This awesome picture is brought to you by Om Nom Nom Nom. Who doesn’t love a funny picture of a laptop attacking a business lady.

All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base manifold.Abstract from Lisi’s 30 page paper. 0711.0770 at arXiv

A. Garrett Lisi may have just uncovered the secret to a Grand Unifcation Theory. The theory behind most GUTs is that at high energy levels, one can combine all the acting forces (Electromagnetic, gravity, weak nuclear, strong nuclear, gravity, etc.) into one unified model of energy. One difficulty with GUTs is where to put gravity, and how to put it… anywhere! This theory uses E8 math and other subalgebras to embed all these forces into a grand unified theory of everything! Here’s a render of the E8 plane.

This model has gained quick praise as the math behind it (you wont think so after trying to read it) is quite elegant and simple. It also behaves correctly with the previously found rules of physics.

Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.

Quote from Telegraphs article Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything.

If you want to blow your mind, read this article!!! It’ll take a lot of reference for the more advanced math, but you can bumble your way through it (I did!).

The Facebook API gives you the option of using FQL (Facebook Query Language) to retrieve data instead of using the built in API calls. I thought this was unnecessary until I needed a quick query to get me the list of a users friends with the current application added. After some research, I came across the following query:

$facebook->api_client->fql_query("SELECT uid FROM user WHERE has_added_app=1 and uid IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = $user)");

This returns a nice quick list I can use in the multi-friend selector for excluded IDs in the ’share’ part of the application as well as a quick number for how many friends have already added the application. This can be very useful.