Ars Mathematica

Either Murray Gell-Mann or Richard Feynman said “Physics is to mathematics as sex is masturbation.” Discuss.

We here at Ars Mathematica set back the course of complexity theory by several hours, and Scott Aaronson thanks us for it.

I’m back from vacation. With any luck, I’ll even think of something to say. Until that happens, I wanted to link to Peter Woit’s post, Open Access Publishing, which links to this CERN task force report on the subject. I haven’t read the report, but Peter’s description makes it sound pathetically timid. As he characterizes it:

The CERN task force doesn’t seem to me to be providing a viable long-term plan for moving to the kind of open access model they are supporting. It doesn’t address the fundamental problem of keeping a system where physicists hand over the scientific literature to Elsevier, then have to figure out how to buy it back.

I will be away from my computer for the Labor Day weekend here in the United States, so there will be no posts from me for the next couple of days.

I’ve just deleted about 200-300 spam comments that have appeared over the last day or two.  I don’t think I accidentially deleted any actual comments, but if I did, please post again.

Trackbacks (and pingbacks) have now been disabled so there shouldn’t be any more spam and the comment RSS feeds should (hopefully) be safe to subscribe to again.  I’d like to re-enable trackbacks again at some stage, but probably not until I’ve figured out how to block this bulk spam.

I’m back from vacation. Tragically, my laptop, one that I literally took with me around the world, has died. But my commitment to your mathematical pleasure is so high that I plan on breaking into my neighbors’ houses to use their computers to post to the site.

According to Steven Colbert on tonight’s Colbert Report, equations are the devil’s sentences. For the past couple of days, this site has been under relentless spam attack (the spam has been showing up in older posts, so no one sees them but me). Clearly, these two events are related.

I thought as an experiment I would put up an open thread. Feel free to discuss the hardness of math, or whatever else is on your mind.

I’ve invited frequent commenter PeterMcB to guest post on Ars Math.

Last week’s claim to be back online turned out to be greatly exaggerated. I think I really am back online this time, though.