Author Archives: Clifford

Good Company

By | | , , , ,
3 Comments

Brian May. Photo from: http://www.guitar-poll.com/BM.phpHey, guess who was at Griffith Observatory recently? Brian May! He’s that astrophysicist who took some time off to play (excellent) guitar and compose songs in the band called Queen. Ring any bells? (I found the nice photo here.) So why was he in town? Well, a slightly giggly (but always great) Madeline Brand (of the NPR program “Day To Day”) went along to interview him, and you can listen to the interview here, and read a transcript, as well as see extracts from him book (written with Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott), charmingly and blatantly (but knowingly?) unrealistically called “Bang! The Complete History of the Universe”. I actually looked through it in a bookstore the other day – looks rather nice. Wonderfully produced and I read some well-written passages, so might be worth picking up if you’re looking for a fresh read about the universe.

As a side note, I was a huge fan of his during my middle to late teenage years and early 20s, and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Random Web Stuff, I – The Princes

By | | ,
2 Comments

Well, every now and again the link tracker from google’s blog search engine (which reports some links to the blog to me on the blog software’s control panel) throws up some weird random stuff. the princesThere was a funny one today. Some site that aggregates random stuff had a post about the Fresh Prince. It then gathered images from the web to illustrate, and somehow grabbed an image from this blog among the haul, which is why I knew of this. Two that ended up together are to the right.

Prince pictures, it said. Excellent. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Inside the LHC!

By | | ,
Comments Off on Inside the LHC!

I recommend these videos that show the inside workings of the ATLAS detector of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) using animation. They are quite stunning and simply lovely. Science aside for a moment (and you can learn about it in the posts listed below), remember that the LHC is simply the largest and most complicated device ever constructed, with the largest team of scientists assembled. It is a wonderful reminder of the international, collaborative, and cross-cultural nature of science. […] Click to continue reading this post →

So Have You Been There Yet?

By | | ,
6 Comments

I’ve mentioned it twice (here and here) in other posts, but I think it is worth a post of its own.

Have you been yet? I’m looking at you, USC-area person. There’s a fantastic new wine-bar in the neighbourhood, a relatively short walk north of campus at Union and Hoover. I’m so pleased to see it, and it is extremely welcome as far as I’m concerned. It is called Bacaro, and I’ve been there a lot already with several different groups of friends and colleagues.

   bacaro interior   bacaro interior

Why? Well, the wine is just great (various Italian wines) and the menu is fantastic too […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tired

By | | , ,
3 Comments

It has been rather a tiring last several days. I’ve been focusing on writing a big report on various internal matters that my committee was charged to study for the whole academic year. The issues are rather large, and the solutions I was trying to present require not just cosmetic tinkering but major changes in the way things are done. So the key thing to get right in writing it is a tone that is critical of what there currently is in place while at the same time painting a picture of what could be in its stead, while also beginning to show how to get there. If you don’t balance all three just right, there’s no chance that anything will change, since either lots of people will just be pissed off that you trashed their system, or threatened the status quo, or they’ll agree but say there’s nothing that can be done, or they’ll say you have not really thought it through. I think I’ve managed to get the balance right.

It was due on Monday. On Sunday night, I had something down, but I did not really like […] Click to continue reading this post →

Major Cyclone

By | | ,
2 Comments

Update: 11th May ’08. Well, as you probably know, estimates have surpassed 100,000. An urgent concern now is the additions to the death toll resulting from the lack of emergency relief, brought on by the restrictions placed by the Myanmar government. See a BBC report here, or an NPR report here, for example.

Update: 7th May ’08. It is much worse. I’ve seen a BBC report with a figure above 22,000.

The news is not good for Myanmar (Burma). The death toll due to cyclone Nargis has apparently passed 10,000 (see CNN and the BBC), making it the deadliest storm since 1999.

Sheril and Chris are blogging about it on the Intersection, (see e.g. here) and so keep […] Click to continue reading this post →

JPL Open House!

By | | , , , , ,
Comments Off on JPL Open House!

Oh! It is the open house for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory this weekend! I almost missed it since it was two weekends later last year. Image composite brazenly taken from their website.

JPL Open House

I went last year and had a great time and so I strongly recommend it. Go along for your own interest, of course, but if you have any kids, take ’em along*. If interested, have a look at my detailed post from last year entitled “JPL the new Disneyland?”

As I said there: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Oh Dear, I Liked Ken…

By | | ,
9 Comments

Oh dear, I liked Ken. Now he’s gone from office. Ken Livingstone really understood public transport and did something about it. And the congestion charge…(which was my idea!!!)… took someone with real guts to push it through. We need more people like him to fight the car lobby – to get people to change their behaviour and do something for their environment.

Thanks, Ken.

-cvj

(Image from “Underground Etiquette”. Worth a read.)

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Sad Ending

By | | , , ,
1 Comment

sam smith’s oatmeal stoutThat’s it. The class is over… I have to admit that I’m pretty sad to see the end of it, although I’m very very tired. It was such a great group. (I’ll be toasting the end of it all with some of the splendid stuff to the right.)

Recall that we stepped away from black holes. After a look at cosmology for some lectures, where we understood the role of four crucial components in determining a universe’s properties (curvature, matter, radiation, and vacuum energy) we dove back into formalism for a short while (one lecture) to develop a little more the tools we needed to properly under stand how to formulate Einstein’s field equations.

It did not take long… You need only the idea that it makes sense to formulate everything in terms of objects that allow you to express the full sense of an equation in any coordinate system you care to write. Once that is done (the objects are called tensors, and the idea and how they work is pretty simple to get to grips with) the key to formulating the field equations of gravity is to have a look at the structure of other familiar systems. The field equations of electromagnetism (Maxwell’s equations) and the field equations for Newton’s formulation of gravity give the required clues. A rummage around the geometry to find the appropriate object to express the physics in terms of uncovers the Riemann tensor and its cousins (“contractions” to get Ricci and so forth), and you’re almost there. A step back to learn how to package energy […] Click to continue reading this post →

Center For Inquiry: Chris Mooney on The War

By | | , , ,
2 Comments

Well, here’s a turn up for the books. I pass the buildings of the Center for Inquiry (West) in Hollywood quite regularly on my to-ings and fro-ings, and always wondered what it was. About what were they inquiring? My inquiring mind wanted to know, but by time I got back to a computer, I’d forgotten all about intending to Google it. I was sort of expecting that it might be some, er, fringe organization, given the neighbourhood (not 1/4 of a mile away is uncle charles - center for inquirythe mother ship (or one of them) for the Scientologists, and a similar distance in the other direction is the “Scientology Celebrity Centre” too, where John, Tom, Kirstie, and others from the remarkably large movie star Scientology set presumably go and hang out and feel… celebrated).

Well, it turns out that it’s not like that after all, but a place where, as far as I can tell, serious reason-based inquiry into issues surrounding the places where, e.g., science, religion, culture and superstition intersect (such as, you know, real life) is encouraged. I like that poster of theirs I found, for example (image to the right).

They have a number of speaker series, where all sorts of interesting people come to speak, and people come to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Phil at LHC

By | | , ,
1 Comment

Do you listen to the CERN LHC podcasts? They can be good. Every now and again, there’s a visitor there, and Brian Cox interviews them on site at the Large Hadron Collider. (Search archives for LHC or see links to lots of posts on it below, such as this one.) The most recent visit is by Phil Plait, aka the Bad Astronomer. They chat together about various aspects of the science to be done at the (soon to be switched on!) LHC, research in basic science in general, the scare-mongering business about the black holes destroying the earth (see here and here), conspiracy theories, and – of course – […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XX – Sporting Locations

By | | , , , , , , ,
4 Comments

Wow, doesn’t time fly when you’re having a busy semester! I meant to tell you about this early March shoot a while back, but got swamped and it fell off the desk. I recalled that I’ve been neglectful because I learned that the show in which some of this will be used will air on Tuesday night (9:00pm I think – “The Universe” on the History Channel). The episode discusses the end of the universe, as far as I know. The point is to discuss the various speculations that have been made about how the universe might end, and what current knowledge (such as the famous 1998 supernova observations showing that the universe’s expansion is accelerating) seems to suggest about which of those scenarios might be more likely. Of course, for the discussions to make sense, you need someone to talk about some of the basics, such as what it means for the universe (indeed, the whole of spacetime) to expand and collapse. Who you gonna call? history channel shoot - end of the universe
Ok. I’m one of many you can call. It was a new (to me) producer/writer, Savas Georgalis, who called this time, and we worked together on plans about how we might […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Darwin Online Project

By | | , ,
2 Comments

On NPR the other morning, I heard a piece about the Darwin Online Project. It sounds just amazing. I hope you find time to explore the site.

Extract from Darwin’s Notebooks

It has all sorts of fascinating things that you can download or view in the above (click for larger) manner (your very own copy of the Origin of Species, perhaps, or parts of his diaries and notebooks…), and is quite a treasure trove of one-stop-shop (but free) Darwin data. (There are even some of (his wife) Emma Darwin’s recipes.) The site is here.

Very importantly, the collection shows Darwin’s work in development, and not just the […] Click to continue reading this post →