Posts with this logo use 
Low-functioning pinhead...
September 28, 2004
La Ronde
(with apologies to Arthur Schnitzler)
Having swept aside my earlier prudery:
- My laptop is now paired with my bluetooth headset and my bluetooth phone.
- My bluetooth phone is paired with my laptop and my bluetooth headset.
- And the headset is paired with my laptop and my phone.
All very fin de siècle. But with all that pairing going on, there still seems to be a residuum of (serial) monogamy.
If I want to use the headset with my laptop, my phone must be either turned off or out of range. That’s not unreasonable; after all, I can’t expect the headset to function as an input/output device for both the laptop and the phone simultaneously.
But why is it that, if I want to sync the phone with the laptop, I need to turn off the headset first?
September 27, 2004
Collinear
A lot of people (myself included) got very excited by the fact that perturbative super Yang-Mills amplitudes seemed to take a very simple form when written in (super)-Twistor space and that, moreover, the tree-level amplitudes can be recovered very elegantly from a topological string theory with target space the aforementioned super-Twistor space. But my ardour cooled considerably when it became apparent that, when one went to the one-loop level in the Yang-Mills, the aforementioned topological string theory would produce not just super Yang-Mills, but super Yang-Mills coupled to conformal supergravity.
Moreover, it appeared that the known one-loop amplitudes were not easily interpretable in terms of a twistor string theory. One could easily identify contributions in which the external gluons are supported on
- a pair of lines in twistor space (connected by two twistor-space “propagators”)
- a degree-two genus-zero curve (with a single twistor-space “propagator”)
- of the gluons inserted as above, but with the gluon inserted somewhere in the same plane as the rest.
This last type of contribution is hard to reconcile with some sort of twistor string theory.
It now appears that this pessimistic conclusion was a bit too hasty. Cachazo Svrček and Witten have traced the problem in their earlier analysis to a sort of “holomorphic anomaly.” Their criterion for collinearity in twistor space was that the amplitude should obey a certain differential equation. However, the differential operator in question, rather than annihilating the amplitude, give a -function whenever the momentum on an internal line is parallel to one of the external gluon momenta. It’s just a glorified version of
The amplitude “really” receives contributions only of types (1) and (2). The apparent contributions of type (3) come from exceptional points in the integration over loop momenta, where an internal momentum is collinear with one of the external gluons.
I wish I’d thought of that…
September 26, 2004
And now B2
First there was an itex2MML plugin for MovableType. Then I ported it to WordPress. Now Scott Bruns has ported the plugin to B2evolution.
So, in at least three different blogging systems you can type $\int_{-\infty}^\infty e^{-x^2} = \sqrt{\pi}$ and have appear in its stead.
In Scott’s honour, I’ve released another minor revision (version 0.9) of the itex2MML executable, squashing a couple more bugs. The source and a MacOSX binary are available from the usual place.
September 19, 2004
Best. Spam. Ever.
I just received the following message in my inbox.
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Evidently, this unsavoury site has been the subject of several joe-jobs in the past. In paranoid times like ours, one wonders how this one will go over…
September 17, 2004
Skype
… rhymes with hype. Yes, the bête noire of VoIP from the folks who unleashed KaZaA.
I downloaded the MacOSX client, and bought myself 10€ worth of SkypeOut credi