It's official. I've got my first date in a long while all lined up, and I'm bouncing with anticipation. His name is Itai, and we learned about each other through a web site for personal ads a little more than a week ago. We've been emailing each other since last Thursday, and he seems like just my type. We'll be meeting this coming Thursday at the Village Green, a vegetarian restaurant in Jerusalem. Wish me luck!

This past Shabbos was a quiet one, and I mostly just caught up on some reading. Most notably, I went back and read the end-notes for The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. I'd finished the main text earlier this week, but I wanted to collect all the end-notes to see if anything terribly interesting was hidden within. The book was quite enjoyable. As its subtitle suggests, it is about "Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory." This was particularly interesting to me since until reading this book I didn't know much about string theory other than that it is a cutting edge branch of physics that, though still in its infancy, promises to heal the pernicious rift that divides relativity theory and quantum mechanics and provide us with a unified view of the rules that govern the universe's most fundamental machinery.

It starts by explaining the most salient concepts of both quantum mechanics and Einstein's special and general theories of relativity. It then goes on to illustrate how relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible with each other and why this might bug us so much. The second two thirds of the book is devoted to a gloss of the various aspects of string theory: a history of its development, an explanation of how it reconciles quantum mechanics with relativity, a high-level tour through the concepts of string theory and their remarkable consequences, a discussion of how this controversial and unconfirmed theory might one day be verified, and a view of the severe mathematical obstacles physicists must overcome in order to extract useful predictions from string theory.

Oddly enough, my favorite part of the book was the introductory parts that dealt with relativity and quantum mechanics. Since both of these branches of physics have been extremely well developed and confirmed with astounding accuracy in the past century, I've had plenty of exposure to these theories both through my formal education and my independent recreational exploration. So this familiar material should have been old hat to me. But Brian Greene surprised me by providing expositions that gave me fresh insights into these pillars of modern physics.

My favorite little gem was his explanation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which made the principle make sense for me in a way that it never did before. It's so simple: since every method of measurement boils down to poking something with one or more particles, the only way you can measure position without disturbing velocity is to poke very, very lightly. But the only way to poke so very lightly is to use probing particles of very low frequency (since lower frequency means lower energy). But since low frequency means large wavelength, the gentleness of your poking has come at the cost of precision in measuring position, since you've only narrowed the position down to the large space covered that long wavelength. You can only measure position precisely by using particles with short wavelength, whose high energy completely screws up your velocity measurement. So you're stuck having to choose one or the other.

I was also especially charmed by a surprising perspective on special relativity that the text helped me discover: everything in the universe is travelling at the speed of light and is forever fixed in this speed, not just photons and other such massless particles. We're just used to thinking otherwise because the massy objects of our everyday experience have most of this speed directed in the dimension of time; all of it, in fact, when an object is stationary in space. Whenever we get our bodies moving through the familiar three dimensions of space, we aren't really changing our speed through spacetime at all: we're just stealing some speed away from the direction of time (thus slowing down our clocks whenever we move), just like turning your moving automobile from facing north to facing north-east only converts part of its north-south motion into east-west motion without changing the overall speed. Thinking about the universe in such delightfully unconventional ways is what I really love about modern physics.

The stringy majority of the book was also good, but wasn't nearly as satisfying since those ideas were explained with a lot less completeness and a lot more vagueness. Of course, this fact is inevitable for at least two reasons. First, string theory is far from completely understood by the very scientists developing it (that's what it means to be cutting-edge), so the author certainly can't give you answers which nobody has yet. Second of all, the mathematics behind the parts of string theory that are well-understood are far too complicated to be explained without bloating up the text to gargantuan proportions and completely losing the audience of the layperson in the process. Thus, I can completely forgive this book for sacrificing precision in the name of comprehensibility. The Elegant Universe serves quite effectively in the role of introducing non-physicists to this fascinating frontier of science, and if it's whetted my appetite for a more detailed exploration of the finer details and mathematics, then that can only be counted in its favor.

This morning I attended the first lesson in a four-part weekly course on Chi Gung, given by Michael Oxman, Tzfat's resident practitioner of Chinese medicine. A lot of the principles and material was familiar to me from when I took a course on Tai Chi Chu in the summer session that was my very last semester at university. On the way home after the lesson, my body was rushing with heat sensations and almost more energy than I could contain, so it looks like it got my chi flowing pretty well. Fun so far; we'll see how this develops in the next few weeks.

The past two days have been full of lots of random geekiness. Yesterday, I went to hang out with Ashira and Becca, but got commandeered into helping Becca with her web site and spent at least as much time teaching Becca how to use .htaccess to lock web pages with a password as I did stealing the precious little baby from her.

And Becca's need for a bit of blogging software of her own sparked me into taking another dive into the vast sea of available blog programs. Even after I decided that Poster seemed like the best choice for her needs, I still kept window-shopping until I finally came full circle and reaffirmed that PyBlosxom is the best fit for me.

Avraham also expressed interest in creating his own computer font from his hand-drawn calligraphy, so I spent some time comparing the free software I could find for font creation to the software he was thinking about spending an exhorbitant amount of money on. It took me very little time to realize that combining autotrace with fontforge would allow me to assemble a font out of bitmapped scans of the glyphs at least as effectively and quickly, if not more so. The fact that the free software for this task is much less "user-friendly" than the commercial competitor is pretty irrelevant, since FontLab proved to be too complicated for Avraham to operate anyway.

In the PalmOS department, I took a little time today to follow up on a tip I'd gleaned when I had my hands on Orna's Treo while at Justin's birthday party. Although palmOne certainly does enough bragging about the LifeDrive's ability to play video files, the software they include for doing so is severely restricted in the types of files it can play: only a tiny handful of codecs and container formats are supported, and the details of the actual video and audio data have to be very, very specific. The upshot is that you have to reencode practically anything at all before you'd be able to view it, a prospect tedious enough to keep me from bothering at all. So I was somewhat surprised when I saw that Orna's Treo had been put into service for watching rather run-of-the-mill video files downloaded casually from the Internet, no reformatting necessary. The secret is TCPMP, which is lovely enough to play just about anything you'd want to throw at it without any fuss. Open source software saves the day again.

And for my last trick, I scribbled up a tiny CGI script to let Becca conjure up a picture chosen randomly from a pool.

For Shabbos, I'd invited my friends Avicom and Yael to dinner to welcome them to town. They just moved in this past week or so to do a few semesters of school at Tzfat's little branch of Bar Ilan University. I wouldn't have even known they were in town except that I'd bumped into them on Tuesday night on the way to the bus station. The early onset of Shabbos was again highly unappreciated as I rushed on Friday to get all the shopping and cooking and cleaning done. Fortunately, the spaghetti and meat sauce were finished just in the nick of time. Avicom and Yael also brought along Amir, who was staying with them for Shabbos, and whom I'd first met when Avicom spirited Justin away to Tzfat for the weekend before Justin's wedding. The honey-flavored distilled wine they contributed to the meal was fully appreciated. I wanted to see Avicom and Yael's new apartment, so I walked them home after dinner. I knew they lived way on the other side of town, but I hadn't even realized that Tzfat extended quite so far east. This neighborhood was obviously not built more than a few years ago, and it's got some very nice houses in a variety of styles along its suburban streets. As I'd been warned, the apartment's bathroom is bigger than my bedroom, and the spacious living room has a nice shiny marble floor on which you are not allowed to wear your shoes. After Yael plied me with tea and an invitation to spend the night, I couldn't find any pressing reason to walk home. So I stayed at their house for the rest of Shabbos. Yael gave me a biography on Albert Einstein to give me some needed practice with reading Hebrew, and I promised to tutor her in statistics. After Shabbos, Amir and Avicom and I took Amir's car down for a quick jaunt to Rosh Pina to see if there would be anything interesting to do. There wasn't, aside from a little window shopping and the decidedly mediocre cigars that Avicom and Amir bought and smoked.