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 is wonderful, and I imagine that (even though they made it just for me) you Continue reading ‘Just for Me’
I noticed that the eleventh edition of the blog carnival Philosophia Naturalis has been posted at 
This 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 
A 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 (also with tamales that they loved, I’ll point out) and guess where they’re from? Chicago. And so on it went… next they were bonding with each other about their favourite places in Chicago, which was fine, but… I wanted to get back to this nonsense about good food being rare in LA. I hate that myth almost as much as the “no public transport” one (but not quite since it is not as dangerous and destructive)…and particularly despise that habit people have of worshiping the thing they love about their home city by dragging down LA. Can’t people learn to just like what they like without having to enhance it by trying to dislike something else, as though Nature has a conservation law about the total amount of “liking” that can go on? (Above, Anne Fishbein photo from an article to be discussed below.)
…and then you have days when nothing works. At all. This was not like 
Yes, part of my job is to sit and think about how the universe works. People hear this, and they wonder exactly what that entails. Well, it entails a lot of things - sometimes there’s the grand thoughts and the thought experiments and the like that you hear of from documentaries and books about Einstein and other famous scientists - but more often that not it is grungy nuts and bolts.
Physics students in Utah recently attended an event where they learned about concepts like acceleration, velocity, magnetism, and centripetal force.
Well, the great news is that the TASI people are making the lectures available online a fairly short time after their delivery. The link is 
