Friday, August 16, 2013

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

A year without the internet. It was wonderful for the author at first, but after a few months:
I'd learned how to make a new style of wrong choices off the internet. I abandoned my positive offline habits, and discovered new offline vices. Instead of taking boredom and lack of stimulation and turning them into learning and creativity, I turned toward passive consumption and social retreat.
Ahem. Procrastination pro tip: For one week, forbid yourself your top N methods of procrastination. If you have a method N+1, soon you will bask in old love made new; if you don't, soon you will make a wonderful discovery...

Monday, August 12, 2013

Stein's paradox (statistics).

Saturday, August 10, 2013

A sad trend in physics:
Most of the talk was about the hierarchy problem and “naturalness”, with the forward-looking conclusion the same one that Seiberg’s colleague Arkani-Hamed has been aggressively pushing: the main significance of LHC results will be telling us that the world is either “natural” (likely by discovering SUSY) or “unnatural” (in which case there’s a multiverse and it’s hopeless to even try to predict SM parameters). Given the negative results about SUSY so far, this conclusion pretty much means that the students at the IAS are being told that the LHC results mean it’s the multiverse, and they shouldn’t even think about trying to figure out where the SM comes from since that’s a lost cause.

Friday, August 09, 2013