I’m flying to Seattle in a few hours, and it is a ~two hour flight. Anyone have any good ideas for a good paper to print out from the Arxiv (or elsewhere) to read during? Anything to keep me absorbed during that tedium? I fly back on Monday, so I suppose it could be a 4 hour paper

I don’t really have a good sense of how much crossover there is between the math blogosphere (such as there is one) and the physics blogosphere (hoo baby!). More specifically, I know that there is some crossover from the physics people to this site, but I am unclear on the other direction. Walt tells me that we have the most read math blog \exists, so I thought I would direct our ten readers to the brouhaha that has managed to coalesce around one of our crossovers, Peter Woit. We link to his blog, so there really is no point to this post, other than for me to comment, that it reminds me of Einstein’s comment “What is all the sturm and drang among the mathematicians?” in reference to the big dust-up brought on by Brouwer’s Intuitionist program, only this time the roles are reversed. Since I have no investment in string theory being correct as far as interpretations go, and only really look at it as some cool mathematics (and get to say “not my area”), I get to embrace the shadenfreud that exists at the core of my being and exhort: FIGHT!, FIGHT!