Monthly Archives: September 2007

The Green Room

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Here’s another image or two that I captured for you of the very large and dramatic pieces of Dan Flavin. This is from my July visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA’s) retrospective of his work. You’ll recall the two earlier posts here and here. (Click them to enlarge.)

dan flavin retrospective -green

It is easy to dismiss these as very simple coloured baubles writ large, and that would be a mistake. I’m sure that the artist was very aware of one hugely striking thing that one cannot convey in the photographs, and that is the powerful effect the presence of one single striking colour can have on one’s feelings. The intense blue from a previous work I spoke of was remarkable, and then shortly afterward you come to this giant […] Click to continue reading this post →

Vélib Works!

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velib bike from parisSo far. I forgot to point this out a couple of weeks ago. There was a nice story in the Guardian giving a one month update on the progress of the Velib program in Paris. Recall I blogged about its launch here, and expressed hope that the expectations that it would not work were wrong (I’m such an optimist). Well, the news is that it is working! The whole article (by Angelique Chrisafis) is here. A quote:

Day and night, tourists, commuters and returning party animals cruise by on the chic new machines. People have joyfully discovered the cheap new way of exercising en route to work or getting home drunk after the metro closes, hence a rush of hires after 1am. There’s a glut of bikes deposited at stands at the bottom of hills and none left at the top, as people freewheel down from the heights of Belleville and Montmartre.

(Now I’m in the mood to get out the wonderful movie “Les Triplettes Des Belleville” (or “Belleville Rendezvous” or “The Triplets of Belleville”) for an enjoyable evening.) Further: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Mistakes!

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Julia Sweeney during a Categorically Not! eventThe 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 […]

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Funky Hideaway

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lost souls cafeI love downtown Los Angeles. No two ways about it. It’s rapidly getting better, as you may have heard, and there are so many interesting things to find down there. I hope to do a report sometime on an extended walkabout I did down there last month, but that’s for another time. It is also great to cycle around, as I do quite a lot.

Today, still in the heatwave, I left campus to go and hide downtown, first stopping by the excellent Grand Central Market for a bit of shopping for ingredients for a special dish I am going to prepare for a Salon-style gathering at some friends’ on Saturday. More on that later. Then I went to work in one of my favourite cafes in the city. I shouldn’t give away my hideouts, but there’s only you and me reading, right? It’s the Lost Souls Cafe, hidden down an alleyway (Harlem Place Alley) off fourth street between Spring and Main. Perfect for the subway at Pershing Square, and one of the few non-bar type places open until 10:00pm downtown. (Wish it would go until 1:00am or so.)

It’s a fantastic place, as you can see from their website, but relatively few people that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Clouds at Will

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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):

wildbell clouds

It is both beautiful, interesting (scientifically and otherwise) and frustrating (why don’t […] Click to continue reading this post →

Paneful Jigsaw

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Temperature update: Going to be 106oF today. I think at 7:30am when I got up today it was already in the mid 80s (although that might have been partly due to reduced airflow indoors – I had to rush outside to take a deep breath). Gosh.

window shatter pattern
Above is part of a puzzle I was working on for a while on Saturday. A more detailed and larger image will follow below. I did pretty well, but then I got distracted after a while (see below). The last puzzle pieces came from (I suspect) a single puzzle piece shattering in a secondary event. The primary event? Bit embarrassing. I was preparing dinner on Thursday night, a guest was about to arrive, and a fly entered the kitchen. I hate flies in my kitchen at the best of times, and this was just too much. I tried to open the window to encourage the beast to depart, and it refused. I tried to open the window further and exasperatedly wafted my hand in its direction to scare it off the window pane, misjudged that action and pushed my hand through the window. Felt like a real idiot, of course: An expensive mistake, an awkward thing to explain, and of course a million flies and other creatures now had unrestricted access… The good news is that I only got a slight nick from the razor sharp edges, my guest did not think I was too insane (or no more than I usually am) and dinner was tasty. So all’s well that ends well.

The next morning I woke up and immediately thought “I can’t believe I put my hand through my window”. Went downstairs to check. Yes, it was true. There was a nice shatter pattern (notice the cracks radiating outward from the reconstructed impact point – see photo and discussion below) to admire, and lots of bits of glass on the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Good Luck Brittney Exline!

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Just spotted this AP article (by Kathy Matheson) about Brittney Exline:

brittney exline[…] at the age of just 15 she is beginning her Ivy League career Wednesday when classes start at the University of Pennsylvania.

Which is very good indeed, but I was especially pleased to see:

She excels at math and science and is really interested in politics, so she enrolled in a Penn program that will award her degrees from both the engineering and liberal arts schools when she graduates in 2011.

Hurrah!

Have a look at the AP story for quotes, information about her background, other […] Click to continue reading this post →

Have One for Michael Jackson

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I’ve got to cross town later on to Pacific Palisades to a party, and while I’m keen on the party, I’m not keen on the journey – It is super hot outside, and I have to go via Santa Monica to pick up some tarts to take along1. Temperatures are sure to go over 100oF again today, and so everyone and their dog will be heading West to the beach.

I was about to begin my morning mission to get supplies for the party, and I heard that Michael Jackson died last week. Not that Michael Jackson, the other one (see below). It’s quite a coincidence, since I was particularly on the prowl for two of my favourite Belgians, Duvel and Hoegaarden, and maybe one of the excellent Sam Smith’s stouts (from England). I was successful. (The excellent Bev’ Mo’ was well-stocked, and I was the first in the door when they opened.)

some excellent beers
(If I may be so bold, you don’t really understand what beer can be if you have not tried Belgian beers. They’re the finest makers on the planet, without a doubt (others may disagree). Even if you think you don’t like beer, there’s probably one they produce that you’d like. The two on the right are among the easier to get favourites from there. Drop what you’re doing and rush out and get some. Go! Now!)

Still don’t know who I’m talking about? There’s a Washington Post article by Adam […] Click to continue reading this post →

Lookin’ For Some Hot Stuff

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___________________________________________________________________________________
Hot, hot, hot, hot stuff
hot, hot, hot
hot, hot, hot, hot stuff
hot, hot, hot

– from “Hot Stuff”, by Donna Summer (1979). I refer to not only the physics but the c. 100 oF temperatures we’ve been having here every day recently.
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On my way back from the conference, I spotted this book (left) last Saturday in Foyles (the booksellers) in London 1. Quark Gluon Plasma book It is a collection of reprints of a lot of the papers forming the foundations of the physics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) idea, going back the early to mid 1970s with such papers as Collins and Perry (Gosh, I had no idea Malcolm was one of the early workers on this idea. He’s much more thought of as associated with black holes, gravity, strings and so forth, ideas which – ironically – have recently turned out to be relevant to the discussions of the physics too. See my recent post, and there are also various popular articles to be found2).

Putting aside the usual ridiculous price that Springer Elsevier charges for books, I found myself in two minds about this book, in view of the surprises being uncovered about the properties of this remarkable state of matter at the RHIC experiment. Is this collection of early papers a useful working tool, or is it now just of historical interest, since many of the basic expectations about the properties of the plasma seem now to be incorrect?

rhic collision of gold ionsWell, after a bit of thought, I decided that the latter view would be way too hasty. First and foremost, on a general level, even if some of the computations in some papers were done in the “wrong” light (it’s a strongly coupled liquid that flows, not a weakly coupled gas of quarks and gluons), much of their content will still be useful in many ways – good and correct calculations last for all time, it is the sense of the words decorating them that may crumble over time. More specifically, one can worry about whether there were assumptions (and approximations based on those) that went into the computations that will render […] Click to continue reading this post →