The Reference Frame
Internet Explorer 8 beta 2
Download (EN, DE, JP, simplified CN)Install instructions (mostly not needed)IE 8 web page (microsoft.com/ie8)Release notes (KB 949787)IE blog, tour (new features)The new browser can nowre-open closed tabs (when you open a new tab)switch to po/rn mode (&qu...
~ published: Wednesday at 22:48 ~ permalink
GLAST renamed for Fermi: first results
Audio (since 2 p.m. EDT = 8 p.m. Prague Summer Time; RealPlayer needed)A web page of the press conferenceGLAST home pageGLAST prelude (MP3; explanation here)Just two months or so after GLAST was launched, we will be told about the first results. They will...
~ published: Tuesday at 11:36 ~ permalink
Glashow: blind chance or intelligent design
Playlist (3/17, an hour in total)Glashow talks about the crucial interplay between unexpected discoveries and planned research in science. He demonstrates the point on many historical examples. Serendipity means to look for a needle in a haystack but to f...
~ published: Tuesday at 02:41 ~ permalink
Russia recognizes independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia
The upper house of the Russian Parliament (Council of Federation) has voted unanimously (130-0) to ask President Medvedev to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent countries. By the rules of statistics, it could have been expected that the lo...
~ published: Monday at 03:33 ~ permalink
Richard Dawkins & Steven Weinberg on religion and science
Playlist (8 parts, 85 minutes)These two prominent atheists, of course, share a lot of opinions. But you can see some funny differences: for example, Dawkins thinks that the anthropic explanations are "elegant"....
~ published: 08/24 at 08:47 ~ permalink
Joe Biden and global warming
Barack Obama will pick Joe Biden as his running mate. When it comes to climate change, Biden seems to be just another mad man:Face global warming or global conflict (2-page interview)As a presidential candidate, he said that global warming will destroy th...
~ published: 08/22 at 23:52 ~ permalink
Strings 2008: Friday
You may go to the main Strings 2008 page on this blog; that page includes the live webcast. This Friday report includes a shortened version of Hiroši Ooguri's summary of all talks and David Gross' philosophical remarks and visions for the future. See als...
~ published: 08/22 at 00:07 ~ permalink
Strings 2008: Thursday
You may go to the main Strings 2008 page on this blog; that page includes the live webcastSteve Gubser begins the Thursday session with a review talk about AdS/QCD and QCD at finite temperature: his PDF is here.The first task is to find the free energy of...
~ published: 08/21 at 01:25 ~ permalink
Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia: 40 years later
Video 1: Pictures mostly from Prague. The sound features (otherwise patriotic) radio hosts who are telling the people that it makes no sense to resist physically because the invaders are far too strong - a theme about "adaptation" that we've kno...
~ published: 08/20 at 01:31 ~ permalink
Strings 2008: Wednesday
You may go to the main Strings 2008 page on this blog; that page includes the live webcastLance Dixon starts the morning session (the only one today) by a talk about the structure of gauge-theoretical and gravitational scattering (on-shell) amplitudes: PD...
~ published: 08/20 at 00:34 ~ permalink
Oslo 2008, 33rd IGC: geologists are skeptical
Last week, Oslo (Norway) was hosting the 33rd International Geological Congress:33rd IGC Oslo 2008 (main website)They have talked about diverse topics related to geology and there are many interesting videos available on the website. But if you have 66 sp...
~ published: 08/19 at 23:38 ~ permalink
Strings 2008: Tuesday
First, great news from the world of awards.Wikipedia pictures above were taken by your humble correspondentJoe Polchinski (KITP, UCSB), Juan Maldacena (IAS Princeton), and Cumrun Vafa (Harvard University) joined other well-known physicists and won the 200...
~ published: 08/19 at 01:28 ~ permalink
Strings 2008: Monday
...and live broadcastClick the picture above for the Strings 2008 website. Click here for a separate window with the live webcast.Monday morningAt Strings 2008, some officials gave nice introductions in the morning. It was announced that 1 octant of the L...
~ published: 08/18 at 01:06 ~ permalink
Climate debate: realist Monckton beats alarmist Littlemore
Start with the bottom part (1/4) to listen to this radio debate on climate change. A podcast page dedicated to the event is available, too. The debate is a full-fledged war, starting with discussions of Littlemore's blog's financial connections to organiz...
~ published: 08/17 at 22:40 ~ permalink
LHC: panoramic pictures
Peter McCready has combined 102 high-resolution photographs of the LHC collider and its detectors into 12 amazing virtual-reality, full four-pi-steradian simulations that include some authentic sound. You can drag and move the picture and hear the natural...
~ published: 08/17 at 08:57 ~ permalink
Koutsoyiannis vs RealClimate.ORG
In this dose of peer-reviewed skeptical literature about the climate, we look to the Hydrological Science Journal. D. Koutsoyiannis, A. Efstratiadis, N. Mamassis, and A. Christofides wrote a textOn the credibility of climate predictions (PDF).They simply ...
~ published: 08/17 at 03:26 ~ permalink
The oxygen crisis
Most mainstream media have abandoned almost all quality control in their science reporting that is now arguably slightly below the image of science as presented in the leading pornographic magazines.The latest extreme example of this observation comes fro...
~ published: 08/17 at 01:06 ~ permalink
Greenhouse paramilitia recommended to Australia
The director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a government-funded think tank (or, more precisely, a place where all thinking tanks), and his collaborator have recommended new greenhouse brownshirts to protect Australia and the world:Greenhous...
~ published: 08/16 at 13:47 ~ permalink
Sweet SUSY from F-theory
The annual conference begins on Sunday (click).In my opinion, the best hep-th paper this week wasMarsano, Saulina, Schafer-Nameki: Gauge mediation in F-theory GUT modelsEven the PC people should be happy about the paper because most authors are female. ;-...
~ published: 08/16 at 12:47 ~ permalink
Spurious three-loop diagrams
Sean Carroll et al. wrote a paper - see Cosmic Variance - whose main point is to superimpose several graphs indicating the allowed strength of two particular types of dark matter interaction.Well, my general feeling about this type of phenomenology is tha...
~ published: 08/16 at 07:52 ~ permalink
Tabarka, Tunisia & Pilsen, Czechia
Your humble correspondent is back from Tabarka, Tunisia. What a beautiful place and weather. The sea was clean, the sky was blue, the sunscreen was badly needed on the beaches, and the temperature was 25 °C higher than what we got after we returned to a ...
~ published: 08/16 at 07:27 ~ permalink
Zuzana Norisová: Pátá
Original: Petula Clark: Downtown, 1964(lyrics: go to downtown if you're feeling sad)Source: "Rebelové" (Rebels), a Czech 2001 retro-movieActress/singer: Ms Zuzana Norisová (*1979), SlovakiaEnglish lyrics (a reverse translation of the retro-mov...
~ published: 08/15 at 09:00 ~ permalink
Georgia attacks South Ossetia
Previous article about a similar topic: AbkhaziaSouth Ossetia eventually became the first region, ahead of Abkhazia (that is of course also getting ready), where the conflict erupted a few hours ago.The region won the independence from Georgia after the 1...
~ published: 08/08 at 01:05 ~ permalink
Dixon law firm: CyberSUSY
John Dixon from the Dixon Law Firm in Calgary submitted the first, 40-page-long preprint about CyberSUSY. He plans to write and submit four papers and they should have hundreds of pages in total.His law firm sounds even better than a patent office and bec...
~ published: 08/06 at 22:54 ~ permalink
SoCal: global warming escalates: 433 °C
FoxNews has a very interesting "most read" story at this moment.LA Times add a map and a videoAs you know, the climate warmed up by something like 0.6 °C during the last century. But as Marx Gore and Hansen Engels warned us, the warming would e...
~ published: 08/06 at 09:14 ~ permalink
Strominger vs Carlip and consensus scientists
Chiral gravity conjecture survives a coordinated attack of 11 wrong scientists & Strominger wins Chiral gravity is the asymptotically AdS_3 general relativity with the usual Einstein-Hilbert term, a cosmological constant, and a (chiral) gravitational ...
~ published: 08/06 at 00:17 ~ permalink
Information loss occurs to all orders of perturbation theory
Iizuka, Okuda, and Polchinski have confirmed something I always believed to be the case.Hawking has shown that the information is lost in the semiclassical approximation. We know that in the full exact theory, it is preserved. But is the information lost ...
~ published: 08/05 at 23:46 ~ permalink
Tevatron falsifies Connes' model of physics
This is just way too funny and I can't resist.Yesterday, Tevatron issued a press release (see also Google News)explaining that they combined the work of the two teams, CDF and D0 (a rare policy they have followed a decade ago to discover the top quark, to...
~ published: 08/05 at 09:15 ~ permalink
MIT: cheap solar energy storage
Daniel Nocera, a condensed matter physicist from MIT, led a team that found a new, arguably cheap method to store solar energy by splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. Links:Popular interview (video)More technical talk (video)Computerworld (written st...
~ published: 08/04 at 23:00 ~ permalink
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: 1918-2008
I can't write a full biography in this case. But... Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn died at the age of 89+. He studied mathematics in Rostov, married a chemistry student, divorced, and married a mathematician. So he was pretty close to science.As a leadi...
~ published: 08/04 at 07:03 ~ permalink
Interdisciplinary trap
Gavin Schmidt and Elisabeth Moyer wrote an essay for Nature:A new kind of scientist (click)It almost sounds like Steve Wolfram. ;-) Schmidt talks about it at RealClimate, too. They promote "interdisciplinary" research because it is "very im...
~ published: 08/04 at 01:25 ~ permalink
Moscow: DiCaprio is a Lenin clone
Prominent filmmakers in Moscow (backup I, II) have determined that Leonardo DiCaprio would be ideal to play Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin.His similarity to young Lenin is striking: he could play the role without make-up. He has Slavic features (DiC...
~ published: 08/03 at 23:06 ~ permalink
LHC will be launched on September 10th
The New York Times inform about the date. By the way, all sectors are now at 1.9 K or so except for 81 that warmed up to 3 K in average again...Original text (August 2nd, 2008):27 pretty hi-res LHC picturesSee Boston Globe (click!)All sectors except for 7...
~ published: 08/02 at 10:17 ~ permalink
Fix: IE7 with Sitemeter: Operation aborted
Update: Sitemeter has fixed the bug (click). Now, you may return the Sitemeter script wherever you like. The text below therefore becomes interesting for curious minds only.This posting is primarily addressed to those webmasters who experience a similar p...
~ published: 08/02 at 04:06 ~ permalink
Sheik sent Lamborghini to London for oil change
The media have informed about a "scandal" that I was e-told about by a terrified Alexander Ač.A wealthy sheik in Qatar needed to change oil in his USD 400,000 "Batman" Lamborghini. Because one can't quite rely on the local Arab guys, ...
~ published: 08/01 at 05:56 ~ permalink
Solar eclipse of August 1st
The solar eclipse will be total in strips of northern Canada, Siberia (there will be a live broadcast from Novosibirsk since 9:00 am GMT i.e. 10:00 am British Summer Time!), Mongolia, China: see a Google map of the path and a NASA home page for the event ...
~ published: 07/31 at 14:01 ~ permalink
Leaked Olympic ceremony: video
Press "Play" only if you want to see a sketch of the opening ceremony. The video was shot by journalists from South Korea that has no nuclear weapons. ;-)Better resolution here... (click)...
~ published: 07/31 at 11:12 ~ permalink
Tevatron favors light Higgs and MSSM
This is the very latest graph showing the top-quark mass (x-axis) and the W-boson mass (y-axis). The blue ellipse comes from the Fermilab:You see that LEP I (CERN) and LEP II/SLD (CERN and SLAC) were undecided but the Tevatron (FNAL) seems to prefer super...
~ published: 07/31 at 09:26 ~ permalink
Bangladesh gained 1000 squared km recently
Many climate alarmists, especially James Hansen, have been predicting a complete inundation of Bangladesh in this century. It has been one of the key examples how the "nasty" carbon-emitting rich nations are destroying the "nice" and p...
~ published: 07/31 at 03:19 ~ permalink
Black holes: quantum mechanics at macroscopic distances
SlavaM has figured out what is the best hep-th paper today. This work by a Benelux (or, more precisely, Bene) collaboration is just amazing and I am surely going to write about it:Jan de Boer, Sheer El-Showk, Ilies Messamah, Dieter Van den Bleeken: Quanti...
~ published: 07/30 at 13:29 ~ permalink
Slavery: the House apology lacks logic
The U.S. House of Representatives has apologized for slavery and segregation.Full text (click)Besides dozens of "Whereas" sentences summarizing and emotionally interpreting some random historical events whose precise role is unclear to me, the r...
~ published: 07/30 at 04:22 ~ permalink
Revkin & inaccuracies in the media
Andrew Revkin wrote an essay about the way how the media deal (and should deal) with uncertainties in science:Climate experts tussle over details, public gets whiplash (see also his blog)RealClimate and BackReaction are among the blogs that have responded...
~ published: 07/30 at 00:27 ~ permalink
Smartkit: SpinIn game
Full screen (click)Press arrow keys to determine the direction of gravity and get the smiling box out of the rectangle....
~ published: 07/29 at 12:54 ~ permalink
Low climate sensitivity and other inconvenient truths
In case I haven't yet linked it, here is the English translation of an introductory text of mine about climate change:Word file, PDF file (click)It is several months old....
~ published: 07/29 at 06:25 ~ permalink
Leonard Susskind, global warming, and groupthink
Leonard Susskind's new book is selling very well. An amazon.com user named Collosus [sic] wrote an interesting 3-star review:Susskind mainly does well here. He takes the time to give a pretty good qualitative grounding in a number of important concepts. H...
~ published: 07/29 at 00:10 ~ permalink
A new kind of mirror symmetry
Hep-th papers on MondayAmong the 17 papers that appeared on hep-th today, a majority is about stringy topics. Thank God, things are not getting crazy.Cvetic and Weigan design a a new "canonical" type of gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking with...
~ published: 07/28 at 11:11 ~ permalink
LHC: FAQ
Update: Physics World spreads a rumor about the first proton beams to be injected on August 9th into parts of the tunnel and on September 2nd-3rd to the whole ring.Original text from July 28th: Martin Coles at The (Montreal) Gazette wrote a couple of exce...
~ published: 07/28 at 03:45 ~ permalink
Loránd Eötvös: 160th birthday
Baron Loránd von Eötvös was born in Buda into an aristocratic family connected with Vásárosnamény, Hungary - a town near Ukraine - 160 years ago, on July 27th, 1848. Fortunately, Lóránd wrote both in Hungarian and German which is why most of the w...
~ published: 07/27 at 00:00 ~ permalink
Cargo cult science: a video
Many of us love Richard Feymman's 1974 commencement speech about cargo cult sciences, disciplines that seemingly seem to follow the scientific method but something must be wrong because no airplanes land.Feynman was trying to explain what's wrong with var...
~ published: 07/25 at 23:41 ~ permalink
The Sun seen to repeat the Dalton minimum
David Archibald's analysis (click)of the length of various solar cycles seems to indicate that right now, at the end of the (very long, perhaps 13.6 years, it's not yet really over) solar cycle 23, we seem to be in a similar situation as we were after the...
~ published: 07/25 at 04:48 ~ permalink