Monthly Archives: June 2008

When We Left Earth

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This is a quick note to let you know about the Discovery Channel show “When We Left Earth”, which celebrates NASA missions over the last 50 years. I have not seen it, but it looks like it’s rather good. It’s on Sundays, and started last week, but you can still see all the shows. Look here for the schedule. Tonight (Saturday) there is something special on (I got an email about this from one of the people who works outreach on the show). There’s a live chat with one of the executive producers. Here’s what they say: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Boredons

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Another week, another edition of the Onion with lots to make me giggle out loud on the street as I walked along reading it. There are several articles that are very good, and to encourage you to have a look, I thought I’d point out the brilliant, particle-physics-themed (sort of): “Researchers Discover Details Smaller Than Minutiae”. Here’s a chunk of it:

PASADENA, CA—A team of Caltech scientists announced Monday that they have discovered a type of conversational detail smaller than minutiae, the class of particulars long thought to be the smallest possible building blocks of mundanity. “These tiny sub-minutiae, or ‘boredons,’ are so insignificant that they contain almost no information, useless or otherwise,” said head researcher Dr. Nathan Yang, adding that the conversationally inconsequential details naturally occur in elevators and other enclosed spaces containing high concentrations of vaguely familiar acquaintances. “At least six must be combined to make up a detail that even remotely […]

Well, you should go to their site for the rest. Better, pick up the paper version and […] Click to continue reading this post →

On Other Modes of Learning

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I was contacted by a researcher at NPR the other day. They wanted me to take part in a live conversation on the program News & Notes (hosted by Farai Chideya). The topic was about kids, technology, and science. In particular the focus was described as follows:

We want to explore the ways kid handle technology. How is technology affecting them in terms of their learning capacity and social skills? The second part of that discussion is this—with all the gadgets that are available to kids, are more of them becoming interested in science in general? We especially want to look at the subject from perspective of urban education.

Yes, all topics that intersect with many of my own interests and passions (which might be why they found me through the blog!), but I did not feel qualified to really answer some of the specific questions pertaining to how things are going currently. There are people who study this full time. I’m not one of them. So I declined to contribute. However, I had a few names in mind, and passed them along, together with two more […] Click to continue reading this post →

Pluto’s Journey Continues…

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poor pluto mathias pedersen I don’t need to remind you about the Pluto reclassification episode of a while back, I’m sure. See posts here, here, and here otherwise.

(Right: Mathias Pedersen‘s “Poor Pluto” poster, used with permission. Discussed here previously.)

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) felt the need to reclassify Pluto in the light of ongoing scientific discovery – it’s just one of probably thousands of small objects out there beyond the orbit of Neptune. This area of science is very much alive- we’re learning a lot about the solar system and other planetary systems. (See my post entitled “Clues in the Blood Splatter Patterns”.) The “demotion” led to lots of angry opinion, you may recall.

Well, the IAU’s Committee on Small Body Nomenclature (I love that!) has now decided […] Click to continue reading this post →

Salman Rushdie on Song

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Libby Lavella performing at Categorically Not! June 8th 2008The artist and musician Libby Lavella, in her presentation about ambiguity in art and music on Sunday night at the Santa Monica Art Studios (in the Categorically Not! series – see my description here), ended by reading a lovely extract from some writing of Salman Rushdie. It really resonated with me, and so I thought it would share it with you. I found out from her where it was from. It’s from his novel “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”. You can see a longer extract in January Magazine here, but I’ll place here the part that she read: […] Click to continue reading this post →

At Last – GLAST!

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GLAST launch in progressGood news everyone! GLAST has been launched successfully. GLAST stands for Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, and it does exactly what it says on the packet. It is an instrument designed to look more closely at gamma rays from outer space. More here. It will help (alongside other instruments such as SWIFT) get better understanding of a wide range of gamma-ray emitting objects, that pertain to a wide range of issues, astrophysical to cosmological.

“Gamma ray bursters” are obvious super-powerful sources of gamma rays out there, largely due to macroscopic astrophysical objects (collapsed stars or stars in the process of doing so, or merging with each other – see earlier posts) doing violent things, or interacting violently with their surroundings. So are active galactic nuclei, powered by black holes. We’d like to better understand all of the processes that allow these objects to generate gamma rays.

Other sources could include particles and antiparticles annihilating each other and (by […] Click to continue reading this post →

Summer Reading: Distance Writing

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Haruki Murakami by Elena SeibertI’m a big fan of Haruki Murakami’s writing. (Photo right by Elena Seibert). A huge fan, even though I’m only on a second book by him.

I read “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” last year and am on “Kafka on the Shore” right now. In each case, I read the opening paragraph and was immediately sucked right into the book.

The writing is, quite simply, wonderfully stirring, with stunning light, chilling darkness and everything in between (including, notably, a great sense of humour). The light and darkness are to be found in the interior worlds of the characters that are explored in the writing and how they connect to the rest of the world as they move through it. A person’s place in the world, relationship to the world, and how they affect the world […] Click to continue reading this post →

Crossings

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snake in runyon canyon

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. […] Click to continue reading this post →

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 →

Wild Irony

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The universe likes laughing at me. In so many creative ways. (See earlier.) Here’s another. Of all the tomato plants I’ve ever grown, the ones that have done best -spectacularly well, in fact- have not been the ones I intentionally planted and red cherry tomatoes that came from a wild plant in the gardennurtured but the ones that have grown up in random places. I then take care of them and they end up bursting with fruit. Meanwhile the others produce some fruit, but nothing to write home about, after a great amount of care and worry about how suited the ground is to their needs. You will recall another example: the cherry tomato plant that appeared in a crack in the steps that I was sure could not make it (but lasted for two years, almost constantly producing fruit) – see posts here and here about it.

Well, at some point during the Winter (yeah, yeah, I know) I noticed a new tomato plant […] 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

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Where Many Paths and Errands Meet

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[Typed in a cafe on Tuesday at about 3:45pm. It’s just a rough collection of thoughts about various recent meetings and activities:]

Interesting day so far. One of those “my office is everywhere” days. I’m on the West side, in Santa Monica, where I’ve a number of errands to do. Also I get to work and have some meetings in between. I try very much to corral everything to one part of town so that I am not driving around too much, adding to the general junk that we all pour into the air without thinking. So I brought my bike with me to connect the dots that I intend to go between while in the area (a couple of cafes (coffee and work), the beach/boardwalk (lunch and work), a mechanic (they’re changing brakes on my car and diagnosing a Noise), one of the English shops (for tea supplies), an electronics store (to shop for memory), a grocery store, possibly a bookstore, possibly the public library (to work and ‘cos it’s just really nice)…).

While reading some notes by one of my students on a project we’re working on, and eating lunch down on the boardwalk/beach wall near the chess-players, I reached for my phone to send him a text with a question. As I did this I looked up at the passers-by and one of them was familiar! It was someone who used to be a postdoc in one of the other groups in the department, who used to share an office with the very student whose notes I was reading! Funny when that happens… We chatted for a while about things (such as career stuff concerning the interesting research life that can often found in various commercial settings), and he seemed interested in my […] Click to continue reading this post →

iPod Resurrected

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Feeling smug, and silly at the same time. Some time ago, I stopped bothering to take my ipod anywhere with me, except on long car trips, since it couldn’t really hold much of a charge on its own. In the car, I can power it from the car itself, and then it is a great asset for singing along to (if alone in car of course). On non-car trips, it was mostly just an annoyance. I’d charge it the night before a flight, and by time the plane had leveled off and it was time to order the ginger ale to go with the nuts (or little packets of gravel, depending upon the airline), it would shut down due to a dead battery. If it was a trip on which I’d have my computer with me (not always the case) I could dig out the coupling cable and run it from the computer’s power, but I did not always want to do that. So on most trips I’d just be carrying around this elegant white and silver brick with me, and then bringing it back home.

My pod is one of the third generation pods that had a defective battery. Apple had acknowledged the fault after a class action lawsuit and owners were invited to get their pod battery replaced for free, several years ago now. Of course, I never got to it […] Click to continue reading this post →

Distractions in the Dark

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Well, you’ve probably guessed that I’ve been somewhat distracted for several days. In fact, my main focus for the past week has really been on computer issues, frustratingly. I’ll give you the blow by blow later, I hope, but the last couple of days have been the most frustrating of all, and so I’ve not been dealing with much else, including blogging. Part of that is actual logistics – some of the things I wanted to post are on the afflicted computer – and some just the sheer annoyance of not having solved the issues driving me to do something totally non-computer related like going for a hike or seeing a movie.

So tonight i think I have a new theory – well, hypothesis- of what’s wrong, after a good deal of the day spent on detective work. It is a conjecture that is supported only by […] Click to continue reading this post →