{"id":8278,"date":"2016-01-31T14:02:45","date_gmt":"2016-01-31T19:02:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8278"},"modified":"2016-02-02T17:49:12","modified_gmt":"2016-02-02T22:49:12","slug":"some-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8278","title":{"rendered":"Some News"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Not much time for blogging at the moment, with one reason that I&#8217;ll be giving a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.physics.rutgers.edu\/colloquium\/\">talk at Rutgers<\/a> on Wednesday, and need to get that prepared.  A few quick items:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>As some commenters have mentioned here, talks from the recent Munich conference (discussed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8132\">here<\/a>) are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.whytrustatheory2015.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de\/program\/index.html\">now available<\/a>.  From the little time I&#8217;ve found to look at them, I think <a href=\"https:\/\/videoonline.edu.lmu.de\/en\/node\/7477\">Rovelli&#8217;s<\/a> is the talk that makes the point about all of this most worth making, with <a href=\"https:\/\/videoonline.edu.lmu.de\/en\/node\/7479\">Massimo Pigliucci<\/a> good at explaining the wider implications.<br \/>\nWhile interesting comments on the talks are encouraged, for reasons that I can&#8217;t explain publicly, discussion here of the Polchinski contribution is not welcome.<\/li>\n<li>Besides watching <a href=\"https:\/\/videoonline.edu.lmu.de\/en\/node\/7485\">Gordon Kane in Munich on string theory predictions<\/a>, he also has<a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1601.07511\"> a paper about this<\/a> out now.<\/li>\n<li>Congratulations to Bert Kostant on the award of the 2016 Wigner Medal.  Kostant has been one of the major figures over the years in developing many deep ideas about the intersection of mathematics and physics, as well as a leading figure in the algebraic approach to Lie algebras and their representations.<\/li>\n<li>A lot of mathematicians and physicists want <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UCJdqltkDxOUIvkVlaluFjSw\">you to use TurboTax<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Steven Weinberg&#8217;s sensible opposition to guns in UT Austin classrooms has gotten a lot of media attention (for instance <a href=\"https:\/\/www.texastribune.org\/2016\/01\/26\/nobel-something\/\">here<\/a>).  Of the many obvious reasons why this is a bad idea, he correctly points out that it may well make it difficult for UT to recruit faculty.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: A commenter points out that more videos from the Munich conference are available <a href=\"https:\/\/videoonline.edu.lmu.de\/en\/wintersemester-2015-2016\/7475\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  John Horgan has a <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/cross-check\/physicist-sabine-hossenfelder-fears-theorists-lacking-data-may-succumb-to-wishful-thinking\">wonderful interview<\/a> with the remarkable and ubiquitous Sabine Hossenfelder.  Highly recommended.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: For news from the LHC, see last week&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/indico.cern.ch\/event\/448109\/other-view?view=standard\">Chamonix LHC performance Workshop<\/a>.  From <a href=\"https:\/\/indico.cern.ch\/event\/448109\/session\/1\/contribution\/12\/attachments\/1218457\/1780101\/plans-for-2016-chamonix16.pdf\">the summary<\/a>, the goal is about 30 inverse fb of pp collisions this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not much time for blogging at the moment, with one reason that I&#8217;ll be giving a talk at Rutgers on Wednesday, and need to get that prepared. A few quick items: As some commenters have mentioned here, talks from the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8278\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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-8278","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\/8278","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=8278"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8287,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8278\/revisions\/8287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}