These stairs have a lot of significance for me. They are at Dartmouth House, just North of Piccadilly, in London’s Mayfair district. There you will find the home of the English-Speaking Union. The ESU is a charity that has an interesting history, all based on promoting friendship, communion and understanding amongst the English-Speaking nations and people of the world. This might seem an odd thing to build an organization on, but it might make more sense if you read the history. In any case, there are so many organizations of all sorts doing things, and in the scheme of things this is as good a reason as any to bring people together. The ESU administers a number of grants, fellowships, and scholarships, among other things, and one of them is the Lindemann fellowship. It is a one year postdoctoral stipend that you can get fresh out of your PhD, and it is designed to give young people a taste of America. It is highly competitive (only a couple are given out each year), and the final decision is made on the basis of an interview. You come up these stairs, all nervous and under stress since it is probably the first major interview upon which your career might depend, and the surrounding fancy parts of London may have helped make it all weigh a bit on your mind. You wait at the top of the stairs near the piano and listen for your name to be called and then you are ushered into the room and put in front of the interview panel.
I know this since I was here in 1992, being interviewed. I had set my sights on Continue reading ‘The Scary Stairs’
As part of a report on a study (or several studies) I was writing last week (because evidently I can’t find enough things to keep me from making progress on the Project), I was including some data on the geographic distribution of members of the National Academy of Sciences within the US. The focus was on Physics, Astronomy, and Applied Physical Sciences. It was rather interesting, binned by state, especially if you grab the columns and tell Numbers to throw up a graph of it all. The concentrations are striking. I wondered whether the concentrations were simply following population, at least roughly, and so I went elsewhere and grabbed the population numbers for each state and ran that into a chart as well. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to the results. I find them interesting. Look at California, Texas, and Florida, for example.
You can look at the membership data (and slice them to your liking) here.
-cvj
I find myself in the odd situation of being in a pub in London well before 9:00am, having breakfast. No, things have not got so bad that I’m resorting to alcohol so early in the day, you’ll be relieved (I hope) to hear. (Things are good, on balance. Thanks for asking.) It is just that I took a rather strangely timed flight over from Los Angeles that meant that I was flying during peak waking hours in my body’s internal clock, and then arriving at 6:30am London time. This meant that I did not do my usual trick of getting at least some sleep on the flight…. So I find myself in London bright and early - way too early to check into my hotel. I’m groggy and hungry. Happily I found a pub Continue reading ‘Pub Breakfast’
So I mentioned recently that we’d been filming for the fifth season of The History Channel’s The Universe, earlier this month and during some of the previous two. Well, I learned the other day to my surprise that the new season starts airing next week!
On Thursday 29th July at 9:00pm (8:00pm central, but check local listings) the first episode will air. It’s a survey of some of the wonderful things in our solar system. You can find a synopsis here.
Now do you remember that I did a post at some point about being filmed in 3D, and Continue reading ‘The Universe Returns - In 3D!’
Well, I got some. I recall blogging about seeing these some time back, and am impressed with them now that I’ve been trying them out for a week. Let me say however a couple of things. I’m not going to spout all the stuff being said about how this is all so much more “natural” than shoes, and so on and so forth. There’s a lot of that being said and I find myself generally deeply suspicious of the way the word “natural” is used to sell products, especially to a certain type of crowd who falls for this stuff. What does “natural” even mean, anyway?
I like these because they are like being barefoot without the pain and discomfort that often comes with it (stubbing toes, icky or sharp things underfoot, etc). I do not think these “five-finger” shoes (as they are called) will replace shoes for me in most circumstances. Apparently people are running in them, hiking, even mountain climbing. Good for them. I want much more support on my feet when I’m doing those things and that is why shoes were invented. Marvellous invention, shoes. Not clear to me shoes are any less “natural” than these are. They’re just different. Like cycling is not “natural”, but is a rather splendid thing humans came up with that I see nothing wrong with on the “natural” vs “non-natural” front.
See also shirts, pants, skirts, etc. Same thing.
But, in short - these are great. I was told by the fellow in the shop that they are becoming hugely popular now, although I am not sure I believe that since I’ve only ever seen one person out there wearing them, and that was a while back. (It is in shoe-sellers’ interest to make these claims.) I got them because I’ve a bit of a heel Continue reading ‘Ten’
Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy has announced what his super secret project has been. It’s a new science TV show for the Discovery Channel! It is called “Phil Plait’s Bad Universe”, and I imagine it’ll be a lot of fun and quite informative. There’s a trailer and some of his thoughts about the show here. I could not work out when it is going to air, so keep your eyes peeled*.
Enjoy!
-cvj
Continue reading ‘Bad Universe’
After spending more than half the day writing a report, fiddling with data gathering for the report, and dealing with various annoying issues in background over email, it is nice sometimes to be able to walk outside into the garden, pause to take a deep breath in the warm sunlight, and harvest some lovely tasty things.
Aaaahh…
I really need this sometimes. It is good.
Continue reading ‘A Vial of Calm’
In case you were wondering, things are moving steadily along in the search for the Higgs boson, and in the general ramping up to study entirely new frontiers of particle physics. I noticed a couple of interesting articles today that give you a nice sample. The first, by Dick Ahlstrom in the Irish Times, and is about the announced “rediscovery” of the W and Z bosons at the Large Hadron Collider, by a team working at the LHCb experiment. (I personally think that the term “rediscovery” is somewhat misleading since it makes it seem like the community forgot where they (the key signatures of the unity of the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces at high energy) were since their discovery in the early 80s, but let me not quibble too much.) The point is that experimental teams are refining their searching techniques while sifting through all the new data being produced in the collisions at the LHC, and one thing you need to do before you begin to look for new things (like the Higgs) is to make sure you can find and recognize old things. Especially very important old things. Continue reading ‘Happy Higgs Hunting’
The experiment seems to have been a success.
Some of our best people were on site working on diagnostics. Here’s one of them engrossed in their work. (Photo on the left. Click to enlarge.)
In short, they vanished like, er,… Hot cakes.
-cvj
.
.
.
.
Ah. Well, I was reserving the title of this post for a followup post to an earlier post about physics research. But, the film I went to last night at the wonderful Vista theatre was so engaging, and so excellently done - on the themes of dreams and memory - that I thought I’d use it.
Christopher Nolan has done it again! Inception (both written and directed by him) is yet another (remember my discussion of the Dark Knight two years back) example that shows that it is possible to make a big budget Summer Blockbuster that does not treat the audience as idiots. It tells you from the opening frames that you’re going to have to pay attention and think during the film, and that interesting ideas and themes are going to be explored, and it certainly lives up to that promise right through to the end. It is thrilling on all sort of levels, and for those who don’t care about ideas, there’s plenty of stuff blowing up and crashing into stuff to keep them happy.
I am going to say absolutely nothing more about it (more or less) since one of the Continue reading ‘But is it Real? (Part Two)’
Ah. Now I feel the Summer. We’ve been having a streak (starting Monday, or that’s when I noticed anyway) of quite hot days here in LA and, as usually happens above a certain temperature, 
I’ve begun to be in danger of shutting down. I tend to get perpetually sleepy in such conditions, and wake up quite early in the morning (which is good for avoiding the heat with an early start), and so get to sleep relatively early. During the day I’m going at half speed if I don’t manage my temperature properly. I’m not a big fan of just switching on and blasting the air conditioning the whole day, so you can say it is entirely my choice to have these issues. Instead, I try to manage good airflow at times of day when it is possible, and shield interiors from heating up under the influence of the sun. It works pretty well, but there’s a point in the middle to late afternoon where things Continue reading ‘I’m Melting, I’m Melting!’
No, I am not going mad. Well, no more so than normal, perhaps. The Green Zebra tomatoes are here, and they are lovely. (Click for larger view.)
Continue reading ‘The Zebras are Here!’
In the New York Times this week there’s an article* by Dennis Overbye on Erik Verlinde and his paper on the idea that gravity is not a force at all, but a consequence of thermodynamics. You can think of it as an extreme take on one of the directions a lot of the research (that I’ve mentioned a number of times has been going on in string theory) has been pointing, although I think it is safe to say that there’s a lot to be done on making the statement a concrete one that you can do physics with. I think it contains the germs of the right thing we’re all reaching for, but does not quite get there yet. We’re now quite routinely formulating some of the key physics of gravity entirely as physics of a completely non-gravitational dual theory - this is the content of what we call holography - and in particular the quantum physics of black holes in those settings get holographically mapped to the thermodynamics of the non-gravitational physics. This is the basis of the tools that we’ve been applying to studying aspects of phenomena showing up in various experimental systems in nuclear physics and cold atomic physics (and studies of phenomena relevant to various condensed matter systems are also being done). I’ve told you about a lot of this in various posts. (Some of them are listed below.) Running this the other way, the model non-gravitational systems (certain gauge theories at strong coupling and with large rank gauge groups) can be thought of as examples of how gravity (and space-time itself) is really an emergent phenomenon, appearing simply as Continue reading ‘Emerging Gravity’
Here are some clocks I saw at the House of Eleven Courtyards (Casa de los Once Patios) in the historic town called Pátzcuaro (at the aforementioned lake of the same name). It was a convent, and is now a place to go and see lots of arts and crafts in action, as well as buy some. The clocks, housed in copper, mark the entrance to an entire room of copper workmanship in various forms.
The clocks have reminded me to give you an update on something else. Through some of May and June, I did a lot of work for the show The Universe, which airs on the History Channel (as you probably already know from reading here over the years. See here.). There will be, as usual, several topics covered over the upcoming season, and it will be interesting to see how the various filmmakers put together their episodes. It is worth noting that the History Channel have done something remarkable here. This is now the longest run that any cable channel has had for a science show. They built an audience with a solid show, and kept producing good episodes and gathering more (and it is worth saying, an admirably diverse set of) viewers over the years.
In fact, the show has been so successful that they are going to, I predict, pay an Continue reading ‘Tales From The Industry XXXII: A Matter of Time’
Another shot of one of the Yácatas at Tzintzuntzan. (See the previous post for background information.)
Bizarrely, my Summer is all of a sudden threatening to transform from one of withdrawal into hiding to work on my Project to a much more travelled mode than I intended. The Morelia trip was intended to be my only exception (I agreed to it back in the Fall of last year and have said no to nearly everything else that came up), but in the last week or two (and the last few days in particular) several things have come up (involving travel) that I can’t easily turn away from. One of them would take me to Aspen (even though I decided not to go and Continue reading ‘Yácatas while Brooding’
(Top prize for the best name on last month’s trip.) This is the name of an existing town as well as the nearby archeological site, the subject of this post. On the Sunday I referred to in a previous post, several of the School went off on a bus to do some sightseeing West of Morelia. This is one of the places to which we went. I learned a bit about the pre-Columbian mesoamerican civilization, the P’urhépecha (or Purépecha), whose capital was Tzintzuntzan (place of the hummingbirds). The structures in my photos (click for larger view) are called Yácatas, which are on a plateau overlooking the lake Pátzcuaro. Continue reading ‘Tzintzuntzan’
Morelia is a beautiful city. One of the things that strikes you is the high concentration of architectural features that are either churches or related to churches (convents, chapels, etc) in the core of the city. The queen of these is the cathedral, which was across the street from my hotel (and gave it its name). Here it is during the day. The photograph was taken quite early in the morning to take advantage of the pleasant light (click for larger view):
It has fountains and gardens on both sides of it, and so acts as an all important Continue reading ‘Morelia Cathedral’
On Sunday in Morelia, Mexico, I was walking along the main street near my hotel and it seemed that something unusual was going on. The street was empty of cars, and some sort of event was going on. I saw a few cyclists here and there in the distance, but not the sort that look all hardcore and determined to go fast and determinedly on their way, but instead the more leisurely stop-and-smell-the-flowers sort. I wondered almost immediately if I had run into a local ciclovía, and a few minutes later, a sign confirmed this. Wonderful!
I’ve been waiting for such a thing to come to LA for a while now, since I heard of it last year when I part (and presented) in a public discussion downtown at the Artwalk about bike issues in the city, and had heard that it was becoming more widespread (it started in South America - Colombia) but it was an unexpected treat to find one right outside my hotel room! Here are three more picture. Click for larger view.
It was great to see lots of people out and about just using the streets with no cars Continue reading ‘Street Invasion!’
Well, here’s the first batch of the season (not counting the onesies and twosies I’ve nibbled over the last few weeks as I go by), representing four different varieties… By the way, my compost played a role in all this, so it is quite satisfying.
If the War goes well, I ought to get more of these soon. Several plants are producing tomatoes.
News from the Front? Fluffy has started the above ground Continue reading ‘Produce’
Well, my work at the Quantum Gravity school over (see previous posts here, here and here), I hopped on a plane yesterday, in order to return to Los Angeles. It was an excellent time. I enjoyed being in Mexico again, and seeing a new part of it (see posts to come), and the school was well organized and very enjoyable. The students were very receptive overall, and I spent a huge amount of time chatting with them about physics between sessions, over lunch, and on the bus back and forth between the campus and the city (and on the excursion on Sunday for a while). A number of students seemed very interested in some of the quantum gravity phenomena that are possible to describe using string theory - surprised in most cases (since the background independence issue that keeps being waved about by some as a naive (in my view) and bluntly used principle seems to have served as a block to many) - and it was a pleasure to be able to open them up to new physical ideas. It worked pretty well because I gave them three lectures on the basics of string theory, and so could build on that material in the one to one discussions to explain more detail.
Dynamical changes of spacetime dimension is one thing that captured a lot of interest, as well as string theory’s various ways of showing in model examples how spacetime is an emergent, classical approximation to an underlying quantum description that does not have manifest spacetime geometry. The latter is something that all approaches to quantum gravity hope to realize in one way or another (since those sorts of ideas and fantasies about what quantum gravity should be appeared in the mid 20th Century), and exactly how it emerges in string theory is a beautiful story. Who knows, perhaps they will take these hints from string theory about how quantum gravity can work and develop them Continue reading ‘Scenes from School’
In other news…
It’s a long story. You should refer to last year’s start of The Troubles, starting with the Great Tomato Atrocity. This year it began with the lovely tomato on the right…
(click for a larger view).
At first I thought it was an early attack by Fluffy (in the 3.x series, presumably - I did battle with series 1 and 2 last Summer - especially since I’d deployed the first level of countermeasures already this season, the shields around the main tomato area of the garden.) Had Fluffy found a way past those? Would I have to fortify them? I was very annoyed since I wanted to make a gift of that tomato and had been admiring it every day since it began to ripen, waiting for the moment to pick it. Evidently mine were not the only admiring eyes. And my paws were not the first to get to it. So I decided to launch more level one of the offensive countermeasures, to test the possibility that something other than Fluffy was a work here. Perhaps one of Fluffy’s allies. The Fluffy series with less good PR: Slinky. I might need to be fighting a war on two fronts.
Seems I was right. Slinky is involved, and I caught one of its agents a day later. Peanut butter is a great bait… A picture of the result is after the fold. Don’t go there if squeamish!!
Continue reading ‘Victory!(?)’
This is a quick update on the school. I’ve been trying to give the students some of the core concepts they need to help them understand what string theory is, how it works, and what you can do with it. Here’s the really odd thing about all this (and an explanation of the post title): While this is a school on Quantum Gravity, after talking with the students for a while one learns that in most cases the little they’ve heard about string theory is often essentially over 20 years out of date and almost always totally skewed to the negative, to the extent that many of them are under the impression that string theory has nothing to do with quantum gravity at all! It is totally bizarre, and I suspect it is largely a result of things that are said and passed around within their research community.. So there are a few students here and there who have some familiarity with strings, huddling together at times for warmth in a sea of miscommunication, misinformation, and strange preconceptions. Let me be the first to point out that the string community also tends to pass on its prejudices about other Quantum Gravity approaches to its students. But my goodness it does seems extreme to me that an approach that has so many clear benchmarks of success (at achieving goals that at least used to be key objectives) in quantum gravity is treated as an irrelevant backwater by the community that thinks of itself as the main practitioners of quantum gravity. Odd. Anyway, my main message is to try to clearly show that the basics are quite easy to grasp if a student has a decent education in Continue reading ‘Minority Report’
(Anyone remember Mike Oldfield? I recall a lovely piece of music of his with the same title as this post and it has now been playing distantly in my head as I type…very pleasant.)
Well, I’m sitting at an outside table across from the main square with the cathedral and having a simple lunch. It is hot, and so I have a glass of cold pale beer in front of me, and everyone around me is speaking Spanish. This feels like it could be that I am back in Madrid, but in fact I am in Morelia, Mexico. (I can tell because, among other things, I’ve never been offered a shoe shine quite so many times in the space of 15 minutes…) It is quite a lovely place, as far as I’ve seen so far (I’ve not explored much yet). I’m resting after a very early morning travel schedule which saw a slight panic (er…long story) at LAX to catch my flight which left just before 1:00am. The seats were fixed to the bolt upright position the whole flight and so the two and a half hours I’d planned to snooze were not so Continue reading ‘Arrival’
So, it is that time of year.
I’ve got to give three introductory lectures on string theory in a Summer school somewhere in Mexico next week. So I must break away from intense work on The Project (which is going well, so maybe you will hear about it sometime soonish(ish)….) and focus on how to cram all the cream into three comprehensible and useful lectures. I hate overdoing the “it can be shown” line that ends up making the whole thing seem like magic (as is so often done), so this is always a challenge. Here’s how my preparation usually goes (and indeed it went this way this week):
Continue reading ‘Summer School Prep’
As I’ve mentioned before, I listen online to Radio 4, one of the BBC radio stations I love for its variety, breadth and depth of programming. Between it and NPR affiliate KPCC, my day is usually rather full of (spoken-word) radio of a wide variety. I’ve noticed that Radio 4 has been doing a programme called “A History of the World in 100 Objects”. The Director of the British Museum does a 15 minute programme on each of 100 objects and talks about aspects of its historical significance. (If you think you don’t like history (maybe bad experiences in school or something like that) this might be a great way back into the subject for you. Not liking a subject is usually, I find, an issue with how it was presented to you and not with the subject itself.) It’s a lovely way of quickly plugging into aspects of world culture in interesting ways, and rather reminds me of the short series that we had here at USC in the College Commons called The Cultural Life of Objects, organized by my colleagues Anne Porter and Ann Marie Yasin. (See also the Collections event, and my post about it.)
The BBC series is about half way now, and it has been quite wonderful. I strongly recommend it to you. Here’s the marvellous thing: The entire series can be podcast Continue reading ‘A Treasure Trove!’
I think I mentioned a while back that as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Laser, there was a video competition on Physics Central to make a fun video about the Laser. They were put on YouTube (tag is laserfest, I think) and then there was voting at some point (I imagine), and winners were chosen. You can see them here. Congratulations to the winners!
Actually, I think the whole playlist of Laserfest video entries is here, and you can jump through them by clicking the link to the next one in the top right hand area.
Are you aware of Laserfest, by the way? Go and check out the website and join in the celebrations of the Laser!
I should mention that the competition has all meant good news for my work as well. I Continue reading ‘Laserfest Videos’
You can read a bit about the work of my colleague Elena Pierpaoli and her postdocs and students in this article in one of USC’s in-house publications. It focuses on the Planck observatory (image right from NASA/ESA), which we’ve discussed here before. (Recall the launch?) There’s a lot of exciting physics about the very young universe to be discovered as more data from the mission get gathered and analyzed.
Enjoy the article!
-cvj
Yeah, there was something wrong with that Darth Vader guy, don’t you think?
An official diagnosis was reported in the journal Psychiatry Research. Seems the poor fellow was afflicted with a personality disorder. This is the claim, anyway. There’s a post about it here that’s worth looking at*. The most entertaining bit (for me) is probably the comment stream from the rabid fanboysandgirls (as you might imagine for something about Star Wars).
For me, the best insights into the fellow are to be found in his blog which I remember from a few years back. Still quite brilliant. (Be sure to scroll to the bottom and read the posts in reverse order to get them in the right order.)
Back to the diagnosis post. One of my favourite comments, after all the people Continue reading ‘He Had Problems…’
You’ll remember the recent announcement about the first synthetic life form, created by team Venter. But what does that mean, really? How truly synthetic is it really? What aspects of Nature needed to be input in order for it to be viable? Too much for it to be called truly synthetic? What dreams are out there to do better? What’s the science behind such a challenge? How did the mechanisms for life that we know know actually evolve, and what steps are adjustable or reproducible?
These questions and many more are addressed in a lovely special edition of BBC Continue reading ‘Understanding Artificial Life’
Googling people is often interesting. One thing I’ve noticed is that in the search results it seems people are showing up a lot more on various kinds of databases, business networking groups, social networking groups (of course) and so forth. Is this a growing phenomenon? Are people joining more of theses, or are various network entries automatically generated? (I ask this as someone who walked away from facebook, for example. Perhaps I’ll talk more about why some other time…)
In this vein, I forgot to mention that a little while ago I discovered that I have a Wikipedia entry. I am not sure how I feel about this, but it is (I suppose) flattering that someone took the time to add this to the things out there on the web about me. (I don’t think it was automatically generated.) I’d previously assumed that if an ordinary person had a Wikipedia entry it must mean that they wrote it themselves. After all, who would be interested enough to write one about someone else? Seems Continue reading ‘Search Results’
Yeah, I know I’ve used this post title before, but I do love it. So… sorry.
One of the things that really sets my week up nicely is my Sunday visit to the Hollywood Farmer’s Market. Today was an exceptionally nice day for it, but weatherwise and just the overall atmosphere of the market. The people making their food purchases and simply socializing, the vendors, the many musicians (even the corny ones sounded really good today), and of course - the food itself.
One of the highlights for me today was a new (ish) vendor, specializing entirely in mushrooms.
The variety was fascinating, and I stood there with a friend sniffing and sampling for a while (encouraged by the vendors, I hasten to add) before purchasing a lovely persimmon enoki (the ones in the middle of the first photo):
Continue reading ‘A Short Cut to Mushrooms (Again)’
(The title is an important way of thinking about what science is all about, at least in part. It is one of the things mentioned and discussed in the lectures discussed below.)
The annual Reith Lectures at the BBC over in the UK are under way. This year, they are given by a giant of astrophysics, Sir Martin Rees. I strongly - very strongly - recommend listening to these lectures. There are four of them. Of the senior superstars of science who I’ve come to know a little, Martin Rees comes across as one of the most gentle and quietly thoughtful I can think of while at the same time being sharp and insightful on all sorts of aspects of science (not just the confines of his field). I mention these characteristics since they are of great value to me - I tend to be repulsed by the practitioners of the more arrogant style that is also common in prominent (and not so prominent) scientists, no matter how good their science might be. He’s the President of the Royal Society, the Astronomer Royal, and the Master of Trinity College (Cambridge), among other distinctions, and so naturally is called upon to express views on a range of topics about science, including how it intersects with society.
Indeed, the intersection between science and policy issues and society is the subject of the first of his lectures. The whole series is called “Scientific Horizons”. The first Continue reading ‘Organized Skepticism’
Since (as high energy theorists working on foundational issues for most (but not all) of our effort) we can be called by some “formal” physicists, or physicists who are concerned with only “academic” issues, I thought our outfits in this picture from last month were quite appropriate*. (Now don’t you just want to hire this dream team to swoop in and solve all your problems? Click for larger view. )
Backstory: Some of the students in the group did a bit of pomp and ceremony to receive their Ph.Ds, and some of the faculty joined in.
Hilarity ensued.
-cvj
(*Of course for all you know, some of us were wearing sequinned bikinis under our gowns. That’s only formal wear in Vegas, I think…)
There’s something enduringly lovely about local independent bookstores. I love stopping by to visit them, try to give my local ones the first shot at supplying me with a book I’m looking for, but most of all I value them as community centres at the heart of the villages (real and virtual) that exist in our neighbourhoods, even in a vast city like Los Angeles. People gather and linger at them, bonding over the written word for the most part, but sometimes just for the sake of gathering and lingering. In that role they are a lot like public libraries, another favourite of mine. Much of what I said can apply to the large chain bookstores too, but somehow I find them less likely to have that community feel that independent stores have. I’m not sure why (location? focus? less of a personal touch in the organization of the material?), but this is the way it seems to me. (I’m speaking about the USA; the feel of bookstores is different to me in different countries.)
Last night, after a quiet evening meal after a long day of working on the Project, I went for a nice long walk, heading to Skylight books in Los Feliz. (That’s the neighbourhood at the base of the hills of Griffith Park, in case you don’t know.) My friend and colleague Aimee Bender was launching her new (long awaited) novel “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake”, and I thought I’d go along to support the launch, hear about the book, and absorb a bit of the buzz. And buzz there was, since in addition to Continue reading ‘Summer Reading: Of Bookstores and Lemon Cake’
I don’t know what they are called, but they’re lovely. There’s a succulent plant that is very common around here (Los Angeles), often growing wild by roadsides, or in no Continue reading ‘Yellow’
Recall the excitement last week about the D0 result? I wrote a post called “An Exciting Asymmetry?”. Well, there’s a rule that says if you write a title as a yes/no question, the answer is often (usually?) “No”.
Sure enough, over at Resonances, Jester reports that the CDF experiment, also at the Tevatron, has looked for a confirmation of the CP violating result that D0 claimed to see, and did not find anything abnormal where it should have. Find further details (on the technical side for the experts) and links at that post, which, as is usual with material from that blog, is well-written and interesting.
This is one reason why we (the particle physics community) build multiple detector/experiments on the same accelerator machine, and this is a prime example Continue reading ‘CDF Says No’
Will is annoyed by the Karate Kid (2010 version, not the 1984 version), not the least because with Jackie Chan involved, you’d be expecting… Kung Fu right? Weren’t we supposed to have stopped confusing the forms back in the 70s or so? People are up in arms about this all over the web it seems. I’ll lay off the whole thing since I’m not an expert in the etymology of the terms anyway, but more to the point I’m just tired of having my childhood memories cynically smacked around by pointless remakes, if the truth be told.
Anyway, to help himself vent, Will wrote some amusing synopses for other remakes Hollywood might do where the details are… modified. Here are a couple I liked: Continue reading ‘Alternative Synopses’
In recent years there was all the nonsense about how scientists were going to accidentally make a black hole with the Large Hadron Collider that would runaway out of control…. we would not be able to stop it. We scientists would have tampered with the murky depths of Nature and awoken a monster we could not control. Naughty scientists that we are. The LHC has been colliding away at unprecedented energies, and last time I checked (you can too - click here) we’re ok.
I just realized something. Now we do have a runaway black hole! But it was created by naughty engineers, tampering with the murky depths of Nature and awakening a monster they cannot control. That gushing well 5000 feet below in the gulf of Mexico is a black hole Continue reading ‘The Runaway Black Hole’
AOL is 25 years old today! Twenty Five! To help you understand that, those of you who where alive then click here for the list of number one songs in the charts at the time… Yes, Wham!, Tears for Fears, Huey Lewis and the News, Phil Collins, Jan Hammer, etc… Do you remember America Online? Dialing up to connect? (Perhaps some of you still dial up, to read this blog?) Ah yes, memories. I was never an AOL subscriber. I was, after all, not in America until the 90s, and only started connecting from home in that decade. By then several companies offered dialup service. Then I was of course, just like everyone else, familiar with the reassuring dialup noises to the point where by ear you could tell if the connection was going to work or not (huh, I just realized that sound is sort of from the same swatch of sounds as the TARDIS noise), and recall the sitting and waiting for files of just a few hundred kilobytes to download, and so on and so forth. (Amazingly, and wonderfully, we are now at the point where people are streaming movies and tv shows directly to their homes on their web connections.) The speed difference became a way of measuring the difference between work and home, in a way. At work, you had tons of storage space and perpetual connectivity, and once got home that went away. So waiting for data to squeeze through the telephone line using dialup was extra frustrating.
Truth be told, there’s a piece of me that does not mind that difference, at times. Being connected all the time at home - fast and conveniently - can bring down the Continue reading ‘Nostalgia’
These stairs have a lot of significance for me. They are at Dartmouth House, just North of Piccadilly, in London’s Mayfair district. There you will find the home of the English-Speaking Union. The ESU is a charity that has an interesting history, all based on promoting friendship, communion and understanding amongst the English-Speaking nations and people of the world. This might seem an odd thing to build an organization on, but it might make more sense if you read the history. In any case, there are so many organizations of all sorts doing things, and in the scheme of things this is as good a reason as any to bring people together. The ESU administers a number of grants, fellowships, and scholarships, among other things, and one of them is the Lindemann fellowship. It is a one year postdoctoral stipend that you can get fresh out of your PhD, and it is designed to give young people a taste of America. It is highly competitive (only a couple are given out each year), and the final decision is made on the basis of an interview. You come up these stairs, all nervous and under stress since it is probably the first major interview upon which your career might depend, and the surrounding fancy parts of London may have helped make it all weigh a bit on your mind. You wait at the top of the stairs near the piano and listen for your name to be called and then you are ushered into the room and put in front of the interview panel.
Recent Comments