flatulence?

theres a website updated daily, http://arxiv.org/ called "archive", where researchers in every branch of physics, mathematics, computer science and quantitative biology can post their newly published papers for all to see. i've been a bit back-logged so today i decided to sit down and catch up on the last two weeks of posts. the title of this one cracked me up because as i glanced over it, my mind substituted the word "flatulences" for "fluctuations." this in itself made me laugh, but it actually became more funny when i read the whole title again! hahaha!

Title: Air-shower simulations with and without thinning: artificial fluctuations and their suppression

Authors: D.S. Gorbunov, G.I. Rubtsov and S.V. Troitsky
Categories: astro-ph
Comments: 8 pages, revtex. The shower library is available at
http://livni.inr.ac.ru

The most common way to simplify extensive Monte-Carlo simulations of air showers is the use of the thinning approximation. We study its effect on the physical parameters reconstructed from simulated showers. To this end, we created a library of showers simulated without thinning with energies from 10^17 eV to 10^18 eV, different zenith angles and primaries. This library is publicly available. Various physically interesting applications of the showers simulated without thinning are discussed. Observables reconstructed from these showers are compared to those obtained with the thinning approximation. The amount of artificial fluctuations introduced by thinning is estimated. A simple method, multisampling, is suggested which results in a controllable suppression of artificial fluctuations and at the same time requires less demanding computational resources as compared to the usual thinning.
( http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0703546 , 472kb)
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