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Low-functioning pinhead...
October 30, 2003
Dark Matter Flowchart
The experimental situation in cosmology has undergone a mini-revolution in recent years. But, theoretically, many things remain as murky as ever. Hence the continued relevance of the Dark Matter Flowchart, which should be committed to memory by all serious students of the field. [Tip 'o the hat to Aaron Bergman.]
October 29, 2003
Updates
Henrik Gemal updated his Acronym plugin for MovableType, to version 0.5. So I, in turn, had to update my patch, which adds support for abbrs and other righteous aspects of marking up abbreviations. It sounds like Henrik may roll my changes into a future version of his plugin, obviating this little waltz.
Apache 2.0.48 is out, fixing a number of bugs.
No, I haven’t installed Panther yet. Most likely, next week …
October 28, 2003
Miscellaneous
Blogging has been light over here at Musings. But I have not forgotten about y’all.
Dvali and Kachru have a new paper out on their New/Old Inflation proposal. I’ve been engaged in discussions with them about my previous complaints. I’ll post something when we’ve converged on some sort of quasi-consensus. Suffice to say that the constraints can be satisfied by taking (in the notation of my previous post) , and .
Shamit has been busy on other fronts, with a paper with Gukov and collaborators attempting to revive an old proposal of Rohm and Witten for stabilizing the moduli in compactifications of the heterotic string with -flux. The new wrinkle, they argue, is that the -flux can be fractional, rather than integral, which, if the fraction is small enough, leads to an AdS vacuum with small cosmological constant (in the approximation that supersymmetry is unbroken).
MovableType Comment Spam continues to be a problem elsewhere in the blogosphere. But not here at Musings, where some simple anti-spam manoeuvres have proven remarkably effective. Since my mt-comments.cgi script has not yet disappeared from Google’s listings, I still see an average of a two attempted robo-postings a day. But all that does is land the chickenboners in my IP Ban List.
October 20, 2003
If It Ain’t Broke …
An innocent attempt to “improve” the Comment-Entry form had the effect of disabling comments over the weekend. This was not an anti-spam tactic.
Should be fixed now.
Thanks to Thomas Dent for bringing my clumsiness to my attention.
October 18, 2003
Camino and MathML
As previously announced, Dave Haas’s MathML-enabled build of Camino is out and works with this blog (as well or poorly as any current Mozilla build on MacOSX). You need the Mathematica Fonts installed and you should add
user_pref("font.mathfont-family", "Math1, Math2, Math4"); user_pref("font.mathfont-family.\u2212.base", "Math1");
to your ~/Library/Application Support/Camino/user.js file.
Update (10/18/2003): Dave Haas writes:
FYI — I changed the default
all-camino.jspref file to include the fonts listed on your blog. On my next build, it should display (presuming the fonts are installed) as “correctly as one could hope” without any additional effort on the user’s part.
October 17, 2003
Peas, Carrots, Beans
My daughter brought home the following problem from her 2nd grade math class:
You have 10 pots in which to plant vegetables. You can plant either peas, carrots or beans in each pot. You could plant 7 peas, 2 carrots and 1 bean plant, or 3 peas, 5 carrots and 2 beans, or … as long as you have at least 1 plant of each type and a total of 10 plants. How many different combinations are there?
This is a wonderful problem … for a slightly older child. My daughter’s answer, “more than 10,” was arrived at by a really noble attempt at brute-force enumeration. For 2nd graders, who have not yet mastered division, the actual solution is tantalizingly beyond their grasp.
Let’s solve a simpler problem first. Say we just want to plant two vegetables: peas and carrots. Line the 10 pots up in a row. We’ll plant all the peas on the left and the carrots on the right, and we’ll put a cardboard divider between them. There are 9 places to put the divider, so there are 9 different combinations of 2 vegetables that can be planted in the 10 pots. For 3 vegetables, we need to put in 2 dividers (peas on the left, carrots in the middle and beans on the right). There are 9 places to put the first divider and 8 places to put the second divider (since we’ve already taken one of the slots it could go in). That sounds like possibilities. But we’ve overcounted, since swapping the locations of the two dividers gives us the same configuration of plants. So the correct answer is combinations. [More generally, with pots and types of vegetables, there are