citation of the day
Maybe I should start a ranking of the best sentences I come across. There is the one of today, taken from the introduction in P. Ginspargs
lecture notes on conformal field theory.
"Omitted references to relevant works are meant to indicate my prejudices rather than my ignorance of the subject."
There you go.
Doktorandenklage
Over the last 5 month I have been constantly complaining about my job. I stumbled from one crisis into the next and its ongoing. There is litterally nothing here I really like.
Since I came here I am supposed to work on stuff I don't really understand. All my supervisor's life is packed with three keywords
Random matrix theory,
eigenvalue distributions and
- regime (Compton wavelength of the pion is larger than the volume). I don't have all these things clear, especially not how they are correlated. I believe in the
- regime low lying eigenvalues of whatever fermion operator you use have to be distributed like some random matrix theory ensemble. And beyond that regime? Do they have to be distributed like this everywhere? But why would we then bother about QCD? I allways saw this
-regime as some kind of auxiliary strange regime which has some properties which you can use to exploit to get results which are relevant in other regimes, but in itself it is a bit sick that regime, what is this, a "pion" that overlaps the box it is simulated in, nothing really physical, not really a pion, is it?
At the moment I am supposed to look at some eigenvalue distributions of the Wilson - Dirac operator, low lying eigenmodes which supposedly have to do something with topology and this again with chirality. But what if the operator is not chiral at all? It has the worst chiral properties you find in lattice gauge theory. What about cutoff effects, Aoki phases all the stuff everybody else out there in the lattice world talks about?
If you simulate in the
-regime don't you then have to choose your parameters,
, lattice size etc. in a certain way, such that you end up in this regime?
I did not generate the data I am working with and I did not check it really is in the
regime, I just blindly trust the other people...
All I do is: I take the operator, look at the eigenvalues, twist them around and hopefully find that they are beautifully distributed. Why? they have to, they are beautifully distributed, why? they have to, they are beautifully distributed. why? they have to, they are beautif...
I am sick of not understanding what I do. So
I look at it and see a very boring pointless thing. And there is so much interesting physics going on out there, elsewhere.
Oo'ense
There is a cinema and the city's main public library in the train station. And there is a
university campus out in the green which looks largely familiar to me: ever thought
Rostlaube was unique?
Freemasons
Yesterday there was the "Kulturnatten" here, that's something like "Lange Nacht der Museen" and "Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften" combined in one thing. So there Science institutes, museums but also other institutions like the Scandinavian Yoga Center, and most of the shops in the city center are all open for the public until midnight. Me of course I don't like Copenhagen and I love Berlin therefore I have thousands of reasons why "Lange Nacht..." is much much better. ;-)
The most important ones being that in Berlin it is more focused. Here as allways if there is something going on there is everybody. So the city center was packed and there were queues all over. And for that reason it was actually not enough to have this Kulturnatten batch to get in to the interesting places, but you needed to make a reservation and to pay in addition there. The one exception being the
main hall of the Copenhagen loge of "Den Danske Frimurerorden" which is a huge fascist-like looking building and the immediate neighbour of Niels Bohr institute.
The main reason why I went to Kulturnatten was actually to go in there, because it's kind of the thing that calls on your attention when you pass by.
So now I can tell you that they very much rule the world, or maybe ruled it. There was a photo gallery with famous freemasons just some I remember:
Several danish kings, all of them called Frederik or Christian of course, Charles VI, Prince Philip (the Prinzgemahl) Churchill, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Th. Roosevelt, Louis Armstrong (the only black in the gallery), Lindbergh (the flying guy), Amundsen (the south pole guy), James Cook (the Australia guy), Voltaire, Conan Doyle, Goethe and Oersted.
But not Niels Bohr. One of us had heard somewhere that Niels Bohr actually was member. When we asked them, one said yes, the next one said no and the third said he didn't know, and there was no picture in the gallery. Hence I conclude he wasn't because if he had, he would have been a member of their very loge and they would know it.
Well their behaviour towards our questions was actually quite revealing. Because first they would easily claim that he was, then when we insisted they became unsure about it and when we said that we were not sure he was eligible as a member at all, because his mother was jewish (though it seems he
was baptised) (Baptism is in entry requirement in the danish order) they became much more unsure. It seems that there are so many famous and influential members that they readily claim somebody if he is famous.
All in all I found it rather dispisable: It's this kind of men's society, where they gather to have a good time together and feel important, \begin{sideremark} without woman, that the one I talked to instisted very much, it sounded like "finally here we can meet without this silly and stupid women, kind of in an insulting way, it seemed to me. If you just meet to discusse and do charity then I don't see why it should be a problem having women discussing and doing charity. Of course the wives of the members can still come to a party from time to time and serve coffee to the public at kulturnatten\end{sideremark} They don't actually seem to do a lot except for charity. So all in all, it seems to be more like a "Studentenverbindung" a place for social interaction and a place to be networking and make informal contacts to people in higher social institutions which will eventually help your career \begin{sideremark_again} Of course _there_ you don't want to have women \end{sideremark_again} Just that the social structure is probabely different than in a ordinary Studentenverbindung, and it maybe is less right wing though here in Denmark it seems to be very much about Christianity and Danish Leitkultur. But otherwise there is no need for freemasonry nowadays it's not like in the 18. century where you needed a place to discuss and promote enlightenment ideas or so. Nowadays you could do this on the open street without a gigantic fascistic building full of halls, decorated as perfect stages for Faust II.
Somehow I felt a bit pity for those guys standing around in this ridiculous dresses wearing medals which most of them don't mean anything, you just buy them. Why do they need this masquerade? Men, uniforms and conspiracy.
Quo vadis Hafnia?
It seems that
Culture Box (sorry, as usual their website is very very bad), the best club in town, is in
danger of being closed. It's the only place where they play electronic music, and you feel well at ease when you come in.
Another good reason to leave town.
It's actually a pity that all these 70ies - 80ies - fuck -the -police-we - are - alternativ guys seem to listen to Reggae and Punk an if they are educated they run a jazz club. Must be the 70ies 80ies thing of course. But really, why is there no good place for electronic music in
Christiania?
When you move in Denmark, you have to register your new address within five days at folkeregisteret. When you move in Germany you have to register your new address within one week at the Einwohnermeldeamt. The difference between those two does not lie in these two days, the difference is a that in Germany you do it maybe within the first month but in Denmark you really do it within the first five days.
At least, when I told the secretary on monday that I had moved on the weekend her reaction was: HEAVENS, DID YOU TELL THE FOLKEREGISTERET??
Runlevels
It seems that it is actually possible to lower and deeper a state of artificial coma. Deepening the coma means more and more functions of your body stop. Just like runlevels on a linux machine. If you wake up the person, you slowly reboot his body, switching from one runlevel to the next.
Hm I heard this today, and I found it quite remarkable, that such a control over body performance is possible.
