Afghanistan: Robert Fisk

"And on this historic day – when Barack Obama plunges ever deeper into chaos – let us remember the British retreat from Kabul and its destruction in 1842."

Taken from:

This strategy has been tried before

Robert Fisk.

Anti GZK for Photons?

The Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cutoff tells us that charged particles don't make it through the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) photon radiation. High energy protons just hit low energy photons and voilà, we lose them. Nevertheless there are indications that high energy photons fare better; the CMB seems to be more transparent to them.

I don't understand this, because long ago, I studied Sakurai's Vector Meson Dominance (VMD) Model , at the energies then available, early 70s, it was doing fine. The model used the Lorentz character of photons and vector mesons to study processes with either of them with a unified approach. All one had to do was to factor out the different strengths of electromagnetic and hadron forces.

The results presented in the New Scientist article above, put this into question at high enough energies.

Phenomenologically though, one can definitely break Lorentz invariance; this being an old game for physicists, and see what happens.

Giovanni Amelino-Camelia et al. do just that in:

Threshold anomalies in Horava-Lifshitz-type theories

Once this breakdown is allowed, even Poincaré symmetry is broken, one can start to make sense on the High Energy Gamma Rays Transparent Universe (awful acronym I'm sure nobody will use, HEGRTU).

Maybe this phrase will be more memorable. Anti GZK for Photons. (AGZKP, I doubt it).

What I mean by that, is that protons are not allowed at high energies, but photons are. This is really unaesthetic, and unfair, but if true; the LAGO collaboration of which I am a member, may have a shot at  fifteen minutes of fame.

LAGO, an upshot from AUGER, will benefit from this asymmetry, and both collaborations would be famous. One for showing that GZK is there for protons, and the other for showing that it is not there for photons. No wonder we didn't think of that before, that will be really ugly. It will prove that the heavens are really much less than perfect.

Sayonara, Plato!

Essay on students

You can read here, the opinions of a colleague in Chilpancingo.

Wordsworth, Anybody?

"When I interviewed McEwan about his 2007 novel On Chesil Beach, we talked of the problems that beset literature with any upfront “green” agenda. First, the trap of propaganda: “Fiction hates preachiness? Nor do readers much like to be hectored,” McEwan warned. Equally unpromising is a too-familiar dystopian tradition that thrills readers with flesh-creeping disaster scenarios of flood or fire: “We’ve had so many dystopias that we’re brain-dead in that direction”. However, McEwan did hold out some hope for climate-change fiction that would offer “something small and fierce? Maybe it needs an Animal Farm. Maybe it needs allegory. But if you’re going in that direction, you need a lot of wit.” McEwan did go in that direction, and has duly come up with a comic solution. His new novel Solar, due in March, will depict the misadventures of a burnt-out physicist, Michael Beard, who in the midst of mid-life mess stumbles on a clean-energy technology that might just save the planet. It will feature eco-emergency not as the didactic centrepiece but more of a “background hum”. "

Taken from:

A tide of green ink.

Comcast

I was at Lucent from 1999 to 2001. I am sure some of my buddies that were let go like myself, now are manning Comcast. I was not an experienced software engineer, I was a physicist trying to change careers. I don't mean to say that everybody who was let go, found a job at Comcast. What I mean is that the ones that weren't have to find a way to make a living now. In my case this means going back to research and distinguish myself.

Times are hard, but now NBC is inside Comcast. A new change is coming.

Disillusion

Disillusion

I fight wars without weapons

I fight battles without remorse

I punch and scrach

When I feel there is no way out

I have a twitch

i-----it makes me f---feel better

I wrote a theif a letter

He stole it, man I should have known better

I took a pill, thought it would make me better

I lost my mind, while I was too busy trying to find unlimited time

I fight wars without weapons

My mind helped me win

Down on my knees not sucking but contemplating his fate

I scream out his name, as the knife comes down

For I am the bringer of pain

A vampire through the mist

A fate for the men that can't resist my poison kiss

I fly through the night, the next victim in my sight.

I fight battles without remorse

I ride on a pale horse

Hands in the air not giving up but contemplating the fate of the human race

I scream out, as fire scorches the earth

For I am the bringer of suffering

A god through the clouds

A fate for the sinners of the world

I puch through thee clouds, snuff out all life

I feel all the pain, all the suffering

I take it in and store it all in my congested mind

Just waiting for the right time

I will shine bright you will see

I have been everything that I can be

Everything you wanted me to be

You were nothing but the time

The time I needed to have

Time was all I needed from you

I refuse to admit, it was me

The total bitch

I'm not crazy

I do n----not have a tw-----twitch

I remember the hugs, the sweet words of love

The sweet sounds of a heart breaking

You were the sucker, the one I loved to hurt

I was mean to you, why do you still love me

Having you was just a game to me

A heartbreaker, that's me

A lover, could never be

A bitch, obsurd

Welcome to my life

My name i-----is

Disillusion

Written By (Disillusion) I mean (Hope Sanders)

Taken from:

Disillusion - Poetry

Oort Cloud and Galactic Tides

"Abstract. We report the first results of a research program to explore the sensitivity of the orbits of Oort cloud comets to changes in the strength of the Galactic tides in the plane of the disk and also to changes in the mass of the host star. We performed 2D simulations that confirm that the effects of the tides on comet orbits are sensitive to a star’s distance from the Galactic center. A comet cloud closer to the Galactic center than the Sun will have comet perihelia reduced to the region of the inner planets more effectively by the planar tides alone. Similar results are found for a star of smaller mass. We also show how this phenomenon of comet injection persists for a set of alternative Galactic potential models. These preliminary results suggest a fruitful line of research, one that aims to generalize the study of comet cloud dynamics to systems different from the Solar System. In particular, it will allow us to study the roles played by comet clouds in defining the boundaries of the Galactic Habitable Zone."

Autopoiesis?

Many years ago Maturana and Varela propsed a kind of self-regulation process, with this name to explain life. Now Guillermo González is using it to check how much alive inorganic matter is.

The abstract above is from:

Effects of the Planar Galactic Tides and Stellar Mass on Comet Cloud Dynamics

Fermi's Question: Where Are They?

Back in the days, when Orson Welles was scaring the wits out of most about everybody with a Martian Invasion. Enrico Fermi asked his buddies at Chicago. Where are they? Meaning if we were here, why did we seem to be alone?

"Most astronomers today believe that one of the most plausible reasons we have yet to detect intelligent life in the universe is due to the deadly effects of local supernova explosions that wipe out all life in a given region of a galaxy.While there is, on average, only one supernova per galaxy per century, there is something on the order of 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. Taking 10 billion years for the age of the Universe (it's actually 13.7 billion, but stars didn't form for the first few hundred million), Dr. Richard Mushotzky of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, derived a figure of 1 billion supernovae per year, or 30 supernovae per second in the observable Universe!"

"It isn't known if every hypernova is associated with a GRB. However, astronomers estimate only about one out of 100,000 supernovae produce a hypernova. This works out to about one gamma-ray burst per day, which is in fact what is observed."

"What is almost certain is that the core of the star involved in a given hypernova is massive enough to collapse into a black hole (rather than a neutron star). So every GRB detected is also the "birth cry" of a new black hole."
Taken from.

The Daily Galaxy

Now we know, their planets got sterilized.

Emeritus Professor Stephen Hawking was giving lectures, or at least telling journalists, about this answer to Fermi's question, a few weeks back.

It sounds good to me. We are alone, because we are lucky.

Actually the process Hawking was popularizing was about big rocks hitting us from out there, far in space.

How long will we be lucky? That is my question.

Here in Chilpancingo, a group of us are looking for evidence for an affirmative answer to Fermi's question. They are here.

Actually I do not believe they are, but I am not the one that is going to stop my friends from looking. Maybe they find Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and who knows what else.

This is fun. Until it isn't, and we see that ominous cosmic ray, or big rock, coming to get us, as very likely many other civilizations were taken down.

Nickel-56 Supernova

"The explosion generated several Suns' worth of radioactive nickel-56 and vast quantities of other lighter elements, such as carbon and silicon. Gal-Yam says that it is the radioactive decay of the nickel that kept the explosion glowing for months."

Taken from:


Nature News

This is the biggest star explosion ever recorded. It was 200 solar masses. The light lasted several months.

⁵⁶ Ni is formed, and radioactively disintegrates powering the explosion for months!

Obama at West Point

I supported President Obama against McCain. I do not vote in the US, but I believe I was not alone in the world in having an opinion on the most powerful position on Earth.

This is my reaction to today's speech. I want to clarify the decision to myself, and hopefully for some readers.

Obama has never been at war, just like the past President. He didn't even have the chance. He was too young for Vietnam. He is a product of the US educational system, he believes the American narrative. A city upon a hill.

The number of weapons of mass destruction in the US is unprecedent in the History of Mankind. Nevertheless, those weapons cannot be used in Afghanistan.

I believe in the power of the mind, and the President has a good head over his shoulders. My conclusion nonetheless is this:

All people believe they are special; my people the Aztecs, believed that an eagle on a lake, on top of a cactus devouring a snake signaled them the right to settle and fight the other Mexicans living there, and so they did.

There are no such commandments to special people, we are all human beings and fight each other grouped in tribes to dominate. The US cannot dominate Afghanistan, nor any other place right now. I do not see the conditions for such a feat, what I see is a world in disarray about to face the abyss, we are at the brink of collapse, and the enemy is not the other, the enemy is us.

Paul Krugman has this to say today:

"The chances of a relapse into recession seem to be rising."

For God's sake, stop: Michael Moore

For God's sake, stop

Obama made a mistake. Tonight we'll hear about it.

A quantum Bose-Hubbard model with evolving graph as toy model for emergent spacetime

   "This toy model is also a condensed matter system in which the pattern of interaction itself is a quantum degree of freedom instead of being a fixed graph. It can be regarded as a Hubbard model where the strength of the hopping emerges as the mean field value for other quantum degrees of freedom. We show a numerical simulation of the quantum system and results on the asymptotic behavior of the classical system. The numerical simulation is mainly concerned with the entanglement dynamics of the system and the issue of its thermalization as a closed system. A closed system can thermalize in the sense that the partial system shows some typicality, or some relevant observables reach a steady or almost steady value for long times. The issue of thermalization for closed quantum system and the foundations of quantum statistical mechanics gained recently novel interest with the understanding that the role of entanglement plays in it [32]. The behavior of out of equilibrium quantum system under sudden quench, and the approach to equilibrium has been recently the object of study to gain insight in novel and exotic quantum phases like topologically ordered states."

Taken from:

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0911.5075

Roberto Bolaño's Infrarealism Manifesto

O.K.

DÉJENLO TODO, NUEVAMENTE

LÁNCENSE A LOS CAMINOS

Roberto Bolaño, México, 1976

O.K.

LEAVE EVERYTHING, AGAIN

TAKE ON THE ROADS

Roberto Bolaño, México, 1976

Taken from:

Página Oficial del Movimiento Infrarrealista

This is wrong and unacceptable. Paul Krugman NYT

At this rate my children are going to be unemployed.

No more. Let us do something.

Read Krugman's piece here.

"The Federal Reserve, for example, expects unemployment, currently 10.2 percent, to stay above 8 percent — a number that would have been considered disastrous not long ago — until sometime in 2012."

That year again.

Horava-Lifshitz and Dark Energy

I belong to the LAGO collaboration. We want to measure Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) with photomultipliers (PMTs) inside water in plastic bags on top of mountains; the Mexican section in Sierra Negra. GRBs come from above directly towards the water; Cherenkov light is produced when charges are produced in the atmosphere and water. This light and charged particles,  go directly to the PMTs at the bottom of the bag. The bags are designed to stop other light from leaking in. The whole thing is inside huge metal cylindrical containers. I just saw one yesterday. Seven meters wide and almost three meters tall, with tons of water in.

Given that we are on the surface of the Earth, albeit at a high altitude, we can put tons of water there. This is someting Fermi LAT cannot do.

As the energy of the GRBs increases, lucky for us, the number of them decreases, otherwise we wouldn't be here. Therefore a tiny surface in space, with little matter, won't collect the highest energy rays. We expect to get above 100 GeV GRBs.

The question now is: What does theory predict?. I believe that given the huge energies, and likely big distances from the sources, that we have a way to study the vacuum.

A new proposal for Quantum Gravity, may help our searches. Horava-Lifshitz Gravity does have implications for Dark Energy.

We are studying this.

Lucha Libre!

I am not a fan of this sport. I played soccer when I was a kid in Mexico City, I never went to a single Lucha Libre fight, even though, the place was somehow near my home. However, I am a fan of Superbarrio.

Heather Levi says about him:

"There was no way to co-opt him because he didn't exist. He was incorruptible because he both existed but at the same time didn't exist."

He got a lot done for poor Mexicans after the devastating 1985 Mexico City earthquake.

Roberto Bolaño

This Latin American writer became famous when he died. I want to read 2666. I've already read, The Savage Detectives.

Life is mysterious.

The First Street of Solitude

The depressed

Los deprimidos

Caminan despacio con las manos

metidas en los bolsillos

agachan la cabeza y parece que

meditan pero no lo hacen

ellos solo buscan encontrar esos ojos

que les devuelva la ilusión por la vida.

Los deprimidos suelen pensar en suicidios

de otros, y parecen motivarse por ello

y muchas veces escriben poemas

en sus noches de insomnio.

Los deprimidos son hombres solos

siempre solos, y su soledad

los aísla del mundo; la soledad

y el estrés, son dos enfermedades

del mundo moderno;

los hombres, cuando están solos

buscan en foros de Internet

alguna mujer que imaginan hermosa

para sentir compañía;

las mujeres solas, describen su pena y

dolor y también buscan amantes

o de menos algún amigo querido;

al caminar la ciudad, ambos

los hombres solos y mujeres solas

son las almas en pena

de la vida moderna.

Taken from:

Edgar Altamirano

Translation:

The depressed


Walk slowly with their hands

inside their pockets

bow their heads down and it seems that

they meditate but they do not

they are only looking to find those eyes

that give them back hope for life.

The depressed use to think in suicides

of others, and they seem to get motivated by it

and many times they write poems

in their nights of insomnia.

The depressed are lonely men

always lonely, and their solitude

isolate them from the world; solitude

and stress, are two diseases

of the modern world;

men, when they are alone

search in Internet sites

some woman they imagine beautiful

to feel company;

lonely women, describe their sorrow and

pain and also search lovers

or at least some dear friend;

walking the city, both

lonely men and lonely women

are haunted souls

of modern life.