Category Archives: Los Angeles

Literary Festivities

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ice sculpture with typewritersDon’t forget this weekend’s LA Times Festival of Books! It is always a pleasure to wander the huge festival and see what’s on offer, and simply be part of an enormous gathering of people in LA on the usually lovely weekend days. – Gathering in the name of books! How excellent that is!

Some bad news this year. You’ll recall that I’ve reported (here and here) on the Oscar-like awards ceremony for the book prizes, complete with fancy after-party. (With chocolate fountains, and ice sculptures with embedded typewriters, no less!) Well, they’re not doing it this year. I imagine its the hard financial times. You see… now it’s hitting home to me that there’s a crisis out there – no awards gala, and no chocolate fountains. However will I survive?

Well, the good news is that the awards continue (actually there is a private ceremony at the LA Times building… yes, for all I know if it is the usual affair, and perhaps they just don’t want the riff-raff any more) and the short lists are interesting once again. You can […] Click to continue reading this post →

I See Book People

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The LA Times Festival of Books is coming up this weekend (see my upcoming post). In memory of the fun time I had at the first time I went to the accompanying awards ceremony in 2006, I’m reprinting a post I did over on CV that year, in which I reported on it. (Timestamp: April 30th, 2006 3:45 am.)

book awards LA Times Well, I’m recovering from an excellent hike up Mount Wilson with the USC Neurobiologists earlier today, so while I do that, I’ll tell you about last night. Recall that the LA Times Book Festival is happening this weekend.

I came closer to seeing a realization of one of those topsy-turvy scenarios I often fantasize about, where more “academic” pursuits, or at least those more associated with the life of the mind, are celebrated in full Hollywood fashion. (I envision it in the context of science and scientists….imagine an Oscar-Like awards ceremony for the year’s best science papers, watched by millions on TV in prime time… but this will do for a start.)

Yes, I went to my first LA Awards ceremony, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, and although I joked about Oscar analogies in a previous post, it actually was […] Click to continue reading this post →

Killing the Earth

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el_mirage_shootIronically, the day after earth day, a TV program (part of the Naked Science series) entitled ‘How to Kill a Planet’ will air tonight (Thursday 23rd April) at 10pm on National Geographic Channel. It explores various scenarios for how the entire planet could be destroyed. Sensational, yes, but maybe an interesting way of exploring some interesting physics topics in an unusual way, assuming they don’t scare people unduly. I appear in it somewhere, I’m told. I’ll be talking about black holes, and may in fact be shown being swallowed by one, if I recall correctly what was planned. Some may rather enjoy that aspect! [Update: Phil’s on it too!]

You may recall me mentioning a shoot I did up near a dry lake (El Mirage) in the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Making Movies, 2

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still_from_shoot_5_smallReally, I suppose this should be entitled “Making Movies, 1”, but I think that the earlier post “Call Me Cecil…” is morally the post of that title. Several days of insanity later (from worrying more about insurance, to locking in locations, worrying we would not get the HD cameras in time, trying to find a PA for the shoot, negotiating with various parties here and there about various things – in between the usual activities of physics professoring), the first big shoot day came. That was yesterday.

It was a day with record (for the date) heat (90+, in F), which was not helpful, but overall it was fun. On Thursday, in my location scout mode, I was to be found popping over once every hour or so to a particular location on campus and taking a snapshot. Why? I wanted to see where the sun would be at what time, so that we could figure out exactly when we could use the location, and for what shots. The sun […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Doing Darwin Differently

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hyperbolic crochetThe next Categorically Not! is tomorrow, Sunday April 19th. The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series – started and run by science writer K. C. Cole – of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See also the links at the end of the post for some announcements and descriptions (and even video) of previous events. (Image above right is discussed in an earlier post here. The last paragraph of the description below made me think of it.)

The theme this month is Doing Darwin Differently. Here’s the description from K C Cole: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Culture is Science

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Well, on my way home on the bus just now I was the one responsible for the strange smell. Guilty as charged.

Let me explain.

This morning, a colleague, one of our teaching lab managers Joe, came by with a surprise gift. It was in a black bag, which I opened. Inside was a transparent bag with a quantity of mysterious looking goop in it. From it came the strong and very familiar smell of yeast. Along with it was a piece of paper with instructions.

yeast_cultureYes, it was/is a living yeast culture that Joe wanted to share with some friends. It was this that was with me in my bag on the bus just now. The idea is that you let it grow over ten days or so, and then you either make it all into a batch of bread, or you leave some over to make new cultures that you hand on to others after ten days and/or bake another batch of bread. What a remarkably unusual (these days) gift! (Thanks Joe!)

I’d actually been planning to start up my bread-making again (I used to do it a lot as a student, postdoc, and young professor-with-more-time-on-his-hands), and had […] Click to continue reading this post →

Call Me Cecil…

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…Well, just for a 24 hour period or so.

Why? Well, it’s just that one of the many projects I’ve not yet had time to report to you about is inching along, growing ever more involved, has been sucking up a huge amount of time recently, and is going to go really large this week.

What’s “going large”?

Ok, here goes. I’ve been taking a turn at being a filmmaker, on and off, for over a year now. I hope that the products of this will be coming to a theatre near you one day soon (probably your computer), but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. What is it? Much more later, but I’ll just say now that it’s got science, and it is educational and – I hope – fun.

So far, what have I been doing? Writing a script, sketching storyboards, waving my arms about trying to explain the concept to actual filmmakers (you know, ones who […] Click to continue reading this post →

Haggadah

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Passover Seder plate from thedailygreenI hope Passover was good for those of you who observe it. I was honoured to be invited to a Seder last night and thoroughly enjoyed it, actually. Lots of telling, reading, telling, and more telling. And food. Plenty of food. And wine. Plenty of Wine. Then, lots of conversation into the night. More food, more wine. Excellent. (Image: Passover Seder plate from thedailygreen.)

Today, I was sent* the a link to a Graduate Student Haggadah. It will no doubt resonate with many of you from either tradition. Among my favourite bits: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Pit Visit

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I promised a report on last week’s College Commons trip to the Page Museum at the Tar Pits, here in Los Angeles. It was an excellent trip. The usual thing I do for blogging these things is, some time later, as time allows, I sit down and do a sort of brain-dump. I tried to do something different this time, and walk on the tour with my Palm Tungsten (yes, really really old technology, I know) and simply write a sort of narrative into it as I went along. Then I combined the uploaded file with the images I took as I went along, and supplemented with some extra sentences here and there. The overall effect should be a sketchier description of the event than I usually do, which may or may not be an improvement given that everybody seems to skim everything these days anyway. (Click on the photos for larger views.) So, here goes:

tar_pits_trip And so it begins. And it begins well – after a name tag is given out, upon check in for the bus, we are given a little brown paper bag of snacks. Hurrah!

3:39 and we’re off! (We run by the excavations for the Expo line and since it is an elevated bus, I get a nice view of what’s going on for quite a way. Wish I’d had the camera out to make a video for you.)

My colleague David Bottjer, a paleontologist, gives a little run down of the history of the region (both social and paleontological) as we go north on La Brea (appropriately – they are the La Brea Tar Pits… Or given that La Brea means The Tar, they are The Tar Tar Pits…)

4:05 We’re here! Somehow, the little bag of goodies is all empty already. Except for […] Click to continue reading this post →