotten around to it. Lenny Susskind has taken the…
Freedom Fighter (April 1, 2003 11:43 PM): Search for terrorist +website on yahoo.com and this blog turns up as #18 in the list of hits. That is…
Streaming Servitude (April 1, 2003 10:14 AM): In addition to being my desktop, Golem is my mailserver/webserver/… and my QuicktimeStreamingServer. This poses a problem because some people…
A Different View (March 30, 2003 9:12 PM): The reportage from the “embedded” reporters on the Iraq war is certainly compelling, if somewhat blinkered. There is — both…
Sendmail 8.12.9 (March 29, 2003 4:28 PM): Sigh. And I thought I would have a quiet weekend doing my taxes….
Michigan Residents: Use NAT, Go to Jail (March 29, 2003 11:22 AM): Ed Felten points out that the State of Michigan has made it a felony to use IP Masquerading, Firewall, or…
Pity the Freshmen (March 28, 2003 4:55 PM): I’m teaching Freshman Mechanics this semester. Not exactly the most uplifting of subjects. Still, even here, one can find…
Javascript Bug (March 25, 2003 11:29 AM): Well, I faced an interesting choice. My Comment Popup used to have a functioning “rememberMe” javascript. But it did not…
War Blogs (March 24, 2003 8:40 AM): In case the incessantly repetitious coverage of CNN/FoxNews/… isn’t enough for you, check out the indefatigable Sean-Paul Kelley, who’s providing…
Strangelove (March 21, 2003 12:46 AM): No, not the creepy National Security Adviser from Stanley Kubrick’s classic film, the free MacOSX utility from Pygmy Software. I…
Let Slip the Dogs of War … (March 19, 2003 11:36 PM): So it’s begun. Early Thursday morning (Iraqi time) the assault on Iraq began, with F117 stealth bombers, tomahawk cruise missiles,…
Fiber, Bandwidth, and Those Crooks at WorldCom (March 18, 2003 9:55 AM): Brad DeLong’s blog has a great discussion going about WorldCom’s recent write-down of the value of their fiber network (now…
Idle Hands (March 16, 2003 1:20 AM): Well, I was wrong. The culprit in the massive UT identity theft case was, apparently, a junior CS major…
QPopper Vulnerability (March 15, 2003 12:57 PM): Yuck. Is there no rest for the weary? According to this Bugtraq thread, there’s a buffer-overflow in qpopper 4.0.4. Qualcomm…
Courseware (March 14, 2003 11:52 PM): Elizabeth Lane-Lawley takes a look at open-source courseware. Inspired by the suggestions in the comments thread, I took a little…
God’s Favourite Breakfast Cereal (March 12, 2003 1:10 AM): The New York Times is reporting on a recent preprint on astro-ph. The title is the rather humdrum, “A…
Closing the Barn Door … (March 12, 2003 12:11 AM): As reported earlier, 55,200 (give or take) names, addresses, and Social Security numbers were stolen from an unprotected database on…
Some Physics Notes (March 11, 2003 4:11 PM): Papers by Berenstein, Strominger/Thompson, and Basu/Sethi.
Die, Blimp, Die! (March 7, 2003 9:29 PM): A hilarious story of a toy gone awry [via Sam Ruby]….
Speaking of Back Ends (March 6, 2003 4:32 PM): “No, I don’t want my payroll data available online.” “No, I don’t want the PIN for my online Annual Benefits…
The Back End (March 6, 2003 3:23 PM): In the interests of greater efficiency and data integrity, I converted to a MySQL backend from the default Berkeley DB….
Bigger, Faster, Harder (March 4, 2003 10:54 PM): (That should garner some “interesting” google queries.) So my iBook started acting up again. I thought I had cured it,…
Gremlins (March 3, 2003 4:17 PM): Sorry if access to this blog has been flaky recently (slow page loads/images not loading properly). Should be fixed now……
A Pound of Flesh (March 1, 2003 12:31 AM): Good old D2 does a bang-up job with an economic analysis of Ezra Pound’s Canto 45. It’s a very entertaining…
Smells Like a Fish 'n Chips Shop (February 28, 2003 9:15 AM): This story broke a while back, but I never did get around to posting on it. There’s always been a…
Creative Confusion (February 26, 2003 1:49 AM): MovableType 2.6.x added a CreativeCommons Licence module (off by default, but all too easily turned on). This has touched off…
Turning on Fluxes and Gauged Supergravity (February 24, 2003 9:22 AM): Previously, I asked whether there was any relation between the de Sitter solutions of compactified string theory with fluxes (and…
Comments (February 23, 2003 12:54 AM): The really cool people have, not just an RSS feed for their blog entries, but also a feed of recently-posted…
Keynote and EquationService (February 22, 2003 9:35 PM): At $14.95, it was hard to pass up the Keynote+iLife bundle from Apple. Which means that I’ve gotten to spend…
Ars on Moore (February 20, 2003 8:48 AM): Ars Technica has a great article on Moore’s Law, that oft-misquoted 1965 prediction about transistor budgets and manufacturing costs. Moore’s…
Moduli-Fixing in M-theory (February 18, 2003 9:57 AM): So I thought I’d say some more about the relation between Bobby Acharya’s paper on moduli-fixing in M-theory (which…
Security Updates (February 17, 2003 11:56 PM): PHP 4.3.1 is out, fixing a CGI vulnerability. MovableType has been bumped up to version 2.6.2, also for security reasons….
Korea and MAP (February 15, 2003 2:41 AM): A really nice post recently by Aaron Bergman on the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into with North Korea. The one…
itex to MathML (February 14, 2003 11:08 PM): Well, as you can see from my two previous posts, I figured out how to do text filtering in MovableType…
Test Post 2 (February 14, 2003 7:30 PM): This is a test of the new itex2MML+parbreaks filter. Here is an inline equation: 2sin(x)cos(x)=sin(2x)2\sin(x)\cos(x)=\sin(2x). And here is a…
Test Post (February 14, 2003 12:26 PM): This is a test of the new itex2MML filter. Here is an inline equation: 2sin(x)cos(x)=sin(2x)2\sin(x)\cos(x)=\sin(2x). And here is a…
Updates (February 14, 2003 2:27 AM): A busy evening in front of the computer. MacOSX 10.2.4 was released, via SoftwareUpdate. I had to recompile and reinstall…
Floppies? (February 10, 2003 12:47 AM): According to this Austin American Statesman article, Dell is planning to discontinue the floppy drive on their computers.
It’s all Just Followup Now (February 9, 2003 10:40 AM): Thanks to Adam Kalsey’s SimpleComments plugin, “Comment” and “Trackback” listings have been merged into “Followups”. Why click twice, when you…
Bubble, Bubble, Boil and Trouble (February 9, 2003 9:37 AM): I’m very confused about the fate of metastable de Sitter universes like the one discussed previously.
Listen Up! (February 9, 2003 1:27 AM): Two wonderful CD’s have recently joined my library.
MathML in Safari (February 7, 2003 10:54 PM): So Dave Hyatt wants to hear where we’d like Safari to go. I’d like to see MathML support come to…
Heterotic Nostalgia (February 7, 2003 10:53 AM): I gave a talk today in our Brown bag seminar about doublet-triplet splitting (and related matters) in String/M-Theory.
Hiccup (February 4, 2003 6:26 PM): Wow! That was weird. My web site was unavailable for about an hour this afternoon, till I noticed something amiss…
Spot the Antisemitic Cartoon! (February 3, 2003 11:50 AM): For centuries, the Blood Libel — the accusation that Jews consumed Gentile children (or their blood) for ritual purposes…
Basher (February 1, 2003 12:31 AM): Brad DeLong takes a break from a long series of excellent posts on the Bush economic “plan” to take…
Bombshell (January 31, 2003 10:08 PM): We’ve all seen the gruesome pictures of the Iraqi Kurds, gassed in March 1988 in the town of Halabja …
Render Onto … (January 30, 2003 10:04 PM): So I’m not all that please at how my last post renders on the Mac (Mach-O Mozilla with the Mathematica Fonts). The “stretchy” characters (the integral sign and the overbar on the anti-D3 branes) … aren’t.
Long Live de Sitter! (January 30, 2003 12:18 PM): Kachru et al suggest a way to obtain classically-stable (and quantum-mechanically long-lived) 4D de Sitter solutions of string theory.
Morph (January 29, 2003 1:30 AM): Gary Markstein has the answer to the Iraq conundrum….
Kabat (January 29, 2003 12:38 AM): Dan Kabat was visiting today, and gave a talk about his work with Easther et al on M2-brane cosmology. I’ve commented on this before, so I thought I’d add what I further learned from my conversations with Dan.
How Slow Do You Want to Go Today? (January 26, 2003 12:47 AM): The activity of the MS-SQL worm slowed large parts of the internet to a crawl yesterday. Thanks, again, to Microsoft…
Cut Your Own Master Keys (January 24, 2003 10:56 AM): Locksmithing, plumbing, and a few other trades seem to persist in a guild-like mentality, where the “secrets” of the trade…
Bugs: Fixed and Unfixed (January 23, 2003 10:44 AM): I learned that, despite being Gecko-based, Chimera can’t render these pages as XML. So back it goes into receiving…
A Look Backwards (January 22, 2003 12:58 AM): So I’ve been blogging for a little over 3 months now. Perhaps it’s time to reflect on the experience. All…
SuperFly (January 20, 2003 10:28 PM): I laughed so hard, I nearly p… Oh, never mind, read it yourself….
Computer Notes (January 20, 2003 12:48 PM): Do I ever get to blog about anything else? A new version of Kung-Log is out, “rewritten from the ground…
Tough Guy (January 19, 2003 1:54 AM): It’s always good to have a niche. If you’re Mel Ulrich, that niche is “operatic baritone with shaved head, who…
Little Steps (January 18, 2003 4:17 PM): As many of you know, the reason I started this blog was because I thought the weblogs would prove to be an excellent vehicle for “informal” physics discussions. Being able to type equations (preferably in TeX) and have them display inline in your browser is an essential part of that.
Wormholes (January 17, 2003 9:42 AM): The beginning of the semester leaves me too busy to post much in the way of serious stuff, but let…
Science & Politics (January 17, 2003 9:37 AM): A good post by CalPundit on the “debate” over Global Warming. It scares me when leftists argue that Science is…
Verbosity (January 12, 2003 12:44 AM): In syndicating the RSS feeds of my BlogRoll, I discovered that I had alarmingly increased the size of the main page of this blog. A little examination revealed the cause…
Popup Feeds (January 10, 2003 2:06 PM): I didn’t like the “RSS Feeds” at the bottom of the Sidebar. Too ugly. So I got rid of them,…
DMCA (January 9, 2003 10:46 AM): Is there no end to the mischief engendered by this stupid, stupid law? As Ars Technica reports, Lexmark has…
Surfing Safari (January 9, 2003 1:28 AM): Apple’s Safari is out, at least in beta. To the suprise of many, including me, it uses the KHTML rendering…
Cut, Cut, Cut (January 7, 2003 9:54 AM): There’s a great scene in an old Laurel & Hardy movie, in which Stan and Ollie are hired as gardeners….
de Sitter Solutions of Gauged Supergravity (January 7, 2003 12:00 AM): I hadn’t noticed when their paper appeared last May, but Trigiante’s talk at a Workshop in Leuven caught my eye….
Only Words… (January 6, 2003 2:53 PM): The blogosphere is all a-titter about the latest arch-conservative, self-described Orthodox Jewish, UCLA undergrad blogger, Ben Shapiro. I have…
He Should Be in Pictures! (January 4, 2003 10:24 PM): The Washington Post and the Manchester Guardian are reporting that, as Reagan’s “Special Envoy to Iraq” during the Iran-Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld helped …
More on MT Text-Filtering (January 4, 2003 12:19 AM): I don’t think I explained, in my previous post, why Ben and Mena’s announcement is so exciting. The point isn’t that it’s boring to type HTML tags. The point is maintainability.
Text Formatting in Movable Type (January 3, 2003 12:20 PM): Ben and Mena Trott have announced that the next version of MT will have a pluggable text-filtering architecture. Currently, the…
Rollover (January 1, 2003 12:24 AM): Woohoo! First post of 2003. No real content, just wishing you, dear reader, a very Happy New Year….
Wifi Heaven (December 31, 2002 1:44 PM): Austin is truly Wifi Heaven. I’m sitting in JP’s Java (a stone’s throw from my office, but much nicer), enjoying…
Sendmail 8.12.7 (December 30, 2002 5:45 PM): Sendmail 8.12.7 is out. If you are, as I am, running sendmail, it’s time to update. Be sure to…
Curio (December 30, 2002 2:20 PM): I should have said that Gottfried Curio also has a derivation of the complex Chern-Simons superpotential I discussed previously.
Welcome Demian Cho! (December 30, 2002 2:06 PM): Perhaps it’s a bit too early (he hasn’t yet posted any “real” entries to his blog), but here’s a…
Feeds (December 27, 2002 1:38 AM): I added a few more RSS feeds to this blog (and modified the existing ones a bit). You can now…
G₂ Compactifications (December 27, 2002 1:07 AM): There have been several papers recently on compactifications of M-Theory on “manifolds”, X, of G2 holonomy. I put ‘manifolds’ in…
XHTML 1.1 (December 22, 2002 2:33 AM): I “upgraded” this blog from XHTML 1.0-Transitional to XHTML 1.1. The idea is that if I ever decide to…
Party Line (December 20, 2002 2:54 PM): While we’ve all been distracted by the travails of Trent “I am not a racist” Lott, the Administration is…
Creative Licence (December 20, 2002 12:39 PM): In case no one noticed (and how could you not?), I finally made explicit the licencing terms of this blog…
CUPS Vulnerability Fixed in MacOSX 10.2.3 (December 19, 2002 10:08 PM): MacOSX 10.2.3 is out. Though it’s not mentioned in the Release Notes, this update fixes a security vulnerability in CUPS,…
De Sitter on My Mind (December 19, 2002 4:01 PM): Tom Banks and Willy Fischler have been pushing a peculiar view of what quantum gravity in de Sitter space should look…
Very Modern Xena (December 15, 2002 12:50 AM): OK, OK … I just couldn’t resist this brilliant Gilbert & Sullivan parody….
O'Reilly on “Piracy” (December 12, 2002 10:34 AM): “Our customers are all crooks” seems to be the motto of the members of the RIAA and the MPAA. “Without…
Crash Test Dummy (December 12, 2002 9:58 AM): I haven’t been blogging much recently. There are several things that have been keeping me otherwise occupied, but one…
Just How Personal Can You Get? (December 7, 2002 12:21 AM): Amazon.com’s software is intended to produce that sought-after personalized shopping experience. Buyers of, say, Pat Robertson’s latest book are gently…
Kick it up a Notch (November 26, 2002 1:34 AM): As I mentioned previously, Paul Krugman is worried about the rise of the New American Plutocracy. If you wait long enough, the Plutocrats have kids…
And Then There Were Three (November 26, 2002 12:54 AM): The latest field-theoretic proof, by Cachazo, Douglas, Seiberg and Witten, of the Dijkgraaf-Vafa conjectures appeared last week. It follows Dijgraaf,…
Remote Root Exploit in Samba (November 24, 2002 10:19 AM): A remotely exploitable buffer overflow has been found in Samba. The version shipping with Jaguar, Samba-2.2.3, is vulnerable. You should…
Hu’s on First (November 24, 2002 12:29 AM): According to Jim Sherman, Abbot and Costello are in charge of the White House. You read it here first….
Plus Ça Change … (November 24, 2002 12:11 AM): We’re leaving a performance of La Traviata, and the psychologist turns to me and says, “Sorry, that opera was too…
No Content (November 21, 2002 10:24 AM): According to the new tool, GetContentSize, the main page of this blog is a whopping 30% “content”. I know… it…
It’s time… (November 21, 2002 12:52 AM): With the UN inspectors on their way to Iraq, war plans are temporarily on hold. What will this Administration do…
M2 Cosmology? (November 19, 2002 9:03 AM): OK, perhaps I have missed the point of Easther, Greene, Jackson & Kabat, but I find it deeply puzzling. The…
Weekend in Jersey (November 17, 2002 12:03 AM): So I find myself in Central New Jersey again, for Curt Callan’s 60th birthday Festschrift. The weather sucks, but the…
Journalling in MacOSX (November 15, 2002 12:09 PM): One of the most talked-about new features of the new MacOSX 10.2.2 update is Apple’s implementation of Journalling for HFS+….
Vulnerability in BIND (November 12, 2002 5:30 PM): Yet another vulnerability has been found in the BIND DNS server. If you’ve enabled the NameServer on your machine (even…
Shiu-In (November 12, 2002 5:24 PM): Gary Shiu gave a lovely talk today about his work with Easther et al. From the ensuing discussions, it was…
MacReporter Plugin (November 9, 2002 5:39 PM): I’ve been getting a lot of hits from people using the RadioUserland News Aggregator. I guess some people want to…
Half Full or Half Empty? (November 9, 2002 1:41 PM): The much-anticipated New York Times article on the Bogdanov scandal has appeared. Alas, it suffers from the usual journalistic…
Jaguar (November 9, 2002 2:17 AM): Finally bit the bullet and upgraded my iBook to Jaguar. I had such a horrible time when I upgraded Golem,…
Alpha Vacua (November 7, 2002 4:58 PM): In light of my previous entry, I thought a closer look at Danielsson’s paper on α-vacua was in order.
Ellen Enters the Mainstream (November 7, 2002 12:06 AM): Our favourite stoneudent makes the daily comics.
Is it Live, or is it Memorex? (November 6, 2002 8:39 AM): Pursuant to a thread in sci.astro.research Ted Bunn has posted three CMBR sky maps. Two are computer-generated noise. One is…
Bogdanovs Chronicled (November 6, 2002 1:00 AM): The Chronicle of Higher Education has a piece on the Bogdanov Affair. Frank Wilczek (as bad luck would have it,…
Inflation and High Energy Physics (November 5, 2002 6:06 PM): So, can one use measurements of the CMBR to detect the influence of high energy physics on the power-spectrum of…
Smarter is Better (November 2, 2002 11:21 AM): I used to have a lot of respect for Andrew Sullivan. But since he left the editorship of The New…
Upgrade (November 1, 2002 9:25 PM): Upgraded this blog to Movable Type 2.51. While the software has improved, the contents, alas, remain the same….
Maldacena on Inflation (November 1, 2002 12:18 PM): Many people have been hoping recently that observations of the cosmic microwave background might provide a “window” into high energy…
Stuck in the Bog (November 1, 2002 10:21 AM): The Bogdanov story just gets weirder and weirder. The following details come from John Baez…
The Bogdanov’s Have Spoken (October 29, 2002 4:09 PM): The Bogdanov brothers insist that they are not committing a hoax. They’ve written to Aaron Bergman, insisting that they are on the up & up.
DGKV (October 29, 2002 3:28 PM): I’ve been reading Dijkgraaf, Gukov, Kazakov and Vafa. They point out the obvious fact that the Vandermonde determinant (which arises…
Not Ready for Primetime (October 28, 2002 1:33 PM): I think I really scrooched the pooch on that one. Converting this blog to .xml with MathML extensions proved even…
Monkey See, Monkey Do (October 28, 2002 1:32 AM): In my previous entry, I gave an example of MathML in action. Unfortunately, Mozilla doesn’t recognize that a file contains MathML unless it ends in .xml …
With Enough Eyeballs: A Manifesto (October 27, 2002 2:49 PM): In my previous comments about the Bogdanov hoax, I alluded to this oft-quoted maxim from the world of open-source software, implying that analogous benefits flowed from the use of the eprint archives to disseminate research results in physics.
Revenge of the French Intellectuals (October 25, 2002 10:09 PM): Stung by the Sokal Hoax, two French brothers, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, have made a stab at righting the…
Blogger.com Hacked (October 25, 2002 7:39 PM): I suppose it should come as no surprise that blogger.com was hacked today. Most interesting, I thought, was the relatively…
Blogging from the Road (October 22, 2002 6:22 PM): I’m in Cambridge, MA, but I thought I’d mention a couple of papers of recent interest. David Berenstein had…
Krugman on Income Inequality (October 20, 2002 12:50 PM): I don’t normally post on political topics. That’s not because I’m not passionate about politics, but because there are already…
From the Art vs Science Desk (October 18, 2002 10:36 PM): Yesterday, I gave a lecture to Samantha Krukowski’s Film class on Time. We talked about Relativity, the Twin Paradox, and…
Modular Escher (October 17, 2002 6:11 PM): There’s a wonderful application of modular transformations and conformal mappings in Escher’s The Print Gallery. In it, one sees,…
OpenSSH 3.5p1 Released (October 16, 2002 12:41 PM): Gotta keep up with the Jones’s! The latest release of OpenSSH can be found here, along with its PGP…
Papers on Superpotentials (October 15, 2002 11:55 PM): Frank Ferrari has given a nice field-theoretic proof of (the simplest case of) the Dijkgraaf-Vafa proposal, using the methods of…
Vulnerability in Jaguar’s xinetd (October 15, 2002 11:01 PM): Jaguar ships with xinetd 2.3.5. Apparently, there’s a DoS vulnerability in xinetd 2.3.4-2.3.7. It doesn’t sound that serious, and…
New York Times Interviews Ginsparg (October 15, 2002 12:51 AM): For those who missed it, our friend Paul Ginsparg (founder of arXiv.org and recent recipient of a MacArthur Award)…
A Bit of Humour from Microsoft (October 14, 2002 4:50 PM): If the prose of this Switch story isn’t funny enough by itself, check out the photo of the woman. Apparently,…
Kung-Log (October 14, 2002 12:34 PM): It’s only compatible with Movable Type, but Kung-Log is a much nicer Blog client than BlogApp. Gotta get Jaguar on…
Klebanov-Polyakov (October 14, 2002 12:25 PM): Strange paper today by Klebanov & Polyakov. They claim the Fradkin-Vassiliev theory (a theory with an infinite number of higher…
SSH tunneling (October 14, 2002 12:53 AM): A good dinner, and a little reflection made me realize that the obvious solution to the cleartext-password problem of…
Permissions (October 13, 2002 6:19 PM): If you don’t (or can’t) go the cgiwrap/suexec route, the alternative “dumb” recommendation in the Movable Type setup instructions is…
In the Beginning (October 13, 2002 3:54 PM): Everyone and his uncle seems to be doing it, so why shouldn’t I? I’ve just installed Movable Type and have…

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