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Agent of change
October 29, 2002
The Bogdanov’s Have Spoken
The Bogdanov brothers insist that they are not committing a hoax. They’ve written to Aaron Bergman, insisting that they are on the up & up.
I’ve read their Annals of Physics paper, and am convinced that it is well-executed nonsense.
The editors of Social Text claimed that they were taken in by Sokal’s phony article because they thought that he was sincere. Sokal’s rejoinder was that his sincerity was irrelevant to whether the contents of his paper were sense or nonsense.
Here, too, the “sincerity” of the Bogdanov brothers is surely a non-issue.
DGKV
I’ve been reading Dijkgraaf, Gukov, Kazakov and Vafa. They point out the obvious fact that the Vandermonde determinant (which arises from fixing the overall U(N) symmetry of the integral) that appears in the Matrix Integral can be represented using Fadeev-Popov “ghosts”.
So far, not too surprising. What had not occurred to me before they mentioned it, is that this leads to a much simpler set of Feynman rules for the perturbative evaluation of the Matrix Integral. It’s obvious, in retrospect, but leads to some very nice calculations.
October 28, 2002
Not Ready for Primetime
I think I really scrooched the pooch on that one.
Converting this blog to .xml with MathML extensions proved even worse for accessibility than I imagined. Of course it rendered beautifully in Mozilla. But Internet Explorer refused to render the page at all, and OmniWeb decided to download the source, rather than attempting to render it in the browser.
I guess we’re not there yet, in terms of MathML. (Heck, maybe we’re not there yet in terms of XHTML.) I don’t know what that means for the future of using weblogs to comment on the archives. In the short term, it seems more than a little inadequate.
Anyway, I will leave a copy of the current index in MathML-enabled format, so that the brave among you can see whether your browser is manly enough to render it.
Monkey See, Monkey Do
In my previous entry, I gave an example of MathML in action. Unfortunately, Mozilla doesn’t recognize that a file contains MathML unless it ends in .xml. A .html file just won’t cut it. It took me a looong time to figure out why I couldn’t see the syntactically-correct MathML rendered in my browser.
Eventually, I just changed all my templates to spit out filenames with extensions .xml, and all was good. But then I had to fool web surfers into downloading files with .xml extensions when they had gotten used to the .html counterparts.
Mod_rewrite to the rescue! I created the following .htaccess file for my blog directory,
# based on example in # http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html RewriteEngine on RewriteBase /~distler/blog/ # parse out basename, but remember the fact RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ $1 [C,E=WasHTML:yes] # rewrite to document.xml if exists RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.xml -f RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.xml [S=1] # else reverse the previous basename cutout RewriteCond %{ENV:WasHTML} ^yes$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html
deleted all the vestigial .html files, and I was good-to-go.
October 27, 2002
With Enough Eyeballs: A Manifesto
“With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
— Linus Torvalds
In my previous comments about the Bogdanov hoax, I alluded to this oft-quoted maxim from the world of open-source software, implying that analogous benefits flowed from the use of the eprint archives to disseminate research results in physics.
But is the analogy really correct? What if there really weren’t a mechanism for the thousands of readers of the source code to report back on the bugs that they have found (or to suggest improvements), except perhaps by releasing software packages of their own? Would “Torvald’s Law”, as it is sometimes known, still hold? Would we really still receive full benefit of those thousands of eyeballs?
Or, to put it differently, does hep-th need the analogue of Bugzilla?
Well, Bugzilla is probably not quite the right model, but I do hope that perhaps the weblog might provide such a model. While this idea has occurred to others before, three developments make me sanguine that perhaps now might be the time for it to take off:
- The development of quality weblogging software like Movable Type eases the burden by automating most of the content-management.
- The Trackback feature of Movable Type provides an automated way to link back to another site which references a given article. Without this feature, it would be hard to discover what others might have said by way of followup on a given topic. Since there is an Open Specification for Trackback, it can be incorporated into other software, perhaps someday including the archives themselves (“Click here to see commentaries on this paper.”).
- MathML 2.0