{"id":2240,"date":"2009-08-20T17:30:34","date_gmt":"2009-08-20T22:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2240"},"modified":"2009-08-20T17:30:34","modified_gmt":"2009-08-20T22:30:34","slug":"various-and-sundry-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2240","title":{"rendered":"Various and Sundry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back from a final short summer vacation, with no further travel plans for the indefinite future. Some things I’ve recently come across that might be of interest:\t<\/p>\n

  • Tommaso Dorigo has posted<\/a> his contribution to a session on “Blogs, big physics and breaking news” held at last month’s World Conference of Science Journalists in London. There’s a recording of the session available here<\/a>. Besides Tommaso, one speaker was Matthew Chalmers, who talked a bit about the “String Wars”, including the role of blogs in it. The last speaker was CERN’s James Gillies who discussed CERN’s efforts to do a better job of putting out information about progress on the LHC project, under some pressure from the phenomenon of others disseminating such information if they don’t…. They’ve done a much better job of this recently, putting out informative press releases almost immediately after major decisions are taken. I’m glad to hear that he finds the role of blogs to have been a positive one.\n

    For a recent LHC update, see these slides<\/a> from a talk at the Lepton-Photon Symposium. On page 35 there’s a copy of the latest detailed schedule that I’ve seen, which one can compare to the continuing updates on progress here<\/a>.<\/li>\n

  • Also at Lepton-Photon, here’s a talk<\/a> by Shamit Kachru about using AdS\/CFT to build technicolor-type models of electroweak symmetry breaking that involve strongly coupled gauge theories. He and his wife Eva Silverstein will be leaving Stanford and joining the KITP in Santa Barbara this fall, see the press release here<\/a>.\n

    For lots more about the KITP, its programs and its finances, see this presentation<\/a> by David Gross to the NSF.<\/li>\n

  • I see there’s an interesting sounding workshop<\/a> at the Fields Institute this fall, but it scares me to see that it is described as a celebration of Allen Knutson’s 40th birthday. I seem to have gotten old very quickly, with conferences now devoted not only to people younger than me, but to people much younger than me that I recall meeting when they were just starting graduate school…<\/li>\n
  • My nomination for the all-time highest quality discussion ever held in a blog comment section goes to the comments on this posting<\/a> at Secret Blogging Seminar, where several of the best (relatively)-young algebraic geometers in the business discuss the foundations of the subject and how it should be taught.<\/li>\n
  • There’s a long and well-informed article here<\/a> on the multiverse, bringing together the “What the Bleep” crowd, mainstream physicists, theologians, and the logo of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics (the one Kachru and Silverstein are escaping from).<\/li>\n
  • For a selection of the latest in cutting-edge applications of new internet technology related to physics, there’s Gordon Watts with his Deeptalk<\/a>, the nLab site<\/a> of the n-category cafe, and the Twitter feed<\/a> of Cosmic Variance.<\/li>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Back from a final short summer vacation, with no further travel plans for the indefinite future. Some things I’ve recently come across that might be of interest: Tommaso Dorigo has posted his contribution to a session on “Blogs, big physics … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2240"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2248,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240\/revisions\/2248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}