Dear Physics Community,

In the midst of all this mess, we still have to navigate international waters.  H.R. McMaster has a very interesting piece on US-China relations here.

Physics Department

What happens when you get behind on your reading – I try to follow what people in Physics are doing, but this week was just hard.  Catching up, I found this paper from Hong Liu relating condensed matter physics, gravity, many-body physics, and string theory.  I really recommend this nice, non-technical review.

Census – one of the most interesting things going on right now is the US Census.  The Constitution says there has to be a census every ten years and Congress says it has to be a count, not a sampling, and it has to protect citizens’ privacy.  The Census determines the allocation of congressional seats and the number of votes in the Electoral College, which we learned in the last presidential election is important. There is cool math used to ensure privacy.

Los Endos

This from Bob Jaffe.

Peter

P.S. I am posting these messages in my blog roll here. Thanks to Physics Council, Cathy Modica, Vicky Metternich and Christina Andujar for input and comments on these messages.