Saturday, September 09, 2006

Waterloo

I am in Canada. My furniture is somewhere. On a ship as I have been told by the moving company. I asked them how that ship is supposed to go from Santa Barbara to Toronto? They told that me its an international move. And international moves always go by ship. I suggested they take out a map of North America and think about it. After spending about one hour on hold, and being forwarded to several people, they decided they would indeed put my stuff on the road.

When the moving truck came last week, I asked the muscle guys where the boxes go next. "To LA", they said. "There we put them on the ship." So, I am waiting for the ship.

Meanwhile the Dept. in Santa Barbara decided to ping back my emails. Which was a major disaster because my new email-account at Perimeter had a forward to Santa Barbara, which I could not remove. The result was that a couple of emails entered loops back and forth from Waterloo to Santa Barbara, spitting out about 10 error messages every minute. After banging my head against the next wall for some while, I ran to see the system administration. The result is that now I can neither receive nor send any emails. With none of my accounts. And how great is that? I AM ON WITHDRAWAL! CAN'T CHECK MY EMAIL.

Besides this, last week there was a very interesting workshop here on Natural Ultraviolet Cutoffs In Expanding Space-Times:




The question of how to describe a natural ultraviolet cutoff in an expanding space-time is of significance in several respects. First, it concerns the fate of general covariance in the presence of a natural UV cutoff. Second, it concerns the continued generating of degrees of freedom through expansion, which carries with it the possibility of an associated generating of vacuum energy. Finally, through inflation, a natural ultraviolet cutoff may have left observable imprints in the CMB.

The question whether it might be possible to extract signatures of quantum gravitational effect from Cosmological data is currently one of the most exciting topics there is. All of the talks from the workshop have been recorded, and I will let you know when they become available online. Unfortunately, I missed a big part myself, since I was busy with signing about 1 million forms, and running around trying to get my life organized.

On Friday, I also gave a talk on the workshop about my Minimal Length model, which made me realize all the things that I intended to work out but didn't... I really hope that I will have some time in the next months to think straight. Something that I wasn't able to do for quite some while.


10 comments:

  1. Hi Bee, glad you are settling in at the Perimeter Institute, not to be confused with the 'imaginary' or artificial boundary commonly known as the cosmic event horizon.

    In case you missed it, here is a shortcut to:
    finding all the black holes

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  2. I hope your furniture will travel
    the North-West-Passage or around Cape Horn. Panama Canal seems boring.

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  3. By train possibly?

    Anyway, here is more to what "Q" might of offered.

    Once settle you will forget quickly. You will do well at Perimeter.:)

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  4. Add a GPS locator and recorder to your stuff, thence to an epic poem if it clears Homeland Severity and its ambient temperature IQ sooperdooperstormtroopers.

    Penelope demanded Ulysses clean out the garage and put the excess in storage, hence the Iliad and the Odyssey. 12,110 lines of Greek dactylic hexameter later we learn that wax plus honey in your ears cures beer goggles. Kirk Douglas finally strings the bow, shoots an arrow through sockets of twelve axe heads lined in a row, and Penelope swears off needlepoint forever.

    Troy, Canada... same ol' same ol'. Go for the rubric of spacetime (Penelope has dibs on the fabric.)

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  5. They told that me its an international move. And international moves always go by ship.

    That's hilarious. Of course, when we were moving from London (UK) to Vancouver (Canada) they said they'd put our boxes on a ship through the Panama canal, which is entirely reasonable. Especially given how ocean freight is free to first order, it's just loading and unloading and insurance that costs money.

    But it somehow missed that boat. So they put it on another. And that boat...well, we're not sure what happened, but we discovered after a while that our things were in Rotterdam. They had a nice vacation, enjoying the beer, before finally being put on ship to Montreal. From Montreal it was the mere work of a week to put them on a train and send them 4000 km across the continent to Vancouver.

    Perhaps they have a similar route in mind for your effects.

    But, welcome to Canada! I hope your things arrive in good order.

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  6. In my experience, you give the things to a post office and say 'surface' and they appear about 2 months later on the other side of the Atlantic.

    However, my experience is limited to moving from Europe to Michigan and back.

    Moving from Greece to another country is particularly impossible because the post office does not accept surface parcels. Everything goes by air.

    It is quite lucky I never had any valuable furniture...

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  7. Hi There,

    yes, I am settling! Today I learned about the secrets of ssh-tunnels and thanks to the IT guys I am now able not only to read but also send email. I almost feel like a human being :-)

    Hi Quasar,

    Perimeter has its own kind of

    Event Horizons

    Thanks also for the link!

    Hi anonymous,

    when it arrives, I will ask my futon how the travel was...

    Hi Plato,

    backreaction is a serious problem not only for black holes. Media have their own backreaction problem which are the more severe the less information channels people access. And the less they access, the less will be offered on the long run. It is tempting to create reality if you have the power to do so. And then reality has to be marketed well.

    Hi Uncle,

    my insurance policy says explicitly, it does not cover 'mysterious disappearances'. Unfortunately, there is no further specification for these events.

    Hi Thomas,

    when I moved to AZ, I had my stuff send with the post from Germany. From 8 boxes only 4 arrived. After 6 weeks. In very bad condition. Half of my books and clothes were lost. Some of the clothes were replaced with new, similar looking stuff, but which unfortunately came in the wrong sizes. All I could find out after weeks of argument was that the accident happened in Chicago. The German post service blamed USPS, and USPS blamed the Germans. Neither insurance eventually covered anything.

    All the best,

    B.

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  8. Welcome to PI! Finally, I said Hi to you face to face. Enjoy!

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  9. So looks like you got
    lots of music proper
    for the Cosmic ballet

    Wnjoy!

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  10. Hi Yidun,

    :-) I hope I have more time when I am through with all the administration stuff. Today I will try to get a drivers licence and social security number...

    Hi Quasar,

    cosmic ballet sound like a good band name :-)

    Best,

    B.

    ReplyDelete

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