Quick Links

Posted on June 3, 2010 by woit
  • Several blogs have now pointed out the wonderful snarXiv site, which automatically produces random plausible-sounding hep-th entries. It’s something along the same lines as the famous Postmodernism Generator. For entertainment, you can try playing snarXiv vs. arXiv.
  • HEPAP is meeting in Washington today, presentations here
  • At Fermilab, the User’s Meeting continues today, talks here.
  • Last week was Brookhaven Forum 2010, talks available here.
  • Talks by Michaels Atiyah and Green at the Young Researchers in Mathematics 2010 meeting are available here. Atiyah reminisces about his early career and offers a lot of helpful career advice for young mathematicians. For the future, he’s betting that topology and symmetry will remain crucial themes in mathematics, with solitons continuing to be interesting since they live in the intersection. Green gives a very standard promotional talk on string theory. For some reason he explains to the young mathematicians the story of the string theory anthropic landscape explanation for the CC, then remarks that he personally finds it to be a cop-out.
  • The Edge web-site has a wonderful discussion with my Columbia colleague Emanuel Derman, covering his early career in particle physics, his days as a Quant, and thoughts about the current state of the finance business.
  • From Fabien Besnard, the news that Vladimir Arnold died today in Paris.
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    15 Responses to Quick Links

    1. Pingback: Career advice from the Fields medalists and some other mathematicians « Successful Researcher

    3. Tim van Beek says:
      June 4, 2010 at 4:29 am

      To stand a chance at “snarXiv vs. arXiv” I would need the abstracts, I guess, with the titles alone I don’t get above 70%.
      What got me in the first run was, for example, “non-compact compactification” (that’s probably too absurd to be computer generated).

    4. CWJ says:
      June 4, 2010 at 2:06 pm

      snarxiv is hilarious. Another one, though more sad (because the posters are completely serious), is viXra.org.

    5. nbutsomebody says:
      June 4, 2010 at 4:20 pm

      Arnold’s death is really a sad news.

    6. D R Lunsford says:
      June 4, 2010 at 10:03 pm

      Thanks for pointing out vixra.org – some of that stuff is really entertaining :) and some of it really is serious. That is, it’s not a joke.

      -drl

    7. Sakura-chan says:
      June 5, 2010 at 1:31 pm

      DR,

      One of the regulars on that site is a Mister Victor Porton, who believes his math discoveries have earned him the Abel prize:

      http://www.mathematics21.org/abel-prize.html

    8. Peter Shor says:
      June 5, 2010 at 4:05 pm

      Thanks for the link to snarXiv. One of the papers that got me had “new old inflation” in the title … I figured that one couldn’t possibly be real. Wrong!

    9. Marcus says:
      June 5, 2010 at 9:23 pm

      When you get 4 out of 4 right it calls you “Nobel Prize winner” and then if you get 5 out of 5 it says “Ed–is that you?”, beyond that I have not tried to go.

    10. Chris Oakley says:
      June 6, 2010 at 4:23 am

      Porton’s request reminds me of a Russian beer ad I saw once. I cannot remember the brand, but the poster showed a bottle with the caption: “Buy our beer. We need your money.”

    11. Ed says:
      June 6, 2010 at 11:55 am

      > and then if you get 5 out of 5 it says “Ed–is that you?”

      No. The Ed sentence is random for 100% results.

    12. Marcus says:
      June 6, 2010 at 3:56 pm

      Ed, I only made 5 tries in all and got 5 out of 5, all I know is that is what it said. Didn’t explore further. You could be right.

    13. PhilG says:
      June 6, 2010 at 4:32 pm

      I got to a Nobel Prize straight off, then got them all wrong after that until I was worse than a monkey.

    14. Hendrik says:
      June 7, 2010 at 6:08 pm

      Another topic:- Witten’s string-twistor marriage is getting an airing at:

      http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=simple-twist-of-fate

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