I mean the good type of Hummers: Hummingbirds! (Some types of which are already visiting the garden even though the flowers they like are most not ready yet. One of my Budlea plants died – from the frosts I think – and another is ill. I expect to get three more of them from the market this week. The hummingbirds like them (butterflies love them), although they prefer the Mexican Sage plants which are right […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, it’s Friday, and the end of the week of standard work days, although not of course the end of the working week. I’m sure I do not speak only for myself when I say that this job does not really get switched off at a specific time every day (as you’ve seen), and it certainly is not contained to any specific days of the week. But I do scale things back quite a bit on Saturdays and Sundays and try to focus more on other things in my life (there are exceptional circumstances, of course). So this will be the last in this short series of “day in the life” posts describing my work day. (The last one was here. You can find all the others listed at the bottom.)
8:30am Finally I managed to get a lie-in! Unfortunately this is probably due to poor sleeping due to the fact that I accidentally fell asleep with the radio on (with no sleep function set) and so my entire night was full of the BBC and NPR. Getting ready this morning I realize that every story on NPR is familiar because I probably heard it at 4:00am already. I have poor reception in my bedroom, and so I listen to the radio over the web on a computer. It did not go to sleep, since the radio streaming keeps it active. If I want to fall asleep listening to something, I usually overcome this shortcoming by listening to a podcast, but this time I did not get to starting it before I dozed off. Anyway, tea, cornmeal porridge, coffee. No shirt ironing as I don’t need to be terribly professorial-looking today, much (see below).
I’ll be in semi-stealth mode again today (like Wednesday), in order to focus on research matters, but only semi. Again, I’ve avoided scheduling any meetings today (except one – see below). Although I do not leave for work, I settle down to dealing with various administrative matters. This starts with emails about next week’s colloquium, a future colloquium, and things of that nature. Also check blog, and add entries and begin to clean up the post about yesterday for later appearance.
Continuing the week, here’s Thursday:
I really only get the LA Times on Thursdays, with any regularity. Mostly because I like the Weekend section, which has listings of events coming up, and some interesting feature article or two about some LA thing or person or other. They’ve been interesting to me more often than not, on balance. Not always hugely interesting, but enough for a good 25 minutes read on the bus. The Home section can be good too. So I get it just in case there’s something good. Indeed, it pays off, and there are some good things. I’ll point two of them out in some later blog posts, I hope.
Continuing, here’s a short notebook on Wednesday.
Soon time to sign up to help judge the California State Science Fair. I hope I can make it. Just to reassure you that not every entry is another trebuchet (just the physics, mechanics, etc., section and you’ll know what I mean), here’s a story about two schoolgirls from New Zealand, Jenny Suo and Anna Devathasan, who decided to test the claims of GlaxoSmithKline that their product – cartoned ready-to-drink Ribena – has high Vitamin C content. They set out to show that cheaper drinks were less healthy than Ribena, and found to their surprise that there were only trace amounts of Vitamin C at best.
I’m a bit shocked by this since I love Ribena, and grew up with it for years. I seem to remember that some of the largest writing on the packaging is about the huge amount of Vitamin C that you’re going to get. Admittedly, it’s not the vitamin C aspect that attracted me to it, of course -I just love the taste! But all the same, it’s a bit disappointing….
From an article by Mike Steere: Click to continue reading this post
Continuing, this was the Tuesday:
Well, it starts out: When physicists marry physicists, the beginning may be a ‘big bang,’ but issues of life, love, and family gravitate toward the universal. Ok. Stop there. That’s way too many physics puns and double entendre in one sentence. It’s a nice article by Mike Perricone in Symmetry … Click to continue reading this post
The other day (some weeks ago now) I started a sort of “day in the life” post, to give you more of an idea of what a typical day was like at work (and maybe also a bit at play). Somehow I never finished it, and then I looked at it a while later and could not remember the rest of the day, and so just deleted it.
I’ve decided to do something different. There really is no typical day. So I will try to do a series of days instead. Of course, I’m not going to have tine to sit and do a long, detailed entry about these days, and so instead I’ll just do a sort of sketchy notebook, with some time stamps. From time to time during the day I’ll stop in and add to it, and then post the whole thing at the end of the day before going to sleep. I won’t include all details (I’ll spare you bathroom breaks, personal grooming, and things of that nature, you’ll be pleased to know), but will try to give you some impressions of how the day goes. If people are interested (and people did ask for such a “day in the life post” before), I might try to do them more frequently. But for now, I’ll try and do one for each day of this week. Average over them to get the typical day.
So here goes.
Well, this work week really started on Sunday night.
Oh my. I’m a sucker for cute bears*. I admit it. My head almost explodes with cuteness […] Click to continue reading this post
I went for a nice hazy-then-sunny hike this morning in Griffith Park, and decided to try a way up that I have not used in a while. I’d forgotten how wonderful it is to approach the Griffith Observatory using the trails directly below it. It’s such a majestic building! – … Click to continue reading this post
No, not the name of a new Jazz singer as far as I know. Instead, it is the single most powerful source of a sweet scent in the garden. What has been happening is that the Jasmine has steadily crept up one of the palm trees, and is engulfing it in hundreds of tiny flowers. (Click for larger view.)
The scent from this is huge. For better or worse, the web does not allow communication of scents, and so I can do no more than offer this rather odd picture (the tree is quite tall, and so it is an odd one to take, and hard to get the right sense of the situation while letting you still see the plant), and leave the rest to your imagination.
The only downside to this wonderful scent is the fact that it is close to the group of […] Click to continue reading this post
Sometimes the journalists and editors get it right. In fact, they get it right a lot of the time, but you hear more about the complaints (sometimes from me, sometimes elsewhere) about them getting it wrong, when it comes to things like science coverage especially. What am I talking about? I’m talking about the set of questions and answers that are in a new article on MSNBC that a number of people pointed out to me yesterday and today. It starts out as an article about Brian Greene’s science outreach efforts (books, and tv and movie appearances, including a new one), with some discussion of how this is regarded by his colleagues, the value it has had in raising public awareness of physics (and fundamental science in general, I would argue), and so forth. All that is interesting, but not nearly as interesting to me right now as the later parts of the article which is simply a question and answer session. (Picture above right is from a fun joke I carried out last year that you can read here – be sure to read the comments too.)
Alan Boyle, the science editor, asks Brian a series of very thoughtful questions, and Brian gives some very thoughtful answers. The topics include research in string theory (of course), hopes and possibilities for experimental and observational results (such as from the LHC and Planck) that can inform and ultimately test the ideas coming from string theory and open up new vistas in fundamental physics, research on issues such as the landscape and the idea of multiple universes, research on better developing our understanding of string theory (to the point where we can, it is hoped, extract firm predictions from it), and many other things. (I wrote an introduction to aspects of the landscape issue here, and talked a bit about a Tom Siegfried article on the discussion amongst researchers here.)
It is nice to see an honest, non-inflammatory and non-hyped conversation about the issues, and read Brian’s personal take on some of these matters. The bottom is, […] Click to continue reading this post
So on Wednesday night while cooking dinner I was listening with half an ear to Talk of the Nation on NPR, and at some point found that I was listening to a discussion about Robots. They were talking to Lee Gutkind about his new book about Robots, and about the future, and robots as tools, and interfacing with robots and so forth. All very interesting, all 
made somewhat more engaging by the very deliberate way the interviewee spoke, taking great care with every sentence he uttered. This feat rather kept my attention more than the material, which I’ll hasten to add was not uninteresting -and certainly a topic I spent a lot of my youth dreaming about especially given all the Asimov books I used to devour- but not my focus was elsewhere I suppose. You can listen to the program here, and it is all certainly worth thinking about, it is a very serious and important topic, and robots (although mostly not in the form we see in our dramas on tv and in the cinema) may well dominate our society the way computers have become so central to us right now… so go right ahead and listen to what he has to say.
What finally grabbed me, this time, was not the serious “issue” material. It was this: […] Click to continue reading this post
The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 25th March. The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series – started and run by science writer K. C. Cole – of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. There’s a new website showing past and upcoming events here. You can also have a look at some of the descriptions I did of some events in some earlier posts (such as here and here), and the description of some of the recent special ones on Point of View and Uncertainty that I organized with K. C. as USC campus events (here, here (with video) and here).
Here is a description from the poster for the upcoming programme: […]
Click to continue reading this post
No, not another flower from my garden. This is a two dimensional projection (originally hand drawn in the 1960s by Peter McMullen, of a polytope that lives in eight dimensions, known as the Gossett polytope 421. Click here to be taken over to the American Institute for Mathematics (AIM) site for more information about it. (This image was computer generated by John Stembridge, and you can get higher resolution there for use on your T-shirts and so forth.)
What does this all pertain to? A new result from a team of mathematicians. They’ve done what some are calling the mathematician’s equivalent of mapping the genome of a Lie group, the one called E8. Groups pertain to symmetries. Symmetries are […] Click to continue reading this post
