Friday, I'm in love!

I love good customer service. I really, really, really appreciate good customer service. I understand that answering questions and meeting the customer more than half-way is expensive and sometimes, going the extra step does not pay off in the end. And, living in Los Angeles, I've become accustomed to the worst in service. Wait staff at restaurants are usually from a much superior gene pool and because of their much, much more appealing phenotype, really, now, a glass of water? Or perhaps the salad I ordered and not this, um, sandwich? Slowly, now, "saaal-AD" not "saaand-WICH". I really ask too much.

But today, here's to you, MOO. I'm not jumping on the MOO bandwagon, because they make beautiful cards. They claim to make beautiful cards, so they should do that. It's like this: I ordered some business cards and the image on the information side of the card was scootched a bit to the right, so that there's that white stripe. I like White Stripes. I like White Stripes probably more than a middle-aging Redondo Beach hausfrau should. Kinda creepy. Kinda weird, in a I-haven't-come-to-terms-with-my-real-age way. But I don't like these white stripes, here, on the side of my business card. Oh, yeah, I clicked off on the design. I understand the rules: You click off on the design, you're stuck with what you get. But, well, I musta done something wrong, 'cause there's the white stripe, the kind of white stripe I don't like, and when I order more MOO, MOO Contact Us, please tell me what to do.

In response, of course, I was expecting something like this:

In QED you have

\mathcal{L}_{QED} = \bar{\psi}(i\gamma^{\mu}\partial_{\mu}-m)\psi + ie\bar{\psi}\gamma^{\mu}A_{\mu}\psi

From this you can work out the equations of motion, the Feynman rules and start calculating scattering amplitudes (ie how particles bounce off one another). In string theory it's not quite as straight forward but there is a Lagrangian for how strings interact, known as the Polyakov action and there's a generalisation of it to branes (ie higher dimensional objects).

S = \int d^{n}\xi \, \mathcal{L} = \int d^{n}\xi \, P(G_{ab}) = \int d^{n}\xi \, \frac{\partial X^{\mu}}{\partial xi^{a}}\frac{\partial X^{\nu}}{\partial \xi^{b}}G_{\mu\nu}

P(G) is the pullback of the space-time metric into the n-brane world volume.

When you start considering fields living on the branes or strings it gets generalised to the DBI action where P(G) goes to P(G_{ab}+2\pi \alpha' F_{ab}) where F_{ab} relates to generalisatoions of electromagnetic fields.

Then you can go into more specific cases and construct Type IIA, IIB, I, E8xE8 and SO(32) string actions in 10 dimensions, supergravity actions in 11 or less dimensions and even the M theory action. Each are interrelated by dualities, compactifications, particular limits and a slew of other things which if you don't know about the different string types already it's pointless me explaining it.

And buried in all of this are the more familiar things like E^{2} = m^{2} + |p|^{2}, from special relativity and G_{\mu\nu} = 8\pi T_{\mu\nu} from general relativity, the former is an input of string theory and the latter is an output.

duh...

(Above-mentioned genius-ness via AlphaNumeric).

But no: I received a personal email from "Al," with an apology. It was all probably an error on their end, and here's a coupon code for a replacement pack.

Just like that. No worries. MOO will replace the cards and refund my shipping.

Cool.

Thanks.

I love that.