Patrick Geddes – not only a town planner but a poet too

Sir Patrick Geddes, one of the fathers of modern town planning, worked as a town planner in Palestine during the 1920’s. He was motivated mainly by his Zionist feeling which can be seen in an unknown poem written by him concerning his attitude toward his work. This poem, which has never been published, presenting his admiration for the old-new Zionist ideology and the way that gifted man bonded together his knowledge of the Bible, his Scottish roots and his work into a poem, found in his unpublished private papers

Vacuum block thermalization in semi-classical 2d CFT

The universal nature of black hole collapse in asymptotically $AdS_3$ gravitational theories suggests that its holographic dual process, thermalization, should similarly be fixed by the universal features of 2d CFT with large central charge $c$. It is known that non-equilibrium states with scaling dimensions of order $c$ can be sorted into states that eventually thermalize and those that fail to do so. By proving an equivalence between bounded Virasoro coadjoint orbits and certain (in)stability intervals of Hill's equation it is shown that a state that fails to thermalize can be promoted to a thermalizing state by preparing the system beforehand with an energy greater than an appropriate threshold energy. It is generally a difficult problem to ascertain whether a state will thermalize or not. As partial progress to this problem a set of lower bounds are presented for the treshold energy, which can alternatively be interpreted as criteria for thermalization.Comment: 1 figure, 31 pages, v2: fixed typos, added reference

On Nations and International Boundaries - The European Case

It seems that our world is made of mainly nation states - independent states based on one particular nation, sometimes with some minorities in that state. Thus the model seams to be ‘a nation is establishing its boundaries’. On the other hand, our world also has the ‘boundaries that made a nation’ model, in which a nation was created after boundaries were drawn. Most independent European countries belong to the first model but Spain, Belgium, and five tiny states belong to the second model