The Mandelbear's Musings

This morning I had my final radiation treatment. There's a gong in the waiting room, and I hit it on the way out. Very satisfying. 70 grays spread over 28 zaps, weekdays for five weeks and 3 days.

( Arithmetical and physical details, for the overly curious. )

I'm still trying to figure out what would make an appropriate way to mark the transition. By the terminology of these days I've been a survivor since my diagnosis. And I'm still being treated with a testosterone blocker -- I have another year and a half or so of that to go. And it'll be maybe another year after that until I know whether the combination actually got all the cancer. So who, or what, am I now?

An impatient, maybe?

The exceptionally beautiful object in my userpic is a projection into two dimensions of an exceptionally weird, complex, and strangely symmetrical family of 8-dimensional mathematical object called E8. In particular, it's a Lie group that just happens to contain, as subgroups, all of the simpler Lie groups used in quantum physics and gravitation.

With me so far?

Last month, a physicist/surfer dude named Garrett Lisi (CV) posted a paper with the title An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything that manages to combine all of the above into something considerably simpler and more elegant than string theory. Well, simpler if you happen to have a graduate-level grasp of group theory, quantum physics, and general relativity.

The current flurry of Wikipedia articles was apparently set off by this article in The Telegraph; I found out about it during my lunch break, from this post by wcg. Needless to say, I didn't get a whole lot of work done this afternoon. Although it also turns out that the E8 lattice is also closely related to the Haming code H(8,4), an 8-bit error-correcting code in which any two codewords differ by at least 4 bits. And that's something that I might be able to use. (Makes a good excuse, anyway.) (But be careful always to call it, please, research!)

update: Almost forgot to mention the connection between E8 and octonions. There's a good monograph by John Baez here. Yes, he's Joan's cousin.

First time I've ever seen Maxwell's Equations in a comic strip.

Excellent exposition in the notes following the strip.

(Feed at irregular_comic.)