Meditation on a Cat Picture and a Flamingo Statue

I am a very visual person. As a student studying cinema, I’m interested in creating stories that can be woven together into a film. Even when something isn’t “supposed to” contain elements of narrative and fiction as defined by its medium, I do my very best to put them in there anyway. I want to make my own unique stories, in pictures and in words. Optimally, they end up being amusing.When making anything, I tend to hack a jagged path through the whole mess as fast as possible, and have something technically defined as a finished product as soon as I can. Then the real work can begin. I read or watch what I’ve put together more times than I can count, making changes, large or small, each time. When a piece is near done, it’s a family member I am dying to distance myself from. I have to take long breaks after making any work before I can survey it without it nagging me to consider switching the order of two shots, or to say “stupid” instead of “lacking of brains”. Whatever the work is, it usually ends up embodying my emotional state during the project, and contains themes and ideas that have recently been rolling around my head.My meditation on a flamingo statue is the most fun I have ever had writing something described as nonfiction. I researched as I wrote, and the research helped me gain momentum and interests in the themes I attempted to cover of real versus fake and a search for meaning and purpose. I have been a lifetime vegetarian, and this guided some of the pieces ideas as well as my research on salmon, unexpectedly teaching me that many of the salmon found at the supermarket could be another fish entirely, something interesting to learn and fun to play with thematically. The sculpture of melting flamingos I chose to marinate my thoughts over haunted me with a dark feeling of decay, which I attempted to portray throughout the piece. My goal in writing it was to build an uneasy adventure through imagination to bring my thoughts and feelings into a physical space and over a narrative arc instead of leaving them as just words on a page

Elements of F-ast Proton Decay

Gauge coupling unification in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) strongly suggests the existence of a Grand Unified Theory (GUT), which could be probed by the observation of proton decay. Proton lifetime in the p \to (e+|mu+) pi0 dimension six mode is proportional in the fourth power to the GUT mass scale, and inversely proportional in the fourth power to the GUT coupling. We provide an updated dictionary of solutions for the relevant unification parameters with generic beta-function coefficients, significantly upgrading the level of detail with which second order effects are treated, and correcting subtle published errors. F-lipped SU(5) with strict MSSM field content is known to survive existing null detection limits for proton decay approaching 10^34 years, and indeed, the lifetime predicted by prior studies can be so long that successful detection is not currently plausible. Recently studied classes of F-theory derived GUT models postulate additional vector-like multiplets at the TeV scale which modify the renormalization group to yield a substantial increase in the SU(3)_C X SU(2)_L unified coupling. We find the conjunction of these models with the F-resh analysis employed to be comparatively F-ast proton decay, only narrowly evading existing detection limits, and likely falling within the observable range of proposed next generation detectors such as DUSEL and Hyper-Kamiokande. The TeV-scale vector multiplets are themselves suitable for cross correlation by the Large Hadron Collider. Their presence moreover magnifies the gap between the dual mass scales of Flipped SU(5), allowing for an elongated second stage renormalization, pushing grand unification to the doorstep of the reduced Planck mass.Comment: V2, As published in Nuclear Physics B; 57 pages, 7 figures, 12 table

Amenability of groups and GG-sets

This text surveys classical and recent results in the field of amenability of groups, from a combinatorial standpoint. It has served as the support of courses at the University of G\"ottingen and the \'Ecole Normale Sup\'erieure. The goals of the text are (1) to be as self-contained as possible, so as to serve as a good introduction for newcomers to the field; (2) to stress the use of combinatorial tools, in collaboration with functional analysis, probability etc., with discrete groups in focus; (3) to consider from the beginning the more general notion of amenable actions; (4) to describe recent classes of examples, and in particular groups acting on Cantor sets and topological full groups