Category Archives: music

Unambiguously Good

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Libby Lavella, performing at at Categorically Not! 8th June 2008

Libby Lavella, performing at Categorically Not! 8th June 2008

Tonight’s Categorically Not! event was rather good fun, and interesting too. There were three excellent presentations under the theme “Ambiguity”. (See here.) K. C. Cole did a great job in bringing these people together (and of course in acting as M. C. on the night).

Bart Kosko did a great job talking principally about “fuzzy” mathematics, contrasting it with more binary (if you like) systems of logic. I think that his overview was great, and he talked about all the grey areas in logic and questions of epistemology where a “fuzzy” system is needed. (The question of whether a door is […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Ambiguity

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The next Categorically Not! is on Sunday June 8th. 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 Ambiguity. Here’s the description from K C Cole:

Nature loves ambiguity, even if human nature doesn’t. What exactly is a species? Where exactly is that subatomic particle? When did life begin? How do genes influence behavior? Why does music move us? What does that poem mean? What color is white? Is that guy flirting with me, or not? The answers are often far more indeterminate than we’d like to think. Heck, we still don’t know why the chicken crossed the road. Or what the meaning of is is.

Speakers at Categorically Not! - June 8th 2008

Bart Kosko, USC Professor of Engineering, attorney and author of best-selling books Fuzzy Thinking, Noise, and Heaven in a Chip will tell us how fuzzy math

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Good Company

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Brian May. Photo from: http://www.guitar-poll.com/BM.phpHey, 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.

As a side note, I was a huge fan of his during my middle to late teenage years and early 20s, and […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Musical Interlude

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Stephon Alexander with saxophone

Cosmologist Stephon Alexander, with saxophone.

A snapshot from last Friday night (a week ago). There was no organized meal from the conference that night, and so people were left to their own devices to explore the chilly embrace of Washington DC. With the group of people that I was with, music emerged after dinner. Here is cosmologist Stephon Alexander (some of you may know him from his blogging days as part of the Quantum Diaries project.) with his saxophone. He’s in the middle of explaining tritone substitutions to two young […] Click to continue reading this post →

Energized

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nicholas payton

Nicholas Payton came to town last Wednesday. For me, this means drop everything and go and hear him play. Two happy coincidences took place as well, contributing to making it a bit more special. The first was that my friend and colleague from UBC, Moshe Rozali (who sometimes comments here on the blog) was visiting to give a seminar that day. As I’ve been discovering (as a result of this blog more than anything else) we are very much in the same place when it comes to music, books and many things, and so it was just fantastic to be able to take him along. The second was that my friend of many years, cosmologist Marc Kamionkowski, got in touch just on the off-chance by email (I’d not seen him in many months) to ask if I knew if there was any good jazz coming to town! Marc and I have shared our love of Jazz for about 16 years now, going back to our days of meeting up in New York together at various Jazz clubs. So the three of us sat there and enjoyed the concert together. It was at the Jazz Bakery (to which you’ve possibly read me refer here before), and since I’ve not been there in a while, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they’ve replaced the plastic picnic chairs with some more comfortable padded ones. Quite an improvement.

Payton was joined by four excellent musicians, who were just great too: Russell […] Click to continue reading this post →

Nick Halmagyi: Why I do Science

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Nick HalmagyiI’m pleased to introduce a guest blogger today. It’s Nick Halmagyi, who you might have seen comment here from time to time. Nick is a postdoctoral researcher in Theoretical Physics, currently at the Enrico Fermi Institute in Chicago. Before that, he was a graduate student in our High Energy Physics group at USC, which is where I met him. Nick wrote his reflections below for Seed, and he reproduces a version of it (with permission – see details below*) here. I hope you enjoy it.

-cvj

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Theoretical physics is a tough subject. Just one example of how hard things can get is when you ramp up the energy density of a system, the physics used to describe the system itself starts to change. At first it may be a small tweak in the parameters that appear in the equations (the electric charge for example), but then there can be large, abrupt transitions.

The biggest system we study is the universe, and immediately after the big bang all of its energy occupied a tiny region of space. Back then, the energy density was enormous, and as the universe grew over time it underwent several transitions before it became what we now observe.

I’m a theoretical physicist, in part, because I relish the challenge of studying the entire […] Click to continue reading this post →

Friday Night Wanderings

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It was one of those Friday nights when I was in the mood to get out of the house, but not entirely sure what to get out to. “Out” was more important than “where”, you see. Wanted to do a bit of thinking and to relax and let the heavy week of too many meetings fall away from my shoulders.

In the end, I did a combination of things. After my mood, followed by my at charlie o’s. John Beasley, Nolan Shaheed, Dave Carpenter, Roy McCurdytrajectory, turned away from Pasadena (where I was planning to see Persepolis, as was my original plan – I’ll do it later… really want to see that film) at about 10:30pm I arrived in the Valley and hung out at Charlie O’s which is one of the more happening of the neighbourhoody jazz clubs in LA. (Sadly, in this context, “happening” by LA late night standards means that there’s more than about nine people present.)

There’s always something on each night and you can just walk in and sit at the bar to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Oliver Sacks on Music

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Oliver Sacks must have a new book out or something*. I’ve heard him twice in as many days in radio pieces, and that usually means only one thing. He’s always an interesting interviewee, and this time the focus is on music. The first piece I heard was one of those amusingly produced pieces by Robert Krulwich, on NPR’d Morning Edition. It was all about people who essentially hallucinate music – it spontaneously appears in their ears and there’s often nothing they can do about it. The audio for the piece can be heard here. It was quite a good piece and I recommend it.

The next thing I heard was on the BBC World Service (my usual late night listening) the segment called “The Interview”. This is a much longer piece, talking about the role of […] Click to continue reading this post →

Christmas – Birth and Death – Oscar Peterson

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Well, somewhere in the Holiday Season comes Christmas, and somewhere in there is some celebration of a new life. On the other hand, the great pianist Oscar Peterson died the day before Christmas Eve. (See an AP story/obituary here, for example.) At about 6:00pm on Christmas Eve, I usually pronounce it time to have the first strong drink of the evening, and declare Christmas as having begun (defying everyone else who seem to want to start it earlier every year) by playing Carols, and other relevant music, the Christmas tree having been erected. It was again so this year, and I dug out my only “Christmas CD” and put it on. The first track was – of course – the excellent version of Thad Jones’ “A Child is Born” , by Oscar Peterson. In order to share this with you, I thought I’d see if perhaps the man himself might be playing it somewhere on YouTube, but was unable to find it. However, someone else was playing the piece, styling it after and reproducing Oscar Peterson’s famous version, and so I give you – with warm wishes for Christmas and the New Year – “A Child is Born”, Oscar Peterson’s version, channeled through the playing of an unknown (to me) pianist. (Hang on for some actual Peterson in a mo’):



Oscar Peterson was simply amazing, and (especially, for me, as an accompanist to several singers I love) he brought me a huge amount of musical joy, and it is sad to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Beginnings

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Bob Miller at Categorically Not!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.

categorically not! Beginnings Speakers

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The DAMTP

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Since everything seems to be degenerating all too rapidly into holiday mood (giant Santas and huge batteries of lights and so forth have started appearing in my neighbourhood1 … students are leaving early to go home for Thanksgiving…which is this Thursday, by the way), this year I’ve decided to give in rather than resist. So my first holiday act of the year was to let my class know this morning that I won’t hold a Wednesday class after all. They must agree to do the homework and other practice I assign, and to use that hour (when it comes) to curl up with and start a new novel of their choosing1. My second holiday act is to get everyone singing. Yes. Singing.

What shall we sing?

Well, Oliver Rosten has written a song that’s quite appropriate, since it is related to physics and mathematics, in a way. It’s about an aspect of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge, so I’ll be listening out for especially enthusiastic singing from you readers over there (you know who you are), ok?!

I’ll steal the words from his site by way of explanation, followed by the song itself. The tune should be familiar to many. Let me/him know what you think in the comments (be sure to close your office door the first time around until you get the rhythm right):

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’T Ain’t Natural

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Josh Ritter ConcertThe photos record scenes from an excellent use of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum’s large exhibition halls after hours: Live music. (They’re not super-great – I only had my phone with me.)

A friend took me as a guest to a filming of Josh Ritter and his band for a TV show. Lots of Lovely Bones everywhere*, stuffed animals, loud (but not too loud) good music (I’d not really listened to Ritter before – hey, not bad at all), and free martinis on tap (surprisingly not watered down!) from Grey Goose. How could I not go?

(You can see the exhibit hall (North American Mammals, I think) with the activity in the distance between the bones of Mr/Ms Triceratops here.)

If you’ve never been the the Natural History Museum here before and you are in LA, please go along. It’s really very good indeed. As an incentive, you can go to the new spider pavillion and wander around with live spiders everywhere. (What’s that? That’s not an incentive? I see…Well, there’s lots to see besides rubbing shoulders with spiders, from dinosaurs, mammals and birds to wonderful gemstones and minerals…) I’m thinking of going to check it out some time, and maybe report back here on the blog about it some time.

Josh Ritter Concert

This event is sort of typical of LA, in both good and bad ways. There are all these […] Click to continue reading this post →