Multiple Updates
(Waiting for the kettle to boil…)
It has been a rather hectic week for me here in the city of Angels. It is difficult to pull it all together in my mind and recall all the contributing elements, but they have been varied and more or less interesting and useful activities, ranging from various committees, teaching issues, research issues, event planning, event attending, and of course, the Project.
(Kettle’s boiled. Water poured on tea. Assam/Ceylon blend…)
I want to work for a bit before going to bed, although I’ll knock off early (midnight) because I’ve got to get up very early in the morning to get prettied up a bit, walk to catch the bus to campus, and get there by 8:15am or so. This is so I can get to my office and put on a cap, hood and gown and play dress-up (remember last time?) with hundreds of colleagues and so forth. The event? The inauguration of our new University President.
I’ve just returned from a long afternoon and evening in which I appeared in two of the classes of my colleague KC Cole (the science writer) talking about the issue of science, and how I do various aspects of communicating it to the public through various means (writing, film, tv, radio; factual, in fiction/drama, through blogging, in speaking engagements), and the broad issue of writing and journalism in that area. Two groups of extremely engaged and bright students in a row, separated by a quick […] Click to continue reading this post
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2010 was awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2010 to Richard F. Heck (University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA), Ei-ichi Negishi (Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA) and Akira Suzuki (Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan), “for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis”
The first CicLAvia is this Sunday! Don’t forget! The sudden Winter weather we’ve been having will have vanished by then, and it will be a lovely day. There’s a seven-mile route of city streets for you to walk, bike, run, etc. Should be fun! 
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2010 to Andre Geim (University of Manchester, UK) and Konstantin Novoselov (University of Manchester, UK) “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene”
Noticed this on the shelves in a supermarket yesterday. (I was hunting for clotted cream, but that’s another story.) I can’t recall if I’ve known before that “quark” was also a kind of cheese. 
It has been a quiet week here on the blog, and there are many reasons for this. They are mostly all to do with me having a very busy week at work and at play. Work has seen a great deal on the usual fronts of teaching, research, and service, and I’ve also made some progress on The Project. Play has been good, varied, valuable and constructive. 
