Symmetry factor

Today I looked at the list of Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards given out by the U.S. National Science Foundation (or simply NSF CAREER awards). NSF CAREER is a very prestigious award given to young untenured faculty at US universities, the NSF version of Outstanding Junior Investigator award given by the Department of Energy, Office of Naval Research and so forth. So when a young faculty gets it, it is a big thing for any department — and a university as a whole. One of my colleagues, Gary Shiu, even told me that CAREER award means what it says: you usually get a career at your university. Also known as tenure, he-he…

Anyway, the point of this post is the following. Since those awards were instituted (as a continuation of the former National Young Investigator program at NSF), only 15 were given to particle theorists - the list of those can be found here (it actually lists 21, but some of those awards are in mathematical physics and are relevant for atomic physics or nonlinear phenomena). So with all that discussion in blogosphere about the role of string theory in particle physics (see Peter Woit’s blog and his and Lee Smolin’s books) I wanted to see what the persentage of CAREER awards is going to string theorists. 

Here is the score:

Phemomenolgists: 6.5
String theorists: 8.5

Almost like a chess game, huh? A 0.5 to each is assigned for one award related to string phenomenology. So 57% of all awards went to string theory… obvious conclusion.

A couple of weeks ago many of my colleagues were over the top about new Apple’s iPhone. Some even said that they’d move over to Cingular in order to have it. It is a cool device. I might even buy it myself.

So, anything that Apple does turns out to be just plain cool — even in Russia my niece insisted on iPod over any other mp3 player that we wanted to send her. Anyways, one might only guess what kind of cool stuff Apple might think of next… Yet, some people thought about that already. Check it out here!

iPotty anyone?

I recently came across this website, which apparently is related to WSU. It has a nice discussion of cosmologies… Well, actually the cosmologies they are discussing have little to do with what I was expecting to see. Check it out for yourself!

One thing: according to that site, this is exactly how Big Bang is supposed to look like:

Who knew? But judging by the text that follows the picture, the author should have taken a modern physics course… It does have a nice discussion of planets, though…