Monthly Archives: October 2007

Remembering Bob Miller

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The Artist and Science educator Bob Miller died on Sunday. This is very sad news indeed. He and his work may be familiar to many of you from San Francisco’s Exploratorium.

categorically not - really?I met him only once, on the evening of April 23rd 2006 at a Categorically Not! event. From that short time I got a sense of his enthusiasm for explaining many phenomena in optics and other aspects of physics to anyone who would listen. He was a unique and highly original person in every positive sense of those words, and his passing is a great loss. The Cat Not! event during which I saw him in action (see clickable image on right) describing optical illusions and other phenomena was one of the most delightful such evenings that I can recall. After re-reading my report on the event, I thought I’d share it with you as a celebration of his life. It is the previous post, and it has links to some of Bob’s work.

Bob Miller was a dear friend of science writer K. C. Cole, and so (with her permission) I am reproducing here a piece that she wrote about Bob Miller not too long ago. It is a fitting tribute. -cvj
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The physicist Frank Oppenheimer used to say that artists and scientists are the official “noticers” of society—people whose business it is to notice things that other people either never learned to see or have learned to ignore.

I’ve never known anyone with quite the knack for noticing as San Francisco artist Bob Miller, and since I’ve known him, countless things I used to think quite ordinary have been animated by his imagination. Once he asked me: How would you suspend 500,000 pounds of water in the air with no visible means of support? […] Click to continue reading this post →

Really Excellent

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This was originally posted on Cosmic Variance on May 3rd 2006. It was a report on the Categorically Not! event that took place on 23rd April 2006, entitled “Really?”. I’ve decided to reproduce it here as a happy memory of the wonder that Artist and Educator Bob Miller brought into the lives of many. (See next post.) It was a marvellous event overall (probably my favourite Cat Not! event), with several excellent presentations, and so I’ll reproduce the post in its entirety (with slight corrections) to give you a sense of the evening. -cvj
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Well, apologies to all concerned for taking so long to post this, but here it is. The Categorically Not! two Sundays ago was -as usual- extremely enjoyable and informative. This one was all about Illusion, in some sense, the theme being “Really?”.

categorically not! Really image

We started out with a few opening remarks by Bob Miller, who specialises in what categorically not! Really image some might call “light art”. He’s well known for creating a large number of wonderful works using light and shadow, several of them forming the cornerstone of exhibitions in the Exploratorium in San Francisco, for example. Have a look at the “lightwalk”, linked here.

Bob did not talk much, because he wanted everyone to just play, learning from getting involved. And play they did. He’d been up all night preparing (with KC Cole’s help) various fun things for people to do (see the table in the picture above, for example). All simple, and all with a little printed explanation about what to do, and the operation of the thing they were playing with or effect they were seeing.
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Inside Out from the Inside

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Last night’s Categorically Not! – Inside Out event was just great. The three topics contrasted really nicely, were very well presented as individual topics in their own right, and there were resonances between the different topics through the main umbrella theme – “Inside Out”.

Science writers Sandy Blakeslee and her son Matt Blakeslee did a sort of tag team presentation, taking turns to build up several aspects of the subject (covered in their new book “The Body Has a Mind of Its Own”) of one’s sense of self and that all-so-important division between inside (ourself) and outside (the rest of the universe) that we make with our minds. sandy blakesleeIt’s very dynamic, of course – you extend it a lot when you use tools, from a fork when eating to the car you’re driving in (everyone grunted in recognition when Sandy mentioned how you have the instinct to duck when driving under a low ceiling in a parking garage….). One of the things that I think resonated most with the audience is the description of the work on showing how many celebrated “out of body” experiences that people get have a foundation in […] Click to continue reading this post →

’T Ain’t Natural

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Josh Ritter ConcertThe photos record scenes from an excellent use of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum’s large exhibition halls after hours: Live music. (They’re not super-great – I only had my phone with me.)

A friend took me as a guest to a filming of Josh Ritter and his band for a TV show. Lots of Lovely Bones everywhere*, stuffed animals, loud (but not too loud) good music (I’d not really listened to Ritter before – hey, not bad at all), and free martinis on tap (surprisingly not watered down!) from Grey Goose. How could I not go?

(You can see the exhibit hall (North American Mammals, I think) with the activity in the distance between the bones of Mr/Ms Triceratops here.)

If you’ve never been the the Natural History Museum here before and you are in LA, please go along. It’s really very good indeed. As an incentive, you can go to the new spider pavillion and wander around with live spiders everywhere. (What’s that? That’s not an incentive? I see…Well, there’s lots to see besides rubbing shoulders with spiders, from dinosaurs, mammals and birds to wonderful gemstones and minerals…) I’m thinking of going to check it out some time, and maybe report back here on the blog about it some time.

Josh Ritter Concert

This event is sort of typical of LA, in both good and bad ways. There are all these […] Click to continue reading this post →

Inside Out

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Part of K C Cole’s teaser for tomorrow’s Categorically Not! – Inside Out said:

Sometimes the results are surprising: circles in the plane can’t be turned inside out, but spheres in 3-dimensional space can be.

This is all the license I need to show you* this wonderful 21 minute video showing exactly that (and explaining some rather beautiful mathematics along the way):



Direct link to the Google Video (for larger viewing) here. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Inside Out

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Paul Stein of Los Angeles PhilharmonicThe next Categorically Not! is a Blue* one! It’s on Sunday October 28th (tomorrow). 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: The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Paul Stein demonstrating “small differences” on the violin, in the event with that theme.)

The theme this month is Inside Out Here’s the description from K C Cole: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Hack!

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I don’t know if you’ve been watching the new PBS series WIRED Science, but I recommend that you give it a try. There was another excellent episode Wednesday night, covering topics as diverse as organ regeneration, neutrino oscillations, and research in supersymmetry (interview of Jim Gates by Zia). You can see video of lots of the segments here.

To my delight there was another excellent new short segment, called “Hack”, again done by Chris Hardwick in the studio. Recall I spoke about the “What’s Inside” pieces a few weeks ago. “Hack” shows you how to make something familiar, as opposed to just find out what’s inside something. In this one, Chris (who’s impressively very funny while he does the chemistry: : “a funnel…’cos it’s got the word `fun’ in it”) shows you how chemoluminescence works by demonstrating how to reproduce what glow sticks do! Here’s the video:

While I’m on the subject, there’s some news over on my other blogging gig, […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Hole in the Blog

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Definitely time for a gin and tonic, a long groan of exasperation, and a lie down on the sofa.

As you can see by scanning down the page (if you’re a regular), all the blog posts and comments since October 11th right up until today have been lost. The blog was hacked a few hours ago, and it was being redirected to a site in the Middle East. I’ve no idea why.

Anyway, I’ve managed to get (withe the prompt help of the good people at Bluehost) everything restored since the last backup. It turns out that I thought i had more regular backups enabled, but it was not set properly.

I’m going to have to rebuild a number of customization elements of the blog to make it compatible with the newer (and supposedly more secure) version of the blog software I am running, and so the site might look a bit weird for a while until I complete that.

In the meantime, I need to see if I can find some way to get those old posts back and […] Click to continue reading this post →

First Watson, Now Holmes

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As a headline, it’s a cheap link, I know, but it was irresistible. The point is that the comet Holmes suddenly got much brighter and is now beginning to do a naked eye display. How much brighter? It went from magnitude 17 to magnitude 2.8 over the course of a few hours. David Morrison (at NASA) who writes a newsletter about near earth objects (NEO) gives an analogy: “This is equivalent to the planet Saturn suddenly becoming as bright as the full moon.”

Before you go wild, based on this, know that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XIII – Magnetic Moments

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[Post reconstructed after 25.10.07 hack]:

magnetism shoot

The strange object pictured above is a rather nice demonstration of the “field lines” around a bar magnet. It is not a great photo (all my fault), but the demo is great. The designers suspended the tiny bits of iron in oil, inside a sealed chamber, forming a block. There’s a little cylindrical hole through the centre of the block (but still outside the chamber) that allows you to put a bar magnet in. This makes for a demo far more exciting than any shake-it-up snow scene: You shake block and the iron filings are all over the oil in three dimensions, randomly arranged. You then insert the magnet. They slowly but determinedly arrange themselves into the familiar pattern, in three dimensions. It’s great. (Why didn’t they have these when I was growing up?! I might have gone into science… Oh, wait…)

I was looking around one of our demo labs last week for things to use to demonstrate some of the principal effects of magnetism. The above demonstration was one of the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Under the Sea

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[Post reconstruction in progress after 25.10.07 hack (body, comments and images to follow)]:

jellyfish from AP story

There’s something ever so romantic (not in the hand-holding-under-the-moon sense) about deep sea exploration. It occupies the roughly same part of one’s emotional landscape as space exploration, I think, but it’s maybe even more exciting in some ways, because there’s something about the utterly weird and unknown being just under the surface of the familiar, while space seems so far away (actually, in one sense it isn’t, if you go straight up, but in terms of logistics, it seems and is far…). It also very much has the feel of a 19th Century adventure, with explorers going off and bagging the weird and wonderful specimens to bring back for museums and entertainment. This was seldom good for the specimens involved, of course, and we […] Click to continue reading this post →

Orionids!

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[Post reconstruction in progress after 25.10.07 hack (body, comments and images to follow)]:

Don’t forget the Orionids over the next night or two (peaking late tonight, the wee hours of Sunday morning). As the name implies, look for them coming from Orion, although even if you don’t know exactly where that is, you’ll see them almost anywhere you look in the sky if you’ve enough dark. Recall that Orion has those three bright equally spaced stars in a line, making up his belt. I spoke about this, and gave more directions about the Orionids in a post last year.

There’s a Space.com piece by Joe Rao with more discussion. About sightings, it says:

Expect to see few, if any Orionids before midnight – especially this year, with a bright waxing gibbous Moon glaring high in the western sky.

But moonset is around 1:30 a.m. local daylight time on Sunday, and that’s a good time to begin preparing for your meteor vigil. At its best several hours later, at around 5:00 a.m. when Orion is highest in the sky toward the south, Orionids typically produce around 20 to 25 meteors per hour under a clear, dark sky.

Today’s StarDate (as usual, read on NPR by the wonderful Sandy Wood) has a piece on it too. Here’s an extract from the transcript (written by Damond Benningfield):

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Massive!

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[Post reconstruction in progress after 25.10.07 hack (body, comments and images to follow)]:

Messier 33 GalaxyThere’s been a recent discovery* of an unusual black hole. It is about sixteen times the mass of our sun. While this might not seem as dramatic as the black holes that are millions of times the mass of our sun that live at the cores of galaxies, such large black holes that result from the collapse of ordinary stars have hitherto been unknown. This presents an important and exciting puzzle about the processes by which black holes form from the collapse of stars. There’s evidently more going on than previously thought, possibly as a result of complicated interactions with its companion star during formation.

(Image: A Harvard-Smithsonian Center image of the galaxy Messier 33, in which the new black hole was found.)

I talk a bit more about this on Correlations, and you can read more about the recent […] Click to continue reading this post →