Category Archives: fun

Yvette on LHC Poetry

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yvette cendesAha! Regular commenter Yvette Cendes (over at The Chocolate Fish) has thrown down the gauntlet! She thinks that we can come up with more, and better, poetry about the LHC. The successful LHC song of Kate McAlpine (deserving of thunderous applause for raising awareness) should clearly be considered just the beginning. So she starts off the challenge to you all with some work of her own, which I shamelessly reproduce below. (Go over to her blog to submit your new writing – or do it both here and there. Up to you.) (My money’s on our regular commenter Elliot producing a marvellous LHC haiku or something like that.)

Yvette calls it an LHC Poetry Slam. Hmmm. I submit that it should be an LHC Poetry Event, or LHC Poetry Collision, or…. anyway, here’s her poem, and wow – true to form, it is good! […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXII – Live LHC Chats

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Just the other day, while coordinating some work being done on my house, I was thinking that it is time I learned Spanish. Most of the people working in the construction industry here in Los Angeles have Spanish as their first language, and besides the usefulness it would give in communicating difficult ideas about a piece of work to be carried out, I really don’t like the feeling that I’m disconnected from them. I’d like to be able at least to, in Spanish, offer a cup of coffee, or a glass of iced water, and have a little small talk – treat them like fellow human beings as opposed to “the help” as is done so much in this city, to my disgust. I interact a lot with the Spanish-speaking parts of the city through my use of public transport, places I go to grab tasty food from time to time, and so on, but there is still a sense that there is an entire alternative Los Angeles out there that I am only barely touching upon by not knowing the language.

Then yesterday this whole Spanish language issue came up again in a big way. There was a phone call to the department from Univision, the Spanish-language TV network. Probably most of you are wondering what that is. You know those several channels that you never watch and when you flick by them, all clustered together, they’re always speaking Spanish and discussing issues or people that you seldom (if ever) have heard of? Yes. This is one of those channels. There’s a huge part of America (and elsewhere) that tune to those channels primarily.

Well, the people at Univision had heard about the excitement about the Large Hadron Collider (see, e.g. last post) and wanted to do a piece on it, and have someone in the studio to talk about it live on their breakfast show. They were looking for a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Help Me! Heeelp Meee!

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the fly operaSorry. Didn’t mean to cry wolf, but I always think of that great (as in camp and amusing) ending scene when I think of The Fly. The movie, anyway. (That’s in the original 1958 movie version – clip at bottom of this post.) Now there’s an opera! I am not joking. David Cronenberg has teamed with composer Howard Shore to create an opera. (You know the work of both of them rather well, actually, from film work together, and separately – Shore did the wonderful music for films such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Cronenberg the film director needs no introduction.) I love the play on Da Vinci’s iconic drawing for the production’s publicity and so forth. See above right.

The artists are of the opinion (and I agree, in principle) that the themes visited in the story are powerful and resonant enough for an opera. Science, science ethics, new technology, fear of same, mercy killing… and presumably devotion to a cause, […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Farewell To Arms

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cut off arms from shirts

When I look at this, it sort of scares me a touch. Just a touch. There’s a memory of the arms – flesh and blood ones – inside them, and there goes a shiver down my spine. But it’s all fine, really. There’s nothing sinister going on, and no horrible subtext lurking at all. What I was doing with my Labour Day holiday was all perfectly innocent. Nobody’s arms – not mine or anyone else’s – were or will be hurt! (I’m rather pleased with the title of the post, I have to say.)

What was I doing?
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Fest

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fig bread.... going fast Well, since it was the last weekend of the slow Summertime (semester begins – see next post), it seemed a good idea to go out with a party. Silver Lake supplied the party (the Sunset Junction street festival, which, despite my strongly supportive words of the previous post, turned out to be not as good as it used to be [update: The Militant says it well]), and I (well, my garden) supplied the figs. I had some friends come around to raid the fig tree, help me consume some bottles of Hoegaarden and Leffe (along with some wine and a little gin later). Seems I threw together a couple of loaves of fig bread as well, while my guests were chatting and drinking.

My guests were nice, in that they said it was delicious (between enthusiastic mouthfuls of it, still […] Click to continue reading this post →

Dance Experiments

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Since it is Friday night, and almost time for the biggest and best street fair on the annual calendar in Los Angeles ([update: not counting the Halloween Carnaval!] the Sunset Junction Street Fair – they shut down several blocks of Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake for two solid days of fun [update: oh dear]), it is time to recall the excellent careful series of scientific experiments in blowing apart stereotypes performed by Dave Chappelle, assisted by John Mayer (along with two other musicians when they do the controls at the end).

The video quality is not perfect, but this is simply hilarious, and rather well thought out. It is presented as though it is a set of experiments, with a control group, and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Art Walk

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Of course, being back in the city means getting back into the routine of enjoying all the fantastic things to do here during a hot Summer. There are too many things to choose from, but one of my favourites is the Downtown Art Walk. (Previous post on it here.) It’s the second Thursday of every month. Strangely, it is still not very well known, even though it is one of the best activities I can think of to do to blow off steam at the end of the day. Or for the whole day. The art is all over the place, in that there is good stuff mixed in with a lot of, uh, other stuff, and so it is fun to hunt for it. Two reliable highlights for me, and maybe the most fun of all, are (1) the fact that these galleries are housed in lots of fantastic old and decayed spaces in old buildings in the core of Los Angeles’ centre. In fact, I often find myself looking at and enjoying the spaces more than the art. (2) The people. Representatives of every Los Angeles archetype, and several more besides, can be found wandering the streets of downtown during the Art Walk… and squeezing into the galleries and sampling the free (or cheap) wine, and generally rubbing shoulders with everyone else. How often do you get a wider cross section of Angelenos out of their cars and, horror, walking and, horror of horrors, mingling with others? Worth going just for that. There’s a brief history of it here, written by Bert Green, (hey, I did not know that I’ve been coming to it almost since it started) and the website for the Art Walk is here.

I wandered around some of my favourite galleries and studios, looking at the art, people, buildings, and spaces. Everything changes so much between monthly events and so it is always a pleasant surprise to learn which gallery will interest me most on […] Click to continue reading this post →

Breathing

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faith machine by robert reynolds

This is a piece by Robert Reynolds, currently on display at the Bert Green Fine Art Gallery in downtown LA. It is called Faith Machine. You’ll have to ask him what he’s trying to depict (Bert, the gallery owner, gave me a bit of a run down, but I don’t want to garble it), but I loved it simply because it’s a working, moving machine, and those bellows are just wonderful, with a motor turning at the back driving a piston that pumps the bellows, blowing smoke (or something) up through the seats (which are actually old school seats). There are some interesting messages in there, evidently, and I’ll leave you to work out your own angles.

I found the sound of the pumping bellows and turning wheel to be very biological in its effect, and quite hypnotic. I made a short video and you can view it below. (I hope that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Not a Free Lunch

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Yesterday saw a mass desertion for a while here at the Aspen Center for Physics. Howie Haber (UCSC) organized a large group (twenty-two) of participants (and some of their guests) of the program entitled “LHC: Beyond the Standard Model Signals in a QCD Environment” (info here), to go for a group lunch at the excellent Pine Creek Cookhouse, 12 miles away up Castle Creek Road. And, I should mention, 1700 or so feet up. The latter is significant since about two thirds of us, led by Howie, cycled up there! It takes a while (times ranged from 1 hr 20 minutes to about 30 – 40 minutes more than that), and there are about two or three major long, punishing hills to deal with, but it was worth it!

Here are some (not all) of the cyclists at the destination (restaurant is a low-slung cabin-style affair out of shot to the right). Howie, our organizer, is in the middle at the front. (Click for larger view):

Lunchtime ride up to Pine Creek Cookhouse from Aspen Center for Physics

(Er, for the record, I’m slightly embarrassed by wearing socks with my sport sandals – a personal no-no – but I wanted to protect my feet from 12 miles of pedalling friction, so made an exception.)
Here are some random shots of happy arrivals (click each for larger): […] Click to continue reading this post →

Experiment IV

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Ok. Time for a bit of fun, or something. It’s rainy here, and I’m waiting for things to dry out before I go home. I’m between tasks, and I’m woozy from that extra beer at the weekly picnic (thanks, Ben!) so that’s my excuse. Not that I’ve ever needed one.

The other day while hiking I found myself singing Kate Bush songs. No, really. I get into a Kate Bush mood sometimes. Deal with it! Anyway, “Experiment IV” sort of stuck in my head and went around several times. It’s all about a science experiment, even if only a slightly naive exploration of how the military exploit scientific research. I simply love the way she made the phrases “We only know in theory what we are doing” and “We recorded it and put it into our machine” work with the rhythm and melody lines. Then I remembered, and checked on YouTube, how she’d construct these really excellent videos which were miniature movies, telling a little story, at least two of them (this song, and “Cloudbusting”) involving scientists.

Kate Bush, Experiment IV performance (still)Now of course, the scientists were the usual men-in-white-coats scientists (however, the image right is explained below). I know I go on a lot about trying to have in the media a wider variety of images of what scientists can look like, but that does not mean that I don’t like things that sometimes have the old chestnuts. Cloudbusting has Donald Sutherland as the scientist-father-figure, and Experiment IV has a similar figure (played by someone I don’t recognize) as the scientist whose work is exploited. There are a number of actors in supporting scientist roles too – look out for (I think) a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Chiropteral Mirror Symmetry?

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Spurred by the previous post showing M-theory’s possible relation to matters Chiropteral , Joe Polchinski (who I think, in 1995 or 1996, first drew the diagram that I messed with in that post) emailed me* to say that there is a quite striking appearance of batman-ology in the string theory literature. It’s from one of the classic Mirror Symmetry papers of 1990 by Candelas, De La Ossa, Green, and Parkes, “An Exactly soluble superconformal theory from a mirror pair of Calabi-Yau manifolds.” (you can find it via here). Here it is:

batman ish mirror symmetry diagram

What is this? It has to do with spaces in string theory called “Calabi-Yau manifolds”, which are important (in some approaches) as starting points for constructing models […] Click to continue reading this post →

Colbert Report: Science – What’s the Big Deal?

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brian greene on colbert brian greene on colbert brian greene on colbert brian greene on colbert

Brian Greene, theoretical physicist and one of the founders of the World Science Festival in New York (May 28th – June 1st), talked to Stephen Colbert about the excitement of science, and how the festival will give people a chance to see lots of fun exhibits and chat with scientists to find out about the wonderful “adventure story” (nicely put) that is science. He manages to do this pretty well, between giggles generated by sharp fun-poking from Colbert.

There’s the festival, large-breasted alien robots (their words), some fun quips about […]

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