Thanks to Turtle Island for the latest update on neutrino oscillation parameters. In summary: the normal hierarchy is looking good, as is maximal CP violation, and the two delta mass squares are around 2.5 x 10^-3 and 7.3 x 10^-5 eV^2, roughly as used in the Koide fits.
“That’s a very unusual charge”, he said, frowning at the monitor before him. The woman beside him shrugged. “That’s what it says”, she said. The price was down to 70 US dollars, just a little more than I had left on the NZ credit card. A few minutes earlier, the price had started out at 600 dollars, gone down to 100 for a moment, and in the morning back in the city it was set at 800. But I told them I did not have the money, and the price miraculously changed before their eyes. So we all get what we want this time, I suppose.
You gotta laugh at those random invisible bookmarks that you cannot delete from your favourites folder on your ipad browser.
That’s right: no recipient. A conference that I have been accepted to, and paid for already, suddenly cannot receive my emails. Of course, the entire thing could well have been a hoax to begin with. What next?
Some things are impossible to forget, even after you return from a place of complete forgetfulness near death. Like the string theory tachyons.
I first encountered these beasts in earnest in 1994, as a grad student in Canberra, where David Gross was giving a series of lectures on the heterotic string. Only two of the students were in the least bit interested in where this stuff was going, and he and I spent days poring over the structure of E8 and other things. But for me there was a snag, and I decided that string theory was not the way forward. The snag was the tachyons.
Much later, in 2006, I was working on motivic amplitudes for the Standard Model, and of course there was a connection to the damned tachyons. My long term online colleague, Michael Rios, was excited when I realized where the tachyons were in Francis Brown’s seminal new thesis on the associahedra. We would never forget it. I finished my thesis in 2007, and managed a brief stint as a postdoc at Oxford in 2009.
Of course I was determined to keep working on the amplitudes. The particle physicists were only just realizing how important this new approach was. I did everything I could to keep going with it. And everything I tried was thwarted by Big Brother, by torture, by abuse, by brainwashing, by thought policing, by manipulation. There was little I could do but watch, as the years passed and the physicists finally worked it out.
More recently, only a week or two ago, I had the chance to talk about it all again, here in the US. I joked to Michael Rios that I had forgotten it. Well, I have forgotten a great deal, but it comes and goes, depending on the circumstances. So here we are all over again. They think they understand what has happened, but it is not possible at all, for them to see, what I see. They are not even ready to try. It seems a waste of time, to fight Big Brother, but someone has to try, I suppose.
So now I cannot even save pdf files from my latex editor to MY OWN drives ...
From Kapranov’s lectures on the noncommutative Fourier transform, at the Streetfest at the University of Macquarie in Sydney in 2006:
The permutohedron for S4 gives the icosahdron. From wikipedia:
Like I said. Stronger.
No better proof that Big Brother exists: