Daily Archive for October 15th, 2007

Dyeing for a Solution?

Published on October 15, 2007 in gardening and Los Angeles. 9 Comments

[Post reconstructed after 25.10.07 hack]:

My first reaction was one of dismay mixed with amusement:

griffith park treatment

(Taken from the Griffith Park Observatory. Click for larger view.)

Surely the solution to the brown 800-plus acre scar in the landscape that was once a lot of greenery in Griffith Park visible from all over the city, after much debate about what to do to re-seed vegetation after the devastating fire, was not to … paint the park green!!??? (A spectacularly unreal shade of green too.) It would be just too “Hollywood” a solution to paint the very mountain called Mount Hollywood (peak to the left just out of view).

So I am assuming that there is some valuable and botanically relevant content to this green stuff that I saw being dumped by the helicopters on a Sunday Morning hike. If anyone knows, let us know. I’ve been too preoccupied with work matters today to do a search of the blogs to find out what’s up. I’ve faith in the good sense of the many thinking about the park to trust that there’s much more to this than the colour green. I’ll update this post when I learn more.

Don’t hesitate to share anything you know about this…

[Update: Apparently it’s “hydromulch”. Erosion control, they hope. I remember seeing some of this weird green stuff on mud patches in Aspen earlier this year. Very odd that they couldn’t find a better green.]

[Update #2: Happily, the weird green seems to fade after about a week to a green that is... less weird.]

[Update #3: Mention of some more information can now be found at the Griffith Park Recovery blog here.]

-cvj

…And He Got Einstein’s Office!

Published on October 15, 2007 in mathematics and science. 0 Comments

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

From the Nobel Prize site, the final one of the year:

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2007 jointly to Leonid Hurwicz (University of Minnesota, MN, USA), Eric S. Maskin (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA), and Roger B. Myerson (University of Chicago, IL, USA), for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory”.

No, I did not really know what mechanism design theory was either. Some of it sounds rather interesting, in fact. The website has a breakdown of the key contributions and ideas here. Once again, I found that NPR had a really nice radio chat about the prize. You can hear that here. In that audio file, you can learn the origin of this post’s title…. if you cannot already guess.

-cvj