Remember our discussions of Pluto’s demotion/reclassification? (Lots of link reminders at bottom of post.) Well, here’s a sad (and amusing) image* created by artist Mathias Pedersen:
You can see a high resolution version of this image here. Don’t forget to look at more of the graphic art of Mathias Pedersen**.
Poor Pluto indeed!
(Take some time to appreciate how good a job he’s done on colours and other Continue reading ‘Poor Pluto!’
Have a listen to Greg Easterbrook (of Wired) in conversation with NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition. The issue is whether NASA’s focus on setting up a manned base on the moon, and then heading for Mars, is really the right focus for a huge (multiple billions of dollars) expenditure, given other scientific priorities. The link is here. See also his Wired piece here, entitled “How NASA Screwed Up (And Four Ways to Fix It)”.
That was yesterday. Today, also on NPR’s Morning Edition, I heard NASA’s chief administrator Michael Griffin attempts to defend the policy. There’s a link to audio here, and be sure to listen to the audio (the transcript offered there is only partial, for a start). I find it revealing. He seemed to have a great deal of difficulty answering certain key questions, such as “Do you think it is the best use of money or not?”. “Are there priorities that you have had to cut…?” His answers on climate change and global Continue reading ‘NASA’s Wrong Stuff?’
Always a big event for me. The first buddleia (or budlea) of the season, in the act of opening up (click for larger):
It should be finished with its grand opening of each of those tiny buds in a few days. I Continue reading ‘Purple Grand Opening’
[Continuing an earlier post...which you'll need to read to understand this one. Link here.]
So, unhappy with the state of affairs, I was on the warpath. I began to consider how to deploy my shiny weapons of war. I considered what to do. I could not believe that this really is the policy of the people overseeing the whole operation of Trojan Hospitality (the organization that oversees the whole of campus catering) – it must have been a unilateral effort on the part of the manager and staff in that particular cafe. Or I least I hoped so. So before calling on even higher powers from, say, the Provost’s office, I thought I’d talk to the head person at Trojan Hospitality. If I got no joy there, then I’d go higher. (Ironically, not long ago I’d politely turned down an approach for me to consider a position in the Provost’s office to become a sort of official campus-wide trouble-shooter on an ad-hoc basis for problems of precisely this sort.)
Another reason why this is all so frustrating to me is the fact that USC recently scored abominably in a recent report/survey grading college campuses according to how much effort they make in the area of sustainability. (Sustainable Endownments Insitute here, USC’s report card explaining its “D” score here.) While the report’s results seemed to me to be likely a bit harsh, I’ve always wondered whether anyone at USC actually cared about this issue enough to take the report seriously. (I’ve my own issues with Trojan Transportation with regards environmental matters -not the least because pedestrians, cyclists, and people who use public transportation seem to be lower on the food chain than people who buy parking permits- but have not got around to making noises about it to date beyond using the suggestion box in their office, and some comments in the campus surveys they sometimes circulate.)
So, here was the letter I wrote on Friday:
Continue reading ‘The Meddler, II’
You may recall a post I did some time ago about a worrying development at Griffith Observatory, just before it reopened after the splendid three year refurbishment. (See here for my long post -with pictures- of my visit to the facility around the time of its reopening.) Various reports said that they’d decided to hire actors (not trained in the subject of astronomy) to largely replace the lecturers (trained in the subject of astronomy) for the new planetarium show. This seemed a very disturbing turn of events, and so I did the blog post about it.
Well, I’d put the issue out of my mind until a few weeks ago when Jerry Weil, one of the show’s creators, showed up in the comments section (I love Google) and made his case for why the new show was just fine. Among the things he said in his comments were:
With the new structure of the shows, there is no time for a Q&A period, so there is no need for the lecturers to have any knowledge of astronomy. It is important to keep the show exciting and entertaining, but the star of the show should be the visuals.
Now, I have not seen the show, and so cannot comment in detail on its contents, or the setting, but I am -to say the least- very worried about such a statement. So I asked him to unpack the statement a bit more, thinking that I may have misunderstood. His clarification:
As far as the role of the lecturers, I was certainly one of the people who originally thought it was an unnecessary burden to have live lecturers when a canned narration would work just as well. After seeing the show, I have to say that having someone there live really adds to the excitement of the show. It makes it “feel†more interactive, and it certainly keeps your attention knowing there is a live human there speaking. However, since it is all scripted and there is no Q&A, it is not necessary for the lecturers to have any knowledge of astronomy. I am also an actor myself (in fact I had coincidentally worked with the actor/lecturer at the show I saw), and I have certainly played many roles in areas where I had no prior knowledge. In this situation it’s more important to have people who can convey the excitement and wonder of the Universe than to have a deep understanding of the subject matter.
Not wanting to repeat my often-made point that education and entertainment need not be thought of as mutually exculsive, I made a mental note to see the show and revisit this issue if I thought I could contribute further.
Remarkably, a few days later I was at a party at a neighbour’s house (Cinco De Mayo), and it was a great opportunity to meet some more neighbours. Among those were Continue reading ‘Griffith Observatory: Entertainment, Education, or Both?’
Well, I’ll leave the hunting aside and focus on the gathering. Some results, from Sunday’s Hollywood Farmer’s Market:
The market was about the same as it usually is every weekend, even for Memorial Day Continue reading ‘Weekend Hunter-Gatherer’
I don’t like getting angry. I don’t like losing my temper. In the first place, it makes me feel like I failed, and in the second place, I’m a little too good at being angry. I’m really scary. So I let it happen very little.
On Wednesday of last week, I almost completely lost my temper at work (bad enough), and in front of a guest (even worse, in my opinion), Bee, and in front of two of my students (setting a bad example). I apologized to them all, several times, later. Luckily (maybe because I was not wearing any purple pants?), I did not lose it entirely but my internal temperature was really very high indeed by the end of the incident.
What was the matter? You’re possibly going to think that this is an insignificant matter, but I don’t agree. We all went for coffee to one the (usually excellent, with usually very good staff) cafes on campus, and as usual I brought along my own coffee cup. I do that a lot, primarily since it means that I do not use any paper cups as a result, and secondarily because it keeps the coffee warmer for longer, is close to spill-proof, and is much nicer to drink from. I’ve been doing this for years. The routine is usually this: I ask for a small coffee, they hand me a small coffee cup, I smile and say I already have a cup and hand it back, I pay for the coffee, and I pour myself a small coffee and leave. It’s not always in that order, but it is close enough.
This time, I asked for a small coffee, and indicated that I’d have it in my cup, as usual. Continue reading ‘The Meddler, I’
Fantastic hike yesterday. More later, perhaps, but now I want to write about a couple of other things. In the meantime, here are some lovely butterflies that obligingly posed for the blog on some (type of sage?) flowers:
These are quite lovely, aren’t they? I always have great difficulty getting these giant structures (whole thing is about a metre long) down from the tall palm trees that produce them. I take them down because they produce a huge mess over the rest of the garden as they develop. Not the lovely tiny yellow flowers but the little palm nuts (tiny scale model (large grape-sized) coconuts, essentially – same family) that result later, one nut for each of those tiny yellow buds that you see!
So I cut them off. Sad, I know, but there it is.
I do it early because they have to fall. Where do they fall? All over the plants below, doing a lot of damage if I am unlucky. Better to have the much lighter blooms fall (still bad enough) than the Continue reading ‘Yellow Fibre Bundle’
There was a nice piece on NPR (by John Ydstie) featuring Joshua Redman today (photo left by Michael Wilson). He’s one of my favourite of the young (relatively) saxophonists on the Jazz scene today. (Some Wiki info here.) When I was an East coaster I saw him a number of times in concert, and he was always very good indeed. His albums are very good too – fun and full of personality, very soulful, although not hugely ground-breaking (not that this is always necessary to make a great musician). By the way, Joshua Redman’s music is actually a good starter place for people who might want to start out in Jazz by listening to some Continue reading ‘Joshua Redman on NPR’
Remember Flora? The Komodo dragon? I blogged about her here and here. She produced offspring using parthenogenesis while in captivity last year. Well, there was a news story earlier this week about a bonnethead shark in in the Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska giving birth to a pup. (Interestingly, zoo-keepers and news reporters seemed uninterested in giving our subject shark a name, as happened for the reptile.)
It was a puzzle for a while as to how she did it (as I learned in a BBC article):
At the time, some theorised that a male tiger shark kept at the zoo could have been the father – but the institution’s three bonnethead females had none of the bite marks that are usually inflicted on their gender during shark sex.
Some even suggested that one of the females could have had sex in the wild and stored the sperm in her body – but the three-year period in captivity made this explanation highly unlikely.
But eventually DNA tests resolved the issue:
Well, I’d expected that I’d have got to go to Griffith Park to do a hike and maybe show you some pictures to give you an idea of the changes since the fire (fire posts here and here). This has not happened yet, partly because last I heard they were not allowing people close to those areas… that may have changed by now. It has been over ten days since I checked.
Anyway, Colin Brown of Silver Lake was up there quite soon afterwards, and took many photos. They are not really for the squeamish, since he focused a lot on the animal remains that he found. So don’t look if you are likely to be disturbed by the Continue reading ‘The Burning, II’
It turns out* that the local NBC affiliate did a piece on the California State Science Fair (which I reported on yesterday). There’s a brief overview, shots of some of the students talking at their displays during the judging, and interviews with some of the students. It’s rather good. Link to it here (unfortunately you have to let it play a brief ad first).
-cvj
(*Thanks, Chris Gould!)
Yesterday was a full day indeed. The main event? The California State Science Fair. The venue? The California Science Center (just across the road from USC). Here’s a picture of it in case you’ve never been:
(Click for larger view.) California Science Center (with one of my personal emergency escape crafts cleverly disguised somewhere in the picture – all scientists have emergency escape craft, by the way – along with our plans to take over the world, our lab coat, and so forth…)
The time? 7:00am. Yes, we start early, as there is a lot to do for the long morning. The judges all gather in the IMAX theatre for a briefing about the ins and outs of the organization this year, the times at which various things will happen, and a reminder about some of the finer points of judging.
At 8:00am we broke up into groups of judges who will judge various sections. Mine was Applied Mechanics and Structures – Senior. Here, we decided on our collective strategy concerning how we’ll go around the various displays, making sure at least five judges (there were ten of us in total) see each project once in the first round of interviews. We’ll compare notes during the break at 11:00am, agree which ones we should all have seen – in order to focus on deciding which ones get which prizes or honourable mentions. I forgot to take a picture of our group of judges sitting around the table chatting. Most of the judges in my group were people from the aerospace industry, I gathered. About three or four people were new to the whole thing, and so some of us explained a bit about the things that we ought to be looking out for in the judging. This also (given the section were were to judge, and given the makeup of the judging panel – many coming from an industry where the place where the science and engineering are quite thoroughly – and necessarily – mixed together) leads to discussion about making sure to distinguish between a great science project and a great engineering project. It’s also good to be aware, when making comparisons, of the vast differences in resources that some entrants have access to. These two things, to my mind, are very important (and we all agreed). A kid (especially one with access to lots of resources, for example) can dazzle an unwary judge with lots of fancy cool equipment and build something that is truly wonderful and admirable, but that does not necessarily mean that they would have done as much science as the next entrant who has done some very careful scientific experimentation with a innovative way of answering a clearly stated question, but in a less spectacular setting – perhaps mostly using more affordable household items.
(Click for larger view.) Overview shot of one of the sections, with poster displays.
Well, with that in mind, we all went off to meet the youngsters! See the project listings here. This is the best part, of course… talking with all those enthusiastic young people Continue reading ‘A Fair Bit of Fun with Science’
(Random title constructed to reply to Bee’s post called Asymptotic Backreaction.)
You know, I’ve made some great online friends here on this blog. It’s all the result of that community I’m trying to keep going (and expand) here with contributions to the conversation from many of you in the comments, and even sometimes in guest posts. I’ve been lucky enough to meet some of these new friends since everyone likes to pass through Los Angeles sooner or later. In the past six months, four familiar Asymptotia contributors have passed through Los Angeles and I’ve been lucky and delighted to meet them: – Amara (November; on her way to a conference, and she gave us a talk – I’m trying to get her to do a guest post on her “Watering the Earth” topic one day), Candace (January; on her way to a conference here -she did a guest post) by the way, Athena (two weeks ago, on the way to a conference), and this week I finally met Bee (also giving a talk, and on her travels -she’s also done a guest post by the way) who turns out to have just that same excellent eye for observation, and quietly sharp sense of humour, as her blog posts. (She’s the main blogger behind the excellent Backreaction, and she’s done a post there which briefly mentions her visit to Disney Concert Hall with me.)
Anyway, in the photo below is Bee (click for larger), at Grand Central Market (inserted into a photo taken near one you saw earlier. See also this post.):
Tameem, a student of mine, has teased me a bit about my showing visitors around, Continue reading ‘Backreacting Asymptotically’
If you’re looking for a day (or half day) out today in the greater Los Angeles area, let me suggest a trip up to the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL). (Details here.) Their open house (held today and yesterday) is rather fun…. you get to learn about some of the grand space missions of yesteryear (like the 1977 Voyager missions… both craft are still actively sending data from beyond the solar system now), or of the moment (like Cassini-Huygens, for example sending wonderful pictures of Saturn and Titan back for us to learn from and marvel at – see e.g. here), or to come soon (like WISE (an infra-red telescope which will help broaden and deepen our understanding of planetary systems, galaxies, and the universe at large), or Dawn (a mission to go and orbit and study two large asteroids).
You can learn lots of things about the science these missions are teaching us about not only far away worlds, but about our own world. There are also missions which are studying earth directly (making observations about our atmosphere, oceans, and so forth), so even if you don’t care about space, there’s something for you.
You can visit special exhibits for each of the missions, talk to scientists and engineers, and even visit the large warehouses where the spacecraft are made, and where they are assembled. There are the control rooms to visit, 
a dome with giant robots (I’ve no idea about that one), an extra special exhibit about Mars exploration, and lots of stations with all sorts of entertainment for kids! They’ve done a great job providing a lot of material for everyone to take away, including packets of information for teachers to use in their classes too!
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory will have on open house today and tomorrow! This sounds like a lot of fun, actually. More about it on their website, from which I snatched:
This popular event will celebrate JPL’s accomplishments with exhibits and demonstrations about the Laboratory’s ongoing research and space exploration. Many of the Lab’s scientists and engineers will be on hand to answer questions about how spacecraft are sent to other planets, how scientists utilize space technologies to explore Earth and how researchers are now searching for planets beyond the solar system. Visitors will see exhibits, displays, demonstrations and presentations about new technologies, solar system exploration, spacecraft communication and much more.
The Open House is a fun and educational experience for children too, with special hands-on activities designed for kids. Food and beverages will be available, along with space souvenirs and NASA and JPL merchandise.
I think I’m going to go along and have a look! Maybe I’ll see you there…
-cvj
The Gravity Research Foundation announced its awards for the 2007 essay competition. (Hmm: I think we should have more technical science essays, in more categories, to inform each other about what the big questions and answers are…. and maybe even just for fun (because I’m in a silly mood) -and to make an important point about how vital it is to communicate what we’re up to to each other- have a swanky awards ceremony, with speeches, and music, and an MC, and everything. And of course it should be held somewhere in LA… Like the LA Times Book Awards. It could be held at the same time as (another fantasy): awards we give to our peers for the important task of writing essays, books and other efforts in the service of communicating science to the general public.)
But anyway, you can read all about the winners of this year’s awards here. Nicking a bit of text from the site, here are the top prizes:
Continue reading ‘Read a Gravity Essay Today’
Jean-Jacques Sempé does it again, with another great New Yorker cover. This time, his subject is- my people! (click for more detail):
Pretty interesting to see the choices of equations actually (mostly various quantum mechanics statements – Schrodinger’s equation, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the definition of the Hamiltonian in question (there seems to be an external electromagnetic field?), then there’s a reminder of what happens in beta-decay of the neutron…and there’s the inevitable Einstein’s E=mc2 thrown in at random… and more…).
It’s great to see all this up there… although it is worth noting that a more typical blackboard would have (instead of definitions/statements known very well to the physicist) much more of a working computation in progress, probably.
Of course, if the physicist knew that he or she was to be on a New Yorker cover, perhaps they would have Continue reading ‘“Simple Physics”, by Sempé’
One of the Large Hadron Collider’s detectors, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS).
As you gather a lot when there are discussions on the topic here and elsewhere, there’s a lot of excitement and anticipation among high energy physicists about a number of things. I would go as far as to say that we are already in a very rich experimental time for results pertaining to high energy physics (or, if you insist, “fundamental physics” issues (I have in mind, for example, all the wonderful cosmological and astrophysical data that continues to come in, with more to come), and it is set to possibly get much richer – maybe even a new Golden Age with a little bit of luck – when the Large Hadron Collider starts producing results. We are really going into the (relative) unknown with this experiment, and this will be a great time to be working in the field – with a little luck, as I keep repeating.
A number of substantial articles have recently appeared in the general media that give you a good sense of what is going on, more reasons (and more detail) for why there is Continue reading ‘LHC Coverage’
One of my colleagues here at USC, Itzhak Bars (picture right, by Don Milici), spends a lot of effort trying to understand aspects of time. In fact, in his way of approaching things, the fact that we see a single time dimension (all the others being space dimensions) would be a consequence of certain choices (“gauge choices”, in the more technical language) made, whereas in the underlying formulation, there’s be two times. Yes, two.
You hear about extra dimensions, and you think “string theory”, no doubt. No, this is nothing to do with string theory. He’s developed this idea independently of string theory for Continue reading ‘Taking the Time to Work it out’
The History Channel is diversifying a bit, and doing their first science show. It will be called “The Universe” and will premiere on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 at 9pm ET. It will be a series of 13 episodes. Here’s a blurb I found on the web:
It’s been fifty years since man first ventured into outer space. Now we have robots on Mars, telescopes capturing the birth of the stars and their collapse into black holes, and probes slamming into comets at hyperspeed. What we’ve learned has completely changed our understanding of the universe and our relationship with it – we once thought ourselves to be at the center, now we know we are a small, small spec. This epic series throws light on all the known universe and out to the edge of the unknown – what’s going on out there, what is our place, and is there life outside of Earth?
I like the idea of more TV channels (besides the usual suspects like PBS or Discovery) getting involved in making shows that have more science, so given the end that it serves (see the about page) -and because it is interesting and fun work- I was happy to help out when I got a call to do some interviews to camera for use in the show. (The other show I did some segments for last year -see here and here- turns out to be part of a (reportedly somewhat saucy) variety and comedy show, I’ve since heard! It will air on another channel in the Fall, and I’ll tell you more about it then. )
We recorded on Thursday. The original plan was to record in a house in the Hollywood Hills, with access to some Griffith Park backdrop to shoot some b-roll of me doing a bit of hiking, but the fire put a stop to that. Instead, we found another location – a house with a lovely garden overlooking the Topanga wilderness. (Actually, they wondered whether we could use my house and garden, but I decided that the garden was not ready for prime time yet, having just begun to come out of its Winter slump where there was hardly any rainfall… So it remains still just between me and you my dear blog readers, ok? In the end, it would not have worked anyway since on Thursday there was still a lot of activity from helicopters en route to patrolling the Griffith park embers… not good for filming!)
How did it go? Ok, it started well. There were two separate settings, for two separate Continue reading ‘Tales From The Industry XI – The Universe’
By the way, in case you’re in town here and looking for a good show, I ought to mention Assassins, put on by the Sight Unseen Theatre Group at the Meta Theatre. I saw it with a group of friends on Saturday night and it was excellent. (Friends mostly from a rowing club, go figure. Not a grouping I expected to meet in LA…No, I don’t row, I met them at a party the previous week.) A Stephen Sondheim musical (very clever songs and lyrics therefore), with excellent direction and performances, based on the book by John Weidman. They’re going to be done by the end of the week, so move fast.
The various assassins and would-be assassins of various US presidents, assembled together, with guns, song and (a bit of) dance.
So I don’t know whether you’ve noticed or not, but there’s been an awful lot of penguin movies (or movies with a big penguin component) recently. There’s yet another one to come out soon about surfing penguins. I’m slightly annoyed by it already, and I can’t really tell you why. It could turn out to be good, I suppose…
So I got to thinking that this could be theoretical physics’ big break! We can pitch our own penguin movie, since we have up our collective sleeve…
The penguin diagram!
This is a type of “Feynman diagram” describing how various particles interact with each other in a specific process. (More on Feynman diagrams here, for example.) What does it have to do with Penguins? Well, this picture I got from Wikipedia might help:
Apparently, John Ellis is responsible for their appearance in the literature, pushed along by Melissa Franklin. The usual suspects were involved too (drinks, a pub, darts, etc…) From the Wikipedia article here is the story, in (we’re told) John’s words:
It’s Mother’s Day in America… but it can be Mother’s Day everywhere!
(Rose from my garden earlier this week. Made a card out of it for my mum…)
Cliché, I know, but I presume that is what calling it “Commencement Day” is all about. Is that not right?
(Commencement Day at USC: Part of the crowd of graduates, family, and friends assembled in front of the grand stage set up in front of the Doheny library.)
Yesterday was both a happy and slightly sad day for me, because I’m a bit of a softy when it comes down to it. Quite a number of the students I taught over the last few years graduated yesterday. While I was so pleased to see them all happy and looking forward to moving on, and meet their parents and siblings, 
I was also a bit sad, since I won’t be seeing them around the USC campus any more. I feel like I’m losing a number of good friends, which seems like an odd thing to say given that I don’t really know them all as friends in the usual sense…. But I got accustomed to seeing them around, spending time with them talking, laughing, worrying, puzzling… getting coffee, milkshakes… They became a real part of my life for a while… Now they are off to take on the world. I feel a bit like a parent… perhaps I’m getting broody?
The campus was lovely yesterday, even more than it usually is. The ground staff Continue reading ‘First Day of the Rest of Their Lives’
The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 13th May – Mother’s Day! (USA). 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. Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See the links below for some recent descriptions (and even video) of previous events.
The theme this month is recycling. Here’s the description from the site:
Everything gets recycled: newspapers and banana peels, the air you breathe and the earth you walk on; some would even say our souls. Our bodies, we know, are made from materials recycled in generations of stars. The mix of genes that makes us who we are is a stew recycled by long lines ancestors—something nice to remember on Mother’s Day. Artists recycle everything from concrete objects to abstract ideas. New musical forms—like new scientific theories—are inevitably reconstructed from pieces of the past.
We’ll start with the ancestors of us all: the stars. An astrophysicist with the Carnegie Observatories, Alan Dressler uses both the Hubble Space Telescope Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! – Recycling’
Well, my previous post (go there for more pictures) went rapidly out of date in just an hour or so… The wind is up and blowing the flames in a way that makes them spread rapidly to new areas… and they’re now evacuating people from some of those houses… Electricity is gone from some homes… Gosh.
(Click for larger view.) Shot showing the rapidly moving edge of flames…. Griffith Observatory off to the left there… the flames have since crawled West over toward the last major ridge before the canyon that leads to the Observatory.
Really sorry about the photo quality. It’s just my tiny little canon from about a mile away. I don’t have a digital SLR with a longer lens…
A number of my favourite trails have definitely gone. Dante’s view (a lovely garden/oasis in the park) sounds like it is either under threat or already gone… Apparently there are deer and coyotes running around confused, poor things.
Ah, yes. In addition to the Jacaranda trees, the temperatures getting up to the 90s, the final exam of my undergraduate courses, and the days of confusion as I try to make the transition from mostly-teaching to mostly-research (I just blogged about it) I’ve had another reminder of the beginning of a long hot summer. Fire.
Click for larger. Flames and smoke of the Griffith Park fire today. You can see them clearly while carrying on with your business in the neighbourhoods near the park.
This time, it hit close to home. No, really. This afternoon a huge fire started raging in the hills of Griffith park (the one I live near, which I often tell you about). I could see flames licking skyward as I made my way home from the bus stop. Occasionally, a helicopter would fly over and dump a load of water on to the flames. (I just missed taking a photograph of a helicopter water drop for you, but a car came up behind me… I was standing in the middle of the road…)
Click for larger. Another picture showing proximity to some homes. You can just see the end of a plume of water from one of the helicopters.
It’s all very odd to see the lands where I regularly hike going up in smoke like that. I Continue reading ‘Another Seasonal Indicator’
Well, an hour ago my Electromagnetism class finished the final exam I set them. Hurrah! There was no immediate sign that it was a total disaster, so that’s good news. Except for the matter of producing final grades and such things, this marks the end of the (standard) undergraduate teaching period for me for the academic year. Nothing until late August.
So you are wondering: – What will he do now? Head for the beach? (Well, it is over 90 degrees F outside, after all. The Jacaranda blooms’ arrival (click left for larger) always signal for me the beginning of those intensely relaxed Los Angeles Summer stretches… Hmmmm….)
Science and Society… Science Education. You’ve heard me speak of this issue so many times here, so I won’t repeat myself too much. Seems that Natalie Angier is in agreement – So much so that she took matters into her capable hands and wrote a book to try to change things: “Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science”. I have not read it, but I’ve heard a lovely NPR interview with her today, and she read an extract. You can hear it at this NPR site, and also read an even longer extract there.
In the interview, she backed off a bit from saying that everyone learning a bit of basic science literacy is of vital importance (increasingly so in this day and age, I’d say), although she acknowledges that there are a number of us in the scientific community who do think so. You’ll notice the -perhaps understandably- lighter approach (“these things are fun…” ) that is taken in the book blurb I quote below. While I agree that the fun part is very important indeed (and we really need to get that across a lot!), and that one should always try to persuade rather than scare, I do think that we’re in a dangerous situation sometimes with regards the overall science education and attitude to science of our citizenry. We should definitely not be reluctant to say it. I think that she thinks so too, but does not – when promoting a book – want to make the book seem like it is bitter medicine, but rather, a bit of tasty candy. I’d prefer to think of books like this as a delicious piece of fruit: both tasty and good for you. To be fair, I should mention that in the interview, while declining to subscribe entirely to the view herself, she mentioned a scientist acquaintance who considers the issue as analogous to the urgency for everyone to acquire literacy when the world changed and printing and the written word became common currency. While we are not quite there yet, I’m inclined to agree with that view, on balance…
Well, rather than repeat myself endlessly on this interesting matter, here’s the blurb from her website:
Here’s one I’ve definitely not seen before:
I’m particularly amused by the fact that the thing the heart is plugged into looks like the power supply for a mac laptop.
-cvj
Well, first major disappointment of the Big Movie season. After doing great work on Spiderman, and brilliant work on Spiderman II, they managed to spectacularly screw up Spiderman III so badly, I can’t even begin to express my disappointment properly, so I won’t try. It started so well, which makes it all the more utterly frustrating that after 45 minutes or so the script irretrievably degenerated into a mess. A total train wreck.
‘Nuff Said.
-cvj
There was a lovely piece on NPR about Benny Golson yesterday. You can hear the article again, and more audio clips that were not aired, by going to the website here.
I’m a big fan of Golson, not just because of his remarkable range of performing and especially compositional work (even if you don’t listen to jazz, you’ll know a lot of his work on lots of television shows such as MASH, Mission Impossible, etc.), but also because without him, the pyrotechnic young trumpeter Lee Morgan might never have teamed up with Art Blakey in the Jazz Messengers (Golson suggested him to Blakey, so the story goes).
People often don’t seem to know much about Jazz trumpeters beyond Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie, so I’m going to digress at this point. There is a line of trumpeters which you should know about, as it forms a huge part of the foundation of pure modern Jazz trumpet playing. Miles and Dizzy, important and influential as they were, form only a medium-sized part of that foundation.
If you have not heard of Lee Morgan, please stop what you are doing right now and go out to the store and buy some of his work. This is an emergency! If you want to be totally blown away by the most audacious, powerful and raw trumpet playing you’ll probably ever hear, get (for example) John Coltrane’s 1957 album Blue Trane. Don’t focus on Coltrane for a change (who is of course transcendent)… Listen to Morgan, and remind yourself as you encounter the intense heat and urgency of his Continue reading ‘Benny Remembers Clifford and Lee’
I don’t know if you’ve already heard about it, but the first commercial solar energy plant, (located near Seville, Spain) was inaugurated a while ago (30th March). It is an 11 Megawatt plant, called PS10 and:
…the project produces electricity with 624 large movable mirrors called heliostats.
Each of the mirrors has a surface measuring 120 square meters (1,290 square feet) that concentrates the Sun’s rays to the top of a 115 meter (377 foot) high tower where a solar receiver and a steam turbine are located. The turbine drives a generator, producing electricity.
I got that quote from an excellent article here. You can read a lot more there about some of the future plans of the EU for solar power there. Go directly to the website of the company that built it, Solucar, for more information and images of the plant.
The 625 mirrors with the central tower, all glowing from the reflected sunlight, is quite Continue reading ‘The Future is Orange’
So the planet hunter Corot has found its first extra-solar planet. It is a bit bigger than Jupiter, and orbiting awfully close to its sun-like star. Artist’s impression, from ESA, to the right. Click for larger.
From a BBC article by Rebecca Morelle:
The new body is called Corot-exo-1b and can be found 1,500 light-years away in the constellation of Monoceros.
also:
NPR’s Robert Krulwich does it again. As part of a long special series that NPR has begun about carbon and climate change, he starts out with a really really good piece (with his usual level of humour and sound effects – and graphics on their website) on carbon. What is it with carbon that makes it such a special element to us, our biology, our planet? What is it about carbon that makes it so happy to stably bond into chains (storing energy), and so stably that we get huge reserves of energy stored underground in the form of fossil fuels (oil, etc).
So what is “Calamity Physics”? Can you help me please, perhaps with your own examples, real or imagined…? I’ve been finding piles of this book (click for larger view) in a number of places…such as in the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the weekend. Either way, it is a great title, “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, Marisha Pessl. Have you read it? I have not, but it does look like fun. Tell us more, if you’ve read it (no spoilers). I’ve noticed that it has received a lot of impressive reviews and breathless blurbs.
You can get a lot of entertainment by just visiting the book’s website. It has an excellent interactive graphic which will keep you engaged for many happy minutes!
I still want to know what Calamity Physics is, though. Any thoughts?
-cvj
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