Dmitry Podolsky has got his PhD from Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He currently works as postdoc at Case Western Reserve University. He is also one of the editors of NEQNET.

70. Excess of cash and the origin of bubbles

Let us continue our dummy studies of the global financial crisis (2008-….). As we have concluded the last time, the intrinsic worth of US economy should be presently strongly overestimated while nominated in US dollars. The surplus – amount of US dollars printed by FED which are not backed up by anything except the price [...]

69. Happy Halloween!

Since it is Halloween, today’s story is about ghosts… Let us follow the analysis of massive gravity theory in de Sitter background by Izumi and Tanaka. The action of the theory is given by

68. On Shakespeare

James Kotsybar replied by a poem to my attempt to compare him and Shakespeare Here it is: Sketching portraits in iambs – metered thought – He reflects the gamut of emotion And presents plainly – no judgment wrought Kaleidoscopes of man’s psychology, Enlightening the unconscious ocean. Swimming in pools – egos – other than his [...]

67. Weak lensing and modifying gravity

Jochen Weller et al. are trying to constrain the modified gravity theories with weak lensing data combined with baryon acoustic oscillations and supernovae data. Namely, the authors are mostly interested to fit the Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati model and its modification mDGP (one parametric matching between Lambda CDM and DGP). The authors conclude that it is impossible to [...]

66. Some interesting talks worth watching

Steve Carlip talks about topologically massive gravity at Perimeter, namely, about 3d topologically massive gravity in AdS and finds that it is unstable (even for chiral values Strominger mentioned at Strings 08). Apart from this (most interesting from my point of view) talk – CITA/Perimeter joint workshop took place on Oct 23, and the presentations [...]

65. Simulations of decaying turbulence

A group of people (with Jonathan Dursi being the only one I know personally among them) has written nice review of existing software for stimulating decaying compressible (supersonic) turbulence with the goal to compare performance of the codes. In particular, they have reviewed GADGET, PHANTOM, VINE, ENZO, FLASH, TVD, and ZEUS (the first three being [...]

64. Since you liked it, I gather… :-)

Here is a bit more poetry by James Kotsybar: QUANTUM MELODY — James Ph. Kotsybar Below subatomic, the particles slip through Heisenberg’s uncertainty nets. They cannot even be called articles; they’re just mathematical epithets. Though we may say they have up or down spins (we may even find them charming or strange), like angels that [...]

63. A little break for a poetry :-)

I was contacted by James Kotsybar, who presented me with several pieces of poetry I have no idea why he sent them to me, but they were fun to read – although not Shakespeare, but I liked them (in which respect – that I will not disclose). James also kindly agreed to allow me to [...]

62. Two decisions and the worth of US economy

Hi friends Today I would like to continue my non-specialist analysis of the global financial crisis, its origin and consequences. Actually, I  hesitated to name this series “Global crisis for dummies” but realized after some email conversations – there is a good chance that I am the only dummy around As I have explained last time, there were [...]

61. Rant: LHC, global crisis and switchers

1. LHC and the reason for this rant As we know, LHC currently stands broken – 5 quadrupole and 24 dipole magnets are broken (out of 392 and 1232, correspondingly) due to the famous incident with liquid helium (see Lubos’ coverage of the incident). User uzhas_sovka, former physicist, currently financial analyst, yet to gain his [...]