Author Archives: Clifford

Physics, 101

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physics at 101 cafeIt’s been one of those days. I just got back home, at 2:30am, after a very pleasant bit of work in a cafe. I was writing up my thoughts of the day into my notebook (I’m old-fashioned that way) and crafting new ones. Where was I? The 101 Coffee Shop, of course, an LA landmark – with those lovely booths, the counter, the lighting, all classics – over near the Capital Records building (another LA landmark) just where you join the 101 heading up to North Hollywood – hence the name, and hence the title of this post.

It’s been one of those days in a good sense. After a long couple of weeks of muddling and being rather down about a project I’m working on that had run into problems, things suddenly made sense today over the course of a long IM conversation (six hours) with one of my collaborators, Jeff Pennington. Things just started to fall into place during the brainstorming… we’d exchange facts and observations, explain thing to each other….muddle along for a while… ask questions… calculate separately for a bit…. suggest computations to each other…report results…get confused… and then it all broke open quite nicely and every single fact seemed to fit into place by the end. A lot to do still, but it seems rather robust and tantalizing.

After taking a break after the long brainstorm to do a bit of gardening work, this […] Click to continue reading this post →

There Will Be No Dawn

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Well, not until September at the earliest, that is. (Oh! That feels so good to have finally been able to use that as a post title!)

Dawn concept image: William K. Hartmann Courtesy of UCLAWhat am I talking about? NASA’s Dawn mission, of course. Dawn is a spacecraft that will go to the asteroid belt to study more closely the two largest asteroids, Ceres and Vesta. (Image right is an artist’s impression of the spacecraft. credit: William K. Hartmann, Courtesy of UCLA) In addition to the mission page linked above, there’s also a nice Wikipedia article about it here.

Last Thursday was to be the launch, but there were problems due to weather (mostly) – you don’t want to be fueling the tanks of the launch vehicle when there is high risk of lightning, as there was that day. There’s more about the matters on the NASA site, and also and Amara’s post on Scientific Blogging.

Actually, her post there is extremely informative about the goals of the mission, and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Boot Camp

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Boot CampYesterday afternoon, feeling a bit down in the dumps for a variety of reasons I decided to head for the hills to clear my head. A good hike often helps these things. My other mission was to begin the painful task of breaking in some new boots. The fantastic repair job that I got done on my faithful old boots that died last year (see here for the full report) held up marvelously, and in fact still holds up, but I will admit that they lost a fair bit of flexibility with the new sole, and although they are great for the medium grade sorts of hikes I do in the immediate surroundings, I’m not really sure that they’d be great on the longer ones. I have not taken them up Mount Wilson, for example. The repair extended their life for quite a bit longer, and they will still be useful, but I decided last week that I should start breaking in a new pair to last me (I hope) another 15 years or so. I decided to try to get something as close to the ones I had as before, and so the Asolo TPS 535s were the ones I got (supposedly the natural successors to my Asolo AFX 530s). So I laced them up (already unhappy with the wimpy laces they have as compared to the big rope-like ones on my old boots) and set off from the trailhead in Topanga.

Boot CampMy goal? Eagle Rock. A favourite of mine. There it is in the photo on the right (click for larger). It’s a relatively quick hike, about 3 miles out, along the Musch trail (not the fire road) and a 1000 foot elevation gain, with mostly nobody around since it is insanely hot at 2:30pm and only mad dogs and Englishmen (so the Noel Coward song goes) go out in the midday sun. I’ll leave you to decide which I am (remember, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog). So I was able to speed up the mountain to the Rock and stay there for a while, only meeting four other people heading that way the whole time.

You might wonder why it is called Eagle Rock. I did for a long time, as probably have […] Click to continue reading this post →

Teesandees

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I forgot to post this yesterday, when it was more relevant, but here I go anyway. I’m not looking to offend anyone here, I’m just curious, and have been puzzled about this for years. I’m reminded of it every year at about this time. What am I talking about? Wimbledon.

venus williams wimbledon 2007 (AP Photo/Andrew Parsons, PA)Not the event itself (which I have not followed in over a decade or so) but the word, or rather its pronunciation. I’ve noticed that a lot of people in America – from people I encounter day to day to newscasters on NPR – seem to get very confused about the “d” and pronounce it as a “t”. So you get people talking about the “Wimbleton” final a lot at this time of year, especially when someone from the US is in it (see photo at right [credit: AP Photo/Andrew Parsons, PA]). Has anyone else noticed this, or is it just my hearing? (Or worse, perhaps it is pronounced with a “t” and I’ve just not been paying attention all these years, and somehow I just hear it more clearly over here when some people say it.)

I’ve been wondering why this happens. Here’s some additional data, I’ve painstakingly […] Click to continue reading this post →

Fluored

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Dan Flavin

Dan FlavinFrom 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 →

Memorising Mingus

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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

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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. […]

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Consider a Spherical…

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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 →