Monthly Archives: July 2007

Twenty Thousand Bikes

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velib bike from parisSo, has anyone who reads the blog used the new Velib system in Paris yet? A new layer of public transport has been rolled out (yes, I know) onto the streets of Paris, as of last Sunday (July 15th). The Bicycle. A publicly funded scheme (familiar to some from elsewhere, such as Lyon and Amsterdam (?), if memory serves) called “Velib” where there are special bike racks all over the city. One of the (charmingly European-looking) bikes is pictured on the right. From a BBC story by Emma-Jane Kirby:

The local authority in Paris has deposited 20,000 heavy-duty bicycles in 750 or so special racks around the city and anyone who wants one simply swipes his or her ordinary travel card and pedals off wherever they want to go.

The bike does not have to be returned to the same pick-up point – you can take a bike from a rack near the Eiffel Tower, cycle to the Pantheon and leave it in the nearest Velib stand there.

This sounds great, from my point of view, you’ll not be surprised to learn! I’m finding it hard to see a downside here at all. A bit more:

The Velib scheme is aimed at people who are making short journeys.

The first half hour of pedalling time is absolutely free but, if you fail to return the bike after 30 minutes, you get charged an extra euro and the penalties go up the later you are.

(So European… penalties. They could not find another, more positive word?)

The Velib website is here. And of course it is only in French. What did you expect? (Actually, it is rather entertaining to read, all the same, since it is mostly easy-to-guess French, and knowing the context helps.)

I can’t see what’s stopping such a system from being introduced in cities in America. I think that we should start with….. Los Angeles, of course! It is one of the cities that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag

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(Apologies to the Godfather.)

My previous hard case for the Brompton was getting battered to bits by the baggage handlers, was too big for the bike anyway (was an old hard-sided suitcase that I bought second hand for $50), but had put in good service for two years. Options: (1) Look for a new one by driving around lots of second hand luggage places again, finding another almost-fit, or (2) Pay the money for a purpose-built professional case that fits rather snugly (and is quite light) and have more peace of mind that the B’s going to be ok when it gets to the other side. It’s expensive, but will be worth it in the long run…

I picked (2):

  hard case for the Brompton  hard case for the Brompton

(Click for a larger view.)

….and I’ve just unpacked the B in Aspen, Colorado, and ten seconds later, it’s ready to ride! In case you’re (somehow) a reader of the blog that has not been familiarized with the Brompton, click here for a view of it unfolded. Look in the “related posts” list below for some posts in which it makes at least a roll-on appearance.

I’m here for physics, as usual, and the bike is going to be even more useful than […] Click to continue reading this post →

Location, Location, Location

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Some interesting news about the outreach mission. From time to time, Asymptotia posts get picked up by some of the local blogs of note, such as LA Observed, and that’s just great, since many things I talk about here are right at the intersection of local interest and the arts and sciences, especially education (such as talking in a local school), events such as the Categorically Not! ones at Santa Monica Airport, and issues such as the environment, in addition to the pure fun stuff, and the tasty stuff. For example, Kevin Roderick at LA Observed was kind enough to mention the posts about the Griffith Observatory (the new relaunch, and the controversy about the use of actors in the planetarium show), judging at the Science Fair at the California Science Center, as well as the post on the open day at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the post about cycling in the city (perhaps in combination with public transportation, as an alternative to blindly using your car/SUV for most journeys.)

Well, I was pleased to get an email a few days ago telling me that Outside.In have added added Asymptotia to their list of LA neighbourhood blogs, and the posts will be scanned for local references, and then added to a location map of all blogs posts. So what happens is that you can look at a neighbourhood in Outside.In (I tailored the previous link to 90089, the zip that USC is in, for example) and see marks on a map where blog posts have pointed to, or lists of posts that pertain to a particular zip code or neighbourhood. You can then follow those marks back to the blog posts! It’s very cool indeed. This will work for your neighbourhood too, where ever you are (in the USA) – just put in your zip code.

Each blog in the system also has their own page, and the one for Asymptotia is here. You should go to it to experiment with the clickability, but I also took a screen shot (since I can’t see how to live-embed the map), and so this is it earlier:

outside in blogging map

So far it seems a bit inconsistent with picking things up and I don’t know why, – it might […] Click to continue reading this post →

Henri Poincaré and the Order of the Polynomial

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I’m conflicted. I read the first Harry Potter book and decided that while it is a good thing that many people are reading more as a result of them, I could not really recommend it highly as great work because it’s just so derivative. Having grown up reading all those boarding school books J. K. Rowling borrowed from (for example) without adding anything to them much, I was frustrated

Well, of course, in the scheme of things, it does not matter. Not all things we like have to be Great Works. And I eventually convinced myself that there’s nothing wrong with people (who did not read those works that she’s imitating) discovering the genre for themselves in the pages of her books. Then others told me that the books got better. harry potter special relativityThey got darker, and more grown up (do they approach the excellence and relative originality of the once largely ignored Philip Pullman books I wonder?), and better written, I’ve been told, by people whose opinion I trust. Well, good.

The films came out and they were all very ho-hum and then happily Chris Columbus stopped directing them after the first two and – Wow! They were suddenly really rather good. (The third one was by the wonderful Alfonso Cuarón, so – of course!) (Clickable above right for clarity: Extract from my own attempt to tap into the mania some years back by using characters from the books/films to illustrate the derivation of time dilation in a class on Special Relativity.)

Anyway, I saw the fifth one last night, and I was very impressed with it as a film. Not having read the book, I find myself hoping that there was more to it than the film, since it still seems all rather derivative. There’s a bit of 1984 and a lot of Lord of the Rings mixed in with the Boarding School motif. I suspect that’s all as a result of stripping it down to look for something to hang a film on? I’m going to assume that, since there’s an awful lot of transparent (but entertaining) dark motifs about the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Purple not Pants

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Or becoming less “pants” every day. Fantastic! On Wednesday, the House appropriations committee repealed the ridiculous and trumped-up 1986 Congressional ban on tunneling to complete the Wilshire subway line project. This was pushed through by Congressman Waxman, the same person who misguidedly got the ban instated in the first place. Funny how nimby-ness (and, arguably, fear of people who don’t look like you getting access to your neighbourhood) about public transportation projects crumbles when you finally realize that your SUV is at a standstill in traffic more often than not…. and all you were doing was driving five blocks to get a pint of milk from Whole Foods. (Found a bit more here on LAist.)

System Map LACMTAThe Purple line right now is either two stops long, or several stops long depending upon how you count. (Click on map to right to see what I mean.) It’s effectively two, since all the other stops are Red line stops – it just runs two stops more to the West stopping a few long block away at Wilshire/Western. Hence the post title, expressing the hope that it will be several stops long, all the way out to the Pacific. It would be just great to go all the way to Santa Monica from downtown on a train. Why is that not obviously a super-wonderful thing to be able to do? Dinner and drinks on the Santa Monica pier at Sunset followed by a concert in the Disney Hall. No faffing about with traffic and over-priced parking. Is that not a dream worth running toward with open arms?

Next step, finding a ridiculous amount of money to build the thing because an […] Click to continue reading this post →

LHC Podcasts: Science Meets Science Fiction

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Confession: I’ve no idea what Torchwood is, and I find the current Dr. Who shows annoying overall (there have been some good episodes that I’ve seen, but they’re swamped in a sea of such poorly thought through and simply phoned-in crappy episodes that I find it too annoying to take the risk of wasting an hour I could have better spent with my head in the oven…) Feel free to disagree with me, and I have not seen the most recent season, so maybe things are better.

LHC You TubeBut anyway, where was I? Oh, right. Someone called John Barrowman (apparently one of the stars on those shows? He plays a scientist? I honestly don’t know, but you will, if you’re a fan) took a visit to CERN (the particle physics lab in Europe you often read about here and elsewhere) to better inform himself about the intersection between science and science fiction. One of the resulting jumpy noisy and (reportedly) fun videos can be found on YouTube here. There are some somewhat interesting animations alongside some of the, er…jolly madcap fun, illustrating the physics. Following the particles along the beam-pipe to the collision is not a view I’ve seen before, I’ll admit.
Much more interesting is something they mention at the end. A series of podcasts on the LHC (the big experiment at CERN we’re all interested in and excited about). This is driven by Brian Cox (no, not that one, this one, the physicist), and seems to be in a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Water World, II

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spitzer telescope team artists renditionI’ve not had time to look at this closely, but there’s been some remarkable news about the possible detection of water in the atmosphere of an extra-solar planet. Wow!

Like I said, I’ve not a lot of time to look at this (Nature paper here), but thought you should know. I can point you to a press release by the Spitzer Space Telescope team, which starts: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Physics, 101

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physics at 101 cafeIt’s been one of those days. I just got back home, at 2:30am, after a very pleasant bit of work in a cafe. I was writing up my thoughts of the day into my notebook (I’m old-fashioned that way) and crafting new ones. Where was I? The 101 Coffee Shop, of course, an LA landmark – with those lovely booths, the counter, the lighting, all classics – over near the Capital Records building (another LA landmark) just where you join the 101 heading up to North Hollywood – hence the name, and hence the title of this post.

It’s been one of those days in a good sense. After a long couple of weeks of muddling and being rather down about a project I’m working on that had run into problems, things suddenly made sense today over the course of a long IM conversation (six hours) with one of my collaborators, Jeff Pennington. Things just started to fall into place during the brainstorming… we’d exchange facts and observations, explain thing to each other….muddle along for a while… ask questions… calculate separately for a bit…. suggest computations to each other…report results…get confused… and then it all broke open quite nicely and every single fact seemed to fit into place by the end. A lot to do still, but it seems rather robust and tantalizing.

After taking a break after the long brainstorm to do a bit of gardening work, this […] Click to continue reading this post →

There Will Be No Dawn

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Well, not until September at the earliest, that is. (Oh! That feels so good to have finally been able to use that as a post title!)

Dawn concept image: William K. Hartmann Courtesy of UCLAWhat am I talking about? NASA’s Dawn mission, of course. Dawn is a spacecraft that will go to the asteroid belt to study more closely the two largest asteroids, Ceres and Vesta. (Image right is an artist’s impression of the spacecraft. credit: William K. Hartmann, Courtesy of UCLA) In addition to the mission page linked above, there’s also a nice Wikipedia article about it here.

Last Thursday was to be the launch, but there were problems due to weather (mostly) – you don’t want to be fueling the tanks of the launch vehicle when there is high risk of lightning, as there was that day. There’s more about the matters on the NASA site, and also and Amara’s post on Scientific Blogging.

Actually, her post there is extremely informative about the goals of the mission, and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Boot Camp

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Boot CampYesterday afternoon, feeling a bit down in the dumps for a variety of reasons I decided to head for the hills to clear my head. A good hike often helps these things. My other mission was to begin the painful task of breaking in some new boots. The fantastic repair job that I got done on my faithful old boots that died last year (see here for the full report) held up marvelously, and in fact still holds up, but I will admit that they lost a fair bit of flexibility with the new sole, and although they are great for the medium grade sorts of hikes I do in the immediate surroundings, I’m not really sure that they’d be great on the longer ones. I have not taken them up Mount Wilson, for example. The repair extended their life for quite a bit longer, and they will still be useful, but I decided last week that I should start breaking in a new pair to last me (I hope) another 15 years or so. I decided to try to get something as close to the ones I had as before, and so the Asolo TPS 535s were the ones I got (supposedly the natural successors to my Asolo AFX 530s). So I laced them up (already unhappy with the wimpy laces they have as compared to the big rope-like ones on my old boots) and set off from the trailhead in Topanga.

Boot CampMy goal? Eagle Rock. A favourite of mine. There it is in the photo on the right (click for larger). It’s a relatively quick hike, about 3 miles out, along the Musch trail (not the fire road) and a 1000 foot elevation gain, with mostly nobody around since it is insanely hot at 2:30pm and only mad dogs and Englishmen (so the Noel Coward song goes) go out in the midday sun. I’ll leave you to decide which I am (remember, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog). So I was able to speed up the mountain to the Rock and stay there for a while, only meeting four other people heading that way the whole time.

You might wonder why it is called Eagle Rock. I did for a long time, as probably have […] Click to continue reading this post →