Green Towers
Close shot of what’s been happening all of a sudden on my giant cactus plant since […] Click to continue reading this post
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Monthly Archives: October 2007
A Kick From Sputnik
Today’s the 50th anniversary of an event that might be thought of as an extreme way of nationally getting really serious about Science education. Sputnik was launched by the USSR. The little pioneering satellite passed overhead several times a day, sending a powerful beeping signal over a radio channel. America immediately became scared, worried and paranoid and essentially declared it a national emergency to respond by a focus on better education in some science and technical subjects. Songs were written. The entire culture was changed.
Fear and paranoia are certainly not the ways I’d like to see us come back to recognizing the value and urgency of improved science education (not the least […] Click to continue reading this post
Some of What Matters
Below I’ve reproduced the text of the approximately 20 minutes of that which I presented at the What Matters to Me and Why event on Wednesday. I mentioned my preparations for it in a previous post. The event was well attended, in an excellent setting (a hidden campus cafe I’d somehow not known about before, Ground Zero). There were students, faculty, staff, alumni, and several others. I chose to give a structured address to start so as to make sure that I did not go on for too long, as I might in a more off-the-cuff delivery. I very much wanted to leave plenty of time to interact with the audience through their observations and questions. I delivered it partly from memory and partly from reading, and wanted it to have a bit of a feel of being read a story, rather than a formal speech. I don’t know how successful that was, but it was fun for me. I think I might try that approach again some time.
Overall, I think the event worked well, and I had a great time. A number of people (kindly) said at the end that they had a good time, and I hope everyone else did too!
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Hello Everyone.
First let me say that it is an honour to be here. I’d like to thank everyone concerned for inviting me to speak in this series. I imagine that everyone starts their piece by saying that they struggled to find a way of saying What Matters to them and Why in a short time. So I won’t dwell on that, except to say that it’s especially hard when, the day before preparing, you realize that it’s not going to be that hour long presentation you were expecting to squeeze your essence into, but 20 minutes!
Some time ago, when people started mentioning that they’d seen that I was a guest in this event, and that they were looking forward to hearing what I will say (!), I’d respond that I too was curious about what I was going to say, and would also try to show up and find out. This was actually true. The other thing that I (half-)joked was […] Click to continue reading this post
WIRED Science – Show Tonight and Website is Live!
A quick reminder. The show WIRED Science (that I mentioned earlier) debuts tonight! Notice also that the website with all the extra material is now live (and rather amazingly well designed -well done the New Media division at KCET), and – don’t forget – debuting also (and already live) is the new blog Correlations (I gave you the back story on that here). You can find a link to it from the site, or go directly here (but go look at the main site too). Please go along and say hi to us over there on our welcoming blog posts. And Tell Your Friends! (That includes you, science-oriented bloggers, it’s in a good cause!).
Here’s a teaser for the program, and one of the reasons I have high hopes for it. Here, they strip aside all the fancy stuff and just put a good person in front of the camera to get people thinking about something simple. This is a great thing when done well, and they’ve got the people who can do it. Here’s presenter Chris Hardwick doing a brilliant job of telling you what’s inside a simple everyday product in an entertaining way (link with transcript here, or play right here by clicking below): […] Click to continue reading this post
What Matters?
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…. […] Click to continue reading this post
More Encounters On the Road Less Travelled
Hey, guess who I saw today! Recall, that I passed a woman on a tricycle a while back? Well, at exactly the same spot, I passed her again today. She’s called Julia, as you may recall from her comment on the blog sometime later, (as I’d met her subsequently and said hello properly). I briefly said “hello and how are you” this time as our bike and trike passed each other, but I apologized for having to rush off, and rushed off. I was trying to catch the next bus in order to get to my classroom by 9:55am. The class’ first midterm was at 10:00 today and I wanted to make sure to be on time. So I dashed off to the stop…
…Only to be accompanied five minutes later by Julia, calmly arriving on her tricycle. She was also catching the same bus, it turned out, and I’d landed in the gap between buses and needed to wait anyway. After checking with me that this was indeed the stop she needed, she chained her splendid red machine to a tree. I contemplated taking a picture of us and the two extraordinary conveyances together to show you. However, while I dithered over this, the bus came. So I’ll cheat and re-use the old picture (right).
Anyway, we chatted quite a while about things (including the frustration of trying to […] Click to continue reading this post
