Author Archives: Clifford

Missed Chance

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The show on television called “24” has an interesting format. It is sort of meant to be in real time, and so each episode – roughly an hour long, including advertisements – charts what took place in an hour of a particular day. A whole season is one day. A very harrowing day for the characters in the show, particularly agent Jack Bauer. They are part of an counter-terrorist unit (CTU) trying to save the America from various highly complicated terrorist plots. The terrorists are obsessed with Los Angeles, it seems, which is convenient given that the unit is based in Los Angeles. Having watched two or three seasons of the show now, I’ve also come to appreciate the fact that the terrorist plots hand over to more and more complex and dastardly ones as the show goes along through the day. And the “controlling mind” bad guy earlier in the day is hardly ever the worst and most dastardly person our heroes will meet. There’ll be a really really bad guy along later on with an even worse plan than the one before lunchtime, and so forth. Another reason that it’s lucky that they’re obsessed with Los Angeles, since there’s an excellent supply of theatre and television actors here to be cast in various partsa.

What I’ve really been hoping to see is an episode of the show when Jack Bauer is not saving America/LA. Instead, he’s just… chillin’. Imagine it now: […] Click to continue reading this post →

On the EDGE

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Golden-rumped Elephant ShrewEDGE here stands for “Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered” and is a term that was coined to refer specifically to certain threatened species of animal around the world. They’re not always your big marquee animals (Lions and Tigers and Bears! Oh My!), and a great deal of them will be unfamiliar to you. (I’d never encountered the Golden-Rumped Elephant Shrew before, and I’ll admit that my life has been all the poorer for not having known about it before. It’s so cute! Furthermore, it has a golden rump. What’s not to like? Apparently, it is related to an elephant, somewhat distantly. Yes, it has a trunk, but it takes more than that to detemine its relationship to elephants! Update: – Here’s a Wikipedia article on elephant shrews, which could be a starting point for finding out more. The EDGE site has a lot of information too: here.

That unfamiliarity – blissful ignorance on our part – is part of the motivation. There’s a campaign to highlight them more, and raise both funds and awareness to enable […] Click to continue reading this post →

200 Calories

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What’s a calorie? Well, it is a unit of energy. If you take a gram of water and put some energy into it, you’ll raise its temperature (assuming it is away from its boiling point). If you succeed in raising the gram of water’s temperature by 1oC, you’ve put one calorie of energy into it.

But that’s not the calorie you probably have used in your everyday conversation. You’ve probably been talking about the Calorie. (Note the upper case C.) The Calorie, or the kilocalorie. It is 1000 times larger than the calorie of the previous paragraph. It’s the energy needed to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by 1oC (assuming it’s not at its boiling point). That’s the Calorie you find discussed in the context of nutrition – the energy content of the food you eat.

Without further ado, let me show you what the Calories “look like”. Let’s take a reasonable number of them – 200. Each of the pictures below represents 200 Calories of a food, which you’d get from eating it. Mini peppers, gummy bears, and kiwi fruit: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Snap Links

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New feature. This one is being tested since I’m not really sure whether I like it or not:

If you hover over any external link in a post, you’ll see something interesting happen. Try it. Here is a link to the USC website, for example.

I am trying to decide if this is a useful feature or not. Perhaps it is just too annoying compared to the gain in functionality? Or perhaps you don’t care either way since you […] Click to continue reading this post →

Look Up!

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Comet McNaught seems to be a gift that keeps on giving. Last night here in Los Angeles, just after the sun set, I stepped out to look from a nearby elevated spot – and there it was. With binoculars, it’s an impressive sight, and possibly the last naked-eye visible comet sighting for a long time. Unfortunately, I have no equipment that I can use to take a decent photo for you, so I can’t share what I saw.

But you can go out and look. I give some viewing tips below.

What you’re probably puzzled about now is why the experts kept getting the “last chance to see” message wrong. People seemed very sure back on Wednesday that it would be gone from view -and I did a post to that effect myself- and and the same thing was said on Thursday and then on Friday.

I’m guessing that this is because although they can track the position rather well, they […] Click to continue reading this post →

Conference in Progress

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Well, I checked in on the Women in Physics conference today, and it seems to be going very well. I went to lunch and sat with a number of the students (and some faculty) and I also chatted to some in private about their interests, current stages in their careers, etc. It’s always so wonderful to hear people so enthusiastic about physics, and listen to them wondering what their part in the great story of science will be.

Here are a couple of shots of the delegates at lunch – it is a sort of panorama (click each component for larger view): […] Click to continue reading this post →