Category Archives: fun

RoboCup

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So on Wednesday night while cooking dinner I was listening with half an ear to Talk of the Nation on NPR, and at some point found that I was listening to a discussion about Robots. They were talking to Lee Gutkind about his new book about Robots, and about the future, and robots as tools, and interfacing with robots and so forth. All very interesting, all bruno robot made somewhat more engaging by the very deliberate way the interviewee spoke, taking great care with every sentence he uttered. This feat rather kept my attention more than the material, which I’ll hasten to add was not uninteresting -and certainly a topic I spent a lot of my youth dreaming about especially given all the Asimov books I used to devour- but not my focus was elsewhere I suppose. You can listen to the program here, and it is all certainly worth thinking about, it is a very serious and important topic, and robots (although mostly not in the form we see in our dramas on tv and in the cinema) may well dominate our society the way computers have become so central to us right now… so go right ahead and listen to what he has to say.

What finally grabbed me, this time, was not the serious “issue” material. It was this: […] Click to continue reading this post →

When Worlds Collide, II

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I think I ought to explain, as promised, why I am in New York. The first thing to mention is that I wrote the previous post in this miniseries (it was written on a flight to Dublin, and finally posted when I returned) before I knew about any of what I’m about to tell you, so it is rather funny to me…

casino royale shoot

The week that I returned from Dublin I noticed a phone message from an editor of a magazine asking me to return their call. A couple of days later I learned what it was about. It’s a magazine that largely focuses on buzz about people and projects in the entertainment and fashion industry – Music (R&B, Hip Hop mostly), Movies and TV, etc., as far as I can tell, along with some coverage of parts of the business world. Its readership is mostly younger African American males, I think. As far as I can tell, the intention is not to be about those things in particular, but it is largely reflecting the interests of the readership it is targeted at. It’s a major product, jumping out at you immediately when you are in the magazine store (the striking picture of a woman on the front helps it grab your attention, of course).

Each year, the magazine does a special issue featuring a group of individuals who are doing “major things” in the industries I mentioned above. It is a combination of a focus on new talent that’s about to become more widely known, or just bringing to readers’ attention the existence of some of the people who are making significant impact in what they’re doing.

Somehow – I do not know how – they got my name. It turns out that they spent some time reading some of things I’ve written here at Asymptotia too. Now normally, you’d expect things to stop at that point, but in fact it did not. They decided to broaden things out a bit and include me (if I was willing) in this year’s feature issue.

I thought about it for a day. It is quite an honour to be approached, and I’m also impressed that the magazine’s editors are being creative in this way (it would be easy […] Click to continue reading this post →

Grindhouse Marathon

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I just learned of this festival, starting tonight at the New Beverly Cinema. I thought I should tell you about it in case you’re able to go. Also, it’s just fun to remember some of the movies in this genre, or some of the modern movies that celebrate, quote from, or were otherwise influenced by them. The festival should be a lot of fun!

It’s a Quentin Tarantino project, and there’s more at the cinema’s website, and an excellent post about it at the blog “Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule”, which early on has this excellent paragraph:

the mack posterThe director has responded to the New Beverly’s generosity by lining up a gut-bucket cornucopia of authentic grindhouse trash cinema to celebrate not only his supermanchu poster upcoming movie, but the whole experience of seeing sleazy cinema classics in the only movie house left in L.A. (outside of the Vine on Hollywood Boulevard) that feels physically, spatially and, yes, spiritually related to the downtown second-run trash palaces that fed Tarantino’s (and everyone else’s) desire for this kind of rotgut, low-rent fun to begin with.

…and then goes on to do a wonderful thing by finding as many of the original movie posters (or related artwork) for each movie. It’s great to look at, and there’s a rather […] Click to continue reading this post →

New Directions in Real Estate?

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keats real estate imageOn NPR’s finance programme Marketplace yesterday, there was a somewhat unusual piece. It seems that conceptual artist Jonathan Keats is making some money by selling the extra dimensional rights to various properties in San Francisco! (You can see him at the Modernism Gallery there1).

Since there’s no known way to build on or otherwise occupy this new extra dimensional property (let me explain a bit further in an enormous footnote2), the prices are awfully reasonable. Here’s a transcript of a transaction that I found on their website. Reporter Nathaneal Johnson is observing a sale to punters Oscar Villalon and Mary Ladd:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Point of View, I

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amy parishTomorrow sees the next in the series of events here on the USC campus that science writer KC Cole and I have arranged. They’re in the style of the Categorically Not! events I tell you about from time to time (held each month over at the Santa Monica Art Studios) but are over on the USC campus instead, amy wilentzas part of the Provost’s Visions and Voices events. You can read more in the links at the end of this post.

The theme is “Point of View”, and we’ll have an anthropologist, a journalist, and a film maker each give their take on the topic. Here’s an extract from KC’s poster about tomorrow’s event (held at 7:00pm at the Gin Wong Conference Center here on the USC campus): […] Click to continue reading this post →

Those Fun Paper Titles

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Scanning the listings on the arxiv just now, I found what has to be the best paper title I’ve seen for a while:

“Would Bohr be born if Bohm were born before Born?”

It is a paper by H. Nikolic, in the history of physics classification, and I have not read it, but I love the title. It’s brilliant!

This reminds me of the process that happens to me sometimes when I’m working on a research project. I suddenly think of a really great title, and then get excited about finishing the project so that I can write the paper with that title! (You’ll have noticed that I do that with some of my blog posts too.) It’s often just a nice turn of phrase, like […] Click to continue reading this post →

Unexpectedly On YouTube

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third law jet demoI don’t know why this possibility did not occur to me before. So let me give you a heads up if you do demos in your lectures. In Physics 100 (which I taught last semester) and in Astro 100 especially, we do a lot of demos to demonstrate various physics concepts. I did a post on the Newton’s third law jet propulsion demo some time ago (linked photo right). My colleague Ed Rhodes did this same demo in his Astro 100 class.

He received an email from one of the students in the class recently saying “Congratulations, you’ve been YouTubed…”.

Apparently, one of the students in the class used his or her mobile phone camera to […] Click to continue reading this post →

What Inspired You?

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It’s always interesting to hear from others about what set them on the path they’re on, no matter what career path that is. I just read Chanda’s guest post on the matter over at Backreaction. Chanda is a theoretical physicist in training, and so from my point of view it … Click to continue reading this post →

Hooking Up Manifolds

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lorenz manifold

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).

It’s the love of patterns, plain and simple. If your child -of whetever gender- gets […] Click to continue reading this post →

Last of the First

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The other day, in a nice cafe on the boardwalk at Venice beach, I was working with Veselin Filev, a student of mine, on a paper that he would later submit to the arXiv. The end of the year was approaching and I wandered off into some irrelevant anecdote or other (as I am wont to do), explaining to him a bit about little traditions concerning the arXiv, from the “old days”. I mentioned in passing that one last tradition will come to an end because the numbering system for papers will all change sometime this year (apparently the mathematicians are close to producing too many papers in each month – more than the 1000 the system can handle1.)

I explained that in days of yore, some people would try to get the very first paper of the year, so that they would have a rather special number, of the form hep-th/XX01001, where XX denotes the year. By far the coolest of these was […] Click to continue reading this post →