The only kind of change management that works

At least outside of a tyranny:

Life as a Healthcare CIO: Leading Change

...My decade of experience executing change suggests that Kotter was right. Building a guiding coalition, broadly communicating the vision, and celebrating a series of short term successes really works. I've watched projects without vision, resources or communication cause pain and anxiety throughout the organization. The good news is that we now know how to execute change and it is the role of senior management to enforce Kotter's principles in every change project...

Excellent details in Halamka's full post.

I read this stuff and I think about how much it used to cost to get advice like this. There's a generation emerging that will be accustomed to finding and tracking freely available wisdom.

Freedom requires religion

So atheists can't be free, but Wiccans can?

Romney: President needs prayers of people of all faiths - CNN.com: "

... Romney said religion is essential to freedom, without pointing to any specific faith.

'Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone,' the GOP contender said.

On another front Huckabee, who's even more explicit than Bush that Creationism should be taught in science class, is emerging as a GOP front runner.

Proclamations of the 'end of the religious right' appear to have been a bit premature.

Predictions of a rationalist victory, or at least a Democrat as president, are equally premature. The nation that reelected George W Bush has not changed radically in the past three years.

The thirty five year slowdown

In the past 35 years America has become vastly more wealthy.

Krugman, DeLong and Reich tell us that wealth has not gone to the middle class:

Robert Reich's Blog: It's the Economy, Stupid -- But Not Just the Slowdown

... middle-class families have exhausted the coping mechanisms they've used for over three decades to get by on median wages that are barely higher than they were in 1970, adjusted for inflation. Male wages today are actually lower than they were then; the income of a young man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago.

The first coping mechanism was moving more women into paid work. The percent of working mothers with school-age children has almost doubled since 1970 -- from 38 percent to about 70 percent. Some parents are now even doing 24-hour shifts, one on child duty while the other works...

When families couldn't paddle any harder, we started paddling longer. The typical American now works two weeks more each year than 30 years ago...

As the tide of economic necessity continued to rise, we turned to the third coping mechanism. We began taking equity out of our homes, big time....

...The fact is, most Americans are still not prospering in the high-tech, global economy that emerged three decades ago. Almost all the benefits of economic growth since then have gone to a relatively small number of people at the very top. The candidate who acknowledges this and comes up with ways to truly spread prosperity will have a good chance of winning over America's large and largely-anxious middle class.

The polls I know of don't show any sign that America's middle class recognizes their dilemma. Until I see that I can't share Reich's faith that there's a winning progressive political strategy in their discontent.

Software comments: quality and metaphor

My paternal grandfather was a railway man. In those days lots of people were. He must have had opinions about how to run a train, but he didn't have a blog.

Today software is the latest railway, but we have blogs. So people like Joel Spolsky, who has about a million or so readers, tell us some very interesting things:

Hitting the High Notes - Joel on Software

.... the conventional wisdom in the world of copycat business journalists and large companies who rely on overpaid management consultants to think for them, chew their food, etc., seems to be that the most important thing is reducing the cost of programmers.

In some other industries, cheap is more important than good. Wal*Mart grew to be the biggest corporation on Earth by selling cheap products, not good products. If Wal*Mart tried to sell high quality goods, their costs would go up and their whole cheap advantage would be lost. For example if they tried to sell a tube sock that can withstand the unusual rigors of, say, being washed in a washing machine, they'd have to use all kinds of expensive components, like, say, cotton, and the cost for every single sock would go up.

So, why isn't there room in the software industry for a low cost provider, someone who uses the cheapest programmers available? (Remind me to ask Quark how that whole fire-everybody-and-hire-low-cost-replacements plan is working.)

Here's why: duplication of software is free. That means that the cost of programmers is spread out over all the copies of the software you sell. With software, you can improve quality without adding to the incremental cost of each unit sold.

Essentially, design adds value faster than it adds cost...

I've read similar arguments in discussions about artists and entertainers -- such as professional baseball players). A hundred journeyman players can't deliver anywhere near the value of one superstar. The incremental cost of sending signal to a few more antennae is very, very small.

I hadn't, however, though about how well this applies to software as well. The incremental cost of creating another CD is very, very small.

In most industries quality doesn't scale all that well. In software, it can. It makes sense to pay enough to hire the very best designers and coders, and to give them working conditions that make them happy and productive. That's what Spolsky has done (See the "in house" software description.) I hope the meme is contagious.

So let's accept that producing software is still very hard and it takes really good and expensive people to create good software.

By why is it so hard to create good software, and why do so many products never fulfill their early promise?

I think I can add something from my own experience here.

I think we have trouble creating and nurturing great software because it's a very long process with a thousand different paths to an premature end. You can get a lot of things right, have a few good years of growth, then fumble a critical transition and see your work die a slow and ugly death.

We commonly use metaphors from architecture, literature, or music to describe the software creation process. I think they all add value, but I think they miss the organic aspect of how software grows and evolves. Maybe a better metaphor is building a company, creating a formal garden, or, perhaps, raising a particularly challenging child.

There's no perfect metaphor, but the common ones have a trap. They imply that there's a point that a product is "done" and the "A team" can move on. I'm sure that's sometimes true, but even then process may take 10 years. In many instances complex software remains a very demanding beast, requiring a lot of skill and ingenuity to keep it health and adaptive. Often that skill has moved on and the software can enter a spiral of every increasing entropy.

I think the long life cycle of software, and the easily underestimated costs of keeping a complex software beast "healthy", help explain why truly excellent software is unusual.

Google Street View in Saint Paul, Minnesota?

This is odd.

Google Street View (more here) is Google's amazing and controversial photographic reconstruction of street level details. It's enabled for San Francisco and a few select other cities.

And Saint Paul, Minnesota?!

My traffic map today has a 'street view' button. Clicking it merely toggles an icon of a standing biped, currently located in an obscure parking lot by an unremarkable intersection about one mile north of my home in Saint Paul.

The icon, which I recognize from other Street Views, is inactive, though s/he does have a context menu (center, zoom, etc).

So is it a glitch, or are we really going to see Street View in the twin cities? Who the heck picked that spot and why?

Update: Each time I access maps the little icon moves around the metro area. So I assume it's being placed randomly. I think Google is picking on me, but my new hat should protect me from Googlation ...

Pay phones join tape reels and broadcast TV

I'm surprised there are still a million pay phones around:

Pay phones? Yeah, I’ve seen them in old movies : Good Morning Silicon Valley:

...AT&T announced today that it will pull out of the pay-phone business by the end of next year, selling off its remaining 65,000 installations in a 13-state area. The company said it wanted to get out before the business became unprofitable, surprising many who figured that with everyone walking around with a phone in their pocket, the coin-op sector had been moribund for a while now. Indeed, it’s a lot tougher to find a public phone than it used to be. In 1998, there were 2.6 million of them scattered about; now it’s down to about a million....

The number of phones probably varies by state and climate. I bought my first cell phone at least 8 years ago because it was getting harder to find a pay phone in the Twin Cities metro area.

Another bit of culture our children will find odd when they see old movies.

By the way, dial phones and vinyl records, aren't yet one of those odd things. They still show up as toys or working devices -- at least in preschool. Carbon paper, rust, broadcast television, typewriters, telegrams, tape reels, punch cards, slide rules and family motels will probably be forgotten first.

Gmail feature request: the ability to edit subject lines

I added this feature request to Gmail suggestions today:

Gmail Suggestion

Ability to edit subject lines.

One of the most powerful features of Outlook is the ability to revise the subject line.

Why is this so powerful?

Because of search. Editing subject lines allows one to both add terms important in search, and increases the value of search results. Since results always display subject lines, good subject lines make search returns more useful.

I depend on this feature in my use of Outlook. I very much miss it in Gmail.

Gmail suggestions allows one to vote on new features that are being considered. It's worth a visit, though I suspect if one enters the same email address too frequently the votes are discounted.

I wonder if Google ranks feedback based on the reputation associated with the email address provided?

Google Docs has no clothes

My earliest posts on Google Docs (nee Writely), written in 2006, are here and here. Back then I thought we'd see Writely technology move into Blogger and Page Creator, and that Google Docs would become impressive.

Hasn't happened yet.

Since then I've used Google Docs fairly often, always with the latest versions of Firefox. It's a miserable word processor.

Sorry. It's true. Maybe it's better with IE, but I haven't tried it there.

If you do anything beyond simple text manipulation, the editing behaviors become increasingly unpredictable. Odd spaces open up that can't be removed. The HTML view doesn't explain the funky editing behavior, but it's a tag mess anyway.

Don't try inserting images and moving them around. You'll have to revert to a prior version as the document becomes irreparable.

I knew MacWrite. Google Docs is no MacWrite. It's arguably superior to WordStar, but I haven't tried any long documents in it. WordStar, however, was obsolete 20 years ago.

Google Spreadsheet is more useful; I haven't bothered with Google's presentation software.

I think we're a lot further from moving everything to the network than most pundits imagine ...

Google Sites to Launch Next Year

Very good news from Google Operating System. It's been obvious for over a year that Google's Page Creator was in maintenance mode. Just about anything else will be an improvement.

Google Sites to Launch Next Year

... JotSpot will replace Google Page Creator. "Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration." The service will also allow you to upload any file formats. You can already see a gallery of applications that use JotSpot.

As expected, most Google services will become Gears-enabled and will start to work even when you're offline. "Will users be able to edit docs, spreadsheets and presentation offline? Scott's answer was yes, and that the Google Gears plugin would handle the offline work. In addition, Google Gears support is in the works for Gmail and Google Calendar."

Another service that will become a part of Google Apps is GrandCentral, but the integration is not expected to be available very soon...

Jotspot is usually described as a Wiki service.

I use GrandCentral, it would be more appealing if they would add a fax receive service, perhaps for an additional fee.

Also expected in 2008 is Google's file sharing and backup service.

Preventing anorexia: are these traits predictive?

A very small, and possibly completely misleading study, suggests some personality traits associated with anorexia - and probably with success in medical school ...

BBC NEWS | Health | Anorexia visible with brain scans

... While the brain region for emotional responses - the anterior ventral striatum - showed strong differences for winning and losing the game in the healthy women, women with a past history of anorexia showed little difference between winning and losing...

...Another brain area, called the caudate, which is involved in linking actions to outcome and planning, was far more active in the women with a history of anorexia compared to the control group.

The anorexia group tended to have exaggerated and obsessive worry about the consequences of their behaviours, looked for rules where there were none and were overly concerned about making mistakes, said Dr Kaye.

He said: "There are some positive aspects to this kind of temperament. Paying attention to detail and making sure things are done as correctly as possible are constructive traits in careers such as medicine or engineering."

I haven't been following anorexia research, but I assume they were watching for these traits based on prior studies. I agree these are great traits for many medical careers. Equanimity about winning or losing, combined with a passion for meeting expectations and following rules, works well in many modern careers.

Now if you have a young daughter who doesn't seem to care about winning or losing, but who is happiest with expectations and rules in all settings, should you worry about anorexia?

It would depend on the positive predictive value of those traits. To simplify, they might turn out be required but not sufficient; they might be universal in anorexics, but also common in non-anorexics.

It would be nice to know the predictive power though. If they turned out to predictive traits, then parents could try avoid reinforcing some traits, while encouraging others. At the very least, one could keep a watchful eye on food behaviors ...

Children of the roaring 20s

Crooked Timber sent me to a 1957 article in the Atlantic monthly by Nora Johnson, who's book was later turned into an early Peter Sellers movie. A quick search didn't turn up a bio, but I assume she was born around 1935 -- a bit younger than my mother. She's 72 now, and likely living still.

I wonder what she makes of the old article.

The part that caught my eye was reflections on having parents who'd led wild and crazy lives. No, not in the 1960s. In the 1920s...

Sex and the College Girl

...Our parents kicked over so many traces that there are practically none left for us. That is not to say, of course, that all of our parents were behaving like the Fitzgeralds. Undoubtedly most of them weren't. But the twenties have come down to us as the Jazz Age, the era described by Time as having "one abiding faith—that something would happen in the next twenty minutes that would utterly change one's life," and this is what will go on the record. The people living more quietly didn't make themselves so eloquent. And this gay irresponsibility is our heritage. There is very little that is positive beneath it, and there is one clearly negative result—so many of our parents are divorced. This is something many of us have felt and want to avoid ourselves (though we have not been very successful). But if we blame our parents for their way of life, I suspect we envy them even more. They seemed so free of our worries, our self-doubts, and our search for what is usually called security—a dreary goal. I think that we bewilder our parents with our sensible ideas, which look, on the surface, like maturity...

Reads like Young Republicans of the Reagan eara.

SETI: find one of nine galactic civilizations

Damn Interesting has a very nice Drake Equation/SETI review today. Allan Bellow's even touches lightly on the Fermi Paradox, though he doesn't get into the various paradox resolutions.

The highlight of the article is an interactive Drake Equation calculator. Users start with various presets, including the 'rare earth' and the 'Drake 2004' options, then add their own biases. Two of the "terms" of the Drake Equation are now relatively accepted, below I show them and 3 variations on the rest: Drake 2004, rare earth, and me.

Common assumptions
New Milky Way stars per year = 6.00
Proportion of stars which have planets = 50.00%

Drake 2004
Average number of life-compatible satellites = 2.00
Percentage of planets where life does appear = 100.00%
Percentage where intelligent life evolves = 20.00%
Percentage of civilizations which send signals into space = 100.00%
Average years that civilizations will send signals = 10000.00
Average civilizations in our galaxy = 10,000

Rare Earth
Average number of life-compatible satellites = 0.000001
Percentage of planets where life does appear = 33.00%
Percentage where intelligent life evolves = 1.00%
Percentage of civilizations which send signals into space = 1.00%
Average years that civilizations will send signals = 10000.00
Average civilizations in our galaxy = 0

Me
Average number of life-compatible satellites = 0.10
Percentage of planets where life does appear = 87.50%
Percentage where intelligent life evolves = 20.00%
Percentage of civilizations which send signals into space = 90.00%
Average years that civilizations will send signals = 200.00
Average civilizations in our galaxy = 9.5

So Rare Earth ends up with zero civilizations, though I think this might be a bug. The first time I ran the calculations they had 1 civilization, presumably us.

Drake has 10,000 current civilizations that send signals for 10,000 years. This definitely runs into Fermi Paradox territory. If there are so many, and they endure for so long, then over galactic time scales at least one ought to have infested the stars.

I end up with 10 civilizations, of which we are 1. I get that by assuming an upper limit of 200 years of radio signals. We started radiating significantly around 1960, and if our civilization endures I don't think we'll be doing much wasteful radiating by 2160. I suspect we (or our inheritors) will be utterly incomprehensible, and perhaps uninterested in the merely physical universe.

This is a very small number of civilizations across a galaxy. Ssuch a low number makes it very unlikely that one of them will choose to aim a high intensity radio beam directly at us -- and that's all we can detect with today's technology.

We'd need to build a receptor the size of the solar system to pick up accidental signaling. I'm sure we could do that by 2160, but of course that takes us into the realm of the unimaginable.

So SETI won't find much.

Damn.

Update 12/31/09: I think we can rule out "rare earth". Also, another take on the Drake Equation.

McCain on torture: the least bad Republican

McCain's policies on lots of things, including his astounding ignorance of science, would put him well below any plausible Democrat for the presidency.

Even so, among the Republican candidates, he comes in first. For this if for nothing else:

INTEL DUMP - John McCain, good on you:

...ROMNEY: And as I just said, as a presidential candidate, I don't think it's wise for us to describe specifically which measures we would and would not use. And that is something which I would want to receive the counsel not only of Senator McCain, but of a lot of other people.
And there are people who, for many, many years get the information we need to make sure that we protect our country. And, by the way, I want to make sure these folks are kept at Guantanamo. I don't want the people that are carrying out attacks on this country to be brought into our jail system and be given legal representation in this country. I want to make sure that what happened ...
(Applause)
... to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed happens to other people who are terrorists. He was captured. He was the so-called mastermind of the 9/11 tragedy. And he turned to his captors and he said, "I'll see you in New York with my lawyers." I presume ACLU lawyers.
(Laughter)
Well, that's not what happened. He went to Guantanamo and he met G.I.s and CIA interrogators. And that's just exactly how it ought to be.
(Applause)...

"McCAIN: Then I am astonished that you would think such a — such a torture would be inflicted on anyone in our — who we are held captive and anyone could believe that that's not torture. It's in violation of the Geneva Convention. It's in violation of existing law... (Applause) And, governor, let me tell you, if we're going to get the high ground in this world and we're going to be the America that we have cherished and loved for more than 200 years. We're not going to torture people. We're not going to do what Pol Pot did. We're not going to do what's being done to Burmese monks as we speak. I suggest that you talk to retired military officers and active duty military officers like Colin Powell and others, and how in the world anybody could think that that kind of thing could be inflicted by Americans on people who are held in our custody is absolutely beyond me."...

[later]

McCAIN: Well, then you would have to advocate that we withdraw from the Geneva Conventions, which were for the treatment of people who were held prisoners, whether they be illegal combatants or regular prisoners of war. Because it's clear the definition of torture. It's in violation of laws we have passed. And again, I would hope that we would understand, my friends, that life is not "24" and Jack Bauer. Life is interrogation techniques which are humane and yet effective. And I just came back from visiting a prison in Iraq. The Army general there said that techniques under the Army Field Manual are working and working effectively, and he didn't think they need to do anything else. My friends, this is what America is all about. This is a defining issue and, clearly, we should be able, if we want to be commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, to take a definite and positive position on, and that is, we will never allow torture to take place in the United States of America. (Applause)

Kudos to Intel Dump for including the Applause/Laughter annotations. In a just universe (pray it is not) those applauding Romney would get their afterlife orientation via Pol Pot.

How can McCain stomach his own people?

PS. The ID Comments included a link to Joe Klein's report on how Republican "undecided" voters responded to the debates. Chilling, but sadly predictable.

The spectrum wars: Chapter One

Google is ready to fight the 700MHz war.

Official Google Blog: Who's going to win the spectrum auction? Consumers.

... we announced today that we are applying to participate in the auction.

We already know that regardless of which bidders ultimately win the auction, consumers will be the real winners either way. This is because the eventual winner of a key portion of this spectrum will be required to give its customers the right to download any application they want on their mobile device, and the right to use any device they want on the network...

Regardless of how the auction unfolds, we think it's important to put our money where our principles are. Consumers deserve more choices and more competition than they have in the wireless world today. And at a time when so many Americans don't have access to the Internet, this auction provides an unprecedented opportunity to bring the riches of the Net to more people.

While we've written a lot on our blogs and spoken publicly about our plans for the auction, unfortunately you're not going to hear from us about this topic for awhile, and we want to explain why.
Monday, December 3, is the deadline for prospective bidders to apply with the FCC to participate in the auction. Though the auction itself won't start until January 24, 2008, Monday also marks the starting point for the FCC's anti-collusion rules, which prevent participants in the auction from discussing their bidding strategy with each other.

These rules are designed to keep the auction process fair, by keeping bidders from cooperating in anticompetitive ways so as to drive the auction prices in artificial directions. While these rules primarily affect private communications among prospective bidders, the FCC historically has included all forms of public communications in its interpretation of these rules.

All of this means that, as much as we would like to offer a step-by-step account of what's happening in the auction, the FCC's rules prevent us from doing so until the auction ends early next year. So here's a quick primer on how things will unfold:

• December 3: By Monday, would-be applicants must file their applications to participate in the auction...
• Mid-December: Once all the applications have been fully reviewed, the FCC will release a public list of eligible bidders in the auction. Each bidder must then make a monetary deposit no later than December 28, depending on which licenses they plan to bid on. The more spectrum blocks an applicant is deemed eligible to bid on, the greater the amount they must deposit.
• January 24, 2008: The auction begins, with each bidder using an electronic bidding process. Since this auction is anonymous (a rule that we think makes the auction more competitive and therefore better for consumers), the FCC will not publicly identify which parties have made which bid until after the auction is over.
• Bidding rounds: The auction bidding occurs in stages established by the FCC, with the likely number of rounds per day increasing as bidding activity decreases. The FCC announces results at the end of each round, including the highest bid at that point, the minimum acceptable bid for the following round, and the amounts of all bids placed during the round. The FCC does not disclose bidders' names, and bidders are not allowed to disclose publicly whether they are still in the running or not.
• Auction end: The auction will end when there are no new bids and all the spectrum blocks have been sold (many experts believe this auction could last until March 2008). If the reserve price of any spectrum block is not met, the FCC will conduct a re-auction of that block. Following the end of the auction, the FCC announces which bidders have secured licenses to which pieces of spectrum and requires winning bidders to submit the balance of the payments for the licenses....

So Chapter One will likely run from now through March 2008.

Let the glorious battle begin! May the barbarians run rampant on the ruins of the Empire.

In Our Time: Symmetry, Moonshine, String Theory and E8

It's good to stretch one's mind on the way in to the office. It makes modeling relationships between arcane procedural descriptions and CPT codes seem pleasantly relaxing.

Today's stretch is courtesy of an In Our Time podcast [1] on symmetry. The professors do discuss Galois, but so far they've missed Emily Noether. Excellent anyway.

I'm not quite done, but I've learned about Galois, a bit of history, and, for the first time, I have a vague understanding of what Group Theory is about and it's relationship to geometry and topology. Not bad for free.

Towards the end of the podcast they talk about mysterious relationships between one "monstrous" element in an "atlas" of "Groups", where a Group is a collection of mathematical objects with shared symmetric transformations. One of them, the "monster", is described as having a mysterious relationship with mathematical physics.

Cue Wikipedia:

Monstrous moonshine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Specifically, Conway and Norton, following an initial observation by John McKay, found that the Fourier expansion of j(τ) ... could be expressed in terms of linear combinations of the dimensions of the irreducible representations of M ...

... lying behind monstrous moonshine is a certain string theory having the Monster group as symmetries; the conjectures made by Conway and Norton were proven by Richard Ewen Borcherds in 1992 using the no-ghost theorem from string theory and the theory of vertex operator algebras and generalized Kac-Moody superalgebras.

... Igor Frenkel, James Lepowsky and Arne Meurman explicitly constructed this representation using vertex operators in conformal field theory describing bosonic string theory compactified on a 24-dimensional torus generated by the Leech lattice and orbifolded by a reflection. The resulting module is called the Monster module...

Well, ok, so I didn't exactly follow all of that. Impressive at a cocktail party no doubt, but we don't do that sort of thing.

All quite exciting in a geeky sort of way, except bosonic string theory seems to have been a bit of a dead end. Again, from Wikipedia (emphases mine, I thought this was a lovely explanation btw_:

Bosonic String theory is the original version of string theory, developed in the late 1960s. Although it has many attractive features, it has a pair of features that render it unattractive as a physical model. Firstly it predicts only the existence of bosons whereas we know many physical particles are fermions. Secondly, it predicts the existence of a particle whose mass is imaginary implying that it travels faster than light. The existence of such a particle, commonly known as a tachyon, would conflict with much of what we know about physics, and such particles have never been observed.

Another feature of bosonic string theory is that in general the theory displays inconsistencies due to the conformal anomaly. In a spacetime of 26 dimensions, however, with 25 dimensions of space and one of time, the inconsistencies cancel. Another way to look at this is that in general bosonic string theory predicts unphysical particle states called 'ghosts'. In 26 dimensions the no-ghost theorem predicts that these ghost states have no interaction whatsoever with any other states and hence that they can be ignored leaving a consistent theory. So bosonic string theory predicts a 26 dimensional spacetime. This high dimensionality isn't a problem for bosonic string theory because it can be formulated in such a way that along the 22 excess dimensions, spacetime is folded up to form a small torus. This would leave only the familiar four dimensions of spacetime visible.

In the early 1970s, supersymmetry was discovered in the context of string theory, and a new version of string theory called superstring theory (supersymmetric string theory) became the real focus. Nevertheless, bosonic string theory remains a very useful "toy model" to understand many general features of perturbative string theory, and string theory textbooks usually start with the bosonic string...

So why does Time always get only one dimension? Space seems awfully greedy.

So the monster/physics connection didn't quite hold up, but one supposes Supersymmetry might have some familial connection to the Monster.

Or perhaps there's another step up?

... E8 is the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional. E8 itself is 248-dimensional...

...Hermann Nicolai, Director of the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam, Germany. "While mathematicians have known for a long time about the beauty and the uniqueness of E8, we physicists have come to appreciate its exceptional role only more recently - yet, in our attempts to unify gravity with the other fundamental forces into a consistent theory of quantum gravity, we now encounter it at almost every corner."

Or a step down?

... Since 1997, physicists have proposed countless variations on Maldacena's theme, all of which interpret a string as a swarm of particles living in a small number of dimensions. Perhaps the easiest case to visualize is when that number is two. In such a scenario, anything that takes place in your many-dimensional, stringy universe has a sort of shadow representation in terms of particles moving on that universe's 'sphere at infinity.' This esoteric-sounding concept is actually similar to the familiar celestial sphere of the night sky as seen from Earth: It's the two-dimensional surface spanning all possible directions one can point to infinitely far in space..

I probably need to stop now. Work beckons, and my furhter inquires on relationship between E8 and the Monster Group started running into "alternative physics" posts. I have enough trouble with "conventional" physics, thanks.

Ok, one last comment. In the nice, sane, quiet world of the humble Higgs (God) particle CV tells us:

... if you impose upon our relativistic, complex, quantum-mechanical wavefunctions the requirement that they be invariant under these U(1) transformations, then you get electromagnetism. Conservation of electric charge. A massless photon. QED - quantum electrodynamics, in all its 12-digit precision glory. Electromagnetism is a simple consequence of the U(1) symmetry of any wavefunction....

It's all relative (sorry). QED seems perfectly pedestrian now.

[1] From a prior post:

Melvyn Bragg's BBC show, In Our Time, has begun a new season. I'm a fan.

The bad news is that the BBC is sticking with its execrable latest-episode-only download policy. So if you want to listen to the superb Opium War episode on your MP3 player you need to either use Audio Hijack Pro to capture the RealAudio stream or (if you know me) ask me for a DVD with the entire series [1]. Incidentally, this is a good time to write a quick email to set IOT free.

The good news is there's a new page that makes it easy to subscribe to a feed. I used to subscribe via iTunes, but if I went a week without using iTunes I missed the show. Now I subscribe via iTunes and Bloglines; I use Bloglines at least daily so it's easy for me to save the MP3 and email it to myself.