The year in review.

This is probably the last post of the year, here at the Shores of the Dirac sea. So here is what happened. We’ve been up and running for four months. This is the 74th post so far (not too bad for a start). Now that the initial hoopla is gone, we are at about views [...]

Read Full Post »

Newton in the NYT

Well, we have not said anything new while the holidays have been going on. That’s not about to change. In the meantime you might want to take a look at the op-ed blog article in the New York Times about Newton. It actually explains quite a bit about calendars and various fixes that were put [...]

Read Full Post »

Happy Festivus!

For some reason this year I’m getting into the Holiday spirits. I would like to wish all of you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah or happy whatever else you might be celebrating. Clearly, you should take advantage and celebrate Festivus tonight with your family or friends. This year seems most appropriate for this celebration, as [...]

Read Full Post »

Blog aggregators?

I got an e-mail today from Regator, informing me that we at the Shores of the Dirac Sea have been picked to be in their physics section. The e-mail is from a blog aggregator site. As it sounds, this is a site that links to blog posts and organizes them. It is supposed to help [...]

Read Full Post »

Doing research on a blog

I’ve always wondered if this blog medium might be useful for doing research. The natural place for academic physics research usually goes by publishing papers and waiting for a response in the form of other papers. This model works extremely well, until one finds oneself publishing something extremely speculative, in which case it does not [...]

Read Full Post »

Walking on eggs

  I’m in a mood today. I have a slow internet connection and all of you should be walking on eggs in my presence. As the picture above shows, I have been able to do that in the past.   Any reply to this post that I don’t fancy shall be deleted without comment.

Read Full Post »

Gauge/Gravity duality in South Africa

For the most part of last week I was attending a conference on Gauge/Gravity duality in Stellenbosch, South Africa. That was the reason I was in Africa in the first place. The link to the conference site is here, and pretty soon they will have the slides and audio of the talks online.  We were [...]

Read Full Post »

The call of the wild.

I was without e-mail or the internet for a while falling in love with Africa. Now I’m back tending the fort and I find that I missed the very interesting discussion on AdS/CFT that happened in the meantime.  I’ll tell you more about South Africa later on, but let me tell you that petting the [...]

Read Full Post »

One more thing

For the small minority of readers who are not entertained by ancient Jazz clips, here is a quick puzzle. Consider the quantum mechanics of a particle moving in a plane, paramatrized by coordinates x and y, and feeling the effect of the potential ,  is the spectrum continuous or discrete? (For a certain generation of [...]

Read Full Post »

A short break

This week marks the end of the semester, and as an academic my life is organized by semesters. This is then the end of my first semester blogging. I have enjoyed many interesting discussions with many of our readers, mostly about quantum gravity . Many concerns I’ve had proven to be a non-issue, I’m pretty [...]

Read Full Post »