So finally I completed the project that began with the chicken wire matters I spoke of a while ago. Work and such things have a way of intervening for weeks, preventing a good idea from going from conception to completion in what should be a day or two. The plan? To stop throwing away lots of wonderful organic matter and keep it instead, turning it into compost. This makes sense because so much of my garden has rather poor soil, for a start, and for a second matter it just seems wrong to not do it. for a third, it’s fun to do experiments with some microbiology for a change. Microbiology? Well, the object of the exercise is to let nature turn any organic material that you have into compost - full of nutrients for growing new things. Compost is also good for moisture control, good drainage, and a host of other things that are beneficial to plants in the garden. How does nature do this? Bacteria, mostly. But for the bacteria and other microorganisms to do their job (digesting the material), one needs to give them good conditions to live in. Conditions involve the right amount of moisture, air, and food, and the point of my project was first to prepare containment for the compost manufacturing process, and then to prepare a good combination of raw materials, place them properly, and then leave the little organisms to their own devices to do their thing. Here’s a good webpage at Cornell about the various stages of composting, the temperatures involved, and the various organisms (bacteria of various sorts, actinomycetes (a kind of filamented bacterium), fungi (various molds and yeasts), protozoa) that come into play at the various stages.
So, phase one: Containment. Well everything is going to be kept together with a cylinder of chicken wire, and so measurement of the desired radius followed by a quick computation () to give me the length I needed to cut, and I was away. Shortly after I realised that my measurements were to be determined by the size of the mouth of the large trash bags I’d bought to add as the liner of the containment cylinder. So I ended up readjusting everything to fit that. I cut everything a bit big to allow for the overlap I Continue reading ‘Composing Compost: Fun with Microorganisms’
Speaking of science television shows (as I’ve been in a number of recent posts), have you seen Brainiac, over in the UK? It came up in conversation recently* and so I went to YouTube to have a look:
[Update: Ugh. They faked the final two explosions. Have a look here. Thanks Tristram Brelstaff for pointing this out. See my comment additions below in the explanation also.]
“The dog’s nuts of the periodic table…” Must remember to use that in my physics 100 class next year….
Ok… it’s definitely fun for the kids! The science? When they calm down, you get to tell them about why this extreme reaction happens. Here’s a rough explanation:
As I said in the previous post, there’s more to the new WIRED Science TV show on PBS than just the TV show. The website is going to be full of quite a lot of additional material, starting next Wednesday. There’ll be show episodes, extensions of some of the segments, extra links to expand upon the stories, materials for schools, and so forth. But there’s also something else in the works. There’ll be a dedicated blog for the show, and it is called “Correlations”.
Correlations is a new group science blog, with bloggers of a range of interests. It will be connected to the show in many ways, but will expand well beyond the show into aspects of science and technology of all sorts, according to the tastes of the bloggers involved. There’ll be all sorts of interesting material, from serious stuff to fun stuff, and points in between. I think that it’s a great combination of bloggers (the team was assembled by Leighton Woodhouse, of KCET - we had a great conversation about the whole business of science blogging and science bloggers back during the Summer) and I’m quite excited to see how it goes. Who are they? Well, here’s the list:
I promised some interesting television news earlier, and here it is. Well, it is actually blogging news too. First let me step back a touch. Recall that some time back I mentioned that there were a number of new science shows vying for the nod from PBS to be their new primetime science show? Viewers could go in and vote on which show they preferred. Well, the show that won this was WIRED Science, the show I also told you more about here. I’m pleased about this since I thought it was actually the best of the bunch.
So they’ve made some cast changes, and made new episodes (and are in the process of making more). The format is sort of like a magazine, so there are two people based in the studio (Chris Hardwick and Kamala Lopez) who introduce segments that are then played. These segments are essentially field reports from various reporters and agents in the field (Ziya Tong and Adam Rogers are two other principals in the studio at the start, but they are mostly doing field reports). There will also be some studio interviews (Ziya interviews Paul Kedrosky in the first show), and some other studio segments, like “What’s Inside” by Chris Hardwick, where he goes through a description of what’s inside an everyday household object or material. (I hope they do more of those - he’s really good at that.) For those of you from the UK, you’ll recognize the format - it is essentially like Tomorrow’s World used to be, but with more science1 (although since this is a WIRED project too, there’s going to be the fun/cool toys aspect).
The show’s headliners: Chris, Ziya, Adam and Kamala
The first one airs next week, on Wednesday October 3rd at 8:00pm. There’s a page here you can go to in order to have a look at the cast, and also see some clips from Continue reading ‘WIRED Science’
How can I resist such topics - among everyone’s favourites, right? No, I’ll stay away from my own take on the subjects and move straight on to pointing you to two rather amusing pieces.
This is simply fascinating. I heard about it on NPR. While it is well known that birds are sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field, and use it to navigate, apparently it’s only been recently shown that this sensitivity is connected directly to the visual system (at least in some birds). The idea seems to be that the bird has evolved a mechanism for essentially seeing the magnetic field, presumably in the sense that magnetic information is encoded in the visual field and mapped to the brain along with the usual visual data. (Image: A garden warbler, photographed by Tommy Holden. I found it on the British Trust for Ornithology website, here.)
Have a listen to the NPR interview with Henrik Mouritsen (professor of neurosensory science at the University of Oldenberg in Germany - and among other things also a keen wildlife photographer, I learned from his website), and learn more about his Continue reading ‘Magnetic Vision?’
Recall that (as mentioned in my post with the doom-laden title) the Dawn mission was postponed by several months due to unfavourable launch conditions. Recall also that the celestial window for launching Dawn will not come again for another seventeen years, if it does not launch over the next couple of weeks or so! This is a bit scary therefore.
So the two week launch window is open, and Dawn is on the pad and ready to try to fly tomorrow, at around….. dawn. They’ve been preparing Dawn for this for a while now (you can see in the picture on the right some of the preparations - encasing it in the protective dressing for the rocket launch… I got this picture from this link and you can see more there), and from the press release of yesterday confirming that the mission is a “go”:
“If you live in the Bahamas this is one time you can tell your neighbor, with a straight face, that Dawn will rise in the west,” said Dawn Project Manager Keyur Patel of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Weather permitting, we are go for launch Thursday morning - a little after dawn.”
Dawn’s Sept. 27 launch window is 7:20 to 7:49 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (4:20 to 4:49 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time). At the moment of liftoff, the Delta II’s first-stage main engine along with six of its nine solid-fuel boosters will ….
They also talk a bit about the science (also see later, below this):
Ok, I’ve a confession to make. I’m going to watch a network show, and it is… Bionic Woman. I know, I know. It could well go down in flames, and all covered in cheese, but I want to give it a chance (and cheese can be good).
Why am I giving it a chance? Well, there’s been some great television made over the last few years, with great writing, acting, directing, and so forth, and most of it has been on cable. I think this has forced the networks to raise their game (often by just buying the services of the same people who did a good job on cable, but not always), and there’s some good work to be found. This might be one of them. I saw the extended trailer that was making the rounds in the early Summer and it looked like they’d been inspired a lot by the marvelous work on Battlestar Galactica, for example - a show that had such great writing, acting and directing (regardless of genre) that it holds up well against anything I’ve seen in a long time on television. (Just get the whole thing on DVD, starting with the pilot/miniseries… Try to ignore the Sci-Fi stigma and just treat it as what is it - well-written human drama. You won’t regret it.)
Further:- While I was watching the Bionic trailer and thinking this, who should show up Continue reading ‘Bionic’
The MacArthur Fellowships were announced today. These are particularly great, as it’s awarded across so many different fields, and I always learn about interesting work going on by reading the synopses at the website. Congratulations to all recipients!! Before I point to the list, I’d like to make a plea that will, of course, go unheeded.
Please please, people of the media, stop calling them “genius grants”. Just stop. By way of explanation, I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the term just seems to strike the wrong tone about what these things should be about. It seems to me to push the recipients away as being “other” rather than encouraging us all to embrace the qualities that they are being encouraged to show by getting the fellowships. Ok, that’s the end of my plea.
Here’s a reminder of what the Fellowship is about (extract from their site):
Yesterday we saw the official “installation” of Howard Gillman the new Dean of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. I find this term amusing in this context, as it sounds a bit like putting in a new lightbulb, or perhaps a new operating system (the latter is, I guess is closer to the truth). I sort of had to go since it represents the outcome of a lot of work I did last year on the search committee* that advised the Provost and President on their choices, and of course I have an interest in it as an ordinary faculty member of the College and of USC in general - The LAS is truly the core of USC, and we need the new Dean to do a good job of steering it forward in this (happily) continuing period USC’s steady and rapid progress on all fronts. So a good opening speech is seen as a good sign. It was good - much more than good actually - and everybody seemed to have genuinely good things to say afterwards (as we munched on the always excellent food served at these events - the other reason we go to them).
Right: Not the most representative photo (click to enlarge), but you can see him mid-speech, with President Sample seated listening. Assembled is a lot of the faculty, mostly seated. All the other Deans from all the other units were present, as well as various vice-Presidents and so forth. They all precessed into the room, and members of USC Thornton School of Music’s choir sang the USC song, which was… quite a bit more pomp and circumstance than I was expecting. What you can’t see is that the room is about twice as big as the part you can see, there’s lots of faculty standing around in that part, with several tables of very tasty food and wine for all.
I heard about it on NPR (audio about it here). I suspect that it will be useful and informative not just for kids, but for us older ones as well. It is by Laurie David and Cambria Gordon. I’ve not read it, but from what I gather from the interview, it is certainly worth a look if you’re in the market for accessible information that someone you know (or a whole household) might like to have.
Just thought I’d let you know that the blog of ScienceWoman (that I talked about in an earlier post) has now moved. Her blogging about her day to day experiences and thoughts as an early career woman scientist will be getting a whole lot more attention now that it is under the ScienceBlogs umbrella. Go and have a look at her new digs. She’s already started off nicely with a post asking readers to name their favourite woman scientist, with the resulting interesting contributions and discussions you’d expect in the comments. Go and add your two cents.
These figs are for my sister, who’s several thousand miles away in London. Read on for how she might get them.
Talking with my sister on the phone last week, the idea came up (as it has done in the past) that she might come and visit me in December, bringing her toddler son. Maybe Continue reading ‘Hope You Like Jammin’ Too’
Photo (added later): Griffith Park’s Mount Hollywood with the Griffith Observatory and rain-filled clouds above. Mount Lee with the Hollywood sign (just visible) is behind.
Finally. I never thought I’d see the day again. Finally and end to the seemingly perpetual sunshine. It has not been since March (unless I’m very mistaken) since there’s been any serious rain here, and more than five months since there’s been any officially measurable rain of any sort in Los Angeles (as measured by the official station down at USC).
I was beginning to despair a bit. I need rain, psychologically as well as for more mundane reasons like wanting my garden to get a good soaking. There’s something about the way my outlook on the world works that needs to have good rainfall sometime. Rainfall where I live, I mean. I’d seen some wonderful rain over the summer (almost daily afternoon thunderstorms in Aspen for a few weeks, nice rain and drizzle for a week in Cambridge), and that did help me with the waiting, but I’ve been needing rain at home.
And so here it is! There’s the wonderful sound of it on the roof, and then there’s the Continue reading ‘Rain!!!’
Here’s my promised report/diary on yesterday’s adventures in film-making.
6:45am Got up a bit earlier than perhaps I should have, given that I got to sleep at 1:00am. Spent a while reading a ton of email, and sending some more. Will be away from my regular professoring duties for the whole day, and so wanted to make sure the fort was held. Prepared some appropriate TV clothing (pretty much what I wear normally anyway - simple solid colours), and so forth. Attempted to beautify myself just a tad (with the usual…inconclusive results). Shower and so forth. Coffee and oatmeal, sprinkled with NPR… Read a bit of stuff on dates of historical background on material I’ll be talking about. I often forget that sort of thing, and its never ever needed whenever I do remind myself of it, so after a few minutes I decided not to bother. The core physics ideas are more important, ultimately. Spent time looking for rain gear (the micro-brolly, basically), since supposedly there’s going to be a rainstorm later (hurrah! finally!). Ready to go.
8:45am Fifteen minutes later than I intended to (how did that happen?), I set off to walk to the Sunset/Vermont Red Line subway station. Waved to a neighbour, and we exchanged pleasantries about how nice a day it was.
8:47am Walked past surprised neighbour back toward home…. briskly.
8:52am Riding the Brompton (the folding bike, for those of you not keeping up), I cycled off to the Sunset/Vermont station.
So the mexican sage (salvia leucantha) has started its new crop of flowers. The purple bobs pictured below right (click for larger - yes, there is a little bee resting quietly on a leaf there for some reason) will turn into long purple fronds with lots of individual bells containing flowers. Soon they will come, and they will keep coming. They’ll come and examine each flower closely and attentively, and I’ll be waiting for them, since they are so magical - appearing suddenly and dramatically as though dropping out of warp, with a wonderful and powerful hum. I’m talking about hummingbirds, of course. They love these flowers, and come and feed on them regularly.
The warp reference? They are fast - incredibly fast, and they can accelerate and decelerate astonishingly effectively. So if you’re lucky and standing still at the right point, there’ll be a hum and suddenly one Continue reading ‘Soon They Will Come’
Gosh, a thoughtfully-written general level (more or less) article on some of the general outcomes of string theory research! It’s written by Matthew Chalmers, and is in the Sept. ‘07 edition of Physics World*. The article can be read online here, and downloadable pdf is here. The graphic on the right came with the article. I don’t fully understand what it is, but the title, like that of the article, is “stringscape”… Look, let’s not over-think this cvj - it’s a pretty decoration.
I’ve done a quick read of it (should re-read more carefully later on - it will no doubt have some emphases with which I disagree somewhat**) and I’d say it is very much worth reading. While not a perfect summary (what is?), compared to a lot that’s been out there, you’ll find it rather more informed, less sensational, (refreshingly unpoisoned by various prejudices, such as the presentations of Smolin and Woit - see numerous earlier discussions in the “More Scenes from the Storm in a Teacup” series of posts, and others), and unafraid to go to some length to unpack the issues somewhat carefully.
That’s such a lovely sound. Chicken wire, or maybe better: “chickenwire”. (I would put it alongside “cellar door”…[update: almost. I suppose it is not as transcendent, really.])
I digress. I just thought I’d share with you a picture of the things I went to the hardware store to get last night1 (Click for larger view):
Several feet of chicken wire (it really is called that on the labeling, but better: Poultry netting. Excellent. I like the idea of going home to construct an enclosure for my wayward happy fat chickens), 3ft high.
A collection of bricks (I chose some nice miniature ones… they called out to me while I was trying to find the regular bricks).
Large black plastic bags. Heavy duty.
Steel wire.
A 25 inch machete. Annoyingly, it comes from the store so (deliberately) blunt I’d be better off using a wet fish to perform the tasks intended for it2. Going to have to put an edge on it later.
Yes, you guessed right, I’m going to be constructing something. Any idea what the project is?
This is very interesting to me. I just heard a story (by Nancy Mullane) on NPR’s Weekend Edition about home schooling. (The link is here, and audio will be available at that page shortly). It focuses on the issue that African Americans are the fastest growing group of adopters among minorities in the US. I was also not aware that homeschooling is on a rapid rise.
This raises all sorts of questions for me. Very basic ones. How well does homeschooling work? Does the “product” - an educated person - perform well afterwards, once they’ve rejoined educational settings with the more traditional social environments (colleges and universities). Does the reduced level of social interaction during those homeschooling years have an adverse effect, or is it compensated for by social interaction that presumably takes place after school? Perhaps there are arguments that the reduction in social interaction even helps in some ways? I really don’t know much about this. Do you? I presume there’s all sorts of statistics on this, but I’d be curious to hear a bit of anecdotal discussion in the comments. Perhaps you were homeschooled? Have friends who were? Are homeschooling someone now? Are being homeschooled now? Tell us what you think!
Ok. So I want to make this post timely, but it means that it will begin to let a cat out of the bag. We’ll see how much I can save for a later post as I write1.
So, as I walked to the subway this morning (yes, they have one in LA), I went through my little checklist of things I take on self-assigned assignments of this sort.
Notebook for scribbling: Check
Pen for scribbling: Check
Camera: Check
Phone (now with decent back-up camera): Check
Spare battery for camera: Check
Decent excuse/reason for being spectacularly late: Check
Water: Check
Good footwear for endless walking back and forth: Check
By now you get it. I’m either doing one of my parade reports, or perhaps a street fair/party, museum exhibit, or some random science fair, object or installation or other. Yes, but which? Well, apparently I was going to the future:
Well, I’m reporting on this as part of a longer blog post (update: it is here) about an event I attended today at the Los Angeles Convention Center, but since it’ll take me a while to finish, and it will be buried in all the other stuff (including pictures and so forth), I’ll snip out a bit of what I’m saying there to inform you of this interesting development:
So what were some of the big ticket items, at least in terms of where all the regular press were? Well, the biggest was of course the X prize. There was a long movie with lots of stuff about space, and dreams about our future in space, and animations and things of roving robots on planetary surfaces, and all that good stuff…. very nice, I thought, and began to wander off…. and then there was a round of applause from everyone and I came back as a voice announced “The Google Lunar X Prize”, and various other people showed up on the stage (like one of the founders of Google - forgot his name, and later, good ol’ Buzz Aldrin, who seems to be required at these sorts of events). The Google co-founder guy began his speech by acknowledging all the Google engineers… and announcing that they’d just launched a new version of the moon. Applause. (I’m pretty sure that they mean Google Moon, by the way.)
Well, maybe on the next flyby. Flyby page here. AP (via Yahoo) story by Alicia Chang here. Interesting extracts:
The international Cassini spacecraft went into safe mode this week after successfully passing over a Saturn moon that was the mysterious destination of a deep-space faring astronaut in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Well, the time came last week. After several years of service, and a valiant attempt to stay in service even with illness and infirmity, there was nothing to do but go for retirement, and let a replacement take over.
Wait - No, not me! I’m talking about my trusty Sony Ericsson T616, of course. A bit of gadget babble follows. You’ve been warned: It is a wonderful phone, and of course, being the conservative (read: boring old) person that I am, I pretty much wanted the same phone again. Of course, progress (as they ironically call it) meant that it can no longer be found in any store, so I tried to find whatever phone Sony Ericsson had made to replace it. (Side note: I’m waiting a few years for the iphone to get to a sensible price and go through an update or two before I go in that direction.) They’ve made some good-looking ones with excellent specs - proper grown-up looking phones with grown up capabilities. Not hip toys for the (post post) MTV generation, you understand. They’re fine (and often full of great features too, I know), but just not me.
Does my phone company (AT&T) do them? Strangely, not any more, and hardly any others, as far as I could see. Meanwhile, you can get them in Europe all over the place (what with their being so far ahead on these things, as usual), which is really no use to me here. So this put me into a bit of a haze for a few days since I really don’t want to go the way of the cutesy flip phone - like one of those RAZR, KRZR, etc., models that everybody -and I mean everybody- seems to be getting. I’m not a huge fan of flip phones in general (I went through that phase a while ago) and furthermore a lot of Continue reading ‘Reluctant Retirement’
Ok, so here goes. A bit of physics linked to this all so significant date. There’s this term that people in string theory were using a lot in the middle to late 90’s, called the “9/11 flip”. I think maybe the Verlinde brothers, Erik and Hermann, possibly in conjunction with Robbert Dijkgraaf, made the term popular but I am not sure about that and I welcome a correction. [Update, since there is some confusion: I’m talking about the term here, not the technique itself, which is older.]
(On right (click for larger) is a snapshot of one of the figures from their influential 1997 “Matrix String Theory” paper. You can see the use the term there, and it is in the paper’s text too, and soon everyone was using it in seminars and other papers to follow.)
The flip became particularly useful when people were discovering the wonders of “M-theory”, which is the catch-all term for whatever is the parent theory of string theory, something we are still trying to formulate. There are a number of narrower uses of the term, however - some more justified than others. For a while, everyone was thinking about the five ten-dimensional supersymmetric string theories (”type IIA”, “type IIB”, “type I”, and two types of “heterotic” theory) which, prior to the middle of 1995 (actually as early as late 1994 or early 1995) all seemed like totally distinct theories, and in the post middle-1995 era (after Witten’s remarkable talk at strings 1995 here at USC: paper here) were recognized to be all part of the same theory. The universe (at least the continually expanding string theory one) changed radically overnight.
(One of my preferred ways of presenting the puzzle that is M-theory, and how the ten dimensional string theories fit in the puzzle. This is a slide from one of my general talks on the subject.)
Yes, it has been that sort of time. The last several days have been full of far too many things - several of which it would be fun to blog about - but none of which have left me any time for doing the actual blogging part. What sort of things? Well, everything from social gatherings like a couple of parties and salon-type events on the one hand, the usual work-type events on the other (like yesterday’s reception to welcome new USC College faculty - I find those especially important to show up to as a means of re-engaging with a cross section of one’s colleagues, old and new, at the beginning of the year*), and on a third hand (sorry) there’s been a big crunch on the research side of things. The big crunch saw me in my office until about 3:00am after a long night of finishing up two companion papers with three of my students (this included breaking for a walk across campus at about 8:30pm to get some tasty mulitas at the excellent La Taquiza) and submitting them to the arXiv. Sensibly, the students went home by 1:30 or so, leaving me the silly one to tinker some more until the end. It was a really fun couple of projects uncovering some rather rich physics, and I’ll try to tell you about them some time soon.
In case you missed this earlier this week, there was an intriguing detective science story that, if correct, has yielded remarkable news about the past of our planet, and of course, us. From an AP story by Richard Ingham (via Yahoo):
The extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago can be traced to a collision between two monster rocks in the asteroid belt nearly 100 million years earlier, scientists report on Wednesday.
The smash drove a giant sliver of rock into Earth’s path, eventually causing the climate-changing impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs and enabled the rise of mammals — including, eventually, us.
(Image above: Simulation images (AFP/HO/Don Davis) of the asteroid collision event, and the resulting extinction collision event on earth, and the collision with the moon.)
The scientists are William Bottke, David Vokrouhlicky and David Nesvorny, working at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado. They traced the rock to a collision event that took place in the inner parts of the asteroid belt somewhere about between 140-190 million years ago, producing the family of fragments collectively called the Baptistinas, the largest being Baptistina 298. Over time, some of the fragments found Continue reading ‘Origins of a Species-Killer?’
Here’s another image or two that I captured for you of the very large and dramatic pieces of Dan Flavin. This is from my July visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA’s) retrospective of his work. You’ll recall the two earlier posts here and here. (Click them to enlarge.)
It is easy to dismiss these as very simple coloured baubles writ large, and that would be a mistake. I’m sure that the artist was very aware of one hugely striking thing that one cannot convey in the photographs, and that is the powerful effect the presence of one single striking colour can have on one’s feelings. The intense blue from a previous work I spoke of was remarkable, and then shortly afterward you come to this giant Continue reading ‘The Green Room’
So far. I forgot to point this out a couple of weeks ago. There was a nice story in the Guardian giving a one month update on the progress of the Velib program in Paris. Recall I blogged about its launch here, and expressed hope that the expectations that it would not work were wrong (I’m such an optimist). Well, the news is that it is working! The whole article (by Angelique Chrisafis) is here. A quote:
Day and night, tourists, commuters and returning party animals cruise by on the chic new machines. People have joyfully discovered the cheap new way of exercising en route to work or getting home drunk after the metro closes, hence a rush of hires after 1am. There’s a glut of bikes deposited at stands at the bottom of hills and none left at the top, as people freewheel down from the heights of Belleville and Montmartre.
(Now I’m in the mood to get out the wonderful movie “Les Triplettes Des Belleville” (or “Belleville Rendezvous” or “The Triplets of Belleville”) for an enjoyable evening.) Further:
The next Categorically Not! is Sunday September 9th. 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 also the links at the end of the post for some announcements and descriptions (and even video) of previous events. (Above right: Julia Sweeney performing an extract from her play “Letting Go of God”, in the event with the theme “Uncertainty”.)
The theme this month is Mistakes! Here’s the description from K C Cole:
Blunders, boo boos, bloopers, errors, slip-ups, goofs, misinterpretations and misunderstandings. Everyone makes mistakes. In science, the notion of “mistake†is often itself misunderstood. Frequently, a “mistake†often turns out to be nothing more than a limited or skewed perspective. Or as Einstein put it, discovering a new theory is not so much like tearing down a house to build a new one as climbing a mountain from which one can see farther; the old “house†is still there, but is seen in a vastly different context. Mistakes in personal life and Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! - Mistakes!’
I love downtown Los Angeles. No two ways about it. It’s rapidly getting better, as you may have heard, and there are so many interesting things to find down there. I hope to do a report sometime on an extended walkabout I did down there last month, but that’s for another time. It is also great to cycle around, as I do quite a lot.
Today, still in the heatwave, I left campus to go and hide downtown, first stopping by the excellent Grand Central Market for a bit of shopping for ingredients for a special dish I am going to prepare for a Salon-style gathering at some friends’ on Saturday. More on that later. Then I went to work in one of my favourite cafes in the city. I shouldn’t give away my hideouts, but there’s only you and me reading, right?
It’s the Lost Souls Cafe, hidden down an alleyway (Harlem Place Alley) off fourth street between Spring and Main. Perfect for the subway at Pershing Square, and one of the few non-bar type places open until 10:00pm downtown. (Wish it would go until 1:00am or so.)
This is simply fascinating to see for so many reasons. Will Campbell (over on his blog [sic] - see the posts here and here for background), who has been doing some fun experiments with his camera and computer to make time-lapse photography (you’ll recall an amusing one from before) has captured an entire day of cloud formation in the skies above some mountains near Los Angeles during the heatwave day of Sunday.
Click the still to go to the site with the movie (or find it at YouTube here):
Temperature update: Going to be 106oF today. I think at 7:30am when I got up today it was already in the mid 80s (although that might have been partly due to reduced airflow indoors - I had to rush outside to take a deep breath). Gosh.
Above is part of a puzzle I was working on for a while on Saturday. A more detailed and larger image will follow below. I did pretty well, but then I got distracted after a while (see below). The last puzzle pieces came from (I suspect) a single puzzle piece shattering in a secondary event. The primary event? Bit embarrassing. I was preparing dinner on Thursday night, a guest was about to arrive, and a fly entered the kitchen. I hate flies in my kitchen at the best of times, and this was just too much. I tried to open the window to encourage the beast to depart, and it refused. I tried to open the window further and exasperatedly wafted my hand in its direction to scare it off the window pane, misjudged that action and pushed my hand through the window. Felt like a real idiot, of course: An expensive mistake, an awkward thing to explain, and of course a million flies and other creatures now had unrestricted access… The good news is that I only got a slight nick from the razor sharp edges, my guest did not think I was too insane (or no more than I usually am) and dinner was tasty. So all’s well that ends well.
The next morning I woke up and immediately thought “I can’t believe I put my hand through my window”. Went downstairs to check. Yes, it was true. There was a nice shatter pattern (notice the cracks radiating outward from the reconstructed impact point - see photo and discussion below) to admire, and lots of bits of glass on the Continue reading ‘Paneful Jigsaw’
Just spotted this AP article (by Kathy Matheson) about Brittney Exline:
[…] at the age of just 15 she is beginning her Ivy League career Wednesday when classes start at the University of Pennsylvania.
Which is very good indeed, but I was especially pleased to see:
She excels at math and science and is really interested in politics, so she enrolled in a Penn program that will award her degrees from both the engineering and liberal arts schools when she graduates in 2011.
So, phase one: Containment. Well everything is going to be kept together with a cylinder of chicken wire, and so measurement of the desired radius 
followed by a quick computation (
) to give me the length I needed to cut, and I was away. Shortly after I realised that my measurements were to be determined by the size of the mouth of the large trash bags I’d bought to add as the liner of the containment cylinder. So I ended up readjusting everything to fit that. I cut everything a bit big to allow for the overlap I Continue reading ‘Composing Compost: Fun with Microorganisms’
Gosh, a thoughtfully-written general level (more or less) article on some of the general outcomes of string theory research! It’s written by Matthew Chalmers, and is in the Sept. ‘07 edition of Physics World*. The article can be read online 
This is very interesting to me. I just heard a story (by Nancy Mullane) on NPR’s Weekend Edition about home schooling. (The link is 
Drat.
