News (2014/06/22)

This news post will be a short one, because I think the news should be pretty obvious -- I've started a new blog! Background Independence will be a home for all of my writings on physics, mathematics, science communication, education, and everything in that vein. With some luck I'll be updating it semi-regularly, so you should have good reason to keep track!

An introduction to the blog can be found on the About page, although I'll be running it in much the same way as Philosophia Mea (which I won't be abandoning completely!) so long-time readers won't need much catching up. One small note, I discourage readers from viewing the blog on mobile devices (not including tablets) if they can. In order to make the mathematics render on mobile I've had to use a mobile template which is not especially user-friendly, and strongly resembles the standard version. Everything is still there, but for the time being you might have to do a lot of reading zoomed-in, with lots of side-scrolling.

In physics news, the controversy regarding the BICEP2 results rages on, with an altered version of their initial pre-print paper being published in Physical Review Letters, a premier physics journal. How significant the alterations are is a matter of perspective, but certainly questions about the accuracy of the group's conclusions are yet to be answered, and likely won't be at least until the Planck group releases their data, which is expected to be more precise, around October.

In somewhat less science-y news, a couple of weeks ago was a rare full moon Friday 13th, which you would think would be off the bad luck charts. I'm not superstitious myself, and as far as I can remember my day went by fairly unremarkably. It was my intention to write a belated post (tongue firmly in cheek) on ghost fields in particle physics to mark the occasion, but unfortunately life has gotten in the way and I haven't had the time, nor likely will I any time soon, so that Wikipedia article will have to do for the time being.

Apart from that, I'll be restarting work on the Fourier post in earnest soon, so I expect to have it up in full or in part within the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out!