One of my favourite scenes from the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books earlier this year (I forgot to post these nearer the time). They’d set up giant crosswords at various points on the UCLA campus (where the Festival was held), and people gathered around and tried to solve them. I think this is a lovely idea! […] Click to continue reading this post
From a shockingly* effective retrospective exhibit of the fluorescent light works of Dan Flavin, now on at LACMA. (The image on the right with a person next to a similarly-sized piece is to give you a sense of scale.)
Here’s a little bit about how fluorescent lamps work, from Wikipedia. The old-style big fluorescent lights you recall from a while back (with that more industrial or corporate feel) are very different than the modern compact fluorescent lights many people would like to see used more in your homes (and elsewhere). This produces a lot of […] Click to continue reading this post
Mingus Lives!
Just now I noticed to my horror that it was on the 1st of September of last year that I intended to get around to repairing Mingus, my G4 powerbook, at the time the main workhorse of my away-from-campus computer arsenal. There was an unexpected failure which I could not figure out the source of, and I managed to get it partly alive -alive enough to drag about 12 GB of data from the hard drive via booting it as a target disc of an iMac, Ella. Well, I never sent it off as I was (1) thrown by the fact that I had no coverage on it, and so any repair would have to be paid for, and (2) in the middle of the semester – a really busy one – and so I did not really have that much time to devote to the issue.
Well, it all got put on a back burner because I decided to use my teaching laptop (a little iBook) as my main laptop -just for a week or two, I told myself. Eventually, last […] Click to continue reading this post
The Cat
by Ryan Alexander
She came to me skittish, wild.
The way you’re meant to be,
surrounded by cruelty.
I did not blame her.
I would do the same.
A pregnant cat, a happy distraction;
some sort of normal thing.
Calico and innocent.
The kittens in her belly said feed me.
And I did.
She crept with careful eye,
Body held low to the dirt,
Snagged a bite,
And carried it just far enough away.
She liked the MREs,
the beef stew, the chicken breast, the barbeque pork,
but she did not like canned sardines.
I do not blame her.
I would do the same.
She came around again and again
finally deciding that I was no threat,
that this big man wasn’t so bad.
I was afraid to touch her as the docs warned us. […]
What is this? The story behind this is just hilarious! I laughed out loud for a good while. […] Click to continue reading this post
Physics World did a small piece on Asymptotia for their July issue. You can read it at this link (and find links to profiles of some other blogs). This means that we’ll have several visitors who might not have been by before. Welcome everyone! Come in and sit down, and … Click to continue reading this post
So I went out to get a new kettle a few days ago. I’ve now given up on a rather lovely design by the company Chantal that I’ve been using for many years since on two models in succession (or is it three?) the same flaw has revealed itself – the plastic parts of the Hohner whistling lid began to loosen gradually (probably from too much heat up the sides, which may be my fault) and then you eventually end up with a non-fitting non-whistling lid.
I began to assess other kettle designs, and in doing so found myself thinking idly about a number of physics issues. One of the main ones was energy. If I got a smaller kettle (the one I had before had a capacity of 1.8 quarts, and I was considering ones as big as 2 quarts and ones as small as 1.5 quarts), which I was leaning heavily toward, it would probably encourage me to save energy and not boil so much water. On the other hand, maybe that’s really silly, since I might just be putting the same amount of water into the kettle anyway… I’d never fill either up all the way in any case. But if I put the same amount of water into both kettles, would the smaller one end up using less energy anyway as I don’t have to heat up the extra air in the chamber, or does that not matter…? It’s not that simple since the chamber is not sealed. Hot air (and later, steam) is escaping all the time. Well, this is all complicated by the fact that the smaller kettle has less of its base in contact with flame, so I’d have to turn down the flame, and heat it for longer on a lower flame than with the larger kettle… would that make a difference? Perhaps a smaller chamber at lower flame means slower steam escape velocity, and so a quieter whistle. Not good if you’re prone to forgetting that you’ve put the kettle on during an absorbing computation…downright dangerous, in fact!
This was not an entirely serious discussion, you see, but it’s sort of fun sometimes to find these things floating around in one’s head. Physicists (and I imagine, other scientists) have this sort of thing flit through their heads a lot. The key thing -especially as a Theoretical Physicist- is knowing when to engage with one of these problems, and when to ignore them. Is there are clear route to tackling the problem? Is it worth it? Is there something to be learned from solving this problem that might be useful elsewhere? In fact, I was trying to explain this all to a writer friend of mine […] Click to continue reading this post
I don’t know if you read ScienceWoman’s posts at the blog “On being a scientist and a woman”, but if you don’t, go over there from time to time. The same thing can be said for the blog “Female Science Professor”. They are both very internal sorts of blogs. You … Click to continue reading this post
As they did with the Incredibles, Brad Bird and the team at Pixar made a movie just for me! No, really! How could they know so accurately about my likes, loves and interests in conjuring up such a perfect combination of the various themes, story elements, images, scenes, characters (and rat facial expressions and gestures)? This time it is all about food – good food – cooking, and kitchens, and you know how I feel about those topics.
Ratatouille is wonderful, and I imagine that (even though they made it just for me) you […] Click to continue reading this post
While on the way to see a film celebrating good food (among other things) it makes sense to have some. This is LoterÃa’s taco sampler (click for larger):
I’ve told you about this excellent restaurant before, I think, but feel compelled to show […] Click to continue reading this post
As you might have guessed, I could not resist having a look at the line at the Grove shopping mall/village/whatever. Here’s an overhead shot of a cluster near the Apple Store’s entrance just after the launch at 6:00pm:
(Click for larger.)
What you can’t hear is people cheering as people either enter or emerge from the store (I’m not sure which). It’s not everyday you see this many people (in a very long line indeed – see one of four segments at right) waiting to shell out so much money for something that they all know will be very obsolete a year from now. They just want to be part of what is (seriously for a moment now) a true […] Click to continue reading this post
A few hours ago, I got back from a rather pleasant event – LA Bloggers Live! What was it? LA Bloggers Live! Exactly what it says on the packet. So there were several bloggers from the Los Angeles area who met (at Tangier) to read out loud some of the posts from their blogs, listening to each other and meeting each other in the “real” world, as opposed to online. It was really great – there were several great readings, and it was excellent to meet and chat with some of the people whose blogs I’ve read from time to time. It was good old-fashioned community, plain and simple. There were readings on lots of topics, from joy and pain in relationships to learning how to swim and ride a bike as a child – the hard ways. Over on Leah Peah’s blog (she conceived and organized the event) and also here, you can see the list of readers, and later there’ll be some links to the posts that were read along with some audio. (I was particularly pleased that Will Campbell, whose blog I read from time to time, read a post that I recognized fondly – in it he’s on his bike, and he gets to do one of those things that all cyclists have wanted to do at least once, and never […] Click to continue reading this post
Good News, Everyone!
Well, you know (if you’ve stumbled upon one of the posts in my long series of attempts -see end of this post- to remind one or two people that they should not believe all the myths about LA not having any public transportation) that I’m continually excited about the steady stream of improvements that are being made by Metro in response to the increased pressure of usage put on the system by the general public.
Well, in addition to adding more and more of the red “Metro Rapid” bus routes, which are faster than the locals (which -ridiculously at times- stop every block) because they stop mostly only at major intersections, and in addition to adding more of the nice and roomy double buses (“bendy buses”) they’ve done something just great (which I’d been hoping for for years) – introduced true express routes! It makes sense to have three levels of granularity on the bus service here since it matches the three levels of granularity on the road system! […] Click to continue reading this post
I noticed that the eleventh edition of the blog carnival Philosophia Naturalis has been posted at Highly Allachthonous. Do follow the link and have a read of the various Physics (and related) posts that have been collected there*. The host Chris Rowan has organized things by distance scale (in powers … Click to continue reading this post
(Title refers to an phrase used in commercials for a chocolate bar that I remember from many years ago: “P-p-pick up a penguin”.)
Anyway: It’s Big. Really big. A recent archeological find of a giant ancestor penguin (Icadyptes salasi) in Peru:
(Comparative graphic from article listed below.)
