thanks for such a nice post. We do enjoy our daily ritual here, but as Mollishka said, after a while it seems like a very natural thing to do, so one forgets it is actually quite unusual. By the way, I was probably the guy sitting right next to her, talking too much.

but of course we are allowed (by ourselves) and encouraged (and do it frequently) to talk about a recent conference or a neat new result from a member of the department. And when a member of the department has a paper out, they will talk about it on that day at length(as Mollishka did on Monday). But the biggest value comes from learning what other people in the world are working on, and doing it every day. The superiority over any journal club (including our own) comes from discussing 10-15 papers a week at reasonable depth, as opposed to discussing one paper a week at great depth. Oh yeah, and we also drink coffee there, which is a good thing.

I’m actually a bit surprised that you view morning coffee in the context of a journal club, and as a superior one at that — it seemed to me to be a poor imitation, at least in the implementation at my institution. There just wasn’t enough lead time for anyone other than possibly the person who led the discussion to have read the paper, and usually not even that person (the usual seemed to be for the person leading the discussion on a particular paper to have read the abstract and conclusion and looked at the figures), leading to a very shallow discussion. And quite frankly some days the papers of the day were poorly selected (or interested only the person selecting them), or there just wasn’t anything worth talking about.

I emphasize that although this was in imitation of the OSU model it was *not* OSU, and implementations may vary. But I didn’t find it terribly useful.

Sorry the weather didn’t cooperate with your visit. Earlier this week, it was 75 degrees and sunny!

It’s interesting to hear you (and others) talk about how unusual Coffee is. As a graduate student, I’ve not really known an astronomy department without morning Coffee … it’s the norm. I think that once it reaches ciritical mass, it isn’t too difficult to sustain. People don’t “try to make time out of their day” for Coffee; Coffee is just an integral something that happens everyday. It’s also an excellent way to keep up-to-date on the current literature; I think one reason people are able to get into the habit of scanning all of the astro-ph abstracts (even the ones not directly related to their own research per se) is that if you understand something and can add to the conversation, the great, but if not, you are better prepared to ask questions which will probably get answered.

And the “fiesty” discussion you mention? It’s not all that scary, well, it can be, and the word “bogus” isn’t shied away from, but we really area friendly crowd and people generally get along with one another. Besides, it sometimes leads to papers! For example, there was Pinsonneault, DePoy, and Coffee (2001). I hear ApJ wasn’t too pleased when they figured that one out …

I don’t see the connection between the discussion that you point to and Mathur’s calculations.

http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000530.html

The situations are not identical. But near enough.

Jack – Samir and I didn’t discuss this in terms of diagrams, but since he is dealing with supersymmetric black holes, they are charged, and these black holes do indeed have a timelike singularity within GR.

You make a very strong and dismissive statement about the believability of this work. I assume that this means you have discovered an error, in which case you should definitely contact Samir – he is a very pleasant and smart guy who is only interested in understanding the physics.

Suresh – this is the point I was making; that these people have managed something few others have. I mentioned what I think some ingredients are, but don’t undestand the full recipe. I think at OSU this has been going on continuously for about 10 years!

Frankly, the fuzzball stuff is about as believable as Nobelist Laughlin’s ideas. ie, not.