A Modest Update

Point the first -

- It was remarked to me that my occasional overindulgence for parenthetical remarks in my writing suggests that I am secretly a Lisp programmer at heart. I snickered. It does look like an interesting language to learn, though…

Point the second -

- I was reminded of a thoroughly snarky point I had made to some friends a while back. String theory (or whatever your preferred scheme for quantizing gravity and unifying the fundamental forces) can explain physics. But the really interesting stuff will require using physics to explain the laundry list of actual phenomenona that we have on our platter. So learn your statistical mechanics, as you can then do everything from analyze (to one degree or another) magnetic samples, ion channel clusters in membranes, and socioeconomic behavior.

So love your stat mech and cherish the partition function!

Point the third -

- A recent blog post over at Just Like Cooking sparked a comment, harkening back to a brief digression elsewhere last year. I was of course led astray for a bit, and dug up some earlier papers on the topic. Not that my to-do list is by any means feeling underweight, but I feel it could be edifying (and potentially interesting) to try and work through the idea in a manner that would be fairly accessible to a (more) general audience. So less "death by Hamiltonian," and more "spiced up with Hamiltonians," if one will permit that metaphor.