Bachelor Living

Tip no 1:
Clean pronto. It appears that the best way to minimize stress and frustration which arises because of growing entropy (i.e., increasing chaos) in the home is to clean immediately. After cooking. When you've done laundry. When you unpack after shopping. When you have eaten - breakfast, lunch or dinner or even a snack.

This requires discipline - but saves a lot of stress.

Tip no 2:
Monitor Ads. Before shopping in a foreign country, especially for household items, it seems useful to look at some TV/Paper ads. Useful because, one can buy say, a single cleaning agent for the kitchen, the sink, and the floor - without knowing the language.

Tip no 3:

Finland

Unusual Slang expressions

Freidhof gemuse: Graveyard vegetable : Old person
pushing up the daisies: dead
Looking at the potatoes from below: dead
Jante law vs Tall Poppy syndrome
Lagom
Nunchi
drachenfutter - literally Dragon fodder - peace offering

In Seoul

Still settling in...

The grace of tragedy

The Entropy of D1/D5

I would like to state a viewpoint about the entropy of the D1/D5 system (2-charge system - admittedly singular, but we will not let it worry us).

The hypothesis is that we look for "modes" which are in some sense bound to the background geometry - in the sense that they do not reach asymptotic infinity. These modes are in some sense "localised near the horizon".

In the AdS2 case, strominger et. al. constructed a bunch of branes which had this feature. In my paper, I constructed a similar brane in the bosonic 2D-black hole.

The microstates of the D1/D5 are the chiral primaries of the dual scft (let me not say boundary scft). These are in bijection with the sugra (on AdS3 X S3) massless modes. These two descriptions are precisely complimentary (strong weak duals).

In some way then, it follows that the sugra modes are "bound" to the (asymptotically flat) background i.e., the asymptotic observer cannot see these modes being emitted from the D1/D5 system. This is not an obvious property because the modes are described in terms of the dual SCFT (which in turn is dual "near horizon" string theory).

I am wondering if the "near horizon branes" can be a way of repackaging these chiral primaries - such that

a. its visible in the form of a "horizon gas" to the asymptotic observer

b. as a description of the black hole microstates, its valid in a different region of couplings/charges/geometry.

To do this, first I have constructed the branes in question. Then I have a proposal of how to assign quantum numbers under the SO(4) isometry of S3. But now i am stuck - in that I am not able to come up with further checks - one possibility is to set up the world volume quantum mechanics by expanding and then count fermion modes. This will help because, the BPS states come in supermultiplets and if a given brane is a "collection" of bosonic (chiral primary) states - the by exciting the fermion zero modes on the world volume, one should be able to fill out the supermultiplet.

There should be a more straightforward way of matching masses of the branes and those of the sugra modes ?

Here a conflicting thing arises - firstly the branes we construct are extended - so have infinite total energy/mass in AdS.

On the other hand, these are nice branes because they act as domain walls in AdS and hence could actually be responsible for the entropy (across these walls, the flux and hence the central charge jumps). This gives an attractive picture of the AdS space as being "foliated" by a series of branes with an IR SCFT with no degrees of freedom and a UV CFT with c=6 Q1 Q5.

SO I am very confused about what to do.

Polything

The human clock

On the evolution of multicellularity:

The Tangled Bank
- see the latest issue. esp the articles on
polyhenism and SAD (i think i sent these links earlier)

A parasitic wasp-brain surgeon and another from Bora

the origins of sex

Eye movements which i was referring to is called
Saccades

and hence the paper that talks about this from the Seung group at MIT
How the brain keeps the eye still

Sleep?

Why do we need sleep ?

The meaning of Tingo

Well, about half the words in the book and the website The meaning of Tingo are about half bogus.
See
The language log

No Sword on the Japanese

Metafilter debunks a few more

and The straight dope board

All in all the bogosity of the book is rather high.