(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’
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’
In physics, most of what we do is look for the simple, often in extremely complicated systems. If you’re asking the wrong question, or looking at the wrong aspect of the system, this quest for the simple is unlikely to work at all, but the right question asked about the right aspect can yield rather striking insights, often with far-reaching consequences. Although it often is not emphasized in this manner during our school or undergraduate (and sometimes even graduate) education, this is the primary skill in the physicist’s arsenal that we teach and learn. (See an earlier article here for a take on this.)
Sometimes, you don’t need the sharp eyes and years of training and drilling in these seemingly arcane (but, I’d argue, most natural) arts (and the requisite sequestering away in monasteries and nunneries with abstinence, self-flagellation, and so forth) - there are times when if just jumps out at you that there’s a simple question or two Continue reading ‘Sand, Man’
Black Holes, by Tamsin Van Essen. Part of a series of lovely ceramics with a physics theme. For more, visit the websites here and here.
As you may recall from the post I did some time ago, the “Light Cone” is a rather important concept in physics, and keeping track of it in a given physical scenario is an extremely important tool and technique for understanding many physical situations. (I urge you to review that post before continuing reading this one.)
One way to understand a most important concept - the event horizon - is by keeping track of lightcones, and so let’s go ahead and explore that here. The outcome is that Continue reading ‘Tipping the Light Cone: Black Holes’
I’ve mentioned it before a number of times, but it’s always worth remembering the downtown Los Angeles Art Walk every second Thursday of the month. Lots of local people still don’t know about it, so I like to remind from time to time.
For the one today, given the day, you can take your sweetheart along for a Valentine’s day ramble around the neighbourhood. Or, if you’ve either too many or too few to choose from… never mind - just go along yourself! There’s always lots to see.
Some months back I made a huge effort to document photographically (sometimes surreptitiously) some of the work I saw, to show you it. I was planning on doing a long post describing all of it and of course I was so exhausted when I got home that I never did and then I sort of went off the boil on that project. I’ve no idea why I’m mentioning it now - it just came to mind.
Tomorrow afternoon at 4:00pm there’s be an interesting conversation on campus for sure. It’ll be between the science writer and journalist KC Cole and the actor Alan Alda. He’s such an interesting person, and (among other things) currently presents Scientific American Frontiers.
While I’m on the subject of art and science, I should point out that QMUL’s David Berman told me about an exhibit of drawings by scientists on various themes in physics. He was looking for contributions too (although it may be too late now, I’m not sure). The website is here. He told me a while ago, and I apologize for neglecting to point it out to you sooner (for a while I was sure that I’d done a post on it, but cannot find one).
David said (back in October):
Sanjaye(Ramgoolam) and I are currently trying to put together a collection of works for a series of exhibitions we have lined up. The idea is to show how physicists use conceptual drawing and just to show some of the
interesting ideas around in a visual rather than mathematical way.
Over on Correlations, I posted about the second of the two pieces I was considering as exhibits for some of my thoughts on science and art for Seed magazine. Recall that my first post on this - about the piece and text that I finally submitted for publication - was done a few weeks ago. The theme I brought out there was “transcendence”. For Continue reading ‘Essence’
I noticed last week that the December issue of the magazine Seed has the short piece I mentioned I was working on a while back. I actually completely forgot about it, and just looked at it on the newsstand on the off-chance, and there it was. It is part of a larger cover story by Jonah Lehrer about science and art (which I’ve not yet read), with a number of other scientists giving their take. I was asked to contribute by picking a piece of art, and writing 100 (they said) words about how it connects to my science, Or I could talk about how a piece might have inspired me, or some combination of those sorts of things showing the intersection between science and art. It took me a while to come up with a short answer to this many-faceted and interesting issue. I actually did two completely separate pieces, before later focusing on one and polishing up the words for the magazine. and I’ll put the latter here (below), and later in the week the other will appear (probably over on Correlations). I’ll use the text I have here as I submitted it… I have not checked to see if it is identical to what appeared in the magazine yet. Go along and look at the magazine for the contributions from others. It is very interesting to see what pieces people chose, and why. What would you choose?
Tell us in the comments.
My choice:
Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1485 (Click for larger view.)
The next Categorically Not! is on Sunday December 16th (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. (Above right: The artist Bob Miller speaking at the event entitled “Really?” on 23rd April, 2006. He died recently on Oct. 28th 2007, and this week’s event is dedicated to him.)
The theme this month is Beginnings. Here’s the description from K C Cole:
Every thing (and every body) began sometime. Even matter, space and time have a history. So do music, religion and galaxies (and along with them, musicians, religious scholars and astronomers.) Of course, how things begin determines to a large extent how they evolve and go on to influence both human culture and the universe at large. So for this month’s Categorically Not, we’ll look at beginnings from three widely (and somewhat wildly) diverse perspectives.
This short video is simply lovely. It illustrates (with perfectly chosen music) an important set of mathematical transformations dear to many of us, the Möbius transformations. It is by Douglas Arnold and Jonathan Rogness of the University of Minnesota. It’s a pleasure to watch, whether you work in a mathematically related field or not. Try it:
I’ve been distracted by several things recently, and so (even more than is usually the case) there’s far more to report than there is time to report it. Among the highlights are, as already mentioned in the comments, a Saturday visit to MOCA (Geffen Contemporary) to see the Takashi Murakami exhibition. (Coinciding nicely with me about to embark upon reading “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” by the other very well known Murakami: Haruki Murakami.)
His simplest motif - which he reuses again and again in many pieces - is the smiling flowers in various colours. The 2D version of the 3D flower box is one of my favourites, and here it is in a room that is wallpapered with the motif. There’s a more solemn one with a range of expressions on the flowers’ faces in an entire field of them (”Kawaii - Vacances”) (including one shedding a tear), but I could not find a good web reproduction of it. The below is a rather small version:
It’s only the second weekend since it opened here in LA and it is hugely popular, with tons of people in the exhibit spaces walking around excitedly and pointing at things. (This being LA, this included a lot of activity in the special Louis Vuitton room, which Continue reading ‘All in a Weekend’s Work and Play’
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.
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
____________________________
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?
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
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?”.
We started out with a few opening remarks by Bob Miller, who specialises in what 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.
The 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:
Well, it’s almost the end of the morning, I’ve just finished one set of tasks and about to move on to another and I thought I’d sit down and chat with a cup of coffee. This morning has largely been about three different outreach-type tasks. I hope to spend the entire afternoon on Physics research. I’m an optimist.
Here’s the shape of this morning:
At 7:00am I checked my email and found that an editor at a magazine was looking for something different from what I initially wrote in response to a question of hers about art and science. I’d spent some of the evening before writing something and sent it along, adding a couple of sentences at the end as a sort of final thought. Of course, she liked the last two sentences and not the rest so much (it was not getting directly at what she wanted me to speak to). So, a bit crestfallen, I tried again. In fact, I had indeed spoken to the issue, but had sort of buried it a bit. So I spent some time scraping away the unnecessary and bending and reshaping the text. Amazing how long that takes when you’ve got a word limit. I sent it along eventually. I’m not sure it is actually as good as what I wrote last night in terms of literature, but it is more to the point of what their feature is about, and so in that sense it is better. From the response I got back, it seems to be more like what they’re looking for now. I’ll tell you more about it when it appears… it’s all about a personal take on the interaction between art and science as far as inspiration goes, with a single piece to illustrate it. It’s the picking of a single piece that was the true difficulty. Took me days to decide. In the end, I had to make some hard choices indeed. I actually enjoyed thinking about the issue though. Sort of re-invigorating. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts about the matter in the comments. I’ll come back to this once the piece appears - if it does.
The MacArthur Fellowships were announced today. These are particularly great, as it’s awarded across so many different fields, and I always learn about interesting work going on by reading the synopses at the website. Congratulations to all recipients!! Before I point to the list, I’d like to make a plea that will, of course, go unheeded.
Please please, people of the media, stop calling them “genius grants”. Just stop. By way of explanation, I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the term just seems to strike the wrong tone about what these things should be about. It seems to me to push the recipients away as being “other” rather than encouraging us all to embrace the qualities that they are being encouraged to show by getting the fellowships. Ok, that’s the end of my plea.
Here’s a reminder of what the Fellowship is about (extract from their site):
Here’s another image or two that I captured for you of the very large and dramatic pieces of Dan Flavin. This is from my July visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA’s) retrospective of his work. You’ll recall the two earlier posts here and here. (Click them to enlarge.)
It is easy to dismiss these as very simple coloured baubles writ large, and that would be a mistake. I’m sure that the artist was very aware of one hugely striking thing that one cannot convey in the photographs, and that is the powerful effect the presence of one single striking colour can have on one’s feelings. The intense blue from a previous work I spoke of was remarkable, and then shortly afterward you come to this giant Continue reading ‘The Green Room’
The next Categorically Not! is Sunday September 9th. 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: Julia Sweeney performing an extract from her play “Letting Go of God”, in the event with the theme “Uncertainty”.)
The theme this month is Mistakes! Here’s the description from K C Cole:
Blunders, boo boos, bloopers, errors, slip-ups, goofs, misinterpretations and misunderstandings. Everyone makes mistakes. In science, the notion of “mistake†is often itself misunderstood. Frequently, a “mistake†often turns out to be nothing more than a limited or skewed perspective. Or as Einstein put it, discovering a new theory is not so much like tearing down a house to build a new one as climbing a mountain from which one can see farther; the old “house†is still there, but is seen in a vastly different context. Mistakes in personal life and Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! - Mistakes!’
I’m writing from the courtyard of a particularly fine and (to my mind) vitally important institution, using their (surprisingly) free wireless (which runs at a charmingly-then-frustratingly glacial speed) to pop up these images of a huge statue, entitled “Newton”.
Since, once again, the temperature is knocking on the door of insane outside, I’ll sit here on the sofa indoors for a while and tell you about the really fun thing I was doing earlier today. Back when it was much less hot.
The mission: First show up at Mama’s Hot Tamales Cafe. (So since at the very least, ridiculously tasty tamales are involved, clearly anything beyond this is just a bonus.) This is located across 7th Street from the South side of MacArthur Park, just West of Alvarado (map link).
Next, after saying hello to the friendly people who are happy to see that you showed up for the event (a friend of mine and I were the first to show up), you sit at a table for a little while and read six plays. Don’t worry, since the average length of one of the plays is less than a page, so it won’t take long -and they’re all rather good!
Next, you go outside, cross the road, and spend some time in MacArthur Park. Why? Well, it is park with a bit of a bad reputation that is seriously underused and under-appreciated by many, so that’s a good reason right there…
…but the main reason for this visit at this point in the mission is to wander the park and see if you can spot some of the performances or, as one woman put it, Continue reading ‘All The Sweet, Green Icing’
This is another of the incredibly striking Dan Flavin pieces that saw at the retrospective at LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) earlier this month.
The sheer blueness of it was particularly striking, I have to say. It was intense. I left the colours from neighbouring pieces at the edges of the image, since I think this helped set the blue in your visual field before you then walk into the corridor and immerse yourself in the blue. I think that helped enhance the blue, but I’m not sure. It was interesting to note that the blue was nowhere near as powerful when starting at the Continue reading ‘Blue Intensity’
From a shockingly* effective retrospective exhibit of the fluorescent light works of Dan Flavin, now on at LACMA. (The image on the right with a person next to a similarly-sized piece is to give you a sense of scale.)
Here’s a little bit about how fluorescent lamps work, from Wikipedia. The old-style big fluorescent lights you recall from a while back (with that more industrial or corporate feel) are very different than the modern compact fluorescent lights many people would like to see used more in your homes (and elsewhere). This produces a lot of Continue reading ‘Fluored’
I learned from Often in Error that Roz Chast, whose work some of you may know from the New Yorker, had some physics-themed cartoons in the May edition of Symmetry Magazine (one of them the cover). Here they are (click for larger, then perhaps click again to zoom):
Remember our discussions of Pluto’s demotion/reclassification? (Lots of link reminders at bottom of post.) Well, here’s a sad (and amusing) image* created by artist Mathias Pedersen:
You can see a high resolution version of this image here. Don’t forget to look at more of the graphic art of Mathias Pedersen**.
Pretty interesting to see the choices of equations actually (mostly various quantum mechanics statements - Schrodinger’s equation, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the definition of the Hamiltonian in question (there seems to be an external electromagnetic field?), then there’s a reminder of what happens in beta-decay of the neutron…and there’s the inevitable Einstein’s E=mc2 thrown in at random… and more…).
It’s great to see all this up there… although it is worth noting that a more typical blackboard would have (instead of definitions/statements known very well to the physicist) much more of a working computation in progress, probably.
The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 13th May - Mother’s Day! (USA). 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 the links below for some recent descriptions (and even video) of previous events.
The theme this month is recycling. Here’s the description from the site:
Everything gets recycled: newspapers and banana peels, the air you breathe and the earth you walk on; some would even say our souls. Our bodies, we know, are made from materials recycled in generations of stars. The mix of genes that makes us who we are is a stew recycled by long lines ancestors—something nice to remember on Mother’s Day. Artists recycle everything from concrete objects to abstract ideas. New musical forms—like new scientific theories—are inevitably reconstructed from pieces of the past.
We’ll start with the ancestors of us all: the stars. An astrophysicist with the Carnegie Observatories, Alan Dressler uses both the Hubble Space Telescope Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! - Recycling’
Thursday 12th’s “Point of View, II” event was a huge success. See here for the blurb on what was coming up. Below I intersperse that with a little about what actually took place, and give you a link to video of the event.
One of the great things about the format is that we’ve no clear idea what each presenter is going to do, where they will take things in their examination of the theme, so it adds somewhat to the excitement of the events. Do come along to some of the Categorically Not! events (of the same type) which happen every month at Santa Monica airport. Web link here.
Don Marolf of UCSB will tell us what Einstein’s relativity REALLY means to the physicists who study our world. Different observers’ perceptions of space, and even of time itself can give different answers. How do we make sense of that, and what are the consequences?
We started with Don Marolf (click image on left for larger view), who did a really great job of telling the audience about what the theme “Point of View” meant to physicists, in the context of Relativity. He had some great computer slides, but in addition he produced various items from his pockets during the talk to use as props to illustrate things. Don is an excellent presenter with a huge amount of charm and energy and an infectious laugh and so gave us a great start to the evening.
Poet and author Michael Datcher, who teaches literary nonfiction and poetry at Loyola Marymount University, will talk about the role of the writer as a witness and also his newly launched journal of literary nonfiction, The Truth about the Fact.
(The striking central red piece above is by the artist called Alonys (as are the ones surrounding). You can see more things of hers at her myspace space.)
Well, it’s been a busy week here, and I had tons of things to tell you in about five or six extra posts (beyond the quick ones I did) that never made an appearance. I had several for last weekend too. I ought to start by catching up from there. Here goes a bit of recollection and reflection:
Saturday was interesting since I ended up cramming three different activities into the evening, after a day of gardening and errands (mostly the latter), if I recall correctly.
The evening began (as it did the Saturday before) with a trip to an opening at an art gallery. This time it was downtown, near Gallery Row, (it is called Crewest) and it was featuring the work of some up and coming female artists. Overall, I was not overwhelmed with things I thought were great, but the exhibition was not without some interesting pieces on the walls (see above - some of her 3D sculpture-meets-painting works were fun too) and sometimes interesting people milling around. There was even a DJ, but sadly no wine (I’d been spoiled by the last gallery reception, I suppose.)
The second of the Point of View campus events in the Visions and Voices series is on Thursday. It is at 7:00pm at the Gin Wong conference center (which is near Fine Arts and Architecture, by the way.) See the bottom of this post for some earlier events of this type, and this post for the background on Visions and Voices.
This time we’ll have a Poet, a Dancer, and a Physicist! Here’s some blurb that KC Cole (my co-conspirator in this business) wrote about who is appearing and what they’ll be saying:
Well, the video of the Point of View event of a couple of weeks ago is now available. Click here for streaming media. There’s a problem, however. While my opening off-the-cuff remarks are utterly unimportant, and so it is not a big deal that the audio of that is poor, the big problem is in the third segment. Apparently (according to the A/V person) the Bluetooth microphone that they were using to capture the sound for the video camera must have used up its battery, as all the audio for USC’s Cinematic Continue reading ‘You Can View Point of View’
The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 7th January. The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with ocassional 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. There’s a website of past and upcoming events here. You can also have a look at two of the last two descriptions I did of some events here and here, and the description of a recent special one on Uncertainty that was held at the USC campus is here.
Here is K.C. Cole’s description of the upcoming programme:
Movement: You can’t leave home without it. In fact, you can’t get anywhere without it—whether you’re trying to bring about political change, compose music, send a robot to Mars, or merely make your way across a room. You can’t even Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! - Movement’
I love crochet. I spent a huge number of hours doing it when I was young, and only in later years did I realize that the same things that attracted it to me then are the same things that drive and motivate a lot of my research interests. (I many have mentioned this before, but it’s worth saying again).
USC has launched a Bachelor’s degree in video games. I know what you’re thinking. Stop it! No, civilisation is not doomed. (Image on right grabbed from Chip Chick). In fact, this could be rather wonderful, as it will create the opportunity to develop the potential of this medium in so many wonderful ways. It will not be about kids sitting there blowing up stuff and shooting up people. Why do I say this?
I remind you that in 1929 USC founded the first film school (at least in the USA)…. I imagine that people turned up their noses at this. Film is now recognized as a major art form, and a powerful tool for education and expression, with USC continuing to lead the pack in educating artists, visionaries and technicians in that area, feeding the local Industry and well beyond.
Tomorrow afternoon at 4:00pm there’s be an interesting conversation on campus for sure. It’ll be between the science writer and journalist KC Cole and the actor Alan Alda. He’s such an interesting person, and (among other things) currently presents Scientific American Frontiers. 
I noticed last week that the December issue of the magazine 
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 
From a shockingly* effective retrospective exhibit of the fluorescent light works of Dan Flavin, now on at LACMA. (The image on the right with a person next to a similarly-sized piece is to give you a sense of scale.)
USC has launched a Bachelor’s degree in video games. I know what you’re thinking. Stop it! No, civilisation is not doomed. (Image on right grabbed from