Author Archives: Clifford

iLike iPhone

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My lovely Sony-Ericsson T616 is just marvellous. I can use it all over the planet (more or less), it talks to all my other devices using Bluetooth so that I can sync calender and other data seamlessly. But it is old and falling apart. My ipod is a bit frustrating because I got one of the bad battery batch from long ago, and never got around to getting the replacement battery from the class-action suit. So it runs out of charge really fast.

But I’m not one for rushing to the new gadget until something really moves me, and so I’ve managed this situation quite well for some time now. Well, this could be the device I’ve been waiting for – Just announced by Apple at the CES in Las Vegas MacWorld in San Francisco: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Andromeda Now Makes Sense

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andromeda IRThe Andromeda Galaxy is bigger than previously thought. Perhaps as much as five times bigger. I know that you’re thinking – “Oh, that’s because most of it is dark matter, right?” No, this is not another dark matter story. In fact, there are many newly discovered stars from a recent study! The suburbs of the galaxy are much more extensive than previously identified. It’s rather good news, since the galaxy makes more sense than it did before, in the context of our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve. (Image above is of Andromeda in the infra-red, from NASA.)

The point here is that current theories of evolution for galaxies have the oldest stars Click to continue reading this post →

All Hands on Deck

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all hands on deck Well, it’s the middle of the Bleak Midwinter, and the first day of classes of the new semester. Mine start tomorrow. It is time to get myself back into the classroom-teaching frame of mind -although to be honest I don’t think the break was long enough for me to have got sufficiently far removed from it: 85% of the research tasks that I wanted to do during the break remain undone.

Anyway, I must sit and contemplate what I am going to talk about in the graduate course entitled “Selected Topics in Particle Physics”. It’s my lunch break, so I thought I’d chat to you for a bit.

Rumour has it that everyone is expecting some sort of string theory course, reasonably complementary to the one that my colleague Nick Warner taught here two years ago. I’ve no interest in just teaching the standard string theory topics – a good and motivated graduate student can just look them up in a book if motivated enough (if they can’t they’re in the wrong business) – and so I’d like to throw in some material that is not packaged together in the standard way, and give them an education that emphasizes powerful ideas and techniques that are relevant to more than just standard string theory research, but theoretical physics in general.

You see, this is one of the wonderful things about the topic that you don’t hear about much when people say things (and write books for a general audience) about how much it is supposedly taking over smart young minds and leading them astray: It is a fantastic framework for training good physicists for whatever new and useful ideas and physics will come along in the future, whether it is string theory or some other topic. The point is that string theory has developed in so many different ways, and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Dark Matter in 3D

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Have a look at this:

hubble 3d dark matter

What is it? It is an image of part of the three dimensional (see below) distribution of clumps of dark matter in our universe, produced by an extensive survey using the Hubble telescope. How did they produce it, given that dark matter is -by definition- not visible? They deduced the presence of the chunks of dark matter by looking at the gravitational […] Click to continue reading this post →

Potential

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Recall that a little over a month ago I reported about the Tesla electric car to you? In that article, I congratulated the car makers on their choice of name, and speculated about what other names might be used in the future when more car manufacturers get into the game. One of my favourites was the “Volt”. Well, today, GM announced a new electric car in development, and guess what they called it? The Volt! I was rather prescient, it seems! More on the announcement of the Chevy Volt at Newsweek (I borrowed the picture from there) and the San Jose Mercury News.

chevy volt

What will the Volt do? It is a hybrid, but the driving mechanism is purely electric. This is different from what other well-known hybrids do”: […] Click to continue reading this post →

The New Plastic Revolution

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The writing’s on the wall. Well, it really will be, and in several other places. The revolution’s very nearly here, you see. We’re on the cusp of it. It’s been talked about before, but it’s really here. Within a year or few we’ll be carrying around completely new devices based on this technology, and there’ll be all sorts of things in the household and office. You may have heard the buzz, but if not, I’ll say it here too. It’s all about microscopic electronic circuitry based on polymers that conduct electricity. The novelty here is the plastic nature of the resulting circuitry and devices that you can build, where I am using the word “plastic” in its descriptive sense – it is flexible and can take lots of shapes quite readily.

There’s a revolution on the cusp, not because this is hugely new (it is not, and the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Just So You Know I’m Not The Only Nut In The Fruitbowl

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share the road You may have read my most recent two posts (here and here) on commuting by bike (maybe combining it with bus, and subway as well, which is what I do most times – there are excellent express bus routes through the city: the Metro Rapid system). I’m not the only person cycling in this city. For more on cycling in LA there is a host of resources. There’s the Los Angeles County Bike Coalition for example, the Bike Kitchen, the Midnight Ridazzz, and many more activities and associations. There are maps of cycle routes and cycle lanes on the LACBC site too, as well as recreational bike paths.

Here’s a recent Los Angeles Times profile, written by John Balzar1, of Monica Howe, who is a major mover and shaker in the local bike and biking awareness scene. (I borrowed the photo, above right, from the article. It was taken by Al Seib.)

It’s very nice to read about people who are super-enthusiastic about the same issue. It is an uphill struggle, but I think I see more cyclists on the roads these days.

One thing that is mentioned a lot in the article and in other discussions of this sort is the safety issue. For what its worth, in my opinion the danger risks are often overstated, or perhaps not properly represented. While there are accidents due to careless drivers not paying attention, etc., I have to say that there’s not enough mention in these discussions of the far too many cyclists who are doing stupid things. I can’t help but wonder how many of those stupid acts contribute to the number of accidents that people count […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Movement

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The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 7th January. The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with ocassional exceptions). It’s a series – started and run by science writer K. C. Cole – of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. There’s a website of past and upcoming events here. You can also have a look at two of the last two descriptions I did of some events here and here, and the description of a recent special one on Uncertainty that was held at the USC campus is here.

Here is K.C. Cole’s description of the upcoming programme:

“Movement: You can’t leave home without it. In fact, you can’t get anywhere without it—whether you’re trying to bring about political change, compose music, send a robot to Mars, or merely make your way across a room. You can’t even […] Click to continue reading this post →