Category Archives: fun

Correlations

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Some big news:

wired science bannerAs I said in the previous post, there’s more to the new WIRED Science TV show on PBS than just the TV show. The website is going to be full of quite a lot of additional material, starting next Wednesday. There’ll be show episodes, extensions of some of the segments, extra links to expand upon the stories, materials for schools, and so forth. But there’s also something else in the works. There’ll be a dedicated blog for the show, and it is called “Correlations”.

Correlations is a new group science blog, with bloggers of a range of interests. It will be connected to the show in many ways, but will expand well beyond the show into aspects of science and technology of all sorts, according to the tastes of the bloggers involved. There’ll be all sorts of interesting material, from serious stuff to fun stuff, and points in between. I think that it’s a great combination of bloggers (the team was assembled by Leighton Woodhouse, of KCET – we had a great conversation about the whole business of science blogging and science bloggers back during the Summer) and I’m quite excited to see how it goes. Who are they? Well, here’s the list:

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry, XII – A Shooting Diary

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Here’s my promised report/diary on yesterday’s adventures in film-making.

history channel shoot september6:45am Got up a bit earlier than perhaps I should have, given that I got to sleep at 1:00am. Spent a while reading a ton of email, and sending some more. Will be away from my regular professoring duties for the whole day, and so wanted to make sure the fort was held. Prepared some appropriate TV clothing (pretty much what I wear normally anyway – simple solid colours), and so forth. Attempted to beautify myself just a tad (with the usual…inconclusive results). Shower and so forth. Coffee and oatmeal, sprinkled with NPR… Read a bit of stuff on dates of historical background on material I’ll be talking about. I often forget that sort of thing, and its never ever needed whenever I do remind myself of it, so after a few minutes I decided not to bother. The core physics ideas are more important, ultimately. Spent time looking for rain gear (the micro-brolly, basically), since supposedly there’s going to be a rainstorm later (hurrah! finally!). Ready to go.

8:45am Fifteen minutes later than I intended to (how did that happen?), I set off to walk to the Sunset/Vermont Red Line subway station. Waved to a neighbour, and we exchanged pleasantries about how nice a day it was.

8:47am Walked past surprised neighbour back toward home…. briskly.

8:52am Riding the Brompton (the folding bike, for those of you not keeping up), I cycled off to the Sunset/Vermont station.

9:01am Arrive at said station on schedule (one minute late does not count in LA), and […] Click to continue reading this post →

That Sort of Time

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Yes, it has been that sort of time. The last several days have been full of far too many things – several of which it would be fun to blog about – but none of which have left me any time for doing the actual blogging part. What sort of things? Well, everything from social gatherings like a couple of parties and salon-type events on the one hand, the usual work-type events on the other (like yesterday’s reception to welcome new USC College faculty – I find those especially important to show up to as a means of re-engaging with a cross section of one’s colleagues, old and new, at the beginning of the year*), and on a third hand (sorry) there’s been a big crunch on the research side of things. The big crunch saw me in my office until about 3:00am after a long night of finishing up two companion papers with three of my students (this included breaking for a walk across campus at about 8:30pm to get some tasty mulitas at the excellent La Taquiza) and submitting them to the arXiv. Sensibly, the students went home by 1:30 or so, leaving me the silly one to tinker some more until the end. It was a really fun couple of projects uncovering some rather rich physics, and I’ll try to tell you about them some time soon.

So anyway, my plan today was to write you a 9/11 post, but not quite about what you […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Scary Universe?

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Ok, there’s “The Elegant Universe”, and “The Ambidextrous Universe”…. even “Stephen Hawking’s Universe”… and so on for these titles. But how about “The Scary Universe” or “The Dangerous Universe”? (Personally, I wish we’d just stop with the whole “The fill-in-the-blank Universe” stuff, so I probably should have not written this first paragraph.)

Well, I myself don’t think of the Universe that way, but tonight (at 9:00pm) the History Channel will be presenting the next show in their series (called “The Universe”), which is about (they say) the Most Dangerous Place In The Universe”. It looks as though it will be a survey of various places where a lot of very energetic activity is taking place, powering some of the most powerful phenomena we’ve ever seen, such as quasars, magnetars, and so forth. So black holes will feature quite a bit, I imagine, and although I probably should not really be telling you about it before I’ve had a chance to see it (recall my remarks about the windy shooting conditions here), I think (I’m not sure) that I’ll be making an appearance as one of the contributors. (I did not get caught off guard this time.)

The whole “dangerous” motif is a sort of deliberately sensational way of presenting […] Click to continue reading this post →

Live Radio Footie Film Fun

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football soccer ballradio dynamoSo you’ve already read my opinion about the Bourne Ultimatum after I returned from seeing it on the opening night – (In short, it’s just brilliant!) Well here’s something related that is rather funny, especially if you are a football (soccer) fan, although that is not necessary (I have little or no interest in it myself). If you don’t already listen to Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo every week (most conveniently via their podcast), let me say right away that you should, since it is just an excellent and often highly entertaining discussion of film and movie releases. As a film reviewer, Kermode is not as good with words as, say, the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane (although it is not a fair comparison – the media are different), but his rants can be just great to listen to when he truly hates (and occasionally loves) something -whether you agree with him or not. Simon Mayo is sometimes thought of as his sidekick in this duo, but he’s really the anchor of the whole thing (and often the pragmatic link back to the everyday that keeps the whole show rooted), and from time to time the focus shifts to him. He’s also into his sports, while Kermode is not, which also makes for an amusing backdrop since the broadcast (on Radio 5 Live) is usually done live from some sporting context or other, which takes a sort of backseat role while they talk about movies. Anyway, it is an excellent podcast to listen to every week. I highly recommend it. You can find it on iTunes. (They also have started doing occasional video podcasts too, but the thing to go for is the radio show. – another convenience of it is the fact that you can keep the podcast until after you’ve seen the films if you like (this is what I usually do – I mostly prefer to not hear anything about a film before I see it), and then listen to it and shout at Mark if you so desire.)

film roll images from usdojAs I mentioned, Mayo is a big sports fan, and his team, Tottenham, apparently got slaughtered by Crystal Palace and are now at the bottom of the premier league (can you tell I’m faking this and I’ve no idea what I’m talking about?) The next day, he’s interviewing (not with Kermode though) the director Paul Greengrass and the actor Matt Damon (both of the Bourne […] Click to continue reading this post →

Perseids!

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Over the next few nights, you should have a good chance of seeing some of the Perseid meteor shower. They’re going to put on a rather splendid show this year, I hear. From the NASA news site, I’ve grabbed a a diagram of the region of the sky (containing the constellation Perseus, of course – that’s where they’ll seem to be coming from, and so that’s what gives them their name) that you ought to be looking toward. (The red dot is not a star, but the central point of (apparent) origin, and the red lines are some example paths of the streakers that you’ll see):

perseids where to look

Concerned that you don’t know enough astronomy? No idea in any amount of detail […] Click to continue reading this post →

My Superpowers Revealed

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Ok, I can’t resist. From an earlier post:

…and of course video footage of me effortlessly squashing a star much larger than our own sun down into a tiny space should help out enormously later on with classroom control, and so forth…

Since my cover is now blown, here are some stills** (click for larger) from Tuesday’s (unexpected) episode of the History Channel’s “The Universe”*: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Henri Poincaré and the Order of the Polynomial

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I’m conflicted. I read the first Harry Potter book and decided that while it is a good thing that many people are reading more as a result of them, I could not really recommend it highly as great work because it’s just so derivative. Having grown up reading all those boarding school books J. K. Rowling borrowed from (for example) without adding anything to them much, I was frustrated

Well, of course, in the scheme of things, it does not matter. Not all things we like have to be Great Works. And I eventually convinced myself that there’s nothing wrong with people (who did not read those works that she’s imitating) discovering the genre for themselves in the pages of her books. Then others told me that the books got better. harry potter special relativityThey got darker, and more grown up (do they approach the excellence and relative originality of the once largely ignored Philip Pullman books I wonder?), and better written, I’ve been told, by people whose opinion I trust. Well, good.

The films came out and they were all very ho-hum and then happily Chris Columbus stopped directing them after the first two and – Wow! They were suddenly really rather good. (The third one was by the wonderful Alfonso Cuarón, so – of course!) (Clickable above right for clarity: Extract from my own attempt to tap into the mania some years back by using characters from the books/films to illustrate the derivation of time dilation in a class on Special Relativity.)

Anyway, I saw the fifth one last night, and I was very impressed with it as a film. Not having read the book, I find myself hoping that there was more to it than the film, since it still seems all rather derivative. There’s a bit of 1984 and a lot of Lord of the Rings mixed in with the Boarding School motif. I suspect that’s all as a result of stripping it down to look for something to hang a film on? I’m going to assume that, since there’s an awful lot of transparent (but entertaining) dark motifs about the […] Click to continue reading this post →

iPhone Madness

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As you might have guessed, I could not resist having a look at the line at the Grove shopping mall/village/whatever. Here’s an overhead shot of a cluster near the Apple Store’s entrance just after the launch at 6:00pm:

iphone madness

(Click for larger.)

line for iphoneWhat you can’t hear is people cheering as people either enter or emerge from the store (I’m not sure which). It’s not everyday you see this many people (in a very long line indeed – see one of four segments at right) waiting to shell out so much money for something that they all know will be very obsolete a year from now. They just want to be part of what is (seriously for a moment now) a true […] Click to continue reading this post →