Links for November 2016

Somehow I had never heard of Georges Lemaître, Jesuit priest:

[Lemaître] proposed the theory of the expansion of the universe, widely misattributed to Edwin Hubble. He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble’s law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble’s article. Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, which he called his “hypothesis of the primeval atom” or the “Cosmic Egg”.

(H/t Sean Carroll.)

An anonymous Physics.SE user, on the meaning of Haag’s theorem and attempts to make quantum field theory mathematically rigorous:

This is a little bit like the development of calculus, which underlies Newtonian mechanics. It took a long time, and was clearly a very valuable exercise for both mathematics and physics. But, long before the subject was rigorously defined it was clear that Newtonian mechanics was correct, but the correct language for it does not exist yet. So, I think Haag’s theorem demonstrates that we are at the same stage of development of QFT.

Quantum is not the first venture attempting to break from the traditional science publishing model. Like Discrete Analysis and the Open Journal of Astrophysics, Quantum is an arXiv overlay journal, which publishes or links to the final arXiv version of papers that have passed peer review by the journal’s editors. But with more than 4500 quantum papers posted to the arXiv last year, the field is much larger than the one covered by Discrete Analysisand Quantum has a much larger editing staff than its astro-focused cousin. The new journal, which will begin accepting submissions later this month, could be a fascinating test case as to the future of science publishing in the preprint server era.

They explains their acceptance policy and reasons for it here. Impressively sensible. This is the future. Unfortunately, retroactive awards cannot be reflected in the journal citation (like the “R” for PRA Rapid Communications) because it would interfere with citation tracking services. This makes me much less supportive of placing such tags in the citation at the time of “publication”, since the retroactive awards seem the most valuable to me. (H/t Lídia del Rio)

Crosstalk, also known by its Chinese name xiangsheng … is a traditional Chinese comedic performing arts, and one of China’s most popular cultural elements. It is typically in the form of a duo dialogue between two performers, but much less often can also be a monologue by a solo performer (similar to most western stand-up comedy), or even less frequently, a group act by multiple performers. The crosstalk language, rich in puns and allusions, is delivered in a rapid, bantering style, typically in the Beijing dialect (or in Standard Chinese with a strong northern accent). The acts would sometimes include singing, Chinese rapping and musical instruments.

Canadian crosstalk comedian Dashan (Mark Rowswell) says the closest equivalent in English would be Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” sketch.

And here’s “Dashan” performing in Manderin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iailMSUVenA

Birds, reptiles and amphibians have varying number of vertebrae in their necks, swans have 22-25, but mammals, regardless of size of animal or the animal’s neck, only have seven. Aberrant neck vertebrae are usually correlated with an increase in risk of stillbirth, childhood cancer and neuronal problems in mammals. These pleiotropic events are often associated with physical problems, such as thoracic outlet syndrome, due to misplaced or crushed nerves, muscles and blood vessels.

The only mammals which have evolved different numbers of neck vertebrae without any apparent problems are sloths and manatees. Two-toed sloths (Choloepus) have 5-7 neck vertebrae while three-toed sloths (Bradypus) have 8 or 9.

“It’s a bad sign in particular that those physicists who are happy about quantum mechanics, and see nothing wrong with it, don’t agree with each other about what it means,” Weinberg says.

Recent mergers have reduced the number of legacy airlines in the United States from six to three. We examine the effect of these legacy airline mergers on fares and output to determine whether the mergers have had an overall pro-competitive or anti-competitive effect. We focus on routes most likely to have been adversely affected by a reduction in competition. Our difference-in-differences regression analysis shows that those routes experienced no significant adverse effect on fares and significant increases in passenger traffic as well as capacity. These results indicate that the recent legacy mergers were pro-competitive.

I definitely would have predicted the opposite, so I’m updating even further in the direction of my intuition being good for nothing.

The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JDDJ) is a document created, and agreed to, by the Catholic Church’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (PCPCU) and the Lutheran World Federation in 1999, as a result of extensive ecumenical dialogue. It states that the churches now share “a common understanding of our justification by God’s grace through faith in Christ.” To the parties involved, this essentially resolves the five hundred year old conflict over the nature of justification which was at the root of the Protestant Reformation.

(NYTimes coverage.)

Both are about an innocent man who is left mutilated and near-dead by villains, is reconstructed into a cyborg by a special-weapons company, and seeks revenge on the people responsible for his fate.

Uber’s Otto team worked with Colorado regulators to get permission for the delivery and to arrange for police supervision of the shipment, said Ron. Otto spent two weeks scoping out the driving route from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, carefully mapping the road to make sure the technology could handle it. The team wanted the trip to take place in the early morning when traffic would be relatively light and on a day when the weather was clear. Those conditions were met last Thursday, when the delivery took place.