Book eggs

I’ve been intending on making a full writeup of recently read books, but have not gotten around to it as I tend to start a new book right after I finish the last (one of the many great things about being a Kindle user, more fangirling to come) and think “well… I’ll just wait until Read More …

Introducing phygg

My Sunday afternoon recover-from-jetlag hack was creating http://www.phygg.com. Phygg is designed to help sort through physics papers and discussion topics related to arXiv.org in the style of digg.com, initially focusing on astrophysics. I’m going to be using phygg to track papers I find interesting, so feel free to follow the rss feed. In addition, I’m hoping to convince a few of my astrophysicist colleagues to join in on the posting and voting, so stay tuned. Read More …

"Our stability is but balance" — Freeman Dyson on how to imagine quantum fields (via Gravity and Levity)

My introduction to QFT was incidentally very similar to http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/so-is-the-universe-made-of-tiny-springs-or-isnt-it/. In the last post I told the story of my own struggles with quantum field theory and what it is supposed to mean.  In this post (as promised), I want to let someone much more intelligent and eloquent tell the story of quantum fields. The Read More …

Foo Camp 2010 Redux

Tim O’Reilly describes it better, but I’ll do my best: Foo Camp is an invite only free event at tech publishing mogul O’Reilly’s corporate headquarters. Being invited meant a great deal to me. My biggest source of inspiration has always come from people, and a new friendship with someone who has an infectious spirit and story to tell can give me fuel–literally–for years. I’ve tried to do my best to give back some of the inspiration I stole from the pool to others while stocking up on protein packed chunks for exciting new projects. Foo was the perfect venue for this. Definitely life changing! Read More …

San Francisco and startups

I’ve been managing working with two startups part-part-time, mod a few sleepless nights, but both could benefit from a streak of full-time work, so when all the stars aligned with my personal and professional summer schedule I jumped at the chance and on a plane to San Francisco. I will arrive back in Zurich exactly coincident with the rest of my team for the true kickoff of my major PhD project. Read More …

Structure finding

I’m at a very specialized conference, on structure finding in cosmological simulations, outside of Madrid call haloes going MAD (MAD being the airport code for Madrid). At the end of a cosmological simulation we have a collection of particles, up to trillions these days, and to connect that to the observable universe we need to do some abstraction.

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