> On Apr 20, 2012, at 8:56 AM, John Gulick wrote:
>
>> I also sense that Doug is trying to pull back a little from on-line
>> chatter altogether.
>
> Not really. I've been doing other online stuff - blog, FB, Twitter - and
> had been finding this list exasperating for the last few months.
> Specifically, the Dynamic Duo of Carrol Cox and "shag" - their chronic
> bitch and bile act was getting me down. Why put up with that sort of shit?
>
> Over the years, I've tried to catalyze conversation, with some success I
> think (though Cox constantly complained about my penchant for asking
> questions), but I haven't been trying lately. But I'll give the thing
> another shot.
>
> Doug
--------------
I attribute the slow down to multiple effects. Much of the world is stagnated into an intractible class war of vast and very depressing proportion. I've gotten tired of following the endless destruction and endless denial and propagandistic bullshit from mainstream media outside a few pieces here and their mostly in print. The best movie I've seen in a very long while was Separation, done by an Iranian director.
I am sick of the endless wars, now turning into abject failures, with a long history of denials. The whole political system is falling apart at just about every level.
How many times can you write the same now boring topics.
Instead of all that, I've been catching up on dark matter and dark energy, and tracking down the Dec 2011 Nobel in Physics, Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmitt, and Adam Riess. You can locate their Nobel lectures and watch them, but do it in reverse order starting with Riess. This was the order they were presented, and each builds on the other
I wanted to know if their work had indeed become a Kuhn moment of a big shift or revolution and the answer seems to be yes. Christopher Stubbs from Harvard (arch rivals to UCB teams) has a few videos of his standard lecture on the subject, that yes they are in such a phase. There are multiple lectures of about an hour that trace these developments for those interested. Here is a Stubbs video:
http://www.bnl.gov/video/archives/default.asp?show=pegramlecture
(Go to the older videos for the first of two lectures. If you manage to download this stream, in the first lecture pause at 21:19 and study the colored diagram. Stubbs explains this diagram which is a version of the one I found in a Perlmutter paper and didn't understand it. Now I understand it...)
CG