lumidek

javascript:void(0) Disclaimer: the commercial is not recommended to minors. Between 2:55 and 3:04, the woman says "once more, but it's the last time". ;-) I am getting ready for a trip to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, where our fellow TRF reader Alexander Ač moderates a debate about climate change tomorrow at 5 pm local time, Climate change: a threat for the 21st century or propaganda? featuring your humble correspondent and Prof Milan Lapin, a distinguished Slovak climate expert who... Read Full Story

John Baez is fascinated by the existence of four number systems, namely R,C,H,O, whose dimensions are 1,2,4,8. He's thinking about this mysterious stuff even when he tries to learn M-theory (at the Distler-owned Category Café). Let me admit that it looks like he is being distracted by marginal and irrelevant stuff all the time. When Richard Feynman was trying to teach the electromagnetic induction to his artist friend (who has successfully taught Feynman how to make paintings), the friend... Read Full Story

The reason behind the recent pause on this blog was a trip to Villeneuve-sur-Yonne in Bourgogne, i.e. to the French countryside. Some presentations including mine were given. Laurent Sacco kindly provided me with an excellent übertranslation: that's like a translation except that the content may be freely doubled, organized, completed, and otherwise improved. ;-) And I lived in a hotel owned by Leslie Caron. I've met some very fine people - French and Czech - and many stories could be covered... Read Full Story

A reader has pointed out an entertaining article on the arXiv. It was written by Bert Schroer and its name is Remarks on the world-sheet saga . As Jacques Distler has independently figured out on Clifford Johnson's blog , Schroer's general "reasoning" goes as follows: Only 0-dimensional particles are acceptable building blocks in physics. So string theory must be a theory of point-like particle fields with infinitely many components, too. It follows that one can never include winding modes... Read Full Story

Juliane Dalcanton asked the question whether anyone cares about the publications in Nature these days. Some people submit their papers not only into the fast arXiv, in order to be the first ones and to share the results quickly, but they still want to use the power of journal Nature to influence a broader public which requires the papers to be embargoed before they're printed. So in reality, all experts know about the new paper (from the arXiv) but they must pretend that they don't. I agree... Read Full Story

Sorry, this blog may be silent for one week. The Biology Center of the Czech Academy of Sciences has published The White Book on Genetically Modified Crops (PDF, click). On 98 pages, Prof František Sehnal, Prof Jaroslav Drobník, and their collaborators summarize and analyze the EU policies concerning GM crops and evaluate the results of their 30+ research papers that happen to show no negative health or environmental impact. (If you're growing something, the biggest risk of GMO seeds is that... Read Full Story

Vijay Kumar and Wati Taylor wrote a new paper, String universality in six dimensions, in which they argue that every low-energy supergravity action (or set of equations of motion) in six dimensions is realized (and UV-completed) as a stringy compactification. Although the stringy constraints may look very different than the field-theoretical constraints, especially the anomaly cancellation conditions (with the cute number 243 that you will see again if you read the paper), it turns out that... Read Full Story

The LHC is not the only experiment that will begin to collect the data later in 2009. The chamber has arrived: click here if the video is missing. CLOUD - Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets - just got closer to reality because of the operation you can see in the video above: their three-meter diameter cloud chamber has just arrived. On CLOUD nine (CERN press release) The experiment will try to find out whether the ions (similar to the galactic cosmic rays) influence the creation of clouds in... Read Full Story

The 2009 European Parliament elections were somewhat encouraging for the center-right and right-wing parties. Misery for social democrats as voters take a turn to the right Center-right and conservative parties won in almost all European countries. In Poland, the rightwingers secured about 80% of the votes and 88% of the seats, no kidding. In Hungary, right-wing and center-right parties won 82% of the seats. Center-right parties also won in the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Czechia... Read Full Story

Porsche's titanium mechanical chronograph with 800 parts is very accurate. Fourty copies were produced in 2005. Just for $150,000, it's yours: and it looks just like a digital watch from the outside. Daniel Holz was brave enough to reveal his technocratic character and asked the question how it was possible that companies could still sell mechanical watches even though they're less accurate, heavier, and more expensive than the quartz watches based on the piezoelectric properties of a mineral... Read Full Story