Wave functions and characteristic vectors.
There aren’t many cyclopses in nature, and those that exist don’t live up to expectation. They tend to be crustaceans like water fleas and another aptly named “cyclops” (see left photo below) or early invertebrate fish-like ancestors of ours like lancelets.

Getting these animals tipsy and stabbing them through the eye with a stake turns out to be much less impressive than when Odysseus did it.
Arctic Ice September 2010

As I write these words - September 01 2010 - Arctic sea ice extent as reported by NSIDC and JAXA is not as low as I had expected it to be.


image source: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
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The IARC-JAXA graph shows 2010 extent as 4th lowest of recent years thus far, behind 2007, 2008 and 2009.

A new paper produced by the DZERO collaboration got me quite interested today, for several reasons. The analysis is based on a large data sample: over seven inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions! This is a huge dataset, the result of about 500 trillion proton-antiproton collisions! In fact, the measurement these data has made possible is extremely precise and it exposes quite strikingly the shortcomings of our present modeling of the production of vector bosons.