Well, I’d have hoped to have done a post today on a few things, but physics intervened. Recall that the Southern California Strings Seminar is on right now here at USC, and since I am the organizer, I’ve been nipping about serving up piles of various types of tasty cookies (hunted down on a late night visit to Trader Joe’s last night – gotta have good cookies to go with the coffee you see), announcing the speakers, and so forth, as well as actually sitting and enjoying the really excellent talks that we’ve had from several young people. Day one (finished off with dinner, wine, beer, and chats with people from USC, UCLA, and UCSB at Bacaro) was just great and day two is in the morning and so I’d better finish up this post and get to sleep.
We had a spectacular sunset on Saturday. Another example of a physics intervention, writ large (“Rayleigh scattering” of light by particulate matter in the air making it nice and red – get some dramatic clouds as a backdrop to paint some streaks of colour onto to finish the job). The skies here out West can be just wonderful at this time of year – so interesting. I was on the top floor of a Home Depot parking lot when it happened, conveniently. (The one in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard, of course.) I stopped loading up the car with my purchases (for a project I hope to mention more on later) and wandered over to where I could get a good shot. One of them is above. When I returned to my car (ten metres away, but I was sort of behind a post and so not fully visible), there were two Home Depot staff, one of each gender, looking in cautiously through the open door of the car, keeping a safe distance. I yelled “can I help you?”, and the guy said “this you?”. I confirmed that it was indeed my car and that I’d just stepped away to take a picture. He said, “oh, ok” and spoke something into his head-mounted headset radio, something to the effect that it was all ok and never mind, “…customer located…” Apparently they were worried and wanted to make sure that I was not kidnapped. I said that a smart criminal would have left me and taken the stuff and not the other way around… We laughed.
-cvj
