I mentioned in an earlier post that Stephano Profumo gave an excellent departmental colloquium here at USC on the subject of Dark Matter, addressing the questions of […] Click to continue reading this post
I grew some decent crystals once when I was younger. Perhaps you did too? It’s an excellent (and cheap) science project for a young person to do, so do encourage them to have a go, whenever you get the chance.
Whatever you do, perhaps it is not a good idea to show them these giant selenite (gypsum) crystals first:
Fantastic aren’t they?! (Click for larger view.) They are in some truly extraordinary […] Click to continue reading this post
Here’s a map of science*!
The work, by Richard Klavans and Kevin Boyack, shows aspects of the connectivity of relations between scientific disciplines (colour key to the left), based on analysis of about 1.6 million scientific articles. Rather pretty isn’t it? And, yes, of course, very interesting to see the connectivity visualized like that.
Please visit their website to see how to visually slice all of this to highlight areas of the map by (a limited selection of) countries, regions, institutions, blue vs red state (!), etc.
There’s more information about the relationships in this Seed article, where there’s a […] Click to continue reading this post
While listening this morning to President Bush splutter and stumble his way through a bunch of mostly softball questions from the press at the Whitehouse (as usual), I was put in mind of this recent excellent Onion article, entitled “Heroic Secret Service Agent Takes Question Intended For Bush”.
It’s brilliantly funny. There’s analysis of the event, interviews, etc.
Have a read.
From the BBC, I learned that there’s been an unexpected turn around in science education in the UK:
The latest statistics from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service on applications to join full-time degree courses, show double-figure percentage rises compared with the same time last year for physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering and technology.
The speculations have begun:
While admission officers admit that they are baffled by this sudden and unexpected surge in interest, many secondary school and university tutors are convinced this is a result of long hard work by many working our education system.
“We really make a point of doing fun, practical things with all pupils when it comes to the sciences,” said Richard West, the head of science and physics at St Peter’s Collegiate School in Wolverhampton.
“We are encouraging after school science activities like astronomy and animal clubs and taking part in national competitions.”
Various other possible reasons are discussed as well, such as: […] Click to continue reading this post
Sunday night, after a long afternoon of intense work in the garden (digging holes and improving soil for planting new budlea plants, standing on the tall ladder for trimming one of the tall palm trees, and more) I went to the Jazz Bakery to see the second set of pianist Cyrus Chestnut with his trio (Dezron Douglas on bass and Neal Smith on drums):
They were excellent. As usual, there was hardly any audience for this extremely talented pianist (20 of us max?) – the triple whammy of (1) Los Angeles – people just seldom seem to make the effort, in great numbers (2) after 10:00pm in LA – see (1), and (3) Sunday night – see (1) again. The club would have been packed, were this taking place in New York, or London. Anyway, not my loss, I suppose, although it does take away a bit from such an event if the crowd is depleted like that. Musicians often feed off the crowd’s responses. In any case, it was an excellent show, as I said. Unexpectedly, they interspersed various standards with some recently reharmonized […] Click to continue reading this post
Saturday night, after a quick trip to catch the end of a pleasant reception down at the Santa Monica Art Studios (they’re featuring a new set of artists), I went to the Arclight (hurrah! – it’s been a while) and saw a quite wonderful film: Mira Nair’s “The Namesake”.
I laughed and cried in turn at the joy and the sadness of it. It’s a very simple film about so many key things, explored marvelously: Family, home, leaving home, leaving your country, […] Click to continue reading this post
So far today, the three best April Fool’s Day jokes I’ve heard or read have been as follows:
On NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, they had a good piece about new regulation to limit mobile phone ring tones in New York:
The city’s Center for Reduction of Noise Pollution issued a public call to action last month, citing an increased number of confrontations spawned by a new phenomenon: It’s called “ring rage,” and it involves strangers getting into fights over obnoxious cell phone ringtones.
David Yassky, a member of the New York City Council for the 33rd District in Brooklyn, has proposed a bill to regulate cell phone rings.
Distracting ringtones in the workplace cost the economy more than $1.2 billion each year, says Yassky. His bill mandates that New York residents choose between four more palatable rings, custom-made by the city.
The audio of the interview is here (along with the funny ringtones). NPR almost completely ruined the idea by being too obvious (you could almost hear them going “eh!?”, “eh!?”, after every sentence), not choosing a credible-sounding interviewee as the main subject, and then immediately reminding you of the date at the end of the interview. Are they afraid people will sue? It’s such a shame they had to be so obvious.
Much better was the following: […] Click to continue reading this post
I mean the good type of Hummers: Hummingbirds! (Some types of which are already visiting the garden even though the flowers they like are most not ready yet. One of my Budlea plants died – from the frosts I think – and another is ill. I expect to get three more of them from the market this week. The hummingbirds like them (butterflies love them), although they prefer the Mexican Sage plants which are right […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, it’s Friday, and the end of the week of standard work days, although not of course the end of the working week. I’m sure I do not speak only for myself when I say that this job does not really get switched off at a specific time every day (as you’ve seen), and it certainly is not contained to any specific days of the week. But I do scale things back quite a bit on Saturdays and Sundays and try to focus more on other things in my life (there are exceptional circumstances, of course). So this will be the last in this short series of “day in the life” posts describing my work day. (The last one was here. You can find all the others listed at the bottom.)
8:30am Finally I managed to get a lie-in! Unfortunately this is probably due to poor sleeping due to the fact that I accidentally fell asleep with the radio on (with no sleep function set) and so my entire night was full of the BBC and NPR. Getting ready this morning I realize that every story on NPR is familiar because I probably heard it at 4:00am already. I have poor reception in my bedroom, and so I listen to the radio over the web on a computer. It did not go to sleep, since the radio streaming keeps it active. If I want to fall asleep listening to something, I usually overcome this shortcoming by listening to a podcast, but this time I did not get to starting it before I dozed off. Anyway, tea, cornmeal porridge, coffee. No shirt ironing as I don’t need to be terribly professorial-looking today, much (see below).
I’ll be in semi-stealth mode again today (like Wednesday), in order to focus on research matters, but only semi. Again, I’ve avoided scheduling any meetings today (except one – see below). Although I do not leave for work, I settle down to dealing with various administrative matters. This starts with emails about next week’s colloquium, a future colloquium, and things of that nature. Also check blog, and add entries and begin to clean up the post about yesterday for later appearance.
Continuing the week, here’s Thursday:
I really only get the LA Times on Thursdays, with any regularity. Mostly because I like the Weekend section, which has listings of events coming up, and some interesting feature article or two about some LA thing or person or other. They’ve been interesting to me more often than not, on balance. Not always hugely interesting, but enough for a good 25 minutes read on the bus. The Home section can be good too. So I get it just in case there’s something good. Indeed, it pays off, and there are some good things. I’ll point two of them out in some later blog posts, I hope.
Continuing, here’s a short notebook on Wednesday.
Soon time to sign up to help judge the California State Science Fair. I hope I can make it. Just to reassure you that not every entry is another trebuchet (just the physics, mechanics, etc., section and you’ll know what I mean), here’s a story about two schoolgirls from New Zealand, Jenny Suo and Anna Devathasan, who decided to test the claims of GlaxoSmithKline that their product – cartoned ready-to-drink Ribena – has high Vitamin C content. They set out to show that cheaper drinks were less healthy than Ribena, and found to their surprise that there were only trace amounts of Vitamin C at best.
I’m a bit shocked by this since I love Ribena, and grew up with it for years. I seem to remember that some of the largest writing on the packaging is about the huge amount of Vitamin C that you’re going to get. Admittedly, it’s not the vitamin C aspect that attracted me to it, of course -I just love the taste! But all the same, it’s a bit disappointing….
From an article by Mike Steere: Click to continue reading this post
Continuing, this was the Tuesday:
Well, it starts out: When physicists marry physicists, the beginning may be a ‘big bang,’ but issues of life, love, and family gravitate toward the universal. Ok. Stop there. That’s way too many physics puns and double entendre in one sentence. It’s a nice article by Mike Perricone in Symmetry … Click to continue reading this post
