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December 17, 2003

Join the stringy discussion on news.groups

Posted by Luboš

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen!

A very interesting discussion has been started at news.groups - it is a name of a USENET newsgroup. If you’ve never heard of “newsgroups”, ask someone how can one use them. Teach your mailing program to deal with newsgroups, and register for news.groups.

Please feel more than free to write anything about string theory - or about the proposal to establish a purely string-theoretical newsgroup - at news.groups right now, because this newsgroup belongs to string theory for a couple of weeks before the internet will vote about the fate of this newsgroup. In fact, you SHOULD join.

You can access this newsgroup via the web, too. See

groups.google.com

For example, a guy interested in string theory pointed out the difference between the narrow and the broad meaning of string theory, and he said a couple of things about Brian Greene’s book and a comparison of a newsgroup on cosmic research with sci.physics.strings.

Come to news.groups to discuss the proposal to found sci.physics.strings - the new and kewl newsgroup that is supposed to have the highest information vs. noise ratio among all newsgroups on the internet.

Your decision whether you will participate or not will influence the opinion of other readers whether string theory is an irrelevant obscure theory studied by a couple of crazy people who are not able to use the internet and who don’t want to discuss anything with anyone, but who eat a lot of money from the state budgets worldwide! :-)

Is string theory important enough today that one of tens of thousands of newsgroups should be dedicated exclusively to string theory?

sci.physics.strings is the proposed name of the new newsgroup and the explanation why it should be created is here.

If someone wants to become a moderator, it is relatively easy to realize this dream at the present!

We will need a huge number of YES votes to make the newsgroup be founded, and therefore you are encouraged to inform all people who are interested in string theory around you.

All the best,
Luboš

Posted at December 17, 2003 1:49 AM UTC

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2 Comments & 0 Trackbacks

Re: Join the stringy discussion on news.groups

Hi Lubos and all.
Even though Lubos once label me as one of “the axis of evil” (Loopy people in sci.phys.research), which is NOT true (Urs can probably prove it for you guys since he met me.), I fully support this new exciting news group. I don’t know whether I know enough to contribute much, but I will read posts.

Now for technical matter. How can I exactly “vote” for the creation of the group?
Also, I better install Mozillar and MathL in my i-book soon.

Cheers, all.

Demian Cho

Posted by: Demian Cho on December 19, 2003 3:28 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Join the stringy discussion on news.groups

Hi Demian -

nice to hear from you!

When the discussion period is over a Call For Votes (CFV) will be issued on the groups which already had received the Request For Discussion (RFD). This CFV should contain all the information necessary about how to vote. Basically, a certain mail account will be given which accepts votes and and a valid vote will be an email to that account saying “I am (am not) in favor of the creation of sci.physics.strings” or some similar unambiguous statement.

You might also want to join the discussion over at news.groups .

Posted by: Urs Schreiber on December 19, 2003 5:39 PM | Permalink | Reply to this