Exodus and exile: the structure of the Jewish holidays

Reviewed Book: Harris, Monford. Exodus and exile: the structure of the Jewish holidays. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992

A New Tower of Rankin-Selberg Integrals

This document describes the authors' current research project: the evaluation of a tower of Rankin-Selberg integrals on the group E_6. We recall the notion of a tower, and two known towers, making observations about how the integrals within a tower may be related to one another via formal manipulations, and offering a heuristic for how the L-functions should be related to one another when the integrals are related in this way. A detailed description of the E_6 tower is then given.Comment: 9 pages, LaTe

Help! Virtue Profiles and Horses for Courses

Glen Pettigrove addresses the proportionality principle in ethics, the principle that “our actions, attitudes, or emotions should be proportional to the degree of value present in the object or events to which they are responding” [p. 1]. He argues this is inconsistent with some familiar features of common-sense morality. In response, he brings virtuous character into the picture, a move we support but wish to modify. We show that certain helping actions should be guided by whether one has the virtue profile most suited to the situation from amongst a surrounding network of people

Remark on the Potential Function of the Linear Sigma Model

It is shown that the potential functions for the ordinary linear sigma model can be divided into two topographically different types depending on whether the quantity $R\equiv(m_\sigma/m_\pi)^2$ is greater than or less than nine. Since the Wigner-Weyl mode (R=1) and the Nambu-Goldstone mode ($R=\infty$ belong to different regions, we speculate that this classification may provide a generalization to the broken symmetry situation, which could be convenient for roughly characterizing different possible applications of the model. It is noted that a more complicated potential does not so much change this picture as add different new regions.Comment: 26 pages, 11 figures (gzipped