I spent an awful lot of time as a child and teenager tinkering with various projects. I’d have lots of projects on at any one time, brewing in my head for a while, and making their way to 
notebooks and scraps of paper, then to elaborate drawings showing the technical details, and ultimately to some sort of realization in the real work, some percentage of the time. In the Summer time, I would probably have one Big Project and that would occupy my thoughts for a great deal of time, and would involve a lot of hiding away doing things. Lots of these projects would involve electronics (increasingly as time went by and I Learned more and my various part time jobs could support more) and there’d be lots of tinkering with all sorts of items, and a constant feature would be the soldering iron, one not so different from the one that you see above right.
Well, one of the many things I liked about the Iron Man movie (yes, I was right there to Continue reading ‘Ferrous Thoughts’
Three things:
(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’
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.
Continue reading ‘I’m Just Driver’
A commenter asked how the aforementioned movie viewing and panel discussion went on Friday (movie: Jumper), and so I thought expand a bit on the answer I gave:
___________________________________________________________________________________
It went very well. We were at the School of Cinematic Arts, at USC. We had a full house in the Norris Theatre, which was great to see. Most of the audience was students from the SCA, I think, with some of the faculty present, and people from the film’s parent studio, and several others. For the panel, present were two of the film’s producers, the visual effects supervisor, costume supervisor, production designer… basically, the perfect people to have a discussion with about the physics! I won’t try to list all names since I did not catch all of them and don’t want to mis-credit people for being there who weren’t.
Teleportation physics aside for a moment, I’m very impressed with how they realized Continue reading ‘Tales From the Industry XVII: Jump Thoughts’
No, not spoiler in that sense. Doug Liman’s new action movie “Jumper” is all about teleportation, you see, and one of the questions that’s going to be on people’s minds is something like “Is teleportation really possible, or is it just some silly science fiction thing?”. I like it when such questions come up, and I like trying to answer them too.
This time I get to do it officially, since Doug Liman’s people are doing a private screening of the film this evening and there’ll be a panel of some of the film’s creators and a scientist for questions and answers afterward. I’ll be the scientist.
The downside is that I’ll be the bad guy of the evening by having to pour a bit of cold water on some of the flights of fancy. The spoiler, you see, as in spoilsport. The upside (besides, you know, free movie) is that I’ll maybe get to explain some really Continue reading ‘Movie Spoiler?’
Readers in New York… Uh… Are you ok? Leave a comment to let me know that you and the city are still there, ok?
Just got back from seeing Cloverfield. Quite well done, on balance. They do a great job of mocking up what it would be like to be just an ordinary citizen during your standard city-under-attack scenario. Routine falls apart, people are scared, fighter jets scream by low and fast overhead, there’s only fragments of information about what’s happening, and you find yourself wondering why on earth we build these tall buildings anyway… Yes, the filmmakers did a very Continue reading ‘Just Checking on New York’
So while you have a look at the following enthusiastic and amusing discussion about how far the Balrog and Gandalf must have fallen (in the film version of the Two Towers), involving discussions of terminal velocities and Balrog profile approximations for air resistance estimates (and so forth)…
(links here, here and here*)
…ask yourself why on earth nobody in the discussion (as far as I can tell from a quick Continue reading ‘Gandalf, Balrog, Physics…’
So yesterday at Pinewood Studios they announced the name of the upcoming second James Bond film in the new series that (excellently, in my opinion) re-envisions the Bond movie universe. Last year’s first one was “Casino Royale”, you may recall. Did you hear what the next one will be called?
Continue reading ‘Planck Meets Fleming’
The next Categorically Not! is on Sunday January 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. (Above right and left: Reza Aslan speaking on the origin of various ideas in Religion at the event entitled “Beginnings” on 16th December, 2007. Click right one for larger view.)
The theme this month is Science Goes Hollywood. Here’s the description from K C Cole:
Despite our prejudices to the contrary, Hollywood and Science have a lot to say to each other. Take special effects: Nothing Disney dreams up can Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! - Science Goes Hollywood’
So I took my mum and my brother (passing through on his way to the CES) to the new Arclight (Sherman Oaks) to see “I Am Legend” last night. I’ll admit that it has some things going for it. Overall it is not the disaster one might expect, given the direction in which big-budget “science-fiction” projects like this headed by action stars usually go. Furthermore, it might be said to be a bit of progress to have the main character be a scientist, and one of African descent as well, although I’d have been more impressed to see the scientist character actually using the scientific method - inference, deduction, hypothesis testing. The placeholder for being a scientist here was still the usual - surround the character with fancy equipment, give them glasses and a lab coat, and get them saying a few sciencey-sounding things. Hollywood - please listen up: That’s not what science is!!
So it was basically an action movie with more than the usual puddle’s worth of emotional depth, for a change. Very good performances and so forth and more or less well put together. It did not have the feeling of being written by committee, and so forth. So worth a look.
On the other hand, one main thing has been bugging me all day. If the rabid infected Continue reading ‘I Am Cranky’
On Friday after a very busy week (the last teaching week of the semester), I decided to go to a 21+ screening at the Arclight. This splendid event is held in a special part of the Arclight complex which means that you can buy a cocktail (gin and tonic in my case, made with Tanqueray No. Ten) and wander into the movie theatre with it and relax in a comfy chair and watch a movie for two hours.
Hmm… Sounds good. Was good. Why don’t I do this every Friday?
What I saw was about multiple universes and particle physics. Oh, and fighting polar bears.
Continue reading ‘Odd Direction For Compass’
Astounding. I can’t get over how amazing it was. I’m stunned, just stunned.
What am I talking about? No, it is not some new experiment I’ve done in my lair downstairs to somehow test out whether there are extra dimensions. It is something else. Something that manages to switch on and exploit an extra dimension with such daring and abandon that one sees things much closer to the way Nature intended. The results are rather spectacular!
Continue reading ‘I’ve Seen an Extra Dimension’
Well, that was a bit of an odd day. Let me explain.
An email and then a call with a producer at Comedy Central last week led me to the (historic) Hollywood Center Studios today. I was to do an appearance in a little comedy “bit” that will be part of a show to air next year. They wanted scientists for a fun piece, but I won’t say what they were doing with us since I don’t know if they’d like it revealed before airing (probably not). It’s a new show too, with some very well known and smart comedians on it. I’ll tell you more when I can. All I can say is that it looks as Continue reading ‘Tales From The Industry, XV - Coincident Science Bloggers’
Since I’ve maybe done a bad thing and spoken ill of a TV show in which I took part (I may never make an unpaid appearance as a talking head in this town again), I’ll try to set the balance right with this important finding reported recently in the Onion:
Continue reading ‘Everybody Loves Everybody Here’
I’ve met some striking writers in this town, but these are easily the best so far:
Writers on strike in Hollywood at the Sunset Gower Studios. (This is the Sunset Blvd entrance to parking. Remarkably, it was reported that earlier today at one of these entrances, someone on the production/editing staff deliberately ran over one of the striking writers in his car to gain access to the building.)
I’m sorry. It is a poor opening pun but I could not resist. I was rather excited this morning as I got an email from someone who’s working on a science documentary show I was reading a script for and the subject was “HELP!”. I was wondering if it had something to do with the strike. The show will air not too long from now and I began to Continue reading ‘Struck’
The next Categorically Not! is Sunday October 7th. 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: Edward Murray performing on the harpsichord, in the event with the theme “Strings”.)
The theme this month is Small Differences Here’s the description from K C Cole:
Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! - Small Differences’
in Los Angeles,
academia,
black people in science,
environment,
film,
gardening,
minorities in science,
miscellany,
movies,
nature,
personal,
science,
science and society,
science education,
science in drama,
science in the media,
television and
women in science .
I’ll let you know.
Huh? Today, I’ve to think about two things I have to talk about over the next couple of days. I’ve to give a physics seminar on Thursday at UCSB, but more urgently, I have to think about What Matters To Me and Why. Why? This is because in the Spring I agreed to be one of the presenters of the four-times-a-semester USC event of the same title, hosted by the Center for Religious Life. This excellent series is run by Rabbi Susan Laemmle, the Dean of Religious Life, with a committee of students. Here’s how it is supposed to work (extract from their site):
At each WMMW session, the featured guest spends about twenty minutes addressing the topic “What Matters to Me and Why,” and then the floor is opened to informal dialogue for the remainder of the hour. Just as there is no one way to address the topic, so there will be no one direction in which dialogue will proceed. The student contact from the WMMW committee introduces the speaker and makes sure that the session goes forward in a professional yet friendly manner. An indirect purpose of WMMW is to maintain an arena in which people can talk about important, personally charged questions in an open, mutually respectful way.
A typical session is described here. This is going to be a tough one. Not because nothing matters to me but because everything seems to matter, and I cannot effectively rank these things to say what matters most in any way. I only learned yesterday that I only have about 20 minutes to say what it is that matters. This either makes things harder or easier, I can’t decide yet. Probably harder. Now I really have to think.
I jokingly thought a few months ago that I ought to just look at my last few blog posts the day before and just talk about what’s in those. What can I see… Well, there’s public transport, community and the environment, composting and gardening, science and television (and scientific honesty). Not bad. (Good thing I did not do that post on dating. Probably not a good topic for WMMW…) I can probably weave something out of those. Do I blog about those things by accident, or because there are some themes there that are being brought out? What are the big themes in those then? Random scattered thoughts follow….
Continue reading ‘What Matters?’
Drat.
Well, maybe on the next flyby. Flyby page here. AP (via Yahoo) story by Alicia Chang here. Interesting extracts:
The international Cassini spacecraft went into safe mode this week after successfully passing over a Saturn moon that was the mysterious destination of a deep-space faring astronaut in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
..and intriguingly:
Continue reading ‘Monolith Not Spotted, Yet’
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!’
Let’s talk about aliens. I don’t mean people coming across the borders of whatever your country happens to be (although I did giggle a decade ago when I was given an official “alien number” by the powers that be back then - though I always regretted bypassing the “alien with extraordinary ability” status that the O1 visa gives you), I mean living creatures from beyond planet earth (it’s also interesting to consider the possibility that the seeds for life on earth may also have come from elsewhere).
It’s one of my favourite topics to consider, which is why I like to follow a lot of the remarkable things we are learning about our neighbouring planets (and other bodies like moons, asteroids, comets, and, yes minor planets like our old friend Pluto), and of course the ever-increasing variety of extra-solar planets (the ones we are discovering orbiting other stars). Overall, it gives one the sense that it is overwhelmingly likely that we are not alone (to use the tired old phrase), which to me is tremendously exciting.
I think we’ll find lots of compelling evidence that there’s lots of simple life on other bodies relatively soon, and I think that when people on the street hear of this, they’ll find it interesting enough. But I suspect that this will completely different to an Continue reading ‘They’re Out There (Probably)’
So you’ve already read my opinion about the Bourne Ultimatum after I returned from seeing it on the opening night - (In short, it’s just brilliant!) Well here’s something related that is rather funny, especially if you are a football (soccer) fan, although that is not necessary (I have little or no interest in it myself).
If you don’t already listen to Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo every week (most conveniently via their podcast), let me say right away that you should, since it is just an excellent and often highly entertaining discussion of film and movie releases. As a film reviewer, Kermode is not as good with words as, say, the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane (although it is not a fair comparison - the media are different), but his rants can be just great to listen to when he truly hates (and occasionally loves) something -whether you agree with him or not. Simon Mayo is sometimes thought of as his sidekick in this duo, but he’s really the anchor of the whole thing (and often the pragmatic link back to the everyday that keeps the whole show rooted), and from time to time the focus shifts to him. He’s also into his sports, while Kermode is not, which also makes for an amusing backdrop since the broadcast (on Radio 5 Live) is usually done live from some sporting context or other, which takes a sort of backseat role while they talk about movies. Anyway, it is an excellent podcast to listen to every week. I highly recommend it. You can find it on iTunes. (They also have started doing occasional video podcasts too, but the thing to go for is the radio show - another convenience of it is the fact that you can keep the podcast until after you’ve seen the films if you like (this is what I usually do - I mostly prefer to not hear anything about a film before I see it), and then listen to it and shout at Mark if you so desire.)
As I mentioned, Mayo is a big sports fan, and his team, Tottenham, apparently got slaughtered by Crystal Palace and are now at the bottom of the premier league (can you tell I’m faking this and I’ve no idea what I’m talking about?) The next day, he’s interviewing (not with Kermode though) the director Paul Greengrass and the actor Matt Damon (both of the Bourne Continue reading ‘Live Radio Footie Film Fun’
(Shooting stars, that is. In other words, meteors. I’ll get to them eventually [or jump].)
The evening started with a 10:15pm movie at the Arclight. I saw the excellent biopic “Talk to Me”, (all about Petey Green and his manager Dewey Hughes) which 
happened to star two actors whose work I like a great deal, Don Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor, who both seem to grow and get better and stronger with every performance. I could be very wrong, but they’re also both among that (much) shorter list of actors who seem to me like people it would be interesting to get to know and talk to as well (missed a chance earlier this year with the latter, who was rumoured to be one of the people they were trying to get to take part in that New York shoot for King Magazine I told you about here and here).
Then, at 12:30am I wandered over to my “local” (well, they treat me like one, which is good), and favourite English pub outside of England - the Cat and Fiddle. Said hi to and chatted briefly with the guy at the door (about Stephen 
Donaldson books, of all things) and then ordered my customary thirst-quenching Hoegaarden and sat in the lovely courtyard for a while, reading some detailed notes of a series of what turned out to be startlingly excellent computations by my student Jeff Pennington. (Well, I don’t know if I should not call him my student any more. He’s graduated now and is off to do graduate work up North.) The Cat was relatively quiet (as it can be late on a Sunday night - it’s a very conservative town when it comes to staying up late; my theory is that it is partly because of all those early starts for shoots - and everybody seems to be connected to the Industry in some way), although I did get treated to the conversations of a group of people at the table near my bench. It seemed that all of a sudden, I was immersed in an episode of Entourage. The five women, dressed in severe (for a Sunday night) regulation “high powered 30-something person out on the town in Hollywood” outfits - more of the scary heel height and mercifully less flesh than the 10 years younger equivalent - seemed to be unabashedly discussing their various liaisons with members of the opposite sex, and two of the men from the group stepped aside (in my direction) to have a conversation about “the deal”, where one guy seemed to be seeking reassurance that he could pull off asking someone for 60 million. Ah, yes. It’s good to be back. Been several weeks since I intersected with this stuff.
The next stop - meteors. There’s nothing like a romantic evening under the stars - even if it’s a solo outing. I went to Runyon Canyon Park of course, getting there at about 1:45am. As I’ve mentioned before, it is another of those LA gems that most Continue reading ‘Stargazing’
… for this year, anyway. The evening out ended with a trip to my primary hideout* of this year’s visit, the nature of which you can deduce from the photo. The barkeep at The Little Nell, Michelle, really knows how to make a decent gin gimlet. I asked for it Continue reading ‘Last Night in Aspen’
As you may know from some of my earlier writings, I dream of the day when science is just as much a part of the typical person’s conversation as, say, the latest antics of Paris Hilton. This is not just because I happen to be a scientist, but because we’re increasingly becoming less of a democratic society when on the one hand there are more and more issues dominating our lives that are basically science issues (energy sources, aids and cancer research, stem cells, global warming, air and water quality, food safety, etc) and on the other hand science is still largely feared, and left as the province of the “geek”, the “nerd”, and all those other select few people in business and politics who are essentially controlling our everyday lives by being handed the scientific reins of society. So, as part of reversing that trend and restoring equal opportunity in the broadest sense, I like to think that we can have increased comfort with science concepts and images infiltrating and enriching our everyday language.
I was delighted therefore to see (a couple of months ago now) the poster campaign of the Los Angeles Film Festival for 2007. It is a perfect example from that society that lives in my dream. It unselfconsciously has encapsulated the two big themes they wanted to convey quite marvellously. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that it is about film (you don’t even need the rest of the poster to tell you this) as there is the film reel, and on the other hand, they want to remind you without a doubt that this is a land of film, and they did this with a simple slogan that put to rest any doubts about their intent in twisting the reel to bring out a double helix structure: “It’s in our DNA”. Excellent. I’d like to shake the hand of the designer(s) who came up with this. (Read a bit about the DNA molecule -which contains our biology’s “blueprint”- and its double helix structure at the Nobel Prize site.)
Here is the detail from one of their posters that I snipped from their website:
Continue reading ‘DNA on Sunset’
To a first approximation, this will not be funny at all to any of you:
I giggled at it, I will confess. I can never get enough insertions of gerbes into a sentence. There’s just something about the total abstractness of the mathematical Continue reading ‘A Bundle of Laughs?’
Last week, Friday night was movie night. (Actually, so was Saturday night, but that’s another story.) The venue: The wonderful Vista theatre, one of the great old movie palaces. The movie: Grindhouse. Why? See title (let’s be honest here), and I love well made terrible films (if you see what I mean) but also because I really do enjoy (overall) Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue1.
To get to the Tarantino segment (a movie called “Death Proof”), you have to wade through Robert Rodriguez’ “Planet Terror”, the first part of the double bill. This is a very well done (but maybe half an hour too long?) celebration of the Grindhouse spirit, complete with missing reels, scratchy film stock with burnt out patches, the works. (Clever idea to put in the technical difficulties - including using a missing reel excuse at a pivotal moment - the second film uses that latter joke too). The level of humour was very high indeed, through all the remarkable and cartoonish slime and gore… It was just the perfect venue that I (with two other friends) had chosen to see this in: Friday night at the Vista with an appreciative Silver Lake/Los Feliz crowd (from the neighbourhood).
Combine Planet Terror iwht the long and marvelously terrible spoof trailer for the movie “Machete”, and that would have been a fun night out on its own. But Planet Terror ended, everyone took a deep breath, and the opening credits Tarantinos’ “Death Proof” began to roll.
Continue reading ‘Because Everyone Wants to see the Woman with the Gun for a Leg’
Saturday night, after a quick trip to catch the end of a pleasant reception down at the Santa Monica Art Studios (they’re featuring a new set of artists), I went to the Arclight (hurrah! - it’s been a while) and saw a quite wonderful film: Mira Nair’s “The Namesake”.
I laughed and cried in turn at the joy and the sadness of it. It’s a very simple film about so many key things, explored marvelously: Family, home, leaving home, leaving your country, loss of family, love, loneliness, joy, togetherness, parents, children, youth, age, aging…
I thoroughly enjoyed it. Mira Nair has done it again, and the performances are wonderful, too. The film grabs you and tugs you in within the first few seconds of the start, engages you with great characters, and holds you close right through the end.
-cvj
