Asymptotia

Phil over at Bad Astronomy has posted about my childhood cradle (although I am sure he does not know that), the (still beautiful) island of Montserrat. I grew up there for ten years from ages 4 to 14. Many years later, in 1997, a volcano erupted there (in the “Soufrière Hills”) and devastated much of the Southern part (where I grew up) of the island wiping out almost all traces of where I lived. Much of the stuff of my childhood memories is buried under tens of feet of ash. In my more tender moments, this thought still brings me to tears, actually. (Yes, of course I do know that it is much more devastating for those whose lives it affects due to their living there in the present.) On a side note, I always find it slightly chilling that the mountain that erupted was one of a pair that I used to love to sit on a giant rock and stare at, for long periods, when I was in a contemplative mood (as I often was) when I was young. Furthermore, two weeks before the eruption I was actually visiting the island for the first time since I’d left it as a child. And guess what I did? One day I was in a foul mood over an issue, and I went and sat on that rock again and while brooding, looked over at the mountain for a long spell. (Just in case, I try not to get too angry these days… )

It turns out that the volcano has continued to rumble and burp over all these years, sometimes dangerously, with a growing dome that forms on top of the whole Continue reading ‘Collapse Results From Space’

Yes, I know: (1) Large head doesn’t make one smarter, but it was just so I could use the post title. (Maybe one or two of you see where it comes from…) (2) The final resort of a busy blogger: - cute animal pictures. Well, I already regularly share pictures with you concerning what I had for dinner, so no change there.

This is Yun Zi, (”Son of Cloud” I hear) who arrived in the public eye (at five months Continue reading ‘Smarter than the Average Panda?’

A shot (click for slightly larger view) from a lovely afternoon walking on the beach recently…

Happy Holidays, one and all!

-cvj

I always like an excuse to look for blue skies, and to have others look too, even in the worst of times. I had a great reason to do it today.

Early this morning before sunrise I settled down to write my ten o’clock lecture for my Electricity and Magnetism class. On Tuesday I had ended with a computation that is the essence of the reason the sky is blue, which is a nice enough thing to talk about, but today I wanted to go more in depth on the whole thing, and show that you can in a few steps show that the blueness has a particular pattern to it. I wrote out the final equations in a few steps and looked at them for a moment or two and realized that with the sun rising at that very moment, it was the perfect situation to have! So I went outside to enjoy the beautiful Autumn day and the beauty there is in seeing an equation writ large in the sky - and it really was all there.

It is particularly at times like this that one remembers why it is that it is hard not to just love Physics! (I hope you’ll forgive my unashamed love of what I do.)

Here is the sky I saw, looking toward sunrise, and directly in the opposite direction:

Oh, you’re wondering what I am talking about..? Why is the sky blue? What pattern in the sky? Thanks for asking! There are two things I’m looking at. First, light from the Continue reading ‘Blue Skies…’

Following hot on the heels of Margaret Atwood coming to town last week (over at UCLA), we have A. S. Byatt over at USC today! Very exciting. It is actually partly one of our College Commons events as well, and last week as a College Commons event (with a Darwin tinge) we had a viewing of the film of her book Angels and Insects, which I thought was really excellent!

Her lecture is entitled: “The Novel as Natural History”, (and will resonate with some of the themes I talked about in my report on the CC event about Collections) and I expect it is going to be quite wonderful. Details here, and the blurb goes:

Continue reading ‘A. S. Byatt’

It has been too long since I have seen rain here. Many months, in fact. Today’s rain is very welcome indeed. Also welcome has been the opportunity to feel enough of a Continue reading ‘At Last…’

Just went to a marvellous talk by Jane Goodall here on the USC campus, in Bovard auditorium. She’s signing her new book as we speak! Among the many things she said, she emphasized one of my favourite themes with regards the environment (and so many other things, like community, education, etc): Act locally.

Have a look at her roots and shoots organization for example. It is very youth driven Continue reading ‘Jane Goodall’

Well that was fun! I’m sitting on the bus on the way home [editorial note: I wrote most of this on Thursday afternoon], with the memory of the College Commons event that I just went to still fresh in my mind. (That and the tasty food at the end of the event.)

This event (”Discovering the World: Collections, Curiosity and Evolution”) was all about collecting and collections, from the institutional collections we have in our society today such as museums and libraries, through the “cabinets of curiosity” of earlier centuries, to the sort of obsessive collections of random stuff that sort of becomes a disease (I mentally glance over at the shelves, piles, and boxes of old New Yorkers in my house; I’ve not been able to throw away a single one since I started subscribing in the early 90s. Yes, I know, I know… I know.)

So many of these types of collections (and the resulting books and compendia which they themselves become the objects of collections and subjects of books and so on and so forth) formed the foundations of the culture, the raw material for scientific study, the inspiration for more collections and for more study, and so on…. So the event used that as a basis and dug out some wonderful articles for us to look and marvel at. The digging was done at USC’s own splendid Doheny library (original Audubon volumes, Cook’s journals, etc) the Huntington library (several illustrated tomes of natural history and an actual plate used long ago for printing Audubon illustrations which were then later hand-coloured by artists) and the Los Angeles Natural History Museum across the street. A number of my colleagues who are scholars in areas that these objects pertain to gave short, informative and Continue reading ‘Collections!’

I’ll blog a bit more about the significance of this scene, but right now, I hope you’ll Continue reading ‘Curves’

Hey, it’s Earth Day today! (Remember Earth Hour last month?) Take some time out to reflect, and maybe join in with one of other (or more) of the events taking place near you. Look here for a link trail that’ll lead you to such activity…

Enjoy!

-cvj

I promised a report on last week’s College Commons trip to the Page Museum at the Tar Pits, here in Los Angeles. It was an excellent trip. The usual thing I do for blogging these things is, some time later, as time allows, I sit down and do a sort of brain-dump. I tried to do something different this time, and walk on the tour with my Palm Tungsten (yes, really really old technology, I know) and simply write a sort of narrative into it as I went along. Then I combined the uploaded file with the images I took as I went along, and supplemented with some extra sentences here and there. The overall effect should be a sketchier description of the event than I usually do, which may or may not be an improvement given that everybody seems to skim everything these days anyway. (Click on the photos for larger views.) So, here goes:

And so it begins. And it begins well - after a name tag is given out, upon check in for the bus, we are given a little brown paper bag of snacks. Hurrah!

3:39 and we’re off! (We run by the excavations for the Expo line and since it is an elevated bus, I get a nice view of what’s going on for quite a way. Wish I’d had the camera out to make a video for you.)

My colleague David Bottjer, a paleontologist, gives a little run down of the history of the region (both social and paleontological) as we go north on La Brea (appropriately - they are the La Brea Tar Pits… Or given that La Brea means The Tar, they are The Tar Tar Pits…)

4:05 We’re here! Somehow, the little bag of goodies is all empty already. Except for Continue reading ‘Pit Visit’

Today’s shooting circumstances (see previous post) produced an unexpected bonus: Snow. Lots of it! It is always a pleasant surprise to me how quickly you can get from Los Angeles to some good snow cover. I was not expecting to see any snow - or trudge through any - this season, but it turned out that lots of it had fallen where we were scheduled to shoot. So much so that we could not get to where we wanted to Continue reading ‘Snow!’

I thought I’d share with you a little video of one of my favourite visitors to the garden! These hummingbirds love Mexican sage (salvia leucantha). I grow quite a bit of it, and they flock to it when it starts blooming in the Fall. As I said over a year ago in talking about the sage and the birds, in a post “Soon They Will Come”:

Continue reading ‘Fast Visitor’

Looking toward the source of some of that lovely evening light I remarked upon in an earlier post. View from the grounds of the Observatory in Griffith Park, not too long after 6:00 pm.

-cvj

Oh, boy this was fun. Christine Louise Berry organizes a series she calls The Speakeasy, and I’ll tell you below about the really great one that took place on Sunday. You’ll remember my mentioning Christine’s work earlier. She (the main force behind SmartGals) did that marvellous McArthur Park event with the fragments of plays to be found all over the park, and had the excellent taste to combine it with Mama’s Hot Tamales. A couple of months ago, at a party of hers (to celebrate car-independence in LA!), I met Erik Knutzen, with whom I ended up talking a great deal about lots of things because we seem to be on the same page on many things with regards biking and public transport (he’s part of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition), gardening and sustainability (he’s involved in a lot of land use issues for his day job). So we talked about lots of topics, from composting to the Velib system (and why Los Angeles has essentially already decided not to take that wonderful route, sadly).

Erik, with his partner Kelly Coyne, write a really great blog called Homegrown Evolution (excellent title), which is all about urban gardening, and they are passionate about getting more people to do gardening (as am I, you might have gathered). You’ve probably read my posts on gardening from time to time and thought that it isn’t for you since you’re in a big city in an apartment on the nth floor (where n is some integer greater than one or zero) with no access to garden space. I’ve occasionally Continue reading ‘The Urban Homestead’

Here’s something I found rather unexpected. It all begins a little more than a year ago in Los Angeles. I was chatting with a friend, Aimee Bender, about our respective modes of work, and about how Summer fits into that in general. As you may know, Aimee’s a fiction writer, (and you may have picked up somewhere that I’m a theoretical physicist), and there are a lot of parallels to be found between professions that both involve lots of sitting around, crafting with symbols, folding fragments of inspiration together into larger nuggets, and so forth. So we chat about that from time to time.

A lot of how that works can be tied to the environment in which you do it, and so we got to talking about the long dry Summer in Los Angeles, with a particularly hot spell we were going through at the time we were talking. It affects how you work, what part of the day is most productive for you, and so forth. We agreed that a rather nice thunderstorm would be a good thing to have come along, even though that was highly improbable. Just the sound of a thunderstorm is a wonderful thing, and then there’s the relief it brings from the conditions before, and the smells in the air during and after. We carried on with the hot LA work cycle, stormless.

I left a week or two later for Aspen.

Shortly thereafter, Aspen went into a typical daily cycle of sunny for most of the day with a rainy downpour in the afternoon. Very refreshing. One of those days, that downpour turned into a long super-violent thunderstorm that lasted well into the Continue reading ‘Sharing the Storm’

Dandelion seeds just outside my door. (Click for larger view.) Continue reading ‘Delicate Star’

Today’s going to be a slow day, with a bit of pottering about town (groceries, new novel), sitting at home (laundry, reading, writing), and working on some physics things here and there. It’ll be good to slow down. I went on another long hike yesterday, back in my more usual solitary mode. Last week’s to Willow (see a couple of earlier posts) was with my friend and colleague Albion Lawrence who I’d not seen for a long time, and so we spent a very pleasant time catching up on things (mostly sharing about books and film, as we do) as we walked.

Yesterday’s hike, following (initially) the West Maroon trail, was taken up with conversations with myself, both internal and external, and that’s something I enjoy a great deal. I thought I’d spend a lot of time thinking over various issues in physics that I’ve been puzzling over in my work, or that I’d learned about from various conversations and seminars while here at the Center. But I did not, surprisingly. Or not much. It was a very physics-free day, even though I was out there struggling along in the West Maroon area for over five hours (out and back to the bus).

Part of this might be because due to the large amount of snow on the ground in places, I lost the trail, and so spent a lot of time following the river trying to pick it up Continue reading ‘Recovery Time’

Imagine my surprise (a couple of weeks ago) when this fellow - all four feet or maybe more - passed in front of me just ahead on the path (click for larger view). It was so sudden that I could hardly get the camera out in time, even though it was attached to my belt pack. I was hiking in Runyon Canyon for a short spell on a Sunday morning. It is quite busy at that time, with everyone and their dog (for real) out and about. Continue reading ‘Crossings’

[Update 19/05/08: It is expected that well over 50,000 people have died. There are several updates on the NPR sites mentioned below. See a BBC article here for a recent summary.]

Well, they’re estimating 10,000 casualties so far from the earthquake in China that measured magnitude 7.9 on the Richter scale. NPR’s Melissa Block and Robert Siegel were actually in the area when it took place and they are filing lots of reports. Melissa had her equipment running at the time of the quake and so you can hear her reactions here. There’s a lot of information (including how to donate to various relief efforts) on the NPR website. Start here, for example.

Of course, there’s a lot more going on in terms of extraordinary natural conditions, including the tornadoes here in America, and the volcano in Chile, and of course the Myanmar cyclone and the dreadful matter of the blocked recovery efforts. Remarkable, overall. If you’ve not been following, you’ll find really good reports at the NPR site too…

-cvj

Yes, it is that time of year when the city goes purple. Or lavender.

The jacaranda trees go crazy for a while. There are stretches of several blocks long, Continue reading ‘Jacaranda Time!’

Update: 11th May ‘08. Well, as you probably know, estimates have surpassed 100,000. An urgent concern now is the additions to the death toll resulting from the lack of emergency relief, brought on by the restrictions placed by the Myanmar government. See a BBC report here, or an NPR report here, for example.

Update: 7th May ‘08. It is much worse. I’ve seen a BBC report with a figure above 22,000.

The news is not good for Myanmar (Burma). The death toll due to cyclone Nargis has apparently passed 10,000 (see CNN and the BBC), making it the deadliest storm since 1999.

Sheril and Chris are blogging about it on the Intersection, (see e.g. here) and so keep Continue reading ‘Major Cyclone’

Taken at the Getty Villa, in Malibu. Well worth a visit.

Continue reading ‘Caustics Galore’

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’

Continue reading ‘Texture, II’

-cvj

Continue reading ‘Light, Water’

Continue reading ‘Warm Yellow’

Well, Tuesday was a big day in class. We reached a landmark - the introduction of one of my very favourite thoughts of the 20th Century: the Equivalence Principle. This is the realization of Einstein’s that there’s something profoundly odd about Newtonian mechanics and Newtonian gravity that hints at something deeper.

Quick reminder from high school (just two formulae, please bear with me): You know Continue reading ‘Equivalence’

This is one of my most favourite features of the landscaping on the campus here at USC. It’s one of the very earliest features that made me feel very much at home on the campus when I first arrived. I remember coming around a corner, seeing it, and Continue reading ‘The Tree, I’

I decided to do Griffith Park for my Sunday morning hike today. It’s been a while - I’ve mostly been doing Runyon. I thought it would be nice to see how things were doing up there since I last went and saw them dramatically spraying the hydromulch to protect the ground from erosion until regrowth from the fire damage (see here and here). The (very) occasional rain we’ve had in the last couple of months seem to have begun something wonderful - there are hints of green everywhere. I saw this beautiful photograph at one point - which sort of says it all - only to find that my camera (which seems to be on its last legs these last few days) had died again. So I had to take it with my camera phone, and so it is a bit below par:

I think this is wonderful (blurriness aside) - it has the striking image of the burned tree Continue reading ‘Hope Comes in Yellow and Green’

Over on the Intersection, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Chris Mooney are wondering why on earth there’s been little or no US media coverage of Cyclone Sidr, the monster storm that is bearing down on Bangladesh. Given the size of the storm, its approach, and the low-lying nature of Bangladesh, the landfall of this storm could be utterly catastrophic (it has already begun to take many lives) - beyond Katrina, for example. Please go and have a look at their series of posts (and more to come I bet) about the storm. For example, here, here, here, here, and here.

-cvj

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?’

So finally I completed the project that began with the chicken wire matters I spoke of a while ago. Work and such things have a way of intervening for weeks, preventing a good idea from going from conception to completion in what should be a day or two. The plan? To stop throwing away lots of wonderful organic matter and keep it instead, turning it into compost. This makes sense because so much of my garden has rather poor soil, for a start, and for a second matter it just seems wrong to not do it. for a third, it’s fun to do experiments with some microbiology for a change. Microbiology? Well, the object of the exercise is to let nature turn any organic material that you have into compost - full of nutrients for growing new things. Compost is also good for moisture control, good drainage, and a host of other things that are beneficial to plants in the garden. How does nature do this? Bacteria, mostly. But for the bacteria and other microorganisms to do their job (digesting the material), one needs to give them good conditions to live in. Conditions involve the right amount of moisture, air, and food, and the point of my project was first to prepare containment for the compost manufacturing process, and then to prepare a good combination of raw materials, place them properly, and then leave the little organisms to their own devices to do their thing. Here’s a good webpage at Cornell about the various stages of composting, the temperatures involved, and the various organisms (bacteria of various sorts, actinomycetes (a kind of filamented bacterium), fungi (various molds and yeasts), protozoa) that come into play at the various stages.

So, phase one: Containment. Well everything is going to be kept together with a cylinder of chicken wire, and so measurement of the desired radius followed by a quick computation () to give me the length I needed to cut, and I was away. Shortly after I realised that my measurements were to be determined by the size of the mouth of the large trash bags I’d bought to add as the liner of the containment cylinder. So I ended up readjusting everything to fit that. I cut everything a bit big to allow for the overlap I Continue reading ‘Composing Compost: Fun with Microorganisms’

Photo (added later): Griffith Park’s Mount Hollywood with the Griffith Observatory and rain-filled clouds above. Mount Lee with the Hollywood sign (just visible) is behind.

Finally. I never thought I’d see the day again. Finally and end to the seemingly perpetual sunshine. It has not been since March (unless I’m very mistaken) since there’s been any serious rain here, and more than five months since there’s been any officially measurable rain of any sort in Los Angeles (as measured by the official station down at USC).

I was beginning to despair a bit. I need rain, psychologically as well as for more mundane reasons like wanting my garden to get a good soaking. There’s something about the way my outlook on the world works that needs to have good rainfall sometime. Rainfall where I live, I mean. I’d seen some wonderful rain over the summer (almost daily afternoon thunderstorms in Aspen for a few weeks, nice rain and drizzle for a week in Cambridge), and that did help me with the waiting, but I’ve been needing rain at home.

And so here it is! There’s the wonderful sound of it on the roof, and then there’s the Continue reading ‘Rain!!!’

So the mexican sage (salvia leucantha) has started its new crop of flowers. The purple bobs pictured below right (click for larger - yes, there is a little bee resting quietly on a leaf there for some reason) will turn into long purple fronds with lots of individual bells containing flowers. Soon they will come, and they will keep coming. They’ll come and examine each flower closely and attentively, and I’ll be waiting for them, since they are so magical - appearing suddenly and dramatically as though dropping out of warp, with a wonderful and powerful hum. I’m talking about hummingbirds, of course. They love these flowers, and come and feed on them regularly.

The warp reference? They are fast - incredibly fast, and they can accelerate and decelerate astonishingly effectively. So if you’re lucky and standing still at the right point, there’ll be a hum and suddenly one Continue reading ‘Soon They Will Come’

This is simply fascinating to see for so many reasons. Will Campbell (over on his blog [sic] - see the posts here and here for background), who has been doing some fun experiments with his camera and computer to make time-lapse photography (you’ll recall an amusing one from before) has captured an entire day of cloud formation in the skies above some mountains near Los Angeles during the heatwave day of Sunday.

Click the still to go to the site with the movie (or find it at YouTube here):

It is both beautiful, interesting (scientifically and otherwise) and frustrating (why don’t Continue reading ‘Clouds at Will’

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)’

Continue reading ‘Wet and Green’

The tree from which the town Aspen gets its name. This shot is from the nearby Maroon Lake area.

It’s interesting to note that this is probably mostly all one tree, as the visible trees are Continue reading ‘Aspens’