## Thursday, September 27, 2007

### eternal

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A nice movie.
My simulation codes start to take hours, then days. I write scripts. These little creatures doing our work. My work.
The acorns have been falling onto my roof.

## Sunday, September 16, 2007

### LaTeX

Ah, the joys of math. So now I can ramble away with equations! (Thanks to)
So, we can represent the symplectic part of the dynamics of an accelerator by a one turn map:
$\mathcal{M} = e^{:H:}$
where $:H:$ is the operator saying to take the Poisson bracket with its argument. $H$ is the effective Hamiltonian and is a function of $x$ and $p$. In the linear case, $\mathcal{M}$ is just a matrix $\mathbb{M}$and if the Hamiltonian is $H =z_i z_j S_{ij}$ with $\vec z = (\vec x, \vec p)$, then
$\mathbb{M} = e^{JS}$
where
$J = \left(\matrix{0&1\cr -1&0}\right)$
is the symplectic inner product matrix and its multidimensional
extensions. Actually its kind of ugly. Ah well, I may or may not write more equations.

### Speaking of Faith

Krista Tippett, pp. 3-4:
Of this I'm certain: the religious energy of our world now is not in essence a rejection of all disciplines by which we've ordered our common life for many decades-- law, politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope. They can't ask ultimate questions of morality and meaning. Our most heated debates--on marriage, or stem-cell research, or abortion--defy the boundaries of legal rulings and political rights into which we've attempted to fit them. They drive back to the mysteries of human life and human sexuality. They are prisms for deep questions about identity, relationship, and love in our time. The also arouse fierce human impulses both to question difference and to defend it. We can construct factual accounts and systems from DNA, gross national product, legal code-- but they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in a life, what matters in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to one another. These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address, and religious traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them. I've seen a tapestry unfurled, both ancient and in progress like the whole of creation, a bearer of truths that arguments cannot contain. I must tell of these things, and how they meet my own deepest longings for truth, beauty, and hope.

## Thursday, September 13, 2007

### settling in

My laptop is a "PC". You know, with Microsoft Windows. I have been so reluctant to install anything permanent because I don't trust it. Now I install Eclipse, consider becoming a Java developer, locate tools to untar, real basics. Figure out how to access lab unix servers. Slowly things become unbroken. And the metaphorical connection to Long Island, this desolate place, that perhaps after enough years starts to come to life.