Erik Peter Verlinde

Dutch Theoretical Physicist in his way to be the next European Newton. Like all European physicists, he is aware of the strong contribution in that continent to our field. He is more than ten years younger than me, thus I started to follow his work when I had been doing theoretical physics for some time. Due to some mental ailment I don't understand, few people know about me; therefore I know more people than people know me.

I know his work.

I was expecting good things from him. He seems to have finally done it. I write here my understanding of his 2009 accomplishment, just when my friend Alex Filippenko was explaining to high school kids here in Guerrero, and Astronomy graduate students at UNAM in Mexico City, the discovery of Dark Energy, that now Erik can start to explain.

It all starts with Thermodynamics, maybe it was not an accident that he comes from Holland: There Einstein's dear friend, Paul Ehrenfest, proved that Quantum Mechanics was consistent with Classical Mechanics, and contributed to Thermodynamics. I met two other great physicists, Prof. George Uhlenbeck , and Prof. Abraham Pais. They worked in Holland during their careers.

At CINVESTAV they expected us to guide distinguished scientists through town. I was honored to take Prof. Pais around Mexico City. I met his son, he was just a boy, and I was happy to take them around. I practiced my English skills besides.

Prof. Uhlenbeck taught us Statistical Mechanics at a Summer School at CINVESTAV. He said that there was no knowledge frontier. There was no boundary line, on the one side all that there is to discover, on the other all that we already know. He said it was more like an archipelago: Known islands, and unkown islands; all scrambled up; as a fractal boundary we will say now.

Ehrenfest committed suicide, obviously he had mental problems as the ones I write about in some of my last posts in this blog. He couldn't bear his son mental problems, he killed the son Vassily, and then killed himself; like his mentor Ludwig Boltzmann before him.

Uhlenbeck had been Ehrenfest's student, and taught us with commitment. I still remember his beautiful lectures. One day, during that summer, Prof. Marcos Moshinsky, from the "other" Theoretical Physics school in the south of Mexico City at UNAM came to our school in the north. Prof. Uhlenbeck just told all of us to go out to the beautiful garden outside the Physics Department. We sat on the grass with Profs. Moshinski and Uhlenbeck. What a treat!

It does not surprise me that the next giant step in our field was taken in Amsterdam. Where else?

Verlinde took the Thermodynamics insights of Jacob Bekenstein.

I follow Bekenstein's work because he was born in Mexico, even though I have never met him personally, and because his work is fundamental. I was introduced to this work by Terry Sejnowski at UCSB. He told us about the Second Law of Black Hole Thermodynamics, when he was a postdoc in Jim Hartle's group there. Terry even organized a seminar where I met Vinod Jhangiani; the Vinod of my short story.

Verlinde also took Gerardus 't Hooft work. The so-called Holographic Principle: everything on one side of a boundary is coded on the boundary, and an observer on the other side of the boundary sees a statistical representation of it. In Quantum Gravity then, we have a Statistical macroscopic field, as seen from our side of that boundary. Gravity then, is an emergent statistical average, just like temperature, and pressure, in the mechanical theory of heat, developed by Boltzmann; who thus found the concept of Information before any human being. Entropy is the probability of a mechanical state. Later Claude Shannon called it Information.

Now Verlinde tells us that Gravity is statistical, just like Entropy and Temperature, i.e. emergent. Actually Jim Hartle had already told us this much at UCSB. He invited Stephen Hawking there, when he discovered that black holes have temperature. I went to Hawking's talk, he still could talk with his own vocal chords, it was hard to understand him, but it was still possible. We were just a few in a small room as I remember the lecture. He gave us a nice preprint after the talk, with his black hole radiation theory clearly explained.

Verlinde derived Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation mixing together the ideas presented here, and some I don't understand here.

I want to bring the memory of a dear person I hardly knew. Prof. Jerzy Plebanski. Unfortunately I left CINVESTAV, when he came back from Poland, and I went to UCSB. Neverhteless now Lee Smolin has connected the beautiful work of Verlinde with that of Plebanski here.

Finally I want to bring the contribution of my friend Alex Filippenko, whose contribution I have tried to explain in this blog.

I was fortunate to have met him at UCSB, when he was an undergraduate student in the College of Creative Studies, and that he graciously accepted to come to Guerrero as part of the International Year of Astronomy's activities last year.

Alex's colleagues discovered that the Universe has been accelerating since five thousand million years ago, when the dark energy overcame the gravitational attraction; and now Erik can tell us, how to go about calculating how big is the coupling of this majority material with the rest of the Universe.

What a year 2009 was!

Autistic Gang

I wrote a short story in this blog. I feel myself mildly represented in the story. The group mentioned, could've been called The Goonies or the Autistic Gang. Maybe something in between would've been better. The characters there are people I either know, or know about. All of them in real life have a problem.

It was unsettling to write the story, I started to wonder who is not crazy. As I saw around my colleagues here in the Mathematics Department in Chilpancingo, I felt uneasy. Then when I considered other professors at the University, I felt that they are not different, but then it hit me; anybody in Chilpancingo and in any city in the world is a bit mad.

Obviously what I started to consider as mad, is not what your average schrink will consider mad. I am stretching the concept of mad way far beyond to where it is useful.  But then again my mother told me the other day about a niece's husband that has a new kind of vice. The poor man plays video games and neglects his wife and kid, to the point where my niece just left him. My father's father liked booze and the marimba so much in Guatemala, that my father didn't get the college education he would've been perfectly capable of getting.

On my wife's side there is an ancestor that didn't drink, or played video games, but lost his money gambling. I am sure my readers can go on, and on, and on. Who is crazy then?

More importantly is the question: What does crazy mean?

As you may start guessing now, I don't really know. That is why I felt strange for a few days. I am still wondering, and watching people around me with a puzzled expresion.

Poll

I haven't changed the poll, because visitors do not get the point of some of my previous posts yet. We are the minority. We are minority materials. At this point most people have answered the question wrongly.

We are a minority in this Universe.

1804

That year Haiti became the first country in the Americas to fight for freedom. They were inspired by the slogan: Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Now more than two hundred years later, Haiti is not free. This country is in dire need for help.

In 1810, Mexico did not exist, this part of the World was called New Spain. Napoleon had taken control over the Spanish government in Spain, authorities there abdicated power, and their Spanish protegés in America felt no allegiance to France. This political situation, together with an economic failure here in Mexico, were the immediate causes for the Independence War.

This year we are celebrating in Mexico one and two hundred years of the beginnings of the First Social Revolution of the twentieth century in 1910, and the Independence War of the previous paragraph.

In this moment of need, Mexicans are helping, with the little we have, our fellow Americans in Haiti. We are all Americans, we are all Africans, we are all Haitians. Borders will not help us during the testing times that are coming our way. If we are to survive as a Global Civilization, it will be because we raised to the occasion, and we all got together. Don't build more walls, don't separate people based on their skin color, or language, instead bring them togerther.

We need to come together.

Dot Com All Over Again

Brian Arthur believes that technological change takes decades to get established. If he is right, the nineties was not the time for .com, it is the tens. In 2010 I predict many businesses in the US and abroad, finally are going to qualitatively change to a new economy. The Information Economy.

My idea of ten years ago, maybe will be realized now.

Supercomputers for all mid size businesses.

My problem now, is why Carnicería Jiménez in West Chicago needs a supercomputer?

For those that do not know the Chicago area, we have one of the biggest Mexican concentrations in the whole world. First we have Mexico City, then LA, and third place must be hotly contested between Guadalajara, Monterrey and Chicago. New York may be below these Mexican megalopolis, not by much though.

My friend Jaime R. Viteri is a well established enterpreneur in the Chicago area. We both worked at Lucent Technologies. I offered him this idea ten years ago, but nothing happened. Maybe now.

I don't even have to go to Chicago, not even with Mexicans only. Is there a need for heavy duty computation in mid size companies? Now it is affordable.

First you build it, and then they come.

What Does the NYT Intention Mean?

The future of electronic publishing is at stake here. Before the Internet, no content creator really thought much about what is the worth of the Intellectual Property of the company. It was safe. You either buy my paper, or wait until somebody else leaves it in the coffee house, or go to the library. In any case somebody had to buy the paper edition.

My friend Aurelio Fernández Fuentes in Puebla, Mexico; accepted my offer to host his paper in our server at the Univeristy of Puebla in the middle nineties. He asked me: How will I make money? and I answered: That is your problem, all I want to do is to put it online for free.

It seems that the time has come to answer the question.

Many newspaper companies have been clobbered. They are no more. The big papers consolidated the market. But now they want to charge.

I expected these huge companies eventually to collect their take, once they pushed everybody out of business.

OK, here we are, now what?

This is going to happen until 2011, but the NYT hunchos are already getting ready for it. I wonder if 2012 is an issue here? Just kidding. I'm not expecting a PREDICTED global collapse. I am afraid of an spontaneous(?) one. There are many distress signals. After the Haitian apocalypse, and the little tremor here in Chilpancingo, a few minutes ago. I am not that relaxed. I don't like these rumblings. What am I supposed to do? though, stop living? No way. I just hope I do not go through a situation like in Haiti.

Massachusetts went Republican, at least in the Senate race. If it means, something, it is that greed may be returning. Probably I am reading too much into that close loss.

I just went to Warrenville, IL. I was pleasently surprised; my fellow Americans seemed to be on top of things, at least compared to my Mexican buddies, my compadres.

Yes, the NYT will charge me if I want to keep reading the paper. Nevertheless the world seems different, it is not possible to go back to the past. Now we have iTunes, and more $.99 songs sold than McDonald hamburgers. Electronic commerce is here to stay. More IT jobs, and new companies. This is actually what I want to think about; but that is for the next post.

How Long Do I Have?

Roberto Bolaño didn't have long. Nevertheless he worked hard to get 2666 finished. Why did he do that?

He knew he was a better writer than people around him. He had harshly criticized well established writers, even affecting his own promotion. Why did he put too much effort, sick as he was, to finish his last novel?

We will never know. Here I write my answer to my question above, and most importantly: What am I going to do until I die?

A little background for my first short story in this blog, may be appropriate.

Grigori Perelman is an autisitic mathematician who proved Poincare's conjecture.

I've known physicists with odd behaviors, counting myself also. I put them in my short story, we all have something to think about. I wrote the plot vaguely as in The Savage Detectives. My question here is why do people write things like that, and why do we read them?

Now I go to the question that really interests me. Will I get something nice about The Nature of Information, or will I just waste my life?

I am glad I posed the question. I do not know if I have enough time to get where I want to go, but at least I know where I want to go.

From Smolin we can read:

" The Gauss’s law constraint hence links the information in the bulk state with the information in the boundary state."

Even an old friend of mine comes into the scene:

" The Plebanski type of formulation of general relativity, which is the basis of everything contained here, is extremely general."

Smolin goes on saying:

" Could there be a more fundamental picture, before spacetime emerges in which area has the fundamental meaning of the capacity of a quantum channel by which information flows[38]?"

As time passes, information enters more and more in Fundamental Physics. All I need to do is answer: What is information?

Immortal Writers

Roberto Bolaño became immortal when he discovered immortality did not exist.

He died at 50, by then he had clearly stated in a Chilean TV interview that in a million years nobody would remember our immortal writers.

To some this may sound irrelevant. Most people do not go through life wondering if people will read what they wrote a million years into the future. But to the minority group of writers to whom this matters, Bolaño's observation is "intriguing", I suppose.

I have never tried to be an immortal writer, the little stories you can find in this blog, fill me more with apprehension that the "wrong" eyes may misinterpret what I write and get into trouble, than if I will be an immortal writer, whatever that means.

Since Bolaño brought the point though, here is my contribution to it.

I haven't read the whole Don Quijote de la Mancha. I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Savage Detectives, and 2666. I felt well after reading them and for that I thank here, Roberto Bolaño, and Gabriel García Márquez.

If anybody understood my little stories and derived a bit of satisfaction from that, my purpose was fullfilled. I don't believe in immortal writers either.

What I am after though, is some glimpse on the Nature of Information. That concept really obsesses me.

Second Short Story: Camp NO

Three Muslim men killed themselves after visiting Camp NO.

Under heavy security they managed to suffocate themselves and hung themselves eight feet above ground with no help whatsoever.

The name of the camp means that it does NOt exist.

Three Muslim men committed suicide after visiting the same camp that does not exist.

Do you want to read another True Story?

One man that was privy to the suicides now serves as an ROTC instructor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

Another True Story, anyone?

Additionally, the autopsy of Salami states that his hyoid bone was broken, a phenomenon usually associated with manual strangulation, not hanging.

NYT Charging?

By 2011 we will know what the owners of the NYT think about charging frequent readers like myself.

As long as Google lets me post this for free. I won't charge for my blogs.

Twelve Hours of Materials

Amy Goodman brought a TV camera to Port au Prince.

Now we know that after 8 this morning doctors there have enough materials to save lives only enough to last 12 hours.

This is the most important hospital in the capital of devastated Haiti.

Correction: The 12 hours were counted from some time yesterday. I assume doctors ran out of materials already. Right now, Amy is outside the pharmacy where the doctors used to get medicine. That pharmacy collapsed already.

Americans in Boston, don't want to give more help to Obama.

Are they getting ready for the beginning of the War to End the World ?

Short Story

Arturo Belano tells us: Leave everything: Take on the Roads Again.

I am organizing a search and rescue operation. Monty, Vinod, Sabas, and I are in our way to St. Petersburg, previoulsy known as Leningrad, previoulsy known as St. Petersburg, to save Grisha Perelman.

Edo Cantor, that is who I am.

Grisha refuses to collect a million dollars. Monty and I already convinced Sabas to collect his salary at that shmita research institute at the City of Smog. Then we went out to get Vinod out of that sick situation in Montecito. What was a genius scientist - like Vinod - doing, in that crazed addict's mansion, anyway?

Now we need to figure out how to convince Grisha to collect the million dollars he rightfully deserves.

The Three Musketeers, and d'Artagnan; the only thing keeping us back at this moment is this decision: Who will be d'Artagnan?

Sharif Abdel Kaddous

Who is this person?

The revolution won't be televised. If you keep watching Murdoch's "information" channels, you will never know who is this courageous, handsome, and young American journalist.

He is risking his life at this very moment at the center of Hell on Earth.

Today I saw his report from Haiti, together with this courageous woman, Amy Goodman, in Democracy Now!

She was at New Orleans, during Katrina's catastrophe, asking strong white men why couldn't they pick up black people's dead bodies that had been on the ground for days! She only got the lame answer that they only follow orders.

I can report that my mother survived the 1985 Mexico City's catastrophe. My kid brother stayed with her for years, organizing from the ground up; he was at some point the head of their building organization. Eventually he achieved something, I cannot believe to this day. She now owns the apartment where I grew up, and fortunately that apartment was spared from the earthquake. It is a beautiful place - for me it is the center of Heaven on Earth. When I go there and talk to her, I feel she is the Oracle in the Matrix trilogy. She is a wise Latina Woman in Mexico City.

¡Sí se puede!

Yes, it can be done!

From the ground up; that is the only way to save ourselves from the global catastrophe I see coming. Let us all get together like the brothers and sisters that came out of Africa. That is what we are. We are all Africans, and today we are all Haitians.

Thank you Amy.

The Rusty Forensicator

Chaos In Haiti!

From the NYT:

The United Nations said it had fed 8,000 people, while two million to three million people remained in dire need.

Today (Saturday 16, 2010) Bob Herbert writes:

"“The world is coming to an end,” cried a woman in the midst of the carnage."

"They rose up against the French and defeated the forces of Napoleon to become the only nation to grow out of a slave revolt. They rose up against the despotic Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier and sent him packing. Despite ruthless exploitation by more powerful nations, including the United States, and many long years of crippling civil strife, corruption, terror and chronic poverty, the Haitian people have endured."

The MP TOE

Pronounced empee-toe. This stands for the Mud Pie Theory of Everything.

I've been preparing the terrain for this note. Below you can find some cryptic notes on Brian Arthur, Stephen Wolfram, the Wachowski brothers, David Lynch, and maybe a few others. What does all this mean?

Here I try to put my thoughts in a draft of a theory of everything.

Maybe when you were a kid, you heard about stone soup, or mud pies. You just take what is available to you and put it together, and voilà: You have a nice cake, or soup. Just combine, basic combinatorics will tell you that n objects can give you of the order of n! combinations. That is exponential; that means many.

Why everything?

Well why settle for less, if you can have an all encompassing idea about everything around you that would be nice, wouldn't it?

My theory, or draft of a theory; starts with the observation that we have dark materials, i.e. arrays of things that we don't know why they are there. Who ordered that? Asked Isidor I. Rabi .

Inside our genome, there are sequences that don't seem to serve any purpose, and maybe they don't. Inside our brain there are a bunch of neural nets with no known function, and on and on.

We get to 1998 and Adam Riess discovery that most of what exists is dark.

I see a pattern here.

The last straw is Brian Arthur's idea that old technology just collects in the garage. I'm not kidding you, I have a working McIntosh there in my garage.

That's it, I get it. In the beginning there was no purpose. The Big Bang was a useless baby. But Purpose is an Emergent Property. Once I uderstood that, I must've been thirteen or fourteen, I started a search for purpose. My purpose is to produce Intelligent Life. Now I have two beautiful creative intelligent kids, that give purpose to my life.

There you have it. This is the bare bones MP-TOE!

Fidel Castro on Haiti

We feel a wholesome pride for the cooperation that, in these tragic instances, Cuban doctors and young Haitian doctors who trained in Cuba are offering our brothers and sisters in Haiti! 

Storms of My Grandchildren

Professor Hansen has written a book for all of us. You can visit the Amazon url for this book here.

He has been at the center of the political debate as a witness, and he is coming to tell us. We do not have that much time left. If you trust me, you better read his book and get ready for the Rain That is Going to Fall.

By the way, I read in the book that Nobel Prize Winner, Van Allen, from the University of Iowa, was his mentor.

I am so glad that the author of the Rusty Forensicator, whom you can see standing behind his creation above, was already accepted in such distinguished center of learning.

Let Aristide go Home!

Let President Jean-Bertrand Aristide get back and fix Haiti.

Where Do Dark Materials Come From?

The economist Brian Arthur has clarified the origin of technology in his book The Nature of Technology. I posted a note before, you can find it here.

Inspired by that, I propose that the "useless" parts of our genome, brain cortex, and the Universe: The Dark Materials, have the same origin, i.e. emergent purpose.

In the beginning the Universe didn't have a purpose, but as it got more and more parts working together, it found one.

I see a connection between Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, and the Wachowski brothers's Matrix Trilogy.

When the Earth Shakes, We All Go Down

This could be a prelude of what our future will be.

Not Even a Twitt

Haiti is dead, no phone service, therefore no twitts. The rest of the World just mumbling.

From today's NYT:

"“Parliament has collapsed,” Mr. Préval told The Miami Herald. “The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed. There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them.”"

I Met a Nice Haitian Boy in Miami

On the night of December 22, 2009, I met a young Haitian in his first visit to the US. I was waiting for my plane next Wednesday morning, so I was there talking to his aunt. She told me this was his first visit to this country. I remembered my own first visit in September, 1973. I was twenty four years old then. He looked just like my son. This boy is sixteen, mine seventeen. I felt kinship.

I hope this boy is still in the US, and not in Haiti today.

Long live the US, but the good one, not the one that feeds greed and the KKK.

Haiti and the End of the World

Today Amy Goodman has a special program dedicated to the Armageddon going on there in Haiti.

You can see and hear her here.

Detention Centers in this Country are a prelude of what you can see in the great movie: The Children of Men.

Democracy Now! presents the problem, you can see it in the link above.

I do not like borders. If we are going to face the End of the World, we should get together, not building walls. Those walls will box us in in terrible apocalyptic scenes. If we don't get together we are going to die, as Jared Diamond has documented in his book Collapse, literally eating our own brothers and sisters. The future of greed is cannibalism.

From the NYT today:

"SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — Dawn brought horrible scenes to light in Haiti’s capital on Wednesday: piles of disintegrated concrete, with limbs sticking out and muffled cries emanating from deep inside; wounded people staggering through the streets; and bodies littering the landscape. Huge swaths of Port-au-Prince lay in ruins, and thousands of people were feared dead in the rubble of government buildings, foreign aid headquarters and shantytowns that collapsed a day earlier in a powerful earthquake."


"“This is a time when we are reminded of the common humanity that we all share,” Mr. Obama said, speaking in the White House diplomatic reception room with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.at his side."


From Kristoff, NYT editorialist, we have this:


"

Today, We’re All Haitians

By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

After 9/11, the French newspaper Le Monde declared: We Are All Americans. And after yesterday’s earthquake: Today, we are all Haitians. No country seems to have had worse luck with misrule, environmental mismanagement, natural disasters and poor governance than Haiti. And now the earthquake.

Poverty always hugely magnifies natural disasters. I saw this first in the terrible 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh that killed more than 100,000 people. The poorest people lived in marginal areas, such as flood plains, and in flimsy huts that were immediately washed away. So they were killed. Those who were better off lived on firmer land in sturdier homes, and after the disaster they were able to afford clean water and medical care for their children. Frequently what kills people in these disasters isn’t just nature but its interconnection with poverty, and in Haiti it’s imperative to arrange not only the earthquake response — digging people out of rubble — but also a public health response by controlling disease and assuring access to clean water for survivors.

I don’t know Haiti well, but I was struck during a visit last year how the country was already suffering from the hurricane aftermath and the global economic crisis (largely because of a drop in remittances). This earthquake is one more disaster piled on so many other misfortunes; my heart goes out to Haitians everywhere. I’m sure some of you readers know Haiti far better: What are your thoughts on the crisis, on what must be done, and on how people can help?"

W. Brian Arthur

The Nature of Technology

What it is and How it Evolves

Neat, eh?

Dr. Arthur is not your regular engineer, technologist, or business advisor; he is a thinker.

I am not going to go into details about his insights, which are several. What I write here are mine, as inspired by him so far in my reading.

He states:

Technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose.


Technology is an assemblage of practices and components.


Technology is the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture.

Economy is the set of arrangements and activities by which a society satisfies its needs.

I just read today in the NYT that the next generation of wannabe Wiis will  use your hands, not some engineered new remote. Your hands will turn into remotes. Neat, eh?

Well, I am the Chief Scientist of a little Elgin Illinois research company, and we had that idea more than three years ago. I am afraid we didn't patent.

The big guys come in now with all their money and dollars, I feel they are going to beat us to a pulp.

What does it take to go from a simple insight into money?

If I knew I wouldn't be posting these things for free.

I take from Arthur's book that you have to be inside of where things are happening, like Tesla joining Edison for some time, or Feynman and his buddies getting one dollar for any idea on how to use nuclear energy. There is a fierce fight out there. You have to be a tiger, willing to cheat and steal like Bill Gates, with that OS he paid a few bucks for, to some nobody, that remained a nobody.

Enough complaining.

One way to get your hand to control a video game is to immerse yourself in some low frequency electromagnetic field, sensitive to your capacitance, or inductance. Just plain old James Clerk Maxwell, and hide it all in some legalese that nobody will ever understand, and voilà, you have a patent.

So it goes.

David Lynch: Semiotic Wizard

Recently I watched Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive back to back.  My present opinion is that Lynch uses symbols better than most directors I know. I feel he has started a new type of cinematic object.

Here I explain.

Symbols:

Fate:

First off, both movies have a "gypsy" warning character. A woman comes early in the plot to tell the central woman character what is her fate. Some other person helps this archetypical main female character to get rid of this unwelcome truth teller. What she was told in a riddle manner does happen. Fate has spoken. We are all warned, but few of us understand.

Language:

In Mullholland Drive Lynch uses Spanish, and a bit of French. For Inland Empire, the main other language is Polish, but there are bits of other languages.

Film Structure:

Lynch uses his idea of a Unified Field. No matter how he films, at the end everything will make sense, in a kind of Mud Pie, or Stone Soup. Everything will be where fate put those symbols since the beginning of time. I understand that according to Lynch, even Inorganic Matter follows a kind of Morphogenetic Field, à la Sheldrake, that forms, or maybe informs matter. I like to call this field Information.

Objects:

We have a blue box and a blue key in Mulholland Drive, and movie sets where the heroine moves in between parallel universes. Calling her companions with not much success. Only she knows at the end that the movie is over, and she can get out of "character", like a marathon runner that stops at her own peril, exhausted. She has to ease out her way from the evil personas as in Bergman's Film.

Camera Effects:

Inland Empire has digital video camera tricks, I feel as if Lynch is a kid playing with his new toy, the "digital camera".  Mulholland Drive has filters all over, one part of the movie has blue, the parallel universe has yellow and orange.

Final Object:

Both films are cultural objects, which I am going to watch over and over. This is the final Lynchean Symbol.

This is why I call Lynch a Semiotic Wizard.

University of Iowa

Lev Cantoral Bronstein has been accpeted to the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
Now I am waiting for other offers.

Congratulations Lev!

Minority Materials

We are like Gold!

We are made of something rare. Only 4% of the Universe as we know it is made of what we are made of. We are mainly water blobs of baryons held together by nuclear and electric forces. Weak forces were crucial to take us out of the ovens we call stars; when they exploded as supernovae, we appeared. Freed by weak bosons and neutrinos blasting us off those exploding stars in our space travel that continues to this day.

Now we know that not only the Earth is not the center of the Universe as Copernicus showed us, but we are not even made of the dark materials discovered more than ten years ago by HZT and SCP through the accelerating Universe sightings of Adam Riess.

My point in this note is to remind my white readers, that at least here in the US, today I am in Warrenville, you are not even the main type of race that is going to be dominant in a few years time. Blacks and Hispanics are set to be the majority, I believe around 2030.

I do not want to scare anybody, nor start a substitute Lou Dobbs outlet! I just want my white readers to take a deep breath and look around. If you live anywhere near a major city, NY, Chicago or LA. We are all around you in plain sight. I just want you to recognize our presence, and start getting ready for the upcoming day in which we'll be more than you. I am a proud Hispanic of Mexican Spanish cultural origins. My immediate family on both sides, mother and father, come directly from Spain, without much Native American blood.

I am starting to read today, "The 10,000 Year Explosion" by Cochran and Harpending. If they are right, I am covered for the future also, my children are half Ashkenazi Jews; which according to them, have a good chance of being smart. My boy is already applying for College. If the chips fall where I expect they may. I'll be fine.

After 10 years of the HZT-SCP discovery; I do not think the media has assimilated the significance of this.

We are Minority Materials!

My Nephew, Alex, and I

Cop15 to Mexico

President Calderón and Mayor Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón are getting ready to welcome you here next November. Nobel Prize winner Mario Molina, will also be waiting for you.

Yesterday Plácido Domingo was in the news here for his upcoming free concert in Mexico City, where he grew up.

What does it all mean?

It means that we are near what physicists call a phase transition, as when water boils.

Alex Filippenko felt at home in Mexico City, Acapulco, and Chilpancingo.

I feel like in the end of the Modern Novel, "A Hundred Years of Solitude" , once I start to understand, the world comes to an end. I explain here what I mean by that.

Globalization has finally shown to the most sensitive among us, that we are brothers and sisters, just like the elders told us, but we never quite understood what they meant.

In 2003 James Watson wrote DNA, to celebrate fifty years of his, and Francis Crick's discovery of the code of life. There you can read, how was it proven that we are all lost children, of a people that left Africa many years ago.

Now we have to help the people of our American president. His immediate ancestors in Kenya are at the brink of collapse, and first him, and then the rest of us, have to get to work, to save them. Literally they are dying.

The whole thing is unraveling. How else do you explain that in Copenhagen they were having meetings all over town, as Amy Goodman, showed for two weeks, small and big save the world meetings? Even President Obama came to organize spontaneous meetings, because the Chinese, wanted to get out of it. It was constructive chaos. We need good will among all the world family to save the Earth. As in a Hundred Years ... - if you haven't read it, do: García Márquez, got a Literature Nobel Prize for it - Aureliano II reads:

"Aureliano] had already understood that he would never leave . . . races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."

We are at that moment now. The only difference is that not only Macondo; Aureliano's town, but the whole world is at stake.

Come to Mexico and save the only world in the whole Universe where we know there is life, and most importantly, Intelligent Life.

Gabriel García Márquez is sick, he has little time left, and he wrote that book in Mexico City.

Leadership

"The deal eventually came together after a dramatic moment in which Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton burst into a meeting of the Chinese, Indian and Brazilian leaders, according to senior administration officials. Mr. Obama said he did not want them negotiating in secret."
"Also dropped from earlier drafts was language calling for a binding accord “as soon as possible,” and no later than at the next meeting of the parties, in Mexico City in November 2010. The deal presented Friday evening said only that the agreement should be reviewed and put in place by 2015."


From NYT

We will be waiting in Mexico, one of the most polluted countries of the Americas.

I like this skinny black guy.

What Size Gaia?

Professor James Lovelock stunned the world when he discovered the feedback loop that keeps our Earth just right.

Could it be that Gaia is bigger?

Prof. Hansen tells us now that the Sun is quieter than expected. Maybe the Sun neighborhood is autopoietic, so the Earth is not too hot, not too cold, for some alloted time. If the Earth warms, the Sun cools. That'll be neat, won't it?

Sun Spots

"Indeed, it is likely that the sun is an important factor in climate variability. Figure 4 shows data on solar irradiance for the period of satellite measurements. We are presently in the deepest most prolonged solar minimum in the period of satellite data. It is uncertain whether the solar irradiance will rebound soon into a more-or-less normal solar cycle – or whether it might remain at a low level for decades, analogous to the Maunder Minimum, a period of few sunspots that may have been a principal cause of the Little Ice Age."

" Frequently heard fallacies are that “global warming stopped in 1998” or “the world has been getting cooler over the past decade”. These statements appear to be wishful thinking – it would be nice if true, but that is not what the data show. True, the 1998 global temperature jumped far above the previous warmest year in the instrumental record, largely because 1998 was affected by the strongest El Nino of the century. Thus for the following several years the global temperature was lower than in 1998, as expected.

However, the 5-year and 11-year running mean global temperatures (Figure 3b) have continued to increase at nearly the same rate as in the past three decades. There is a slight downward tick at the end of the record, but even that may disappear if 2010 is a warm year. Indeed, given the continued growth of greenhouse gases and the underlying global warming trend (Figure 3b) there is a high likelihood, I would say greater than 50 percent, that 2010 will be the warmest year in the period of instrumental data. This prediction depends in part upon the continuation of the present moderate El Nino for at least several months, but that is likely."

Taken from:

Dr. James E. Hansen

Uncertainty is the human condition. Professor Hansen already put his life on the line, I believe he has to sign some place periodically, because he willfully broke the law, to save this world for his grandchildren.

What if the sun does what Jim writes here?

In that case we will look into the SOHO satellite and forget about almost about everything else, trying to find the way out. As it is right now, it is only a blip in the radar screen of our survival conceptual map.

Aware, awake individuals, and courageous, like Dr. Hansen are our best asset to ride the wave of life.

A hard's rain is going to fall.

Filippenko: Berkeley's Talk

Alex Filippenko: Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe from Steve Croft on Vimeo.

Will The universe Have a Happy Ending?

Dark Matter?

"An international team of physicists working in the bottom of an old iron mine in Minnesota said Thursday that they might have registered the first faint hints of a ghostly sea of subatomic particles known as dark matter long thought to permeate the cosmos.

Dark matter became a serious issue in the 1970s, when Vera Rubin of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and her colleagues charted the rotation speeds of galaxies and found that they seemed to be enveloped in halos of dark matter, then called missing mass."

A wide range of astrophysical and cosmological measurements have subsequently converged on an intimidating recipe for the cosmos of 4 percent atoms, 25 percent dark matter and 70 percent a mysterious energy that has been called dark energy and has nothing to do with the news on Thursday." Today at the NYT.

This is only tantalizing. Bigger and better detectors are needed.

Somehow this experiment doesn't ring true to me.

Maybe They'll Make it

Dear eduardocantoral,  Today marks a very important milestone in AOL’s history – and future. As we separate from Time Warner and become an independent company, we mark the beginning of a fresh start and open the door to new opportunities. I believe this is a perfect time for rebuilding trust, confidence and passion around AOL and the products we bring you.  I realize that – at times - over the past few years, it’s been challenging to be an AOL Mail user. I’ve heard your feedback and we’re going to start making changes with a renewed focus on you. We can and will make our free AOL Mail product world class!  We’re starting today with three simple (but important) changes:  1. Significantly fewer ads  2. An easier AOL Mail sign-in experience 3. A new message reading pane that helps you get through your email faster  I know that some of you are comfortable with your current email experience. So, wherever possible we’ll provide you with the choice to disable new features and keep the classic email product.  This is just the beginning. I’m truly excited about what’s to come in 2010 so please stay along for the ride. Our promise going forward is to keep you well informed of the changes we make and the new features we launch. In the meantime, please continue to send us your feedback or suggestions as we work to build a world class email experience – focused on you.  Thanks again for choosing AOL Mail!  Sincerely,  Brad Garlinghouse President, AOL Consumer Applications

Save the Children!

Filippenko: Mexico's Visit

I found something odd. Very young people were asking Alex about 2012.

Something I can say, is that the child doesn't have to talk much. I just put the microphone in her mouth and she only said 2012.

That is handy, I guess I should've asked: What about 2012?

Anyway, Alex gave thoughtful answers to what he thought were scared children. He comforted them. Forget about it, and have a good time.

Now that I am reflecting on this great IYA-2009 finale. I write here something for me really, as my readers must've noticed by now. This is my diary, the fact that I chose to make it public has to do with my personality. I let people get close to me. I guess it has to do with having been treated well. I trust people.

Because of my dereliction of duty; I have to speculate. I guess Alex was right in his assumption, these kids are scared and need reassurance. Parents may be anxious making ends meet and the children pick up that anxiety. We are scaring the kids. I am afraid, I reared up my children with a "realistic" view of the world, being a scientist and all that. I never put myself in their position. No Santa Claus, no Tooth Fairy, and so on. My girl had an imaginary friend, Alicia, and my wife had the good sense of letting her have her friend as long as she wanted to. She breastfed both of them more than any woman I know; as long as they wanted. Thanks Mary.

We should protect the little ones, not scare them. I am so glad that Alex used his immense stature in front of these kids to give them expert advice: Forget about it, and have a good time.

Great IYA-2009 Filippenko's Closing Lecture at Chilpancingo Mexico

Today's activities fill me with emotions. This is my report:

We started with a visit to Sergio Ocampo's Program at XEUAG at 8:20 in the morning. Sergio was gracious enough to let me talk almost up to nine o'clock when Alex got here from Acapulco.

I explained what I have been telling the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA-2009) participants here in Guerrero, that the HZT and SCP discovery was revolutionary; just as  Galileo's discovery that Jupiter had moons was revolutionary, four hundred years before.

The revolution now, is that there are dark matter and energy, different from what we knew before the news that Filippenko came to announce; namely the 1998 discovery of "Universe Acceleration".

Not only we are not the center of the Universe, we are not even made of the stuff that most of the Universe is made of.

At 8:45 AM, Alex got here from Acapulco; psychologist Memije a little later, and Lilith Cortes started her program "True Science" at 9 o'clock sharp.

Lilith lost her father, the poet and musician Joel Cortes Varona last week. I was strongly moved when Alex finished answering Lilith's questions, and she told us that the interview had made her think of the marvels of the Universe which she cares for so much: That maybe in some way her father was somewhere in this huge space we inhabit.

You can read a Joel homage report in Spanish here. The poet Edgar Altamirano already made it available for us in YouTube at the link in the previous paragraph.

From the center of town we went to the National Teacher's Union auditorium, where we got early enough to connect Alex's computer to a projector, and two LCDs.

The young students kept on coming from their schools together with their teachers, until they filled the auditorium, with some having to sit on the floor. There could've been seven hundred in attendance. Before starting  the lecture a video was shown with the Mexican astronomers Manuel Peimbert, Jose Franco, and others.

Other Mathematics Department professors also came, like Armando Carballo, Gerardo Salgado, Efrén Marmolejo, Flaviano Godínez, and Javier G. Mendieta. Also some students came, like Florida, Yadira, and Bricio. Finally a group of friends like El Chilo, Antonio Martín, Jesús Martínez Castro, Roel Ayala Mata, the astronomer Jorge Villa, with his family, and a few others that I don't remember or didn't see. My nephew, the architect Ignacio Cardenas Uriza came all the way from Huitzuco. I really felt at home with so many dear friends.

What moved me the most was the enthusiastic treatment  the young students gave our speaker at the end that surprised us all.

I can mention two of the organizers, psychologist Angela Memije, and Dr. Rodolfo Cobos.

At the end Alex and me left the event surrounded by young people asking for more autographs, and  eager to have more pictures taken with us, like if we were some popular stars whom they admire. I don't know, maybe Amandititita, Diego Luna or Gael García Bernal. They jumped on top of the front of the car; until they went down we went to the La Casita restaurant where we ate pozole.

How touching!

Now the young students know that the Universe is in Accelerated Expansion, they saw Alex throw his apple  up in the air, as you can see in other talks on YouTube if you search for his name.

Alex offered to come back to Guerrero. All the organizers feel satisfied.

Lessons Learned?

"Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question."


Here is another jewel from this piece:


“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” 

Paul Krugman

I know a good friend Garrett Cook , from Captain James Cook stock, that writes bizarro novels. These alternative universes cohabit ours, it seems. Conservatives are the aliens from UFO's lore, but I stand by my point made in a post in this blog. There is no intelligent life in this Universe, besides that of Krugman and people like him.

It is moments like these, that I worry about the future of my bright intelligent children.

I know I shouldn't despair, sometimes is hard though.

Esto de jugar a la vida, es algo que a veces duele. 

This game called life, is something that hurts at times.
Enrique Ballesté

Alex Filippenko's Talk at Astronomy Institute (IA-UNAM)

This picture is from another Filippenko's talk.

Friday December 11, with some of the five million people walking towards Tepeyac Hill Basilica to celebrate Our Lady Guadalupe's birthday; we arrived to Mexico City, where astronomer Alexei V. Filippenko presented his last results at the University City (CU, by its initials in Spanish) to the Astronomy Institute faculty and students.

The talk is based on work contained in three papers, with data taken over the past decade, with 10 years more of work to get the robotic telescope built and working.

He presented two new results:

For nearby supernovae Ia, they found a correlation between the rate per unit galaxy mass and galaxy mass: the more massive the galaxy, the smaller the rate per unit mass; if multiplied by each galaxy's mass, the rate increases with mass. More supernovae are produced in big galaxies.

The second result is the formula:

dN/dt ~ (1 + z)³

where z measures distance, and t time: the greater the z, the farther the exploding star, and N is the number of observed core collapsed supernovae.

Astronomer Xavier Hernández from IA-UNAM, expressed the opinion that the first result may be biased by using a reference galaxy mass of 4x10¹⁰ solar masses, which is big for this type of supernovae Ia.

Filippenko believes their result is the best they can get with their data set, which has been collected for ten years, and is the biggest sample obtained by a single group.

As it happens, there are not that many galaxies with lower masses producing supernovae they can detect with their robotic telescope.

Previously an amateur Australian astronomer had the nearby supernovae record. The religious minister Evans is a human "robot" to detect visible nearby supernovae.

Now Alex's group has the nearby supernovae Ia biggest professional sample in the world. To collect this amount of exploding star sightings, systematically characterized, their KAIT robot was used.

Alex then presented in this talk, and at a previous one this last summer, the results of the analyses done by his group.

Many of us expect all their analyses and results; we'll know more on these stars so important to study the "Accelerated Universe", that his group HZT, and SCP; discovered in 1998.

With talks in the "Sinfonía del Mar" open air venue this Monday, December 14, at 18:00 hrs in Acapulco, and Wednesday, December 16, in Chilpancingo at 11:00 hrs. in the SNTE auditorium; both with the title "El Universo en Expansión" and presented by this UC-Berkeley astronomer, and translated by me, we formally finish the activities of the International Year of Astronomy-2009.

I think it is appropriate that we celebrate four centuries of Galileo Galilei's use in 1609 of a telescope in Astronomy, with talks based on the use of a Newtonian telescope, invented later, and for the invention of which, Isaac Newton was accepted to the London Royal Society, with these talks of the great American astronomer Alexei V. Filippenko, recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences of his country, due in great part for work done with this robotic telescope built and managed by the group of astronomers he directs.

I want also to report that Professor Manuel Peimbert Sierra, present at the UNAM talk this Friday, is a corresponding member of this scientific American society, and that he published the paper on which the astronomer Filippenko, based his Ph.D. thesis at Caltech, under the direction of Wallace Sargent.

I wish these efforts to promote Astronomy, serve as inspiration to Mexican young people to pursue this passionate way of life.

Go see him, his students say:

"Filippenko is the greatest professor you'll meet ... TAKE THIS CLASS!!!!!"

Dark Matter?

"I will present new results from the recent blind analysis of 612 kg-days of raw exposure using the CDMS germanium detectors at Soudan. CDMS uses ionization and athermal phonon signals to discriminate between candidate (nuclear recoil) and background (electron recoil) events in Ge crystals cooled to ~ 50 mK. Timing, yield, and position information allows us to tune our expected background leakage into the signal region to less than one event. I will report on what we saw when we “opened the box”, whether we have seen WIMPs or not, and implications for future dark matter direct detection experiments."

Prisca Cushman

Guillermo González

"For the first time, we are able to compare the Sun’s Li abundance in a fair way to a sample of comparison stars. We find that its Li abundance is low compared to our sample of comparison stars, and it is comparable to the Li abundances of SWPs (Star With Planets) with similar T_eff values."

G. Gonzalez et al.

Guillermo deserves more recognition than he is getting. He has good guesses. I don't think it matters what is the source of his guesses. Here he reports the confirmation of his hunch that Li abundance in stars can be used to search for planets like ours. That is science; you have a hunch and you check it. If it is true you use it. It seems that the source of his insights is some belief in Intelligent Design.

You know, I do not believe in God, and I don't care where Guillermo gets his information, for all I care he may have a direct red telephone line to the big guy up there. I do not care. Is it true or not?, if it is, Guillermo is alright in my book.

Importance of Alex V. Filippenko's Work

Early yesterday I listened to Captain Roel Ayala Mata in Sergio Ocampo's program in XEUAG RADIO UNIVERSIDAD DE GUERRERO 840 Khz. AM 1000 W. The University of Guerrero Radio Station here in Chilpancingo.

Here I add to what the Captain said, to put in context the work of the Berkeley Astronomy Professor, that soon will visit us.

In 1998 two scientific groups, the High-Redshift Supernova Search Team (HZT) and the Super Nova Cosmology Project (SCP), discovered that distant exploding stars are more distant than they were expected to be. This implies that the  expansion of the Universe is currently accelerating. Supernovae are searched, because each emits as much light as a whole galaxy in a few days. Astronomy Professor Filippenko was a member of both groups. One of his important contributions was to obtain Keck telescope spectra of the high-redshift supernova candidates, determining whether they are indeed supernovae and measuring their redshift. Both teams reached their conclusions at nearly the same time, although the HZT, where Filippenko stayed after switching from the SCP, announced and published their results first.

I have expressed the opinion that this work deserves the Physics Nobel Prize - by the way this month at Stockholm the Physics Prize will be given for work in fiber optics and CCDs - which greatly aid Astronomy. Here I write my reasons to consider him for that distinction, explaining the importance of the discovery, which Science magazine considered the "Top Science Breakthrough of 1998”.

To begin with: this discovery is a continuation of Edwin Hubble and Allan Sandage's work, both working in California as Alex on the same problem - "The Expansion of the Universe".  At the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) , arguably the most important US scientific institution in Astronomy, where students and faculty collaborate closely with NASA, Alexei V. Filippenko earned his PhD degree in 1984 with Prof. Wallace Sargent. Prior to that he got a BA in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I met him as an undergraduate , when I was a graduate student at the Physics Department, since he is close to eleven years younger than I am. He finished there in 1979.

Prof. Filippenko's collaborators developed methods for the use of supernovae as standard candles. If you see how the light goes off, in a few days, you know how much light they sent, thus obtaining the distance between their galaxies and ours.  Alex showed, in the early 1990s, that Type Ia supernovae have a greater spread in their peak luminosities than had previously been assumed, so they could not be used as "standard candles" unless some correction factors were applied. These corrections were later developed and applied by his collaborators. Since the mid-1980s, Filippenko has been studying supernovae at UC Berkeley, and starting in the late-1990s he has used a robotic telescope to find dozens each year. He  is a Professor at his Alma Mater, UC, at the Berkeley campus, near San Francisco, like six hours North by car from Santa Barbara, since California is a huge State. Santa Barbara is almost six hours from the campus in Los Angeles. Caltech is near LA. He is  now the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, at U.C. Berkeley.

With hardware and software tools developed by the HZT and SCP groups, at last it was possible to observe the highest number of far supernovae in the History of Mankind. With something like ten of these, with the farthest ever measured at that time, his young collaborator, Adam Riess, born almost ten years after him, finally  found something unexpected. The most distant supernovae were not moving away with the expected velocity. Hubble's law did not apply to them, they were accelerating away from us.

He has many cites of his work by other astronomers. By the way the Mexican Carlos S. Frenk was number 8 in that list. More on him later.

If this was the only contribution Filippenko made, he would deserve the Prize I refer to here. Nevertheless it happens that there are no easy ways to explain this.

Now I write on cosmological theory. What does it mean that the Universe expands?

The first to propose the equations that allow to explain this, was Albert Einstein in 1915.

Here you can see Prof Einstein using the Mt. Wilson 100-inch telescope in California; Edwin Hubble is the one in the middle.

In this visit of Einstein to Hubble, Einstein got convinced the Universe is dynamical, not static as he thought previously. Einstein spent a few days at Caltech, in Pasadena, near Disneyland.

According to the so called General Relativity Theory, the Universe with the known kind of matter before the work of the HZT and SCP, should forever expand at constant velocity or decelerate. It is not possible to accelerate.

To explain this acceleration, the easiest way  in Einstein's Theory of Gravity, is with what he called the Cosmological Constant. Depending on the sign of this constant there could be a repulsive or an attractive effect. We are interested in the repulsive one, since the rest of the Theory already explains gravitational attraction.

Adam Riess' discovery, for which he should get the Nobel Prize, means that we need the Cosmological Constant.

The importance of this discovery is that no known type of matter produces cosmic repulsion. Einstein's Cosmological Constant does not correspond to any known form of matter until now, even less in Einstein and Hubble's time, i.e. last century's 20s.

To end this note I want to introduce a new character in this plot. It is Prof. Carlos S. Frenk.

His brother Julio is very famous in Mexico, since he was Secretary of Health, in the "great" Vicente Fox administration.  Currently Julio is Dean of the Harvard Public Health School, in Boston Massachusetts, and Carlos is the Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics and Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University and Principal Investigator of the Virgo Consortium. Both studied at UNAM. It seems that UNAM, does not have the capacity to retain some of its stars.

Carlos Frenk then, was one of the first to use supercomputers for cosmological calculations, i.e., of the whole Universe with Einstein's Gravity. With his colleagues in several countries, he demonstrated that it is necessary to have two new types of matter and energy to explain the observations of HZT and SCP . Prior to this supercomputer work, one should recognize Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s , and Vera Rubin in the 1960... and many, many people in the 1980s and 1990s

The names given to these two unknowns are Dark Matter, and Dark Energy. Frenk's result, is that the matter we are made of, which was known up to the great discovery of Universal Acceleration by HZT and SCP, is minimal. This  so-called baryonic matter, in Frenk's soup , is only the salt, something like 4% of the total. Even this small quantity is mainly dispersed as gas all over the known Unvierse. Only 10% of that 4%, is found in the form we know it, mainly stars and black holes, and very little as planets like Earth; by the way over 400 solar systems are known in our Galaxy, the Milky Way.


The great mystery for theoreticians like me, is to find out what is Dark Energy, and for that, I thank my friend Alex, for having given me the opportunity to search for an explanation for Dark Matter and Energy.

Thanks Alex!

P.S. I want to report that the mirror, built under the supervision of Prof. José Luis Pérez Mazariego during the workshop at the Chilpancingo Institute of Technology, was useful already to observe Io - Jupiter's moon - three different days, each time it has been in different positions, since its year is 1.8 terrestrial days.

Vote for Morales Today!

What, you don't vote in Bolivia?

It doesn't matter, very likely you have Real Native Americans near you, they need autonomy. Support them.

Hilarious

Víctor Jara, Buried Properly in Santiago Yesterday: Here "Te Recuerdo Amanda"

Víctor Jara Buried Yesterday in Santiago.

Cheo Díaz in Guerrero, México

Corny?

I'm watching Selena and reading Bob Herbert. I feel I am not Mexican nor American, and both our countries are a mess.

I don't think I have anyplace to go. Either I make it in North America, or I'm done, man.

Viva North America Cabrones!

Alex Filippenko The Fate of the Universe

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.