The title of this post is a famous question (posed, for example, by Joe Polchinski) which is modeled after an even more famous question by Ken Wilson, “What is Quantum Field Theory?”. I certainly can’t answer the first question, but Wilson’s question now does have a widely agreed upon answer (which is sadly not well […]
Month: August 2007
Turn Around
For those of you willing to stay up late, there will be a total eclipse of the moon on August 28 visible to various extents over most of the western hemisphere and some of east Asia. The show is a little late for me (some might call it early) as I’m on the east coast […]
Karesansui, Kinkakuji
Saturday, we did a swing through northwest Kyoto, where there are a whole bunch of famous temples with gardens, spanning pretty much the full possible range. They range from the dry rock gardens (karesansui, according to Google) at Ryoanji to the faintly preposterous Golden Pavilion at Kinkakuji, which is, as the name suggests, covered in […]
Nijo-jinya, Kaiseki, Nara
No update yesterday, because we went to Nara, about an hour away by train, and hurried out to get an early start. Thursday was a light day, anyway– the highlights were a visit to Nijo Jinya, which is a preserved Edo-period inn for feudal lords visiting Kyoto, and includes a number of slightly over-the-top security […]
For Your Weekend Enjoyment
Or, “Stealing Chad’s Ideas: First in a Series”. When you write ‘log’, do you mean base 10 or base e? What field do you work in? Update: Or base 2 for you CS-types.
Penguin suit
I’m off to Denver for a long weekend; two friends of mine are getting married (both PhD scientists, and exemplars of the two-body problem: one’s doing a postdoc at Princeton, the other at MIT…) I get to wear a tux, which is nice, because no one looks bad in a tux. In fact, a tux […]
Maldacena on the Beach
As I mentioned earlier, I’m currently attending the Simons Workshop in Mathematics and Physics at Stony Brook University. The weather finally warmed up today, and we relocated to Smith Point Beach to hear Juan Maldacena tell us a bit about AdS/CFT and gluon scattering. If you’re looking for a precis of the talk, I’m afraid […]
What is this “blog” you speak of
Some things I’ve noticed lately: Anton Zeilinger (Vienna) has a blog. It’s in German, but that shouldn’t be a problem, right? I found that out at Michael Nielsen’s place, where he’s started blogging again after a little hiatus. In an effort to improve on my bibdesk+bibtex+folder-full-of-local-pdfs system, I’ve been playing around citeulike, Papers, and Nielsen’s […]
Crystal healing
Lest this blog turn into a one-trick pony, let me tell you what I did today that’s of a little different flavor. I epoxied some stuff onto some other stuff. More importantly, I calculated a band structure. This amazes me. Sure, all you squa^Wsolid-state types out there do this every day, over your cereal even, […]
Tetsugaku no Michi
(These regular updates are brought to you by the loaner laptops in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency, and the fact that jet lag has me waking up at 5 every morning, well before the restaurant opens for breakfast. They may or may not continue from Yokohama when we get there, but for now, it […]