Monthly Archives: June 2007

Just for Me

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As they did with the Incredibles, Brad Bird and the team at Pixar made a movie just for me! No, really! How could they know so accurately about my likes, loves and interests in conjuring up such a perfect combination of the various themes, story elements, images, scenes, characters (and rat facial expressions and gestures)? This time it is all about food – good food – cooking, and kitchens, and you know how I feel about those topics.

ratatouille

Ratatouille is wonderful, and I imagine that (even though they made it just for me) you […] Click to continue reading this post →

iPhone Madness

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As you might have guessed, I could not resist having a look at the line at the Grove shopping mall/village/whatever. Here’s an overhead shot of a cluster near the Apple Store’s entrance just after the launch at 6:00pm:

iphone madness

(Click for larger.)

line for iphoneWhat you can’t hear is people cheering as people either enter or emerge from the store (I’m not sure which). It’s not everyday you see this many people (in a very long line indeed – see one of four segments at right) waiting to shell out so much money for something that they all know will be very obsolete a year from now. They just want to be part of what is (seriously for a moment now) a true […] Click to continue reading this post →

Making Real those Imagined

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la bloggers liveA few hours ago, I got back from a rather pleasant event – LA Bloggers Live! What was it? LA Bloggers Live! Exactly what it says on the packet. So there were several bloggers from the Los Angeles area who met (at Tangier) to read out loud some of the posts from their blogs, listening to each other and meeting each other in the “real” world, as opposed to online. It was really great – there were several great readings, and it was excellent to meet and chat with some of the people whose blogs I’ve read from time to time. It was good old-fashioned community, plain and simple. There were readings on lots of topics, from joy and pain in relationships to learning how to swim and ride a bike as a child – the hard ways. Over on Leah Peah’s blog (she conceived and organized the event) and also here, you can see the list of readers, and later there’ll be some links to the posts that were read along with some audio. (I was particularly pleased that Will Campbell, whose blog I read from time to time, read a post that I recognized fondly – in it he’s on his bike, and he gets to do one of those things that all cyclists have wanted to do at least once, and never […] Click to continue reading this post →

Rapid Changes in Los Angeles

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Good News, Everyone!

Well, you know (if you’ve stumbled upon one of the posts in my long series of attempts -see end of this post- to remind one or two people that they should not believe all the myths about LA not having any public transportation) that I’m continually excited about the steady stream of improvements that are being made by Metro in response to the increased pressure of usage put on the system by the general public.

local long busWell, in addition to adding more and more of the red “Metro Rapid” bus routes, which are faster than the locals (which -ridiculously at times- stop every block) because they stop mostly only at major intersections, and in addition to adding more of the nice and roomy double buses (“bendy buses”) they’ve done something just great (which I’d been hoping for for years) – introduced true express routes! It makes sense to have three levels of granularity on the bus service here since it matches the three levels of granularity on the road system! […] Click to continue reading this post →

SciTalks

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I learned from Jonathan Shock and Sara Tompson about SciTalks. In Jonathan’s words (from a comment on another post):

“There’s now a site where people can link to, review and rate scientific videos online. This is a great step as there are so many wonderful lectures online but currently they’re spread all over the web and it’s always hard to tell the quality and level that a lecture is going to be.”

Jonathan has also done posts about online resources in theoretical high energy physics, including a recent one where he discussed SciTalks a bit more.

jennifer goldbeck on the semantic webThis got me thinking a bit about where we are going with all these resources, how useful they are, and -very importantly- how easy it all is to find, and then to search through. (Imagine there are 10 hour long talks broadly on your favourite topic. Assuming there are no accompanying files, how can you search them to find a specific fact that they might mention, without sitting through ten hours worth of material?) Well, ironically, one of the first things that caught my eye on SciTalks was a rather nice talk by Jennifer Golbeck (given at FermiLab last year) entitled “Social Networks, the Semantic Web, and the Future of Online Scientific Collaboration”. She’s quite interesting about this very topic… She describes online collaboration, data sharing, social networks, etc, all in the context of helping us do science (not just physics by the way!). She also illustrates her subject matter -still staying on topic- using examples of data sets from Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, […] Click to continue reading this post →

99

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The other day in the Hollywood Farmer’s Market I was having my regular moment of pure bliss (spinach and corn tamale from that amazing tamale stand) for lunch after a nice bit of shopping when I found myself sitting at a big outdoor table with a number of other people. Two of them were headed to the convention center for the afternoon and were wondering whether they might be able to find anything good to eat down that way. Of course, as a public-spirited person I had to tell them a bit about the options that popped into my head at that point (starting with La Taquiza of course), and ended up patiently explaining how to squint your eyes to look past all the fast food places to the culinary bliss that lurks just below the surface of the city. We had a delightful conversation and then they moved on, leaving me soaking up the sun for a while longer.

image from Jonathon Gold's 99 restaurants articleA woman who’d been sitting on her own (also enjoying a tamale) spoke up and said that she’d been interested to hear that I thought there was a lot of good food in LA since she could not really find much of it (and she’d been here for four years). Happily I’d finished my tamale and so did not choke or splutter at this revelation, in equal parts horrifying and deeply sad, and spent a few more moments listing some recommendations at her request. Unfortunately, the conversation turned (as it so often does) to one where I find myself defending LA against someone’s expectations of it based upon their own city, and their own requirements (instead of them learning how to navigate and understand the place they’ve chosen to live). Usually it is New Yorkers I have this sort of conversation with, but this time it was someone from Chicago. Her thesis was that good food is hard to find in LA and you’re just falling over it in Chicago. Two other diners arrived […] Click to continue reading this post →

Strings 2007

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goya strings The main annual conference in my main field of interest starts today. Strings 2007 is in Madrid, and runs all week. The website is here (while there, have a play with the front page image of the Goya painting – quite entertaining). They promise to update the schedule/speakers page with scans of slides, and video, so you’ll be able to keep track of some of the new developments online. There’s no system for doing this live, or asking questions remotely, so if you want to quiz Ed Witten about his new 83-page monster paper on three dimensional gravity that came out yesterday (just in time for the conference!), or feel the buzz of event-anticipation whenever Witten talks about huge new sets of results, you’ll still have to show up in person.

Why am I not there? Well, it would be nice, but there are lots of reasons I’m not going […] Click to continue reading this post →

Morning Computations

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morning computations…and then you have days when nothing works. At all. This was not like last Saturday. Despite starting out nice and early with a cup of tea in the sunshine and scribbling away while wrinkling one’s brow. Things got worse and worse through the morning, as I realized that many things I so wanted to be right about the next stage of my computation (which perhaps I’ll tell you about one day) were in fact not going to work. Not even close.

By lunchtime I’d given up, and summarized my thoughts on the research blog for my collaborators. Was probably not the most encouraging reading for them to encounter, but I tried to be as constructive in my deconstruction of our idea as I could. I’m hoping that they -or later, I- might find some useful threads to pick up on from my notes and remarks.

It’s not over yet.

Maybe I should have gone for that hike instead of sitting entirely at home on a […] Click to continue reading this post →