The equation-filled blackboard is one of the most reliable props of academia, not just in cartoons and movies, but in real life. You know a scientific discussion is taking a turn for the serious when the protagonists head to the board. Walking into a colleague's office, a glance at the scrawled notes on their board gives you a taste of their current research preoccupations and teaching commitments; wobbly chalk drawings along the bottom edge are a pretty good sign that the office's owner has a small child in their life.
Just under a year ago the internet cranked out dozens of stories on NASA's efforts to develop "warp drive" technologies. And just under a year ago, dozens of scientists and science bloggers explained that while Einstein's general theory of relativity let's you describe a warp drive, that doesn't mean that the universe will let you build one.
For theoretical physicists, ambulance chasing involves getting papers out quickly after a major data release. Some ambulance chasers make significant contributions, some are just trying to draw attention to their earlier work, while others are banging out insubstantial papers in the hope that they will be cited by their slower colleagues. But whatever their motives, cosmologists have certainly been busy: the BICEP2 discovery paper has been cited 188 times on the Arxiv, all in "preprints" written within a month of the original announcement. I am pretty sure this is a world record, and you can always check the current tally.
Within the Zen garden, the iconic, Fuji-esque "Moon-Viewing Platform" or Kogetsudai, is a conical mound of sand that stands as high as an adult. Ginkakuji is a World Heritage Site, so the Kogetsudai is almost certainly the world's only UNESCO-listed sandcastle. Unlike a pyramid or a stone temple a sandcastle is an inherently evanescent structure, which must present a challenge to its curators.
Over the (southern) summer, I am digging into N-body dynamics as I start work on a couple of new research problems. To warm up, I wrote a simple code which tracks the motion of a handful of particles interacting via their mutual gravitational attraction. Watching the intricate dance the particles made in my simulations, it struck me that I had also inadvertently invented an algorithmic story-generator.
