Author Archives: Clifford

The Yankovic Singularity

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So I actually had no idea that Weird Al Yankovic was still doing his, er, particular brand of music. (Singular, one might say.) I actually thought it stopped a long while ago, not long after the Thriller parodies. Well, not long ago he did a video/song called “White and Nerdy”. I looked at it, and so can you, on Myspace video (wow, I had no idea they had a video service). Here is the link.

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Among the things featured in the video’s visuals are Schrodinger’s equation, Stephen Hawking’s BHOT, M C Escher (It’s a rap video, so…) Here are some stills (click for larger):

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I laughed, I’ll admit. I find his fresh-faced and cheerful style quite funny at times. But then I got thinking. I can’t decide whether I should be depressed at the potency of the stereotypes he is playing with, or just carry on giggling. For example, why did the guys who were representing the complete opposite of being nerdy (and into science, reading, and the like) have to be cast as black? Worse than that (or at least equally as […] Click to continue reading this post →

Happy Flipping Memories

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A couple of magazines showed up in the post the other day, unlooked for (as JRR would write). Spent a short (unfortunately) time lying on my bed in the sun flipping through them, and it reminded me of my boyhood. Do you remember something similar? You’d go out and get that next issue of that magazine you’d been waiting for and you’d just drink it all up in a general way for a while, lying on your stomach, legs kicking in the air: The smell of the pages, the glossy pictures and other juicy tidbits of writing and other stuff to digest more fully later on….

For me, when I was young it was mostly magazines about music, electronics, computers, science… some crochet, macrame, and knitting (yeah, I know – I’ll tell you more later), and of course lots of comics (these latter I did not browse first… I would read […] Click to continue reading this post →

Lighting Up Your Quantum Class

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I forgot to tell you about this last week, so here goes. The colloquium last week was given by John O’Brien. One of the perks of the job of having to organize the department’s colloquium series is that you can use it (on rare occassions) as a blunt tool to find things out. I’ve always been curious about connecting the name I saw on one of the labs downstairs to a face. John’s lab, primarily part of the Engineering department, uses a little of the space in our building, you see, but I’ve never really made the connection between the face and the name. It certainly seemed that the USC Center for Photonics, of which he is part, was certainly up to some interesting and fun stuff, and so, egged on by another curious colleague, I sent him an invitation to give us a colloquium. He generously accepted, and here he is:

The talk -see the abstract here- was excellent. As you can see from the website listing the faculty in the centre, they are concerned with all sorts of fun things to do with very small scale devices which do rather clever things with light, such as nanoscale semiconductor lasers. The reason that the talk was excellent, in my opinion, was because it was not a standard device+engineering talk that you can often get from very good engineers who nevertheless don’t neccessarily appreciate what aspects the physicists care about. Those talks can often be pretty pictures and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Jammin’

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fig emergencyYou’ll recall that I had a fig emergency not too long ago. Too many figs from my tree and (despite commenter Moshe’s suggestion to just eat them all) no inclination to eat them all in one sitting. Recipe ideas were considered (and thanks all of you!), and I made a decision. I was looking for a way to preserve them, not how to eat immediately them, and so sadly I did not take up all the lovely suggestions of things to do. By a day or two later I had several more, and so it became urgent. As hinted at by the post entitled “Jam Tomorrow” (which I took a while to deliver on – sorry) you can guess what I decided to do: Fig Jam, of course!

So I bring you the first of what I expect to be several trips to the kitchen on Asymptotia, where we go through all the steps together […] Click to continue reading this post →

More Scenes From the Storm in a Teacup, IV

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Finally we get to some real substance in the program! (See earlier notes, and thoughts.) Jeff actually mentions all the effort going on string theory and experiments at Brookhaven, and asks that question I keep asking everyone… “why oh why is this never mentioned by the press in these discussions?” I’ve asked this of Peter Woit on his blog a lot too, for example, and have never got much of an answer. Peter and Lee want the world to believe -by reading their books- that the entire field of string theory is just people sitting around discussing the Anthropic Principle and lots of different universes, and blah blah blah… It serves the purpose of the books in question to completely distort the view of what is actually going on in the field. They claim that there is no experimental support (true) or hope for experimental support (how can they know that?) for string theory… but they ignore the fact –they intentionally don’t tell you, dear reader– about the interesting work going on by a huge percentage of the field to use string theory to study the structure of nuclear matter. It is still in its early stages, and may not work, but it is rather interesting. As Jeff put it, about the new form of matter that is constructed in these experiments, string theory is “the only approach that I know of” that currently seems to be able to explain the observed properties….

Lee, about the omission of this huge effort in string theory research from his book: […] Click to continue reading this post →