Author Archives: Clifford

Phase Diagram

By | | , , ,
Comments Off on Phase Diagram

phase_diagramFor those who have a thirst for something physics-y to follow the tomato chutney post, here’s a decorated physics diagram I made in Matlab this morning. Click for a larger view. It’s the phase diagram of interesting black hole transitions* (that I co-discovered 14 years ago) associated with part of the story I mentioned last month. On the right of the line you have small black holes favoured (of a given charge, so move horizontally), and on the left side of the line the system favours large black holes and so when you cross the line you have a sudden jump from one type to the other. That second order critical point I talked about there is the end of the line of first order points. The blue dot. Above there, you cross over smoothly from small to large holes. The blue dot is the border between the two cases.

It is a bit like having steam (or water vapour) on the left and liquid water on the right, and crossing the line is what you call boiling. The second order point is the place […] Click to continue reading this post →

When Life Hands You Tomatoes…

By | | , ,
4 Comments

… make chutney!

tomato_surplus_1

So the garden has been yielding a great deal in the tomato department, as you saw from earlier posts. There’s been quite the fig surplus too, but more on that later. Last night – late last night – I decided to work on another food item that allows me to use them up and save this glorious condensation of Summer for a later time. I decided to make a tomato chutney. Well, I’m making two. I wanted to take the yellower tomatoes to make one with a lighter colour and flavour, and I will (later tonight perhaps?) make another, darker one with red tomatoes (with a little pepper from the garden for warmth).

A chutney is simple. It’s a bit like a savoury jam but even easier. I halved the little yellow pear variety tomatoes, and chopped a yellow onion – about half as much in volume as I had tomato. (Some extra tomatoes showed up late – I found a few green […] Click to continue reading this post →

Steamin’

By | | , , ,
5 Comments

CPU_usageYeah! It feels great when I get the workhorse computer really chugging along. 85% is unusual to see on a normal run, since this beast (a 2010 3.32 Ghz Mac pro quad core) has a lot of computational capacity that you don’t need for most tasks. I’m getting up to 85% because all four cores are crunching away independently on the same problem (written in MatLab) but different parts of it. Each point on the resulting graph will be the result of having computed 2000 points. Each of those 2000 points comes from computing a boundary value problem discretized into a million points. See an earlier post for more about that.

(Update: Now running even more tasks associated with this problem: Up to 96% now:
CPU_usage_2
…with nothing idle at all. This is probably not as efficient any more, but it is for a few hours and then back to 85%. In the meantime, it is amusing how it makes me feel I’m doing more work somehow…)

I assigned different parts of the graph to different processes by hand, not using a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales from the Industry XXXX – Comedy Moments and More

By | | , , , , , ,
6 Comments

crystal_D_and_cvjWhat happened here? Who is that, and what exactly made her so annoyed? Read on!

There are a number of new things coming out on screens near you (or may have already aired) that might interest you. For fans of the History Channel’s The Universe (thanks so much for all the emails with kind remarks, and so forth, by the way) there’s a new show in the works that’ll mix science and history (and other disciplines) in an interesting way. I’ve no idea when it is set to air though, and frankly I’m very confused as to what is on History and what is on H2, the companion channel, so I’ll just say watch out for that. We shot a lot of material for that earlier this year, and I hope you enjoy the show overall, despite my mumbling mug appearing on your screen a bit!

Apparently the many of the Weather Channel’s science-y segments were shown, in a series called “Deadly Space Weather”, which imagines what would happen on earth if you brought various prevailing conditions on other planets back here. Yeah, I know… but actually it’s a good opportunity to think about science ideas, at least in principle. You’ll recall that I did some demos for that which were rather fun – and hopefully interesting too. I saw a piece of one of them online (10:44 or so), and got rather annoyed at one point. There’s a segment where I demonstrate – with real sulphuric acid – the effect it has on organic compounds, using sugar. It is quite spectacular. And of course quite dangerous, so I’m actually wearing a lab coat (yes, there are occasions where real […] Click to continue reading this post →

Franklin Vs Watson and Crick

By | | , , , , , , ,
5 Comments

Wow! This is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been hoping to see more of! When the report on this started on NPR about having students do music and video about science topics, I groaned a bit (while making breakfast) when I heard the Watson and Crick mentions in the clip in the background, saying to myself that it is so unfair that once again, Rosalind Franklin is being forgotten and a whole bunch of kids will miss the opportunity to learn about the nuances involved in doing science, and miss that she did such crucial work on this most important discovery…. I continued making my coffee, listening to the report with half an ear…. and then! …more of the clip was played and a girl’s voice came on, singing a bit about Rosalind Franklin, and then I realized that this was exactly the story they were telling in the video*. The whole NPR report, by Adam Cole, is here, with a short video doc. It is about not just the Rap B.A.T.T.L.E.S. doing songs and videos about various science topics, but also about other programs as well, started by people such as Christopher Emdin at Columbia, and others. Excellent.

I’ve embedded the Franklin/Watson/Crick video below. It was made by students in the Bay area, guided by Tom McFadden at Stanford. I think this is great piece of work since they did a great job on production, particularly with casting and costuming everyone to play the principals, cutting in reaction shots and so forth… It’s a real film! And for a change, for a popular rap about science that a wide variety of young people might be attracted to, this time the music is actual contemporary rap (which usually means well thought out lyrics combined with rhythmic devices that are definitely post 1980s, and not just a bunch of lines recited over a corny background beat – see another excellent example at the end of this post) which is great! An amusing and poignant extract:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Drawing Your Nobel Prize

By | | , ,
3 Comments

Another fun combination of science and sketching! Photographer Volker Steger decided get his subjects – a selection of Nobel Prize winners – to try to represent their work (what they got the prize for) with a drawing. You can see a discussion of the results (and find links to the prizewinners talking about their work) here*

-cvj
Click to continue reading this post →

Strange Omission

By | | ,
1 Comment

tardis_earls_courtSo over a quick lunch of sardines, tomatoes from the garden, and homemade bread*, I decided to glance and the bbc news website. It had a thing in the corner listing the top five stories, and one of them was How to build your own TARDIS.

Well, naturally I looked, because I was not aware that the required technology was available to do this yet. (I was sure we’d still have to wait until last year, or at least to 1985…. But anyhoo….) Turns out it is in the Technology section, so even more interesting, right?
Click to continue reading this post →

Break a Plate!

By | | ,
5 Comments

alcestis_stillWow. I’ve just returned from a most marvellous evening, and feel compelled to recommend what I saw to those in the area who can get to see it. You’ve possibly heard/read me talk about Nancy Keystone’s wonderful work in collaboration with her Critical Mass Performance Group before (e.g. see here and here). I probably used a lot of superlatives while doing so. Well here I go again. Nancy and the CMPG are doing a remarkably lively, clever, poignant (and downright funny in all the right places) production of their treatment of the Euripedes play Alcestis at the Boston Court Theater in Pasadena. I strongly recommend it for a thought-provoking and very moving evening out. It is a meditation on life and death that is powerfully done, and it is one of the best evenings of theatre I’ve had for a while. It’s one of the classic Greek plays we’re talking about here, but it is not a bunch of people standing around in togas (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) fretting. It is contemporary, on the face of it, timeless in another sense. (Photo is from the Boston Court Theater site.)

It is always impossible to describe Nancy’s work, because it is such a powerfully […] Click to continue reading this post →

TwentyWonder!

By | | , , , , , ,
2 Comments

TwentyWonder is tonight! Come along if you’re in the area. Some quotes from the site:

A mindblowing cultural mashup. One night only. Only in LA.

Art. Science. Music. Comedy. Food ‘n Drink. Weird Geeky Stuff. …and Roller Derby!

Feel the Love. All proceeds go to the Downs Syndrome Association of Los Angeles.

See you there?

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Science Slams!

By | | , , ,
Comments Off on Science Slams!

One of the things that came up in conversation in my meeting at the APS on Tuesday was Science Slams. These are a lot of fun, and are growing in popularity and frequency. Maybe you might want to take part in one, or organize one. There’s a lot of great theater to be had, and its fun for wider audience, just as poetry slams when done well can be fun for an audience that might not have chosen to study or listen to poetry. (See earlier posts on the local Dead Poets’ Slam, for example.)

My friend Herbi Dreiner, at the University of Bonn in Germany, (he’s in the photo at the right, used with permission) is one of the most active and experienced people I know of in the area of successfully combining physics, theatre, and (if you like) performance art. If you don’t know about his herbi_dreiner_slamminphysics show, that has even gone on tour internationally, have a look at an article he wrote about it (with links to video and photos) for the journal The Physics Teacher here (arxiv version here).

Herbi’s been getting involved in physics slams too, and he wrote a very nice piece about his own participation in the Guardian. Have a look here. He went into some nice detail about how (with the help of the audience) he illustrated the issues [..] Click to continue reading this post →

Face Time

By | | , , , ,
5 Comments

You know those cross-country trips that nip from one coast to another for a day and then back? There are people who do that regularly for a living. Honestly, I don’t know how they do it. I left LA on Monday to go to a meeting in DC, and returned on Tuesday night, and while nothing unpleasant happened en route (and the meeting at the DC office of the American Physical Society was good), it is really not something I’d make a habit of. I like to add a bit of time to see the place I’m visiting, and get a bit of a feel of the pulse before flying back. But there wasn’t time. I was in DC for a day and a half last November to visit another organization, and I did manage to get two hours to wander the mall and have sandwich in the cafe of the Smithsonian, but I’d have liked a bit more time back then too. Anyway…

I did, however, get some face time. On take off on the flight back I flipped through Hemispheres (United’s in flight magazine) to see if there were any more large faces airline_sketches_9th_july_2013to sketch. (You’ll recall several earlier posts about my liking to do this for practice […] Click to continue reading this post →