Well, it was a full day. Since this morning I’ve been putting the last touches on a paper with my student, V. I’ve been working at my home office (something odd going on with my office computer) while he’s elsewhere but present via IM. We can chat, exchange equations, drafts, and so forth, so it is good medium. Then mid-morning, I had a moment of confusion for a while, and progress stopped while I sorted that out. Discussions with V and another student, T, via IM about this and some other matters ensued, and then I was back on track, inputting edits from a session yesterday of reading it with pen-at-the-ready in a bookstore, inputting edits from V, and then another printout and review to add more.
Every now and again, a check of email, a walk around and a pull out of the odd weed in the garden, and then back to it. Somehow this went on until 3:00 - three hours Continue reading ‘Final Thoughts’
(1) Did you, like most people, miss the movie Idiocracy* last year? It looks like yet another lame comedy, but bear with it. It actually isn’t, really. It is one of the best indictments of what seems to be happening to a large part of the core of our society that I’ve seen in a while. You know what I mean… lower and lower thresholds for waiving all sorts of basic things that were once part of our required education… not just the awful spellings on signs that some of us whine about (sometimes too much, I’ll admit), but the necessity to use a severely reduced vocabulary to make yourself understood in the local store…or the lack of patience people (and the media) have for a reasoned, structured argument, focusing rather on looks, personalities or sound-bites (look for example at some the political headline discussions in both US and UK news at this moment)… the worry that fewer and fewer people seem to read a book from time to time**… The fact that nobody who works in stores seems to know anything about the merchandise they are employed to sell you… Or that situation you’ve had where the person behind the counter gets confused and can’t serve you because the item that you want to buy does not have a little picture of it at the checkout that they can click on in order to ring up your order/total…
Well, this film imagines a future where that sort of thing has become the least of your worries. The “dumbing-down” has just continued unabated. Everybody is essentially Continue reading ‘Idiocracy’
Well, they’re estimating 10,000 casualties so far from the earthquake in China that measured magnitude 7.9 on the Richter scale. NPR’s Melissa Block and Robert Siegel were actually in the area when it took place and they are filing lots of reports. Melissa had her equipment running at the time of the quake and so you can hear her reactions here. There’s a lot of information (including how to donate to various relief efforts) on the NPR website. Start here, for example.
Of course, there’s a lot more going on in terms of extraordinary natural conditions, including the tornadoes here in America, and the volcano in Chile, and of course the Myanmar cyclone and the dreadful matter of the blocked recovery efforts. Remarkable, overall. If you’ve not been following, you’ll find really good reports at the NPR site too…
It’s bike to work week here in [LA] California again! Do consider participating (even if it isn’t where you are…) The MTA here in Los Angeles is doing a good job of pushing the idea that biking to work is a good alternative to fighting with other drivers on the highway*. Have a go! (I’ve been noticing more cyclists on the roads in the city in recent times, by the way, so you won’t be alone.) [Update: Click here for the website of the California Bicycle Coalition for events near you.]
If in LA, pop over to the MTA website. They’ve got a number of things going on. There are pit stops along the Red Line today, and on Thursday, if you show up on a bus or the subway with a bike helmet, you can ride for free! (I wonder if they actually bother to check if you have a bike with that helmet…?)
One of my favourite topics to think about, since I was very young, is the effect that direct contact with intelligent alien life would have on our society. It would be transformative, I think, whether it be initially seen as for good or ill. Of course, most imaginings of such an event usually considers the “ill” aspect. I was chatting about the issue recently with a friend of mine while hiking the other day and then I recalled that I forgot to do a blog post on last week’s Sunday night radio listening, part of which was about just this very topic!
The show was in two parts (both good… more on the second later) and the first was a 1994 recreation of the classic War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938. You know the one, I hope… It was a CBS radio broadcast by the Mercury Theater company, masterminded and led by Orson Welles, and was a Howard Koch radio adaptation of the 1898 H. G. Wells novel. As you may know, the radio show created a huge panic among the listening audiences at the time, brought on by a combination of the relative newness of the medium (it was done in the style of a series of on-the-scene breathless news reports) and the general atmosphere in world politics at the time. (There’s a rather good Wikipedia collection of information about it here.)
All of this puts me in a nostalgic mood, since during some of my school days I loved that War of the Worlds rock musical concept album by Jeff Wayne from 1978 (I knew of it only in the early to middle 80s), with a star-studded cast of musicians (Justin Hayward, Phil Lynott, Julie Covington, David Essex and Chris Thompson), and the wonderful voice of Richard Burton as the main protagonist (a journalist). Anybody else remember that? From so many listenings to it, I used to be able to sing along to every note and word of that album! Probably still can, even though I’ve not heard it in so long. Altogether now - Uuuu-Laaaa!!!, or Come on Thun-der-child!!… Here’s a Wikipedia link.
Anyway, I highly recommend the recreation of the broadcast. Find an hour and curl up next to your computer and pretend it’s a warm old valve radio. Leonard Nimoy plays Continue reading ‘We Interrupt This Broadcast…’
Do you know about Pauli’s Other Principle? One statement of it is:
Fermions are discovered in the US, whereas bosons are discovered in Europe.
(In case you don’t know, it is useful to classify particles according to whether they come with integer (0, 1,2,…) multiples of a basic unit of spin, or half-integer (1/2, 3/2,…) multiples. Fermions include the electron and the quarks, bosons include the photon and the gluons…)
Jester at Resonaances examines the striking evidence for the Principle in modern particle physics, and examines some of the predictions that follow from it. It was clear from the principle, for example, that the SSC (Superconducting Super-Collider) in Continue reading ‘Pauli’s Other Principle’
Hey, guess who was at Griffith Observatory recently? Brian May! He’s that astrophysicist who took some time off to play (excellent) guitar and compose songs in the band called Queen. Ring any bells? (I found the nice photo here.) So why was he in town? Well, a slightly giggly (but always great) Madeline Brand (of the NPR program “Day To Day”) went along to interview him, and you can listen to the interview here, and read a transcript, as well as see extracts from him book (written with Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott), charmingly and blatantly (but knowingly?) unrealistically called “Bang! The Complete History of the Universe”. I actually looked through it in a bookstore the other day - looks rather nice. Wonderfully produced and I read some well-written passages, so might be worth picking up if you’re looking for a fresh read about the universe.
Well, every now and again the link tracker from google’s blog search engine (which reports some links to the blog to me on the blog software’s control panel) throws up some weird random stuff. There was a funny one today. Some site that aggregates random stuff had a post about the Fresh Prince. It then gathered images from the web to illustrate, and somehow grabbed an image from this blog among the haul, which is why I knew of this. Two that ended up together are to the right.
I recommend these videos that show the inside workings of the ATLAS detector of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) using animation. They are quite stunning and simply lovely. Science aside for a moment (and you can learn about it in the posts listed below), remember that the LHC is simply the largest and most complicated device ever constructed, with the largest team of scientists assembled. It is a wonderful reminder of the international, collaborative, and cross-cultural nature of science.
I’ve mentioned it twice (here and here) in other posts, but I think it is worth a post of its own.
Have you been yet? I’m looking at you, USC-area person. There’s a fantastic new wine-bar in the neighbourhood, a relatively short walk north of campus at Union and Hoover. I’m so pleased to see it, and it is extremely welcome as far as I’m concerned. It is called Bacaro, and I’ve been there a lot already with several different groups of friends and colleagues.
It has been rather a tiring last several days. I’ve been focusing on writing a big report on various internal matters that my committee was charged to study for the whole academic year. The issues are rather large, and the solutions I was trying to present require not just cosmetic tinkering but major changes in the way things are done. So the key thing to get right in writing it is a tone that is critical of what there currently is in place while at the same time painting a picture of what could be in its stead, while also beginning to show how to get there. If you don’t balance all three just right, there’s no chance that anything will change, since either lots of people will just be pissed off that you trashed their system, or threatened the status quo, or they’ll agree but say there’s nothing that can be done, or they’ll say you have not really thought it through. I think I’ve managed to get the balance right.
It was due on Monday. On Sunday night, I had something down, but I did not really like Continue reading ‘Tired’
Update: 11th May ‘08. Well, as you probably know, estimates have surpassed 100,000. An urgent concern now is the additions to the death toll resulting from the lack of emergency relief, brought on by the restrictions placed by the Myanmar government. See a BBC report here, or an NPR report here, for example.
Update: 7th May ‘08. It is much worse. I’ve seen a BBC report with a figure above 22,000.
The news is not good for Myanmar (Burma). The death toll due to cyclone Nargis has apparently passed 10,000 (see CNN and the BBC), making it the deadliest storm since 1999.
Oh! It is the open house for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory this weekend (both today and tomorrow)! I almost missed it since it was two weekends later last year.
I went last year and had a great time and so I strongly recommend it. Go along for your own interest, of course, but if you have any kids, take ‘em along*. If interested, have a look at my detailed post from last year entitled “JPL the new Disneyland?”
Oh dear, I liked Ken. Now he’s gone from office. Ken Livingstone really understood public transport and did something about it. And the congestion charge…(which was my idea!!!*)… took someone with real guts to push it through. We need more people like him to fight the car lobby - to get people to change their behaviour and do something for their environment.
That’s it. The class is over… I have to admit that I’m pretty sad to see the end of it, although I’m very very tired. It was such a great group. (I’ll be toasting the end of it all with some of the splendid stuff to the right.)
Recall that we stepped away from black holes. After a look at cosmology for some lectures, where we understood the role of four crucial components in determining a universe’s properties (curvature, matter, radiation, and vacuum energy) we dove back into formalism for a short while (one lecture) to develop a little more the tools we needed to properly under stand how to formulate Einstein’s field equations.
It did not take long… You need only the idea that it makes sense to formulate everything in terms of objects that allow you to express the full sense of an equation in any coordinate system you care to write. Once that is done (the objects are called tensors, and the idea and how they work is pretty simple to get to grips with) the key to formulating the field equations of gravity is to have a look at the structure of other familiar systems. The field equations of electromagnetism (Maxwell’s equations) and the field equations for Newton’s formulation of gravity give the required clues. A rummage around the geometry to find the appropriate object to express the physics in terms of uncovers the Riemann tensor and its cousins (”contractions” to get Ricci and so forth), and you’re almost there. A step back to learn how to package energy Continue reading ‘Sad Ending’
Well, here’s a turn up for the books. I pass the buildings of the Center for Inquiry (West) in Hollywood quite regularly on my to-ings and fro-ings, and always wondered what it was. About what were they inquiring? My inquiring mind wanted to know, but by time I got back to a computer, I’d forgotten all about intending to Google it. I was sort of expecting that it might be some, er, fringe organization, given the neighbourhood (not 1/4 of a mile away is the mother ship (or one of them) for the Scientologists, and a similar distance in the other direction is the “Scientology Celebrity Centre” too, where John, Tom, Kirstie, and others from the remarkably large movie star Scientology set presumably go and hang out and feel… celebrated).
Well, it turns out that it’s not like that after all, but a place where, as far as I can tell, serious reason-based inquiry into issues surrounding the places where, e.g., science, religion, culture and superstition intersect (such as, you know, real life) is encouraged. I like that poster of theirs I found, for example (image to the right).
Do you listen to the CERN LHC podcasts? They can be good. Every now and again, there’s a visitor there, and Brian Cox interviews them on site at the Large Hadron Collider. (Search archives for LHC or see links to lots of posts on it below, such as this one.) The most recent visit is by Phil Plait, aka the Bad Astronomer. They chat together about various aspects of the science to be done at the (soon to be switched on!) LHC, research in basic science in general, the scare-mongering business about the black holes destroying the earth (see here and here), conspiracy theories, and - of course - Continue reading ‘Phil at LHC’
Wow, doesn’t time fly when you’re having a busy semester! I meant to tell you about this early March shoot a while back, but got swamped and it fell off the desk. I recalled that I’ve been neglectful because I learned that the show in which some of this will be used will air on Tuesday night (9:00pm I think - “The Universe” on the History Channel). The episode discusses the end of the universe, as far as I know. The point is to discuss the various speculations that have been made about how the universe might end, and what current knowledge (such as the famous 1998 supernova observations showing that the universe’s expansion is accelerating) seems to suggest about which of those scenarios might be more likely. Of course, for the discussions to make sense, you need someone to talk about some of the basics, such as what it means for the universe (indeed, the whole of spacetime) to expand and collapse. Who you gonna call?
Ok. I’m one of many you can call. It was a new (to me) producer/writer, Savas Georgalis, who called this time, and we worked together on plans about how we might Continue reading ‘Tales From The Industry XX - Sporting Locations’
On NPR the other morning, I heard a piece about the Darwin Online Project. It sounds just amazing. I hope you find time to explore the site.
It has all sorts of fascinating things that you can download or view in the above (click for larger view) manner (your very own copy of the Origin of Species, perhaps, or parts of his diaries and notebooks…), and is quite a treasure trove of one-stop-shop (but free) Darwin data. (There are even some of (his wife) Emma Darwin’s recipes.) The site is here.
Don’t forget - The LA Times Festival of Books is on this weekend. As I said earlier:
It’s a Los Angeles celebration of the written word, done in wonderful sunshine, with hundreds of marvellous events in three days for young and old - Yes, it is the LA Times Festival of Books, coming up the weekend starting April 25th. The main daytime proceedings take place on the 26th and 27th (Saturday and Sunday) and I recommend them to you if you’ve not been. Mark your calendar. (Once you’re over there on Sunday, stay for the Categorically Not! event in the evening (entitled “Loops”), which will involve among others, science writer Dava Sobel!!) (Above right: One of the 2008 theme images from the Festival’s website. More here.)
The next Categorically Not! is on Sunday April 27th (upcoming). 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.
The theme this month is Loops Here’s the description from K C Cole:
When you come right down to it, just about everything is loopy: planets, proteins or life stories, things have a way of coming around again, always with a slightly different spin. This month’s Categorically Not! was conceived as a tribute to Douglas Hofstadter’s new book, I am a Strange Loop, which uses Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! - Loops’
So you’ll recall the shoot last year, right? Casino Royale theme? Where I got all dressed up in a Tuxedo at a club in New York that was kitted out as a Casino playing blackjack and so forth (click right) and getting very cosy with Ms Moneypenny? (Wait, that last bit didn’t happen.) Along with some actual stars, from entertainment, sport, fashion, etc? You don’t recall? Well, that’ll teach you not to use the blog’s archives more during your coffee breaks…
To recap (but please read properly about the background here), it was a photo spread with short bios for an annual piece called “Coming Kings” for a men’s magazine called “King”. I’d got the call out of the blue from them, and decided to do it since it’s an opportunity to do something a little different. To put some awareness of science and scientists in places where you normally don’t find much (if any) of it, rather than only targeting the more traditional crowds. It’s all about, as I said: Continue reading ‘When Worlds Collide IV: The Verdict is…’
It’s Administrative Professionals’ Day* today! Thanks to all the many Administrative Professionals who make our systems run so much more smoothly! (In some cases, who make them run at all…)
Morning cup of tea, and short reflection - coming up for air before diving back in…
It’s a bit of a mess here, time-wise. Just not enough hours in the day. Everything totally fragmented. Yesterday was grueling… here’s some of it:
Up at 5:30am, finding that I’m immediately thinking about a physics project for a bit (I fell asleep doing so, having been the whole evening in the Casbah drinking coffee and doing the same) before having to break off to get ready, get to office early to start an insanely busy day. Answer a ton of email, and deal with other online stuff, planning to ignore it for the whole rest of morning. Note that flimmaker/journalist friend B has sent me an email with a list of comments and suggested changes to my script for the Video. Got to discuss it with A, my collaborator in Chemistry on this. Whenever are we going to meet in the next few days? Sigh. (Must remember to do blog post about this new project, and how I ended up involved with the Chemistry department!)
After some dithering, decided to drive in, since the plan was to stay super-late and probably involve driving someone home.
Cold as I walk to the office from where I parked on the street. Mostly in my mind, and Continue reading ‘Up for Air’
Sheril talked a little bit about the lack of a debate on Science by the presidential hopefuls, and pointed to a number of articles on the matter. Recall (from my earlier posts and many other sources) that she is one of the movers and shakers behind ScienceDebate2008. The candidates simply punted the issues.
Shame really. The Franklin Institute’s good china was all laid out and the space made ready to host the debate, and several were hoping it might really happen… But it was politics as usual on all sides, with lots of silliness, and pandering to the much more powerful “Faith” constituency.
One of my cycads* had been worrying me for a while. It looked sad, very yellow and dry, and I began to wonder if it has departed this world. Then all of a sudden, as Continue reading ‘Renewal’
Well, I’ve been quiet here because I got rather swamped with lots of things over the last few days. The biggest thing was yesterday. I gave a colloquium at Caltech entitled “Cooking with Quarks and Gluons: Recipes from the String Theory Kitchen”*. The abstract is given below**. It is mostly based on what I wrote about last Summer.
With all the other things I had to do (including writing and giving two fun two hour lectures on cosmology in my undergraduate GR class) I still decided that it was time to totally rethink how I tell this exciting physics story, and how I present it. This meant designing and building many new slides. Each slide can take a long time to prepare, so this took two solid days of hiding away while designing and building them, only breaking for the other stuff.
Well, it was fun in the end, and today I am exhausted. I decided that you should not miss out entirely on the treats, so I made a little movie of the first parts of the talk to Continue reading ‘Some Unusual Recipes’
Well, I’ve said (and pointed to) enough on the matter, but I could not resist a quote from today’s essay by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times (do have a look at the rest of it):
Besides, the random nature of quantum physics means that there is always a minuscule, but nonzero, chance of anything occurring, including that the new collider could spit out man-eating dragons.
Well, Comedy Central fans, here’s something for you. Before you get settled into your nightly dose of the Daily Show on Wednesday night, tune in half an hour earlier, at 10:30 (at least on the coasts). It’s Lewis Black’s new show “Root of All Evil”, this week covering the issue of which of the two prevailing juggernauts in our culture, American Idol or High School, that reduce so much in our culture to popularity contests, is more Evil.
(This one I actually think speaks to a serious point. Sadly, in an presidential election year here, any attempt to parody this sort of thing for comedic effect is totally outshone by almost any news broadcast.)
Another giant moves on. John Wheeler died yesterday. He’s known for bringing to light many wonderful pieces of physics (he’s also credited for coining the term “black hole”), classical and quantum (helping craft many of the ideas surrounding issues in quantum gravity, for example), and for being a great teacher. There’s an obituary* by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times here. I’ve borrowed their lovely photograph (which was given no photographer credit, so I cannot).
[Update: Daniel Holz has a personal reflection here.]
Did you catch the discussion on NPR’s Science Friday just past? I was particularly pleased to hear some calm, thoughtful responses from someone who definitely knows his way around the issue, on a major broadcast. What issue? Whether or not we high energy physicists are carefully endangering planet earth (or even the whole universe) by switching on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) later this year (or whenever it is due to start collisions). You’ll recall the lawsuit, since I posted on it here (with links to other thoughts), and perhaps you even recall my April Fool post on the matter.
Well, Ira Flatow was talking to Frank Wilczek! It was a good, informed chat around the issues that also gave Frank a chance to explain a little about what the machine was really constructed for (since this seems to so easily fall out of these public discussions of black holes and extra dimensions and strangelets (interesting as they are), and to plug his book that is due to come out. Since it’ll almost certainly be a really interesting Continue reading ‘Frank Common Sense’
I should really start a new series of posts with the title “What Could Possibly Go Wrong…?” This story from yesterday would be a fitting entry…
Did you see Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises” last year? It was excellent, and of course totally overlooked in the recent discussions about good films of last year. It was released and seen by most people way too early in the year. Hollywood’s memory is not very good at recalling anything that came out earlier than the Fall if it did not come with a huge bang of publicity and so forth (like the excellent Bourne Ultimatum). Well, just for a moment there, I was in an American version of the film. (Setting-wise I mean. The film is set in a gritty, realistic not-Four-Weddings-or-Bridget-Jones London.) I was in New Jersey yesterday just for the day. (I’ll tell you more about it later.) Here’s what happened.
Ok, this is a post of (probably pointless) complaint about one of society’s conventions. I do that from time to time. So as I said in an earlier post, I lost my bag within which I carry around my personal day to day stuff. It is small and fits on my shoulder and carries lots of useful stuff that I don’t like to carry in my pockets. My handbag, if you will. I happily carry such a bag, and call it by that name quite often. Sometimes I jokingly say that I’m “secure enough in my sexuality to call it what it is”, and not have to lamely resort to inventing a new name for something that already exists in the world serving that exact function - but carried by women. I’d forgotten just how serious and non-joking this whole business actually is. I did not recall how much trouble I’d previously gone to when I tried to find such a bag that suits my needs (practical and aesthetic). It’s a real pain. Losing it now meant that I had to go through this all over again, and discovering that I’d not really finished the job that previous time. (And the alternative names are so stupid - “manbag”, “murse”, etc… Haven’t they noticed that “handbag” is already gender neutral?)
What is the problem? Simply put, there’s an unbelievable amount of phobia here (and it is here in the USA more than, say Europe) about guys carrying such bags. Utterly Continue reading ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag (Again)’
This was not the time to break my over a decade long run of not flying American Airlines. I pretty much only fly United when doing most travel, but I had no choice for this trip from LA to Amarillo, Texas. It was a quick hop there and back in about 36 hours to take part in a rather important event - Andrew Chamblin (a friend and colleague who, you may know, died tragically in 2006) was being inducted into the Hall of Fame of his old High School and so I went along to take part in the ceremony with his family and some of his friends, and address (briefly) the assembled student body (it was such an honour to be asked Continue reading ‘Head in the Clouds’
Hey, guess who was at Griffith Observatory recently? Brian May! He’s 
There was a funny one today. Some site that aggregates random stuff had a post about the Fresh Prince. It then gathered images from the web to illustrate, and somehow grabbed an image from this blog among the haul, which is why I knew of this. Two that ended up together are to the right. 
Oh dear, I liked Ken. Now he’s 
the mother ship (or one of them) for the Scientologists, and a similar distance in the other direction is the “Scientology Celebrity Centre” too, where John, Tom, Kirstie, and others from the remarkably large 
