The tomatoes are coming! Here are two of several clusters of tomato-ey goodness about to go from garden to table. The benefits of having remembered to plant early this year… (Click for larger view.)
So I’ve been involved in two or three shoots so far (I forget which) for the new series. It has been good, overall, since I’ve been pleased to help out with explanations of various physics ideas here and there where I can. I’ll be winding down on all this soon since (a) I must get back to working on other things, and (b) I will be going away from the area for a chunk of time, so there’s a bit of juggling going on, I think, to find some space and time to include some more contributions from me for various episodes. I think I’ll end up being in three of them, if I recall correctly, and have had to turn down shoots on various others for a variety of reasons. Most of the reasons are to do with scheduling, but at least one was simply because I figured I’d be the wrong (or at least, very certainly not the most right) guy for the job. There’s a move […] Click to continue reading this post
Yes, I confess that I do think of a certain time machine when I see one of these. This one was parked next to my car in Pasadena not long ago.
I didn’t wait to see if “Doc” showed up. (Link to amusing 1985 Popular Mechanics article here.)
I wonder how they came up with 88 miles per hour…?
This short video from the Fluke Corporation showing various vibrating objects slowed down so you can see the motion is quite lovely. You get to see some key physics happening at a more manageable speed. It is often illuminating! Enjoy*:
[…] Click to continue reading this post
…And that lump of newness continues to rise for a day or few…
(Quick snap taken in evening light, so colours drained somewhat… not to mention focus… Ack!)
That last set of leaves of the cycad was quite battered. So I am quite happy to see this new beginning.
More to come.
Seems that everyone is talking about this game called Angry Birds… when they are not playing it on their phone, at least. The last time (and one of the few times) I think I played a computer game was in a pub in Trieste in 1991 when I was a graduate student visiting the ICTP for my first international physics school (gosh I so miss that place). The game was tetrus. I loved it. Knowing my obsessive nature, I decided long ago to stay away from things like that, since I worried that I’d get into computer games in a big way and then never get anything done again. Ever. So I still don’t play computer games, even now. I suppose I passed the point where I’d have got into them, and so now they don’t really interest me so much, other than as an interesting social phenomenon…
So everyone has been talking about the craze for Angry Birds, and the fact that they’ve been distracting themselves with it between things at every opportunity. That’s fine, really, and all well and good. I didn’t really know what it is in detail (some friends tried to fill me in a bit the other day, so I am less ignorant than I was last week) on Thursday during the shoot when I happened to see an amusing way of being able to say that I’d been playing angry birds without actually playing angry birds.
[…] Click to continue reading this post
Thursday’s shooting day was tiring, but fun overall. It started in the (highly unusual) June rain that we had in the first area we shot in – Griffith Park. We were at those famous (man made) caves that you may well have seen in one or other movie Western, or TV series like the classic old Batman show, where they played the role of the batcave. Don’t ask me why we were there. I think it was just a nice backdrop for the physics I was talking about to camera, between rain showers and screaming bouts from some, er, Angry Birds*. Crows, I think they were. It was cold, and I was a bit low-spirited and off my game as a result. I did not even remember to take a picture for you…
Then we headed South -and warmer- to Knott’s Berry Farm. Now, I’d vaguely heard of such a place, but I will admit that I had no idea that it was so close to Los Angeles. We were there to shoot lots of moving, interacting bodies, as a series of analogies for some other physics issues…and this is the perfect place for that, with all the various fun rides there are within easy reach. It was fun to enter the park through the service entrance, and then emerge through a secret door in the middle of the special universe they’ve created for the customers! We wandered off to find the various things we […] Click to continue reading this post
(I think that perhaps Prince ought to write a song with this as the title. Hmmm…)
So to accompany the other types of squash that have begun to appear (see previous post), I’ve some courgettes (or zucchini) coming along nicely. It seems I have two plants of these this year (with a bit of leaf mould infection that I ought to see to), and so in the next few weeks I should have some nice additions to various meals…
Still to be unveiled are some Mystery Squash plants that I put into the soil a bit late. I grew them from some seeds that […] Click to continue reading this post
One very good piece of good news from last month was the announcement that one of the TV series I have done a lot of work for over the last five or so years (gosh, has it been that long?) has been renewed for another season. I’m being deliberately vague here and not naming it since I do not know if it has been officially announced yet. (On the other hand, nobody has told me that it is a secret…) (You can see many of my posts on this sort of thing here.)
It’s great that the parent channel has again continued to invest in science programming, and people seem to like the show a great deal. As I’ve said here in the past, I am very encouraged by the very wide range of types of people who stop me on the street (or bus, subway, bar, cafe, plane – yes, I’ve had show-related encounters in all of these places… people who like science shows are everywhere!) to tell me they like the show, ask questions, or just say thanks for my on-screen explanations and demonstrations. It’s a diverse range of people in terms of careers, race, gender, age, and so forth, which I am very pleased to note, and I do very much hope that TV executives take note of this when making decisions about future programming for their outlets.
It is great to get the chance to contribute a little bit again, even though it takes a bit of time away from other projects (particularly right now, The Project). As far as I know, so far I’ll be in two or three episodes, although there may be more (that’s all […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, don’t forget the total lunar eclipse tonight! It is already starting… Apparently it will be the longest one for over ten years. It won’t be visible in North America, however, but google has provided a way to make sure you get your, er, lunatic desires to see the moon in earth shadow. For a start, there’s another excellent google doodle on their front page today (snapshot right) that allows you to slide the shadow over the moon to your heart’s desire. Furthermore, there’s a live feed of the eclipse on their YouTube channel, here.
Enjoy!
Ok… So that was a bit unexpected. I was not expecting these when I planted them. Crookneck Summer squash.
I’ve got several of them coming along in three clusters… They look very much like tough, inedible gourds, and I imagine that they can be like that if picked at the wrong time. So I’ve picked a few small ones and the bigger one in the second photograph (below) and will see how they deal with being tossed into a stir-fry.
* * *
I only noticed this late in the day, but had to point it out! There’s a Les Paul tribute on the google home page today. If you go there, you’ll find that there’s a set of playable guitar strings there… You can strum them, pick them, etc., and even hit the record button below it all to record your experiments. Then it gives you your own URL with your result! […] Click to continue reading this post
Did you hear yesterday’s Fresh Air? It was very interesting indeed, being, as it was, about a subject that you probably know interests me a lot – electric cars. The guest was Seth Fletcher, and he was talking about electric cars, hybrids, and so forth. Not focusing on far futuristic matters so much as what is possible now (with all the exciting things going on in the market), and where we might go next in terms of the development of the science and technology needed to continue to change our world by moving away from gasoline as our primary energy source for transport. A lot of his focus in on the development of batteries, and he does a good job of explaining […] Click to continue reading this post
This morning, before starting what turned out to be a long day of work, I did some sewing. I realized the day before last that the umbrella that protects me from the sun’s rays a lot of the time was filthy with dust and mildew. Realizing that this was connected to it never having been washed in its seven or so years in my possession, I set about removing it from the frame (a task that involved 16 screws, interestingly) and popped it into the washing machine. It emerged with a lot of the mildew greenery still attached and so I soaked it for a while in diluted bleach* and then rewashed… It emerged rather splendidly clean, but then I noticed that all those years in the sun and other elements had rather taken a toll on a lot of the stitching in various places (perhaps the vigourous cleaning contributed a bit too?), and so before putting […] Click to continue reading this post
