A new entry in the best title ever competition appeared last week on the arXiv:
arXiv:0806.4874
Why devil plays dice?
Authors: Andrzej Dragan
Abstract: Principle of Relativity involving all, not only subluminal, inertial frames
leads to the disturbance of causal laws in a way known from the fundamental
postulates of Quantum Theory. We show how quantum indeterminacy based on
complex probability amplitudes with superposition principle emerges from
Special Relativity.
I bet the devil would play a mean game of liar’s dice.
Do Dragan and arXiv pay royalties or license fees, or get a quantum qickback? Consulting wikipedia:
Devil Dice (Xi, pronounced “Sai”, in Japan) is a video game for the PlayStation. It was originally created by developer Shift on the “homebrew” Yaroze platform, and later turned into a commercial game. Released in 1998, it is one of only a handful of games to make the leap from the Yaroze to commercial release. The game is a million-seller and a demo version was released as a PlayStation Classic game for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable (PSP) on November 7, 2007.
A PSP version, Xi Coliseum, was released in Japan on March 9, 2006. This version includes support for ad-hoc wireless play between up to five players.
The title has a number of sequels, including Devil Dice 2, also for the PlayStation, and Bombastic for the PlayStation 2.
I recommend the wireless play. Less chance of getting entangled with your enemy.
I like this title, especially tasty if you’re fighting a cold or at a good deli.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.4213
Matzoh ball soup in spaces of constant curvature
Authors: Genqian Liu
Comments: 28 pages
Subjects: Analysis of PDEs (math.AP); Differential Geometry (math.DG)
In this paper, we generalize Magnanini-Sakaguchi’s result from Euclidean space to spaces of constant curvature. More precisely, we show that if a conductor satisfying the exterior geodesic sphere condition in the space of constant curvature has initial temperature 0 and its boundary is kept at temperature 1 (at all times), if the thermal conductivity of the conductor is inverse of its metric, and if the conductor contains a proper sub-domain, satisfying the interior geodesic cone condition and having constant boundary temperature at each given time, then the conductor must be a geodesic ball. Moreover, we show similar result for the wave equations and the Schrodinger equations in spaces of constant curvature.
And then, for dessert:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.4450
Title: Candy-passing Games on General Graphs, I
Authors: Paul M. Kominers, Scott D. Kominers
Comments: 2 pages
Subjects: Combinatorics (math.CO); Discrete Mathematics (cs.DM)
We undertake the first study of the candy-passing game on arbitrary connected graphs. We obtain a general stabilization result which encompasses the first author’s results (arXiv:0709.2156) for candy-passing games on n-cycles with at least 3n candies.
Sweet!