Asymptotia

This is a reminder of today’s event here at the USC campus. I’ve no idea what is going to happen. Uncertain, I suppose I should say. That’s the fun of it…. we’ll just see what serendipity brings.

To kick off the events, I’m going to show that lovely clip from one of my favourite Coen brothers movies, “The Man Who Wasn’t There”, where the fancy lawyer from out of town, Freddie Riedenschneider, (played wonderfully by Tony Shalhoub) all of a sudden does this long speech about the Uncertainty Principle. I couldn’t believe it when I first saw it…. - it is rather overstated by the end of the scene, but as a piece of drama, it is excellent. Have you seen it? If not, get it. It’s an excellent movie all around.

Anyway, for more information on the event, see earlier post here. See poster below (large pdf here). Come back here for more discussion, or just give your impressions of the event!

-cvj

You’ve probably heard the news wherever on the planet you are. California’s legislature is commiting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels (so, by 25%) by the year 2020. I’ve got a class to prepare, and so can’t spend a huge amount of time writing a long cheerleader-type post about this, but I am so delighted. (Stories in the BBC, LA Times and New York Times, for example.)

This is so important for so many reasons. Besides the obvious one of us just getting on with the task of doing this sort of thing, there is the symbolism. This flies in the face of the Bush administration’s lack of leadership on the whole issue, and will help nullify that lack of leadership, since the other states will be able to look to California’s lead on this as a powerful example. The world takes notice too, since California is -as an economic force in its own right- the number 8 economy in the world. None of this will happen if the economics are not done correctly.

The point is that it can make economic sense (despite fears that possible resulting Continue reading ‘California Steps Forward, Again’

This is the lovely composite Hubble space telescope picture that is going around, showing the debris of a supernova - a star’s explosion. This is Cassiopeia A, and the explosion happened in 1680 AD, our time. See HST’s website for more on this , and discussion on the Bad Astronomy Blog.

In other supernova news, there’s a lot of news today (Wed) about a new supernova explosion, recorded this year (2006). This particular event is highly significant since astronomers were able to watch most of the entire event in real time. The thing that signalled that something was about to happen was a (relatively mild) gamma ray burst (GRB060218 - it was seen in Feb. 18th) picked up by the Swift telescope. After the burst (really it was an X-ray flash… a GRB’s younger sibling, as it were) faded, the star exploded -essentially on camera.

Quote from an AFP (via Yahoo News) article:

“Usually these events are not detected until after the supernova has brightened substantially in the optical wavelength, many days after the initial explosion,” said Keith Mason, chief executive of Britain’s Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), which operates an ultra-violet/optical telescope aboard Swift.

“But on this occasion we were able to study the remarkable event in all its glory, from the very beginning.”

Other articles at the BBC (with images of the event - an article is due to appear in Nature tomorrow), and Reuters (via Yahoo).

-cvj

[Updated, see below.]

You’ll recall the news I reported about a number of members of the astronomy and planetary science community asking people to sign a petition to get the IAU to reconsider their Prague decision to accept the planetary definition that resulted in the “Pluto demotion”. See this link where you can find the precise language of their objection. (HST image of Pluto and Charon on right. Click for larger.) The short statement at the header of the petition itself is:

We, as planetary scientists and astronomers, do not agree with the IAU’s definition of a planet, nor will we use it. A better definition is needed.

Well, this is an update to let you know that they have gathered all the signatures that they wanted, from members of the scientific community. The petition is now closed. I don’t know if I’m allowed to point to the website where you can see the list of signatures (I hope someone will let me know), but I can report that there are 300 signatures (after a quick count), from a truly international group, from every continent, and from pretty much every astronomy department (or other institution) that I’ve heard of. [Update: I've got permission from Mark Sykes, one of the proposers of this petition, to make public the website. It is here, and has the list of signatories. There is now a press release there. If you're a member of the press, I imagine it might form the basis for an interesting story.]

Also on the website is the following:

Continue reading ‘Keeping the Flame Alive’

I don’t know about you but I melt each of the (very few these days) times I receive a real letter, by post, that contains… stuff we used to put in letters. Not the endless formal letters from business, nor the fake personal ones from businesses (like the amazing fancily embossed wedding invitation I got a while back that turned out to be from HBO… it was an ad for the new TV series on polygamy, “Big Love”… did anyone else get that? Must have cost them a huge amount…. I’ve been to a few fancy weddings, and that invitation was in fact comparable in quality to some of those…)

It is all so rare to get real personal mail the old fashioned way these days. So many things done by email. Hundreds of emails. Too many sometimes. Fast. Too fast sometimes. Or is it just me?

I love the look and feel of a nicely addressed (airmail especially) envelope, with firm, flowing writing by an actual human being… I really miss that. I loved getting this one so much, loved the look of the exterior so very much, that it took me a while to actually (carefully) tear it open to get at the contents.

In fact, at the beginning of this Summer in a fit of good intentions, I bought some airmail envelopes and a pad of writing paper, with lots of mutterings about starting to actually write real hand-written letters again. It has not happened yet. Sigh….

-cvj

Lovely yellow folding bike, spotted on campus outside my building. Soooo cuuuuuute!

Two comments:

(1) I wish they’d raise the seat on this bike, give it a bit of self respect so that it does not look like a children’s toy. (Assuming it is not… I am not familiar with this model. [Update: It is a "Zport" folding bike.]) Granted, I guess that it could be a small person riding it…. but most bikes are so often mal-adjusted to suit the rider, so I’m betting the person is taller than it would appear.

(2) Love the yellow. Obnoxious on a Hummer… cute on minis, beetles, and folding bikes.

(3) Ok, three comments. Poor thing, left outside on its own. Sad thing to do to a folder. Very sad. Should always be picked up and taken inside.

On point (1), since people can’t get past the small wheel prejudice….. you can have a properly adjusted seat post, and -on well designed models like the Brompton and others- have enough spread to allow as comfortable ride as on any bike regardless of size…. actually, sometimes more comfortable.

Here they are (the bike and my B) in conversation, in their respective park modes:

My student, Tameem, almost got an injury from laughing at this picture. I’ve no idea why. He said, over IM (which I’ve cut and paste here with permission):

it almost looks like a bike bully trying to get money from the smaller bike….

wow, my head hurts from laughing so hard….

My response was to be “So how’s that calculation coming?” But he might have thought I had a sense of humour failure….. and actually, it is sort of funny.

-cvj

Look what arrived the other day!

More later….

[Update: There was never meant to be a paperback. They told me this. The reason Continue reading ‘D-Branes in Paperback!’

So yesterday continued the stretch of unfortunate events. I decided to hide and work on the paper to make up for the lost time from the day before. Got a good start, and then after a couple of hours, the computer started its weird behaviour. Slow….. applications hanging up for a long time… etc. Then I realized that it was super hot, perhaps more than it ever has been before. Perhaps brought on by it being a really hot day. Then I realized that I can’t recall the last time I have heard the fan on the computer. In fact, I’m not sure I ever have. A check via IM with one of my students confirmed that it is really obvious when the fan is on with this computer. So I formulated a theory that somehow the computer is not able to cool itself down in these extreme conditions. The fan needs repairing, the system is overheating and it is producing problems. I put it to sleep and into the freezer for a little while. A few minutes later, nice and crisp and cool (like a KitKat straight out of the fridge -delicious!) I started it up again. Runs perfectly. Aha!

So I went like this for a couple of cycles… Computer overheats, I cool it down, I get another hour of work or so done. But I’ve begun to worry that I’m about to lose my hard drive. This is a particular horror for me, since I’ve not backed up this computer for a long, long time, because….. The LaCie d2 250gb external hard drive I bought for the purpose mysteriously started to remain in stealth mode, i.e., not allow itself to be recognised by any of my computers.

So I spent several hours in the afternoon trying to figure out how to resurrect the drive Continue reading ‘Mama Never Said There’d Be Two Contiguous Days Like This’

I learned from an article in New Scientist by David Shiga that there have been recently found four more small satellite galaxies of our Milky Way galaxy.

The satellites are dwarf galaxies a few hundred to a few thousand light years across. The tiny galaxies are thought to be the building blocks of large galaxies, such as our own Milky Way – which is about 100,000 light years wide.

As you may know, we’ve known for some time that there have been such satellites (the number knwon has gone from 10 to 20 in the last two years, and some models expect as many as 50), but the small ones are very hard to detect. How do you distinguish them from other stars in the way? As part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the researchers have been looking for….

the particular types of stars expected to lie in dwarf galaxies, then detect the dwarfs as slight “overdensities” in these types of stars – patches of the sky where there are more of the stars than in surrounding areas.

The Cambridge team named them after the constellations in which they were found:

[...] Coma Berenices, Canes Venatici II, Hercules, and Leo IV, all of them lie between roughly 100,000 and 500,000 light years from Earth.

[...]The largest and smallest are Hercules and Coma Berenices, which are about 1000 and 200 light years across, respectively. Like most of the other dwarfs discovered by SDSS, the new finds are much smaller and fainter than the 10 dwarfs that were known previously, [Vasily] Belokurov [the team leader] says. “They should not really be called dwarfs – they are more like hobbits,” he told New Scientist.

Hobbits. Right. Does that make the Milky Way a Cave Troll? Or maybe a Numenorian? (Picture above is one of them. This one’s Farmer Maggot, I think. They’re not as Continue reading ‘From Dwarf Planets to Hobbit Galaxies’

Oh Boy. So it started this morning with me making some plans to do things on the bike, starting with a visit to the Hollywood Farmer’s market to get some supplies (especially some more superstring beans, which are delicious!) and meet a friend. Idea would be then to -after excellent tamales for lunch from my favourite stand, of course- visit a couple other places, such as a bike store in West Hollywood to get some equipment for my friend’s bike, and then maybe over to the Sunset Junction street fair (you might remember my blogging about it last year), to par-tay. Then I’d go home and work.

Bad thing number 1:

• Halfway to the middle of Hollywood on the way to the market: Catastrophic puncture. Flat tyre. Guess what? Puncture repair kit I carry around with me all the time is of course in my other bag, not the one I use for market. Sigh. So after wheeling the bike all the way to the market (I could have folded it up and taken it onto a bus or train, but I was halfway there and already late and did not want to wait for either), fun, shopping, and tamales were had, which was good. Could not do the other bike things, so I then wheeled bike to the subway, folded it and took it on a train to my ‘hood, then wheeled it home at other end, which all took a while. Actually, wheeling with shopping in its bag is a great way to get the shopping home and see what’s going on in the ‘hood, which I like to do from time to time, so not so bad.

  As this is only the second problem I’ve had with this bike in almost 18 months of cycling it around the city, I decided (yeah, I know!) to take a commemorative picture of the sad scene:

  

But by then I’d lost a lot of time and I’m supposed to be working on writing a paper today. So I decided to pass on the Sunset junction activities (I can hear them from my place a bit, and I encouraged some of my students to go, so I can sort of live vicariously -even though I know they won’t go) and work on the paper. I want to give a draft to some of those students for them to get up to speed on the idea, and once the week starts, I don’t expect to get much time to work on this sort of thing before next weekend.

So okay, no par-tay-ing this afternoon. But first I’d better get bike back to functionality for work tomorrow.

Bad thing number 2:

Continue reading ‘Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This’

I’ve temporarily forgotten the name of this beautiful flower. I’ll let you know when I recall it. [Update: Athena worked it out and reminded me....Scaveola, or fan flower] Its blue is more dramatic than the camera has captured. It nods somewhat more to purple than is suggested here. It grows reasonably fast and close to the ground, and is drought tolerant, so I used them as a quick ground cover to repopulate a part of the garden. They’ve done very well since I planted them in the Spring.

One thing I love about them is the asymmetry of each individual flower. Look closely (click on left image) and you’ll see that there are five petals on each, but the five are on only half the flower. Very asymmetric on that scale, but on a slightly larger scale, symmetry is restored by arranging a five of these “half-flowers” around a central leaf cluster to make a sort of larger, symmetric super-flower.

Very elegant.

-cvj

…And from serious protests of the previous post to humourous (fictional!) ones.

Go check out the Worth1000 photoshop competition on the subject, linked here.

Some of them are great! Here’s one I liked:

Creator’s caption: “Don’t argue with him, the man’s a genius.”

-cvj

So despite the announcement yesterday, reliable sources tell me that some members of the astronomy community are hoping that there is still maybe a small window of opportunity for Pluto.

Some members of the community are preparing a petition which protests the IAU planet definition! They don’t agree with the decision, and point out that a rather small percentage of the astronomical community actually voted at the Prague IAU. They give the following additional reasons for their questioning of the decision:

They say that the community voted….

… for a definition of ‘planet’ that uses dynamics (location) rather than intrinsic properties to decide if an object is or is not a planet. This result is counter to other classification schemes in astronomy (e.g., stars, galaxies, nebulae, even asteroids) in which dynamical context does not play a controlling role. Furthermore, it produces results that are incongruous and cannot be extended within our own solar system or to extra-solar planetary systems without producing immediate results that are patently absurd: e.g., a Neptune-sized object discovered beyond 150 AU could not be a planet, the presence of an Earth orbiting its star between a Jupiter and a Saturn would mean the Earth could not be considered a planet since it could not clear its “neighborhood”. This definition also excludes Pluto from planethood in our solar system, something that is both scientifically questionable and publicly problematic. Both Pluto and a distant Neptune would be classified as a “dwarf planet”, which is not to be considered a subcategory of “planet”.

The petition is to be among the community only, so I will not give you details about how to sign it. Also, I don’t know if I have permission to reveal the names of the people who put forward the petition, so I will not do that, at least until I know more.

This is rather unexpected and quite interesting, I hope you agree.

-cvj

I learned a new term from a producer at a television studio the other day (in a context I do not know if I’m allowed to blog about yet): “Spinach TV”. I love it. This is a term expressing the idea of television programming that is supposed to be “good for you” since it is educational in some way. Some of us are doing this sort of thing in the blogging world, for better or worse. See my about page.

With that in mind, I’d like to offer some words about this week’s science coverage of the two big Astronomy/Astrophysics stories. I’ve heard the issue raised a number of times today (including by my colleague Sean over on CV) that it is somehow to be thought of as a bad thing that there’s more coverage in the press of the Pluto demotion than there is of the new results giving new direct evidence of Dark Matter. The former is supposed to be all about the politics of science while the latter is supposed to be covered more since it is a profound new result.

With all due respect to my friends and colleagues who have expressed that opinion, I would say that such a view is somewhat short-sighted and has more than a whiff of elitism about it. They’re just missing the big picture. I completely agree that the Dark Matter result is vastly more important new science than the simple fact of Pluto’s demotion, but from the perspective of science education, the value of the Pluto coverage is immensely important, and maybe at least as important as the Dark Matter coverage. I can think of several reasons, and here are some:

Continue reading ‘Spinach Blogging’

If, like I am, you’re tired of people getting ensnared by the nonsense in the “What the Bleep…” movie, and asking you to explain it….(I scared myself just now by looking at the technorati tags for What the Bleep and Bleep…yikes)… please please help out Jennifer Saylor, a blogger who is a freelance writer with a passion for science. She wrote a post about the movie recently, which you can read here. She let me (and my colleagues over on CV) know about it, and -more importantly- let us know that she’d like to do something more than just blog about it expressing her annoyance. Let me reproduce some of her email:

Continue reading ‘Bleep Bleep Yet Again’

So you’ll recall that when we thought we had twelve planets we started trying to think of new mnemonics to help people remember the planets’ ordering.

For example, from Yvette:

My Very Educated Mother Can’t Justify Someone Using New Planetary Conventions… oh no, they haven’t named the last one yet!!!

Or from Amara’s friend Damien Broderick:

My very eccentric mother’s cook just served us nine pastry coated xylophones

(On the assumption that the last planet would be named Xena.)

Or from astromcnaught:

My View Embraces Moving Classifications, Just Stop Uncovering New Planets Called 2003 UB313

Or from Alan Hamilton (via Robert Greenham):

Most Victorian Euphoniums Make Cats Jump Suddenly Unless Neighbours Play Calming Xylophones.

Continue reading ‘So Do We Need a New Planetary Mnemonic?’

Ok… Let’s try this again shall we?

It’s official! There are eight planets in our solar system. The vote has taken place. Last week’s proposals have been rejected. Pluto has been demoted, apparently.

They were voting on the following (I got this here):

1) A planet1 is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

(2) A dwarf planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape2, (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.

(3) All other objects3 orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as “Small Solar System Bodies”.

1The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
2An IAU process will be established to assign borderline objects into either dwarf planet and other categories.
3These currently include most of the Solar System asteroids, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), comets, and other small bodies.

That was resolution 5A, and then there is 5B:

Insert the word “classical” before the word “planet” in Resolution 5A, Section (1), and footnote 1. Thus reading:

(1) A classical planet1 is a celestial body . . .

And then the Pluto-specific resolutions (actually, 5B seems to lay the groundwork of the attempt to save Pluto):

RESOLUTION 6A
The IAU further resolves:

Pluto is a dwarf planet by the above definition and is recognized as the prototype of a new category of trans-Neptunian objects.

RESOLUTION 6B
The following sentence is added to Resolution 6A:

This category is to be called “plutonian objects.”

Anyway, from what I heard, looks like these attempts to keep it have been rejected - those last few resolutions were voted down - and Pluto has been given the chop.

More later…

[Update: BBC story on it here.]

-cvj

The saga continues. Nobody yet knows how many planets we have. There has been fierce argument at the International Astronomical Union. As a result, the definitions of last week have been revised. “Pluton” has been discarded as a term (partly because of the clash with a geological term, a clash which was also swiftly noted by one of Asymptotia’s readers), and the vote is very soon.

Pluto and all the loveable little bodies might now in trouble because a revision to the definition says that a planet must be the “dominant body” in its orbital zone, clearing out any little neighbours. New Scientist’s website reports that

Pluto does not qualify because its orbit crosses that of the vastly larger Neptune.

Quoting further:

Continue reading ‘It’s Not Over ‘Til It’s Over’

Apparently the hole in the ozone layer above Antartica is stabilizing. Some of you will remember the late 80s, when the hole was discussed a lot in the popular press. It was a huge problem. The hole we made meant that we were losing our protection from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. We identified that chloroflourocarbons -CFCs- which at the time were used everywhere (such as propellants in aerosol cans, refrigerator coolants) were the chief ozone-depleting substances that we produced.

What did we do? We sat down in Montreal and decided -as a global society- to change our behaviour. International agreements were arrived at to stop producing CFCs (and a range of other related molecules), to serve the greater good.

It seems to have worked. See the article I spotted on the BBC’s news site. Quoting:

Continue reading ‘International Cooperation Can Work’

Some days I’m optimistic, and I think we’ll change our behaviour in time. We’ll be able to stop destroying our environment quite so recklessly. We’ll stop our dependence on oil and other fossil fuels. We’ll stop fighting ridiculous wars over such fuels…. etc.

Other days, stuff like this happens, and I think “We’re Doomed”.

The scene: Two Fridays ago at Aspen airport. I was there to pick up a rental car that I had ordered over the web. It was needed for a trip I will tell you about. Of course, I had booked for a compact car, and was hoping to get one.

So I filled in the paperwork as usual, checking the boxes, declining the insurance (since I have my own), etc. The usual drill. Then the agent gave me one other form to sign which was weird. It is an agreement to accept a financial penalty if I brought back the car within two hours of renting it. I asked about this and he mumbled something about breach of contract, etc, etc. After giving him a hard stare, I thought nothing more of it.

Transactions with paper done with, the agent smiled at me and handed me the keys. Now remembering what just took place (see end of previous paragraph), observe what he said:

“Well, we don’t have any cars left sir, so we’re giving you a free upgrade to a Chevy Humongous. It is an SUV”.

“But I don’t want an SUV, Chevy Humongous or otherwise”.

He looked at me like I’m nuts.

Continue reading ‘Why I’m Sometimes Sure We’re Doomed’

Well, the press conference I told you about has happened! This is so exciting! There’s new and very direct proof from observations of the Bullet Cluster with the Chandra X-ray Observatory that Dark Matter really exists.

So the need to make modifications to how gravity works on large scales in order to explain observations seems to be something we can put aside for now.

Your mission: Go to the press release website for more information, and lovely Continue reading ‘MOND Laid to Rest?’

Aaron Bergman has written an extensive review of Peter Woit’s attack-book on string theory. I’ll let you read the thoughtfully written 11-page pdf document linked there. I think that Aaron deserves some sort of medal or other award for making the effort. Peter responded here.

Note from the title that this post is part I of II. Part I was to be a quick rundown of my thoughts on the recent Science Friday program featuring a head-to-head between Brian Greene and Lee Smolin over string theory research. I never finished writing it. I’ll try again in a day or two, and make it part II of this.

You can pretty much tell from the title of this post what I’m going to say. This is all just mostly media-inflated nonsense, which will continue for some time. In case it is not obvious why, I’ll summarise my reasons for saying this (again) in that post.

Summer has ended for me. Tons of stuff to do during first day of semester tomorrow.

-cvj

(Spotted at Uncertain Principles.)

Below (nearer the end of this post) is the description of the “Uncertainty” event (Thursday 31st August, 7:00pm, USC’s Annenberg auditorium; much more here) part of USC’s Visions and Voices program I told you about in the previous post.

These are, as I said, events that build upon the Categorically Not! series held at Santa Monica arts studios on Sundays, and about which I have blogged extensively on Cosmic Variance (see some recent descriptions here and here). The old Categorically Not! series will not stop. The Santa Monica series will continue, but there will be some gaps to accommodate the USC events. We hope that the regular Santa Monica crowd will make the short trip across the city to USC on those nights. For more information on all Categorically Not! - type events, visit the Categorically Not! website.

We will start on the USC campus -in the Visions and Voices program- with Uncertainty, and we will do this theme twice this semester. We did this theme before, actually (we had K.C. Cole, Jonathan Kirsch, and Julia Sweeney) and it was very successful. We were planning to redo this first event with the same presenters, but at the time of planning, Julia (who did extracts from her monologue/show “Letting Go of God” (which you must see if it comes to a theatre anywhere near you)) was thinking of leaving LA for a bit -nooooo!- to go away for a year to New York to do her show there. So we modified things and added a different component - from actress Chloe Webb instead (which will no doubt also be thought-provoking, entertaining, and funny …see below). (I’ve since heard from Julia that her plans have changed and she’ll be staying in LA -hurrah!- and so I’m already thinking of some ways of collaborating with her on arts-meets-science related projects in the near future, which I’ll probably tell you about - as soon as there is something to tell.)

Why redo the theme? Why twice? What other themes will we do there? Have a read of the Science and Serendipity blurb at this link to get an idea of what we had in mind. An extract:

Science, Serendipity and the Search for Truth puts science on stage in an informal series of conversations and performances alongside music, theater, journalism, religion, film, dance and other disciplines to see what serendipitous connections might bubble up. The informality of the presentations and discussions will encourage intellectual risk-taking–both on the part of the presenters and the audience. People will feel free to “play” with ideas in any way they like–falling on their faces if need be, rather than bending over backwards to please some arbitrary convention. Nothing will be rigged, staged, hyped or in any way polished and sanitized or overly practiced. Because of this, we have reason to believe that real discoveries can be made.

“Uncertainty” is just an excellent theme for this, and we’ll use it this Fall semester. “Point of View” is also an excellent theme, and we’ll use that in the Spring Semester. We did that latter theme before too. We’ll get a chance to revisit both with performances and presentations similar to the ones done before, and then we and the participants will look at themes all over again with a fresh set of performances and presentations, having had time to discuss everything over the intervening weeks (maybe on this blog if you’re game?). It should be fun and instructive, I hope you agree.

Here is the blurb for the first Uncertainty event:
Continue reading ‘Uncertainty’

This year, there’s going to be even more to do on the USC campus to broaden your mind, and several events which link USC with off campus venues such as theatres, museums, and performing arts centers. The (then) new Provost, Max Nikias, announced his “Arts and Humanities Initiative” in his installation speech last year, where he reminded us of USC’s core values and then said:

These core values represent USC at its very best. They form its foundation and drive every aspect of President Sample’s creative vision for our future. And so we must pointedly ask: how can the university incorporate the rigorous exploration of these values into each student’s experience at USC, regardless of discipline? I believe we should turn to the arts and humanities. These disciplines fully capture the values of the university and provide students with an outstanding opportunity to examine their own relationship to these values on a truly personal level. The arts and humanities bring these values to life- illuminating their complexities and nuances…

and that this series is intended to:

affirm what is most essential and most enduring within the human spirit.

He then invited faculty to write letters of intent (and later, proposals) describing programs that they might want to see (and help make) happen on campus. In collaboration with other colleagues, I put in three. Actually, as I type, I recall that I blogged about this last year in my “Three Proposals of Marriage” post.

Well, one of them was selected! When a campus news story was being prepared to announce it, somehow the Annenberg School’s K.C. Cole, the Cinema-Television School’s Tara McPherson (who chaired the selection committee) and myself were chosen to be the poster children of the event. This explains the purpose of the photo shoot, about which I blogged some time ago at this link. We had some fun with it, you might recall. (Official photo they used is to the right; contrast, if you will, with the one I showed back then.)

You can find a lot about the events from the news story that Diane Krieger wrote, linked here. Here are all the events (not all the descriptions are totally accurate, including the one of our event):
Continue reading ‘Visions and Voices’

Speaking of fresh produce, some of you are probably wondering how the garden is doing. I’ve not seen it for a long time. I told you about the fig tree, but not of other things.

Well, there’s more to come, but here are a few pleasant things to come home to (as a result of the improved drip system I mentioned earlier):

I’ve got corn! I have not grown corn since I was a child, so this has an extra buzz for me. If you want to teach a child the value and wonder of gardening -and more seriously, give them a key component of an appreciation of how our planet’s food supply works- get them growing something easy and fast-growing like corn, or beans. It’s just magical, even as an adult, since these things grow and change so fast, you can almost see them progressing in front of your eyes. Please consider getting a child involved in something like this (or just yourself if you’ve never grown anything!) It is fulfilling, and easy - and you don’t need a garden. You can do it on a window-sill, or on the doorstep, with a deep pot or two.

Another good and easy thing to grow that gives results that are easily appreciated are various things from the squash family. Cucumbers, pumpkins, patty pan squash, etc. Here are some zucchini (courgettes) coming along nicely in the shade of the leaves of their parent plant, not so far from the stovetop pot:

Continue reading ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’

Final day of Summer for me. Second day of my return home from travelling. Market Day! Time for a trip to the market to get supplies for the first week of the semester.

The loot (which includes, hidden under the leeks, some of the last of the white peaches of the season from the peach people I like):

Be sure to note (click on right for larger) these extra extra long beans- Superstring beans I think they must be called (quickly goes back and changes the working title of the post).

(”Chinese long beans” the lady selling them said. My first thought: Sure. Trick from produce-seller-101. If you ever want to sell a slightly unusual-looking vegetable, just make up a name like “Chinese something-or-other”, or “Guatemalan doo-dad”. But it is actually an accepted name, along with yardlong bean, asparagus bean, snake bean, etc. I prefer superstring bean henceforth. Given the popularity of string theory in the popular conciousness now (the horror!)… it might catch on…)

Some other pictures (click on thumbnail for larger):

-cvj

(Update: On reflection (hot Sunday afternoon and don’t want to think about planning the busy week ahead) maybe I should have called them “Cosmic String Beans” since they are much larger than normal string beans, as opposed to having an extra remarkable internal symmetry…. at this point, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one still following the joke, which was already stretching it.)

Last year long after a Summer’s decent crop of figs I heavily pruned back the fig tree, and pulled it clear of some trees it was tangled in, cut those back a bit to give it some light, and tied two if its main branches to a post to try to train it to grow in a new direction.

It’s payback time! All through the Spring this year I’ve been watching it grow back even stronger and more happy, fed by more light and the knowledge that someone cares. It was covered in several tens, mabe hundreds, of green figs when I last saw it. Now that I have returned, (first day back - straight out to the garden to see what’s up) I see that I am more or less just in time! A few have over-ripened already, and some animal or other has helped themselves to several more, but there’s more than enough for desert for me and my guest tonight at dinner. Yum!

There are many more where those came from…. Dee-licious!

-cvj

“Yeah, this string theory stuff is nice and all, but what does it have to do with the price of eggs?”, is not one of the questions I’ve had to field at the end of a public lecture, but it could have been.

If it had come up, I could have pointed the questioner to this post by Robert. Please, please check out this fine example of how we use scaling laws in physics and in everyday life, with remarkable effects.

-cvj

P.S. After reading it, I bet you’ll consider contacting your local government representative to get them to urge for more tax dollars to be put into theoretical physics. It’s really the best way to be sure that more of us are kept off the streets…

Well, I gave the talk and I’m back at my temporary apartment. I’m exhausted, as is always the case for me after general talks. Does that happen to you?

I think I managed to get across everything I wanted to (see the previous post) and it was a nice complement to the TV interview. I was pleased to get to talk about the exciting research applying string techniques to strongly coupled gauge theory, and emphasize the storm-in-a-teacup nature of the current media obsession with the “Landscape issue”.

There were several excellent questions, which included staying after the lecture answering several questions into the night. A worthwhile evening, it must be said. If interested, in addition to the TV interview already showing daily since Wednesday, there are several opportunities to see the entire talk on Grassroots TV starting this weekend (check their online schedule for times).

Now to get back to the huge number of things to be done before the Summer ends for me this year. Only problem is, I’ve only one non-weekend day of the Summer left. The insanity begins on Monday.

-cvj

Well, it has been a really long day, and I have yet to finish all I need to do before tomorrow. I’ve just had dinner, and am finishing off my splash of wine while waiting for my tea to brew (making it slow in a pan with spices -chai-style-, to combat the aforementioned altitude-induced flavour problem.) The plan is to get back to work for a few hours…

I’m not a huge TV watcher, but occasionally I want to look away from a long day of books, papers, notepad, and computer and distract myself over dinner. Especially when in a hotel or other short stay place. More fascinating then somehow. I don’t know why. So I switched on the TV.

… and Jurassic Park is just beginning on AMC.

I can never resist this film. Never.

I don’t know why I love this film so much. It is Spielberg at his best (and he packs in every single one of his signature tricks, camera angles, and other story-telling devices), and John Williams’ theme -another set of almost inversions of his other well known themes- is just perfect.

It is not a perfect film, but somehow the imperfections are over-ridden for me by:
Continue reading ‘Why Do I Love Jurassic Park So Much?’

It’s official!* There are twelve planets in our Solar System (so update all the posters, such as the ESA one on the right). [Update1.... Oh no it's not official! See here.] [Update2: The vote is in... see here.]

Count ‘em:

1. Mercury
2. Venus
3. Earth
4. Mars
5. Ceres
6. Jupiter
7. Saturn
8. Uranus
9. Neptune
10. Pluto
11. Charon
12. 2003 UB313

In addition, you’ll have to add a new word or two to your vocabulary, such as “pluton”, of which Pluto is the prototype. From the 16th August press release of the International Astronomical Union:

16-August-2006, Prague. The world’s astronomers, under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), have concluded two years of work defining the difference between “planets” and the smaller “solar system bodies” such as comets and asteroids. If the definition is approved by the astronomers gathered 14-25 August 2006 at the IAU General Assembly in Prague, our Solar System will include 12 planets, with more to come: eight classical planets that dominate the system, three planets in a new and growing category of “plutons” – Pluto-like objects – and Ceres. Pluto remains a planet and is the prototype for the new category of “plutons.”

-cvj

(Thanks Amara!)

(*almost official. It has to be approved, it says.)

NASA is about to make an exciting announcement, apparently. On Monday 21st August there will be a press conference, and there will be actual information (they say) at several places mentioned in this link.

I have not the slightest idea of the details of the announcement [but see update below], except that the title of the page is “NASA Announces Dark Matter Discovery”! It concerns observations with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The Chandra site says “Astronomers will announce how dark and normal matter have been forced apart in an extraordinarily energetic collision at 1 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 21.”, so I infer from this that they might not have completely pinned down the nature of the Dark Matter so much as found a completely new kind of smoking gun pointing to its existence.

On the other hand, Continue reading ‘Watch That Space!’

Can’t resist, in view of our earlier discussion:

This was taken from Nick Anderson’s (Houston Chronicle’s Editorial Cartoonist) blog.

Thanks, anon!

-cvj

Well, I had the “Aspen Physics Preview” interview for the station called “Grassroots TV” this afternoon. It was a pleasant chat with host Sy Coleman about aspects of research into fundamental physics and string theory. I don’t have a good sense of what it was like since I was focusing on answering questions, but I do believe that I was able to get across some of the key ideas that I mentioned earlier, although we ran out of time before we got into the details of the Landscape “controversy”, but it was mentioned as a sort of teaser for the main talk. We just talked for 27 minutes non-stop, and it will be broadcast as recorded -unedited- warts and all.

My main mission in a lot of this discussion is to point out that:

Continue reading ‘Talking Heads On Strings’

I’m going to try to tell you a bit about a few of the talks (physics and otherwise) that I’ve seen here at Aspen, but not now. I’ve got rather a lot to do right now…. But I will try later in the week. In the meantime, here is a shot of one of the talks we had on the patio, with the sounds of the rehearsals for the Music Festival coming from the tent nearby. It is of David Berenstein (one of the organizers of the earlier string workshop) telling us about an idea for doing phenomenology directly using brane constructions. You can see Hirosi Ooguri listening intently at the front of the audience.

David’s proposals were bold (there is a paper coming) and he was given a rough time here and there, but he persevered to the end. Looks a bit like he is emerging from Elsewhere in a flash of light, doesn’t it? Hmm…

-cvj

Ok, after procrastinating the whole afternoon, I’ve finally got around to getting down to phase one of preparing this talk. Going to give myself a few hours of sitting sifting through things I want to recycle from my database of old talks…. thinking of new themes I want to explore which will require whole new slides, etc. Next session will be the design of new slides and updating (if necc.) of old.

I’ve got the pen and paper (essential for me), the computer, the ipod on random (Charlie Parker’s “Billie’s Bounce” playing right now - great early solo by Miles), a supply of Carr’s water crackers, a generous lump of Saint Andre soft cheese, and -I know it might not quite fit- a glass of a Ravenswood Zinfandel. Oh…. and nice evening light on some distant mountain. Surely, I’ll get a lot done…. no?

-cvj

Well, I dashed off a lecture summary to be printed out in time for the public lecture on Thursday:

Title: Strings Everywhere?

Hold it right there. What is the meaning of the title? I’m riffing on two things, one physical and the other sociological. The first, vastly more important theme is the fact that strings are powerful tools that represent one of the major steps in modern “technologies” (like quantum field theory) that are useful in several areas of theoretical physics, and -I suspect- may well become useful in several other areas as the field matures. I have in mind the idea of an “effective theory”: that there are physical phenomena that are not as easily (or in some cases -not at all-) described by standard particle-like theories (quantum field theories, relativistic or otherwise) as they are by string theories. Stringy techniques -quantum mechanics of extended objects- have and (I suspect) will continue to show up in diverse places in physics, and not just particle physics where it began. I hope to give some indication of this in the talk. One of my primary examples will be the contrast between electromagnetism and the strong interactions, I imagine. There are phenomena like quark confinement that are rather hard to describe using standard QFT, but seem to be extremely natural in a string theory framework…

The second, which to my mind is a storm in a teacup, is the issue of strings showing up all over the press, and increasingly (because the press -editors, some writers, and publishers- love a controversy and a David-vs-Goliath fairlytale, sadly sometimes at the expense of painting an accurate picture; see e.g., here) in a negative light as being some useless juggernaut-come-cult. I’ll talk about that a bit too…

Anyway, here is the blurb I dashed off for the background to the lecture:

Continue reading ‘The Blurb’

Well, I have to face up to it. There’s been this embarrassing thing all around town here in Aspen that I have not told you about, but I have to get it done this week. Everywhere you go around town -and I mean everywhere- there are little piles or pinboards of free flyers telling you what things there are to do in Aspen this Summer, along with other information about bus routes, timetables, etc. So you’ll see things for the Summer Films, the Theatre series, the Music Festival, the Music School, the talks going on at the Aspen Institute, and…. the Summer Public Physics Lectures at the Aspen Center for Physics. I’m pleased that the latter gets such wide distribution, since…. well you know how I feel about getting more Science out to the Public. But here’s the embarrassing bit:

I’m giving one of the Public lectures this Summer, and they decided to use an image of me as the cover of the flyer! So everywhere I go, there I am smiling back at me, holding up some strings. (Closeup on right, if you click.) It is actually quite an honour to be chosen to give such a talk, and more so that they wanted to use my photo for the series this year. Of course they got my agreement before using the photo, but it is still a shock to see it all over the town, but a bit embarrassing when asked about it by my colleagues! (I admit that am very pleased -given my passions in this area- to be alongside useful information about public transport. I like that a lot somehow….Perhaps I could have supplied them with a picture of me with the Brompton.)

The image they used, which is by the excellent photographer Phil Channing, has haunted me for years since it pops up to the front page of the USC website at least once a day -as part of a thing they do where they feature their faculty on the front page- which is always a shock when I need to go there for something. I have to explain to people from time to time that I am not always on the site and that I am not the face of USC. (You know, like Susan Sarandon and Halle Berry for Revlon, or Whoever-it-is-now for Maybelline, or Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz for L’Oreal… although if USC wanted to pay me their level of salary to do so, I’d be pleased with that… I could do the theoretical physicist’s equivalent of a supermodel swoop of the hair (write a long equation with brightly coloured chalk maybe) and say, in an annoying way, “Because I’m worth it”.) To be fair, the photo does a good job, since it gets people asking questions about what that thing is I’m holding up, and why.

(The backstory there is that the USC people in charge of the website project asked some of us to come to a photo shoot, and Continue reading ‘Hard To Avoid’

New Scientist has an article by Stephen Battersby on their top ten weirdest cosmology theories. My first thought, beore reading the article was that they were going to have a lot of fun with this, but they seem to be rather conservative about their definition of “weird”. This means that they’ve focused on “weirdest” in the context (mostly) of existing scientific observational input, and published science academic circles, which you might think puts a damper on things… but read more below.

So here are the titles, under which the author writes a short paragraph describing the idea:

1. Clashing branes

2. Evolving universes

3. Superfluid space-time

4. Goldilocks universe

5. Gravity reaches out

6. Cosmic ghost

7. It’s a small universe

8. Fast light

9. Sterile neutrinos

10. In the Matrix

This means that the kind of whacky cosmology that you and I could think of in a flash for fun on a Friday (or other) afternoon are not allowed. Nor are the ones I constantly get in the mail from well-meaning citizens. All of which can be way, way weirder.

Oh well. I’m opening up this particular thread (note: no, not all discussion threads on this blog!!) to any fun/whacky/weird cosmology ideas you might like to share of your own. Serious or non-serious. I’m not going to rank them. Just feel free to share.

Here is a fun constraint (which has a serious point): Try as much as you can to make Continue reading ‘Top Ten Weirdest Cosmology Theories’

Dear Reader,

I’m desperately wracking my brain to find some science in this, but I cannot. Nope, reading the article does not help either. Nevertheless, it is in New Scientist (a fact that means nothing on its own, from past experience - they’ve a technology for it’s own sake focus as well, which is fair enough).

Some researchers in Tel Aviv have developed an algorithm that can give a makeover to your digital photographs of human faces. Magazine editors do this by hand all the time, of course, but this algorithm might be able to speed this up, and -for that (I suspect scarily large) number of people who would actually want that kind of thing- allow you to do this to your own photos!

Quoting from Helen Knight’s article:

Software then analysed the images, measuring distances between facial features and ratios such as that between facial width at eye and mouth level, and the thickness of the eyebrows. It compared these with the attractiveness ratings given by the volunteers to create a set of rules, known as the “beauty function”, for assessing whether a face is attractive.

Leyvand has now written a second piece of software that applies this algorithm to a facial image to make adjustments to features so that they more closely obey the rules. It then analyses the results to determine which changes have been successful, and discard any that don’t work. Users can also adjust the severity of the changes.

You can go to the site yourself to look at an example of the results.

I’ve the following questions.

Continue reading ‘Digital Makeover?’