Happy Valentine’s Day!
Tasty goodies on display at Café Susina, as usual. Some are even appropriate to the day.
Enjoy!
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Category Archives: Los Angeles
Sketching
The things I do for a living. Or whatever.
You see me at the end of a two hour process of watching some YouTube videos of a sport, thinking, reflecting, doing some analysis, and then (pictured) working up some sketches of some of the physics going on.
This is for a magazine doing a piece on various techniques in this sport (which I won’t mention since I don’t know if they want their thunder stolen). I’ve no idea whether they’ll use it in the end, but they needed the help pretty fast, and how could I say no? […] Click to continue reading this post
Polenta Adventure
It was an evening of reflection, a quick dinner, a nap, and then a moonlight walk until midnight. What was dinner? Some spontaneous improvised polenta squares. It’s been a while since we’ve been to the kitchen on Asymptotia, so come along…
Take some of the coarse ground cornmeal that’s great for making polenta (or tasty breakfast porridge, for that matter), and sprinkle it into some water, stirring immediately. Only then do you bring the water up to a boil, on a low flame. Putting the meal into hot water will make a lumpy mess. How much water to how much meal?
To be honest, I don’t really measure this. Just… enough. I use a small 5 inch shallow […] Click to continue reading this post
Light Thoughts
Last night, for one reason or another, I decided on the spur of the moment to head to the beach, in order to wander there with the darkness clinging to me while I faced the bracing wind and cleared my head of many things. Although not quite like walking, for example, the Northumbrian coastline, even this part of the Pacific can be wonderfully restless, rugged, and alive when there are strong storms in the air, as is the case right now in the area.
On my walk, heading Northwest, I saw the Santa Monica Pier in the distance, with its new (as of last Summer) Ferris Wheel sporting some 160000 LEDs (I read this – did not count them) and putting on a light show. It is interesting to look at for a number of reasons. They’ve programmed in a lot of patterns that it cycles through, some of which are nice, but the most interesting thing to me (and not depicted in my snaps) […] Click to continue reading this post
Other String Activity in Los Angeles
Follow my friend Casey Rentz for her stringy project! Last November, she walked the 6.4 miles from the Machine Project in Echo Park to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) leaving a trail of a single string behind her….
STRING from sam meister on Vimeo.
I asked her for a few reflections on it all: […] Click to continue reading this post
Another Approach?
No, it’s not my solution to things (you know, when patient, tiring, endless, circular discussion and explaining that it is work in progress does nothing to stop the whining of those who’ve made up their mind in advance…) but it certainly makes me laugh out loud! Enjoy:
(Click to go to larger version.)
Taken from Abstruse Goose, which is hilarious!* This follows on nicely from […] Click to continue reading this post
So What Is String Theory, Anyway?
The usual answer you’ll get from the person on the street (as it were) includes lots of nice words about wiggling strings that look like particles, and so forth, and that’s fine. However, the [informed] next level answer, when you’ve worked enough in the field, is that we don’t know. I’ve told you why (at least in part) in previous posts and so I’ll let you read them. We’re still working on it.
While we work, we’ve learned that it is a quite marvellous thing (from the bits of it we’ve come to grips with) that is teaching us a lot about all kinds of physics, and mathematics too. Some of this may be good for describing things about Nature, and we’re still working out lots of that (although see some of the exciting things I’ve been talking about in my previous post and the links therein).
So what do we put on the T-shirt? (You know, the analogue of Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism – light, etc – that every physics undergrad likes to have on their T-shirt). Well, we don’t know yet.
But that’s all my opinion. Every now and again it is good to hear from one of the masters about what they think of string theory*, and what it is and so forth. Happily, Joe Polchinski has been known to agree to stand up and give an exposition on this […] Click to continue reading this post
Brainstorming
I had quite a marvellous brainstorming session today. You’ll recall I was preparing a presentation for the February 15th symposium at the AAAS meeting the other day. Well, all of us concerned (the four of us presenting as well as various Brookhaven staff who will take part in the symposium discussion as well) got together over the phone for a teleconference today. It took almost three hours (but happily I was sitting in the sunshine while doing it, as you can see). We wanted to chat about the distribution of ideas and results that will be presented.
There are four of us presenting at the event, with only a short time each to get across some of the key ideas and so we need to make sure that we don’t do too much […] Click to continue reading this post
Categorically Not! – Dark Matters
The next Categorically Not! is on Sunday February 1st. 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.
The theme this month is Dark Matters. Here’s the description from K C Cole:
Uncommon Conversations
I almost forgot to mention that tonight marks the launch of the series of events called the College Commons here at USC. Here’s a news story about the programme. This academic year, I’ve been working on the committee working on shaping the ideas that have come up from the faculty (I had promised to tell you more about this), and we’ve announced the short Spring programme, which you can see here.
There is a featured part celebrating 1859:
Where do ideas come from, and how far do they travel? One hundred and fifty years ago, the astonishing year of 1859 saw not only the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, but such pioneering works as John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, and Richard Wagner’s first version of Tristan and Isolde. This year also marked amazing advances in travel and communications, the first battles prefiguring the Civil War and the first trapeze act performed in Paris. Can we imagine the world 150 years from now, and imagine the place our ideas will have in it? Scholars from biology, anthropology, physics, literature, history, and gender studies, as well as poets and artists, will explore these questions together this spring.
I hope there’ll be a lot of participation in the events (I’ll say more on this later). Tonight has a free movie, Master and Commander (so there’s a reason to go, right […] Click to continue reading this post
Preparation
Yes, I’ve been a bit quiet of late, I know. I’ve so many things on, both professional and personal that it sometimes keeps me occupied from when I wake up just before sunrise right through to falling asleep a bit after midnight. And yes I know that means I’ve been not getting the traditional full nights of sleep, but if my body insists on getting up at 5:30am, who am I to resist? I thought it was due to jetlag from the trip a couple of weeks ago, but it seems to have taken. I don’t mind too much since watching the light change as the sun rises is a marvellous way to start the day.
Among the things I’m up to (yesterday and today so far) is a strip-down-and-redesign of a short talk for an exciting symposium that is coming up in a few weeks in Chicago. The American Association for the Advancement of Science is having their big annual shindig there (apparently the biggest science conference in the world) and there will be a number of addresses, plenary talks, and keynote speakers and the like (including Al Gore, by the way), and also several sessions of symposia and other presentations on various topics.
While slightly annoyed at the fact that one major day of the conference is on Valentine’s day (which means I’ll have to be out of town on just the day that maybe, just maybe, on the off-chance, you know – if the universe sneezes or something, somebody might want me to be their Valentine…*), I was looking at that day’s schedule and it caught my eye that there’ll be a session (with several presenters) entitled “The Science of Kissing”, and three hours long, no less:
Presidential Poetry
More encouragement (see my earlier piece about education and about science and more science) comes around the matter of poetry and the presidency. Larissa Anderson, on Weekend America this Saturday, reported on the president-elect’s evident interest in poetry. Derek Walcott was featured in the piece as well (I was pleased to hear this since I like his work, and it is also good to hear about the work of a Caribbean thinker on the national stage – it does not happen often enough for my liking) and had some very interesting things to say. From the transcript of the piece (see that link for audio):
Walcott says it’s good for people in power to read poetry because human beings are complex and contradictory, and poetry can capture that. Like in Langston Hughes’ poem “Theme for English B” when the black student writes to his white teacher, “Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me. / Nor do I often want to be a part of you. / But we are, that’s true!” Or in Walt Whitman’s line, “I am large — I contain multitudes.”
Walcott likes the idea of a president who reads poetry and thinks about this kind of human truth. Someone who can see beyond the act of political posturing.
Then he read his recent poem, “40 Acres” that he wrote for Obama, which I thought was rather good. He also described some of the process of writing it – also excellent to hear. Finally, the piece reported on something he said that reflects my own […] Click to continue reading this post
Remembering Uncertainty
Gosh, look what I found on YouTube, quite by accident. It is video of the first Uncertainty event I did with science writer KC Cole way back in 2006, and was one of the first Visions and Voices events at USC.
It has as features (about 20 minutes each) Jonathan Kirsch on Monotheism (and how it actually isn’t, really), some opening thoughts by moderator KC Cole, her interview […] Click to continue reading this post
Snow!
Today’s shooting circumstances (see previous post) produced an unexpected bonus: Snow. Lots of it! It is always a pleasant surprise to me how quickly you can get from Los Angeles to some good snow cover. I was not expecting to see any snow – or trudge through any – this season, but it turned out that lots of it had fallen where we were scheduled to shoot. So much so that we could not get to where we wanted to […] Click to continue reading this post
Snowed Under
Ok. It’s official. This week I am snowed under with things. Every day I write half a blog post, and then something comes up and I do not got back to it and I fall into bed later, exhausted, some time in the wee hours, only to get up early the next day to carry on with things.
So in case you were wondering, I am still here. Just snowed under. I gave my final exam for my Physics 151 course (Fundamentals of Physics: Mechanics and Thermodynamics) on Monday (hurrah!) and I’ve spent a huge chunk of today playing with various excel files of various chunks of data from the course, trying to turns a sea of numbers into final grades for the students. It has been slow work, and I’m nowhere near done yet. It’s complicated because I must incorporate multiple components of assessment, from three different exams, laboratory work, online homework and written homework, to in-class responses using individual RF transmitters, and online quizzes of various sorts. (All a bit much, in my view, but, well that’s another story…) Every single bit has its own spreadsheet with data that must be uniformized and then combined to give the whole picture of each student’s performance.
It has made me a bit dizzy just talking about it.
But it’s not that simple. Oh no. Here’s a small part of the extra stuff: I’ve been trying to get the exterior of my house painted, and of course there have been (quite fantastic) rainstorms delaying everything and so I’ve been dealing with painters for longer than planned – with the Christmas holiday closing fast, and I’ve got my mum visiting me (hurrah!) and so I must be a good host and so forth and not just hide in the study crunching numbers (she arrived a day earlier than I expected – my fault! – so I’m a bit off-balance about that too), and… and…
[…] Click to continue reading this post
