Saturday loose ends

Santiago is still standing after the storm yesterday which caused a couple of blackouts through the night (link from here).

I fear that this means that my code which was running overnight will not have been saved, so I'll have to go back and restart that some time this weekend.

In the meantime I've been trying out a new piece of software: Mnemosyne, which is similar to the interval learning software, Genius, which I wrote about some time back. The benefit of Mnemosyne is mostly that there are plenty of ready made word lists in Spanish and Chinese (amongst many other languages). The interface takes a little more time to get comfortable with, mostly due to its simplicity, but it seems like another good system for interval learning. (NB. See also Kevin's page with some great links to more Chinese files for Genius)

This morning I also found a series of lectures at the Perimeter Institute (as I followed a link from Bee's blog) which look excellent. In particular, this course from Alex Buchel which is an ongoing course on String theory promises to be a valuable resource for those starting off in this subject without any other directed learning. Also check out the extensive course on Quantum field theory.

(Random, no context link to a multigigapixel panorama from the Online Photographer. I shan't be processing anything like this any time soon!)

Anyway, another busy weekend beckons including the promise of plenty of good Chinese and Korean food tonight with a Korean birthday to go to. Kimchi supplied by yours truly.

Blogrolling

Chaoyangmen as taken a couple of weeks back:

Click to view the full image. Panorama created with ArcSoft Panorama Maker 4, by far the best software I've found so far.

The blogroll in the left column has finally been updated to reflect most of my Google Reader content.

The Criteo blogroll to the left is currently underwhelming me with the content that it's providing. As I wrote a few posts back, this tracks which blogs readers of this blog also read, though it can only track blogs with the criteo tracker installed. It's going to take more time and more people to install this for anything useful to come of it and it seems that people are being put off too soon to really see any benefit. I'm going to give it 6 months and see what happens.

Rounding up

I'm resynching as my mathematica code whirls away in the background, losing decimal places and approximating integrals as it does so. Now, I thought I'd put my weekly summary in a slightly more appropriate place so, when possible, Friday will be the day I attempt to compact the week's web finds into a few bite-sized morsels.

• Where better to start than perhaps the finest mathematically orientated all-male a capella group your likely to find at Northwestern University. From Flip Tomato comes a fine Valentine's offering from the Klein Four Group.

• To go with your musical harmonies, Clifford picked up on a particularly stunning astronomical harmony. In fact this story is more than just a pretty picture. The signals from this particular object (a white dwarf surrounded by the shell it threw off in its old age) don't behave as one may naively expect, but from recent studies of several similar objects it looks like the answer may have been found.

• Also in an artistic vein is a link to the work of Vija Celmins on John Baez's diary (Feb 11th). Well worth a look.

• Asymptotia as well as Cosmic Variance have been posting their favourite titles of papers on the arxiv. OK, so maybe we don't get out enough, but this week not only was there a good title from a friend of mine, but what looks to be a rather interesting paper. In Matrix Big Brunch, James Bedford et al extend the work of A Matrix Big Bang to include a big crunch in their cosmology and glue together the big bang and big crunch geometries to get a closed cosmology. Using matrix string theory, both of these singularities are resolved though it seems like there are some questions regarding the perturbative nature of the theory at the turning point between big bang and big crunch. Any additional commentary on the paper is welcome.

• Another good explanation from Bee at Backreaction talks about our fascination with understanding the universe on ever smaller scales, and in particular gives another nice explanation of why we should all be aware of what's going on at the LHC and the ILC. The questions of whether we should be spending the large sums of money on these things are discussed at the end, but there's a huge amount one can (and should) say on this subject.

• As I noted in the last post, there's a good review of Michael Dine's new book over at Jacques Distler's Musings. As I said in my review, it's a good overview of a lot of topics. It's not going to get you up to research speed but it will point you in the right direction.

• I've mentioned it before but I thought I'd also note it in a summary post that for a very nice introduction to 'the world as a hologram', you can't go far wrong with this video from Raphael Bousso. As I discovered from showing this to some graduate students, in order to generate some discussion, a basic knowledge of black holes is useful.
  

• There's a truly stunning movie linked via Pharyngula of the mechanics of DNA replication. No prior knowledge required, but what looks like a fun animation is backed up with some unbelievably complicated calculations. (Note that in the comments is a note which I don't claim to understand on a technical level but it seems to indicate that aspects of this model - for it is only a model - may have been discredited). See some more, impressive biological animations at this site.

• While I'm on movies, and in Japan: For all your trivia about both contemporary and classic Japanese cinema go to Midnight Eye. Absolutely rammed full of good information about the weird, the wonderful, and everything in between.

• In software I thought I'd share a find this week which is making the use of Windows Live Messenger (WLM) slightly less painful. As I've mentioned before I spend some time each day on WLM discussing work with various collaborators around the world. This is a great tool with which I've had many, many hours of useful conversations. With a little tinkering it's possible to write in tex and get an output of the conversation saved in order to remember the conclusions you came to and the paths you took to get there. With Messpatch (once you get over the gaudy web page) you can tinker with Messenger to get it looking and acting just the way you want, well, just about. I can't vouch for the amount of spyway which is put on your system when you get this program but Adaware should see to that.

Here endeth this weeks summary. If people see or write articles which they would like me to link to, then please ask. I'm very happy to do so if I think others will benefit.

Q+A

A few random bits and pieces for now. I still have to discuss the trip last Sunday to Nara including the visit to a temple with some of the oldest wooden structures in the world. The post needs some serious editing and will have to wait.

Some quick links for now. First, the excellent videos from the ASTI summer school are back online, having been unavailable for some time. These are perfect for first year particle physics students and would probably be good for keen undergraduates, too.

Secondly, a software tip: I'd used Google Desktop Search as a superb way to search within files (specifically for searching through the jungle of PDFs in the mire of folders on my computer) for a couple of years now, expecting by default that Google software would be the most convenient for a windows user. However, after a little searching I realised that there are many other very good free products out there. In particular, I've found that Copernic Desktop Search to be better at pinning down particular files and you can organise how the search is displayed. There's also a window where you can preview the files on the search page. It's not integrated within Firefox, as Google Desktop Search is, but I still prefer the interface. Anyway, if you haven't come across these products, they are vastly quicker than the default windows search function.

While we're on the subject, if you're a high energy physicist working with Firefox, I recommend the Spires search plugin. I can't find the original Mozilla page I installed the plugin from but there is one which looks identical to the one I use here. Save valuable seconds on your searches!

Having just had a good chat with Hari Dass, who gave an interesting talk on QCD strings from the lattice perspective, I have lots of leads to follow up...have a good weekend folks!