{"id":254,"date":"2005-09-11T15:30:50","date_gmt":"2005-09-11T19:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=254"},"modified":"2005-09-27T09:55:28","modified_gmt":"2005-09-27T13:55:28","slug":"comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=254","title":{"rendered":"Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I realize that this is a low form of entertainment, but reading Lubos Motl’s blog<\/a> today has definitely livened up my birthday, which in recent years has been a rather sad occasion. It’s hard to say what is the funniest thing there since it’s all great stuff, including:<\/p>\n

1. Crazed, heavily ideological attacks (here<\/a> and here<\/a>) on climate scientists, who unlike Lubos, actually know something about the subject. The comment sections feature mathematician Greg Kuperberg, who has the hilarious idea that it’s possible to try and have a rational discussion with Lubos on this subject. <\/p>\n

2. Kuperberg’s attempts to endear himself to Lubos by attacking the evil Peter Woit, announcing that even though he doesn’t understand string theory (something he has shown a perverse interest in demonstrating publicly, besides his comments on Lubos’s blog, see here<\/a> and here<\/a>) he believes it because “string theorists seem credible, seem talented, and have appointments at top universities.”<\/p>\n

3. Lubos’s response to said attempts, comparing Kuperberg to some of his more “out-there” commenters.<\/p>\n

4. Lubos’s claims that neither Lee Smolin nor I know what we’re talking about when we point out that perturbative finiteness of the superstring is not yet proved beyond two loops, followed by his claim that QFT perturbation series are Borel-summable, nonsense that Jacques Distler then writes in to correct.<\/p>\n

Some may object that it’s highly unfair to use the fact that some of its practitioners and supporters are out of their gourds to make fun of string theory, but, hey, it’s my birthday, so I can do what I want today, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I realize that this is a low form of entertainment, but reading Lubos Motl’s blog today has definitely livened up my birthday, which in recent years has been a rather sad occasion. It’s hard to say what is the funniest … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254","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\/254","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=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}