Always with the if onlys

I happened to stumble across an old post of mine, from back in the era of cold Beijing nights and surreal days which promised the unexpected around every corner. I've been away from there for over a year now, but it stays in your blood - everyone I know who has spent serious time there attests to this. The feelings of true love for that city are those of a stormy relationship, with highs and lows which even in retrospect bring back vivid feelings of elation and desolation.

In fact it wasn't the content of this particular post that I was reading, written around two years ago which caught my attention, but a little twang of nostalgia for the days that I took great pride in sculpting a post, paying attention to the flow and rhythm of every sentence and, on occasion if I was very lucky, causing others to comment that they had enjoyed the insights, the weirdness, the humour, or simply the string of words.

These days I'm busy, really really busy. I've had to slow down the social activities a little as I've turned my days inside out. Spending time in the office in the day and the library at night, reading the piles of papers that await my attention does not make for a very sociable timetable. I'm learning, I'm playing with new tools and ideas, and I'm enjoying it a lot, I would even go so far to say that I feel a current boost of creativity. But still the call of the open road was brought to my attention by the piece of writing that I put forth not so many moons ago.

Anyway, despite the momentum of work which I've promised myself will go on for the next couple of months at least - provided I don't burn out, I do feel the need to explore. Once again I'm feeling a little hemmed in by this beautiful, but undeniably small city. I want to get out at the weekends occasionally for an adventure, and though I enjoy my weekend trips to the local cafe where I continue with work, somehow I'm not feeling fulfilled by the current balance. It's a difficult balance to strike however, and the guilt and drive of wanting to get the work done must be carefully offset against my natural need for new stimuli.

Anyway, this Sunday I'll be heading to Madrid for the AdS collective at the beginning of next week, so I'm not going to be able to escape this time. However, I'll see what I can cook up for the coming weekends and hopefully look to post something more in line with what I have always envisioned this blog to be about.

String theory at Scitalks

I'm extremely happy to be working with Scitalks, which I've spoken about in several previous posts (see here for more). Lee Vodra and I have been in frequent contact. I was asked to set up a possible curriculum of video lectures on string theory for them to have as a featured set over the next month. I think this is a great idea and I hope that people will a) become interested in the subject and possibilities and b) ask questions about the material as it comes up.

At the end of the month I will act as guest blogger on the Scitalks blog where I will answer questions that people have raised. I urge others to come over to the blog and add their thoughts too. I hope to find an open-minded discussion developing.

One thing I pointed out was that it's not possible to create a curriculum in string theory which can start you out with the very basics (pop-science level) and in a month of videos work you up to cutting edge results in the subject. I hope however to be able to put together videos which will satisfy all levels. Those who are new to the subject will take most from the first sets of lectures. I hope that those at first year graduate level will gain most from the second week where there will be more prerequisite knowledge and then the final sets of lectures will be chosen as lectures on more advanced topics, for which knowledge of the foundations of the subject are expected.

I must point out that the lecture on 'Imagining the tenth dimension' featured on Scitalks is not one of my chosen videos and has nothing to do with the ten dimensions of string theory. This confusing video by musician and author Rob Bryanton is Rob's ideas of what extra dimensions may mean. Sadly this a) seems to have no mathematical formalism behind it and b) is completely unrelated to extra dimensions in the perfectly well-defined sense, discussed in string theory (though not exclusive to string theory).

In Rob's poll on his blog he is pleased that many people see his ideas as a combination of physics and spirituality. As a physicist, spirituality has absolutely nothing to do with my research and so anyone who claims to be motivated by this automatically loses a large amount of credibility in my book. Sadly this video is a great example of the clash between faith and science.

One thing I should note is that in Scitalks, just as in Wikipedia, though videos will appear which don't tie in with what most of us think of as good science, there will be voting and comment sections where people can voice their opinion about given videos. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but I feel positive that as long as people take up this great opportunity to build a library and social network of great videos and great minds that Scitalks will be a huge resource for those coming into as well as already established in science. As Flip Tomato points out, watching videos of a conference is not the same as being there, but it's vastly better than having nothing at all. The interactive aspects of Scitalks, due for release in the not too distant future will only add to the possibilities.

Anyway, I hope that this experiment will be a good chance to share some of the excellent videos out there on the subject. I have already suggested a fair few videos but am always keen to learn of more, so please tell me if you know of good recordings of string theory talks, at all levels.

Including your Feed Reader blogs in a blog roll

From the Google Systems blog are a set of instructions for taking the subscribed blogs in your Google Reader and automatically creating a blog roll which can be pasted into your blog. This takes about 2 minutes to set up and means a closer tie between the blogs you read and the blogs you advertise to others. Note that you can choose which blogs in your feed reader are included in the blog roll.

The new blog roll with a few new blogs can be found in the left column of this blog.

String blogging

Jacques Distler is currently blogging from Strings 2007. If anyone knows of other stringy bloggers then please let me know and I'll add them to the list.

Videos still to come.