Category Archives: Los Angeles

Fat Moon!

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Tonight, have a look at the full moon. It’ll be significantly bigger than any of the others you’ve seen this year since the moon is at perigee (as close as it can be in its elliptical orbit). This is not a slight difference that only those deeply into astronomy care about. The moon will be, as the NASA site on this* notes:

…14% bigger and 30% brighter than lesser full Moons we’ve seen earlier in 2008.

Anthony Ayiomamitis\' 2004 apogee perigee comparison

(Anthony Ayiomamitis’ 2004 apogee/perigee comparison.)

Go out and have a look at it at shortly after 4:30pm today when it rises. When the moon is near the horizon, it looks bigger anyway – combine that with the fact that it […] Click to continue reading this post →

Physics Intervened…

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Well, I’d have hoped to have done a post today on a few things, but physics intervened. Recall that the Southern California Strings Seminar is on right now here at USC, and since I am the organizer, I’ve been nipping about serving up piles of various types of tasty cookies (hunted down on a late night visit to Trader Joe’s last night – gotta have good cookies to go with the coffee you see), announcing the speakers, and so forth, as well as actually sitting and enjoying the really excellent talks that we’ve had from several young people. Day one (finished off with dinner, wine, beer, and chats with people from USC, UCLA, and UCSB at Bacaro) was just great and day two is in the morning and so I’d better finish up this post and get to sleep.

sunset from home depot on sunset 5th december 2008

We had a spectacular sunset on Saturday. Another example of a physics intervention, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Are We There Yet?

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Well, no we are not.

Are we making progress? Sometimes I think we are, and other times I’m not so sure, but what do you think?

I’m talking about that thing I talk about a lot: science and scientists being part of the broader culture. This time on TV. A recent LA Times article by Mary McNamara (one of their television critics) surveys a number of shows on TV in this context and is, on balance, rather positive about where things are compared to where they used to be. I’m inclined to agree (and I should say that I found the article itself rather valuable as a quick survey – I don’t keep up with all the TV produced out there, and found myself surprised here and there). She also quotes conversations with Jennifer Ouellette (of Cocktail Party Physics) and yours truly on the issue, (mentions the recently established Science and Entertainment Exchange I blogged about two weeks ago), and overall produced a pretty good article. (The full article is here.)

I’m still on the fence about all this, though. Once you scratch the surface a bit, I don’t think there is yet a single example of what I think is possible, and what I think should be fairly routine before we declare that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Improv!

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categorically not! performers on seventh december 2008

(Categorically Not! presenters and performers on 7th Dec. 2008)

The next Categorically Not! is on Sunday December 7th. 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 Improv!. Here’s the description from K C Cole: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Southern California Strings Seminar

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Takuya Okuda talking at the SCSS at UCLA, Dec. 2007Takuya Okuda talking about Wilson Loops at the SCSS, UCLA, Dec. 2007. Click to enlarge.

The next regional string meeting is a two-day one at USC, this Monday and Tuesday. It’s going to be full of interesting talks and conversations, as usual. Please encourage your graduate students to come, especially, since special effort is made to make sure that each talk begins with a pedagogical portion to help non-experts in that subfield navigate and see the motivation.

The speakers are: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Conjunction!

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Tomorrow night and the night after (Sunday and Monday), you should look West just after sunset, if you’ve a clear sky. There’s going to be a rare conjunction of Venus, Jupiter, and the crescent moon. Already, Jupiter and Venus look great together (they make a lovely couple) each night, but the trio – the three brightest objects in the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Redemption

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A few Tuesdays back, I went for an early evening hike in Griffith Park to get a burst of energy and clear out the mess in my head, as I am wont to do. I went straight and fast up to the Observatory and then beyond to Mount Hollywood’s lookout point. It was a lovely evening, with a number of people out and about enjoying it. This visit had a different treat than I usually encounter. There was a guy up there playing his guitar… and he was rather good to listen to. mount_hollywood_view_guitar_guy I listened to him for a short while and then he stopped (sadly, just before going beyond four notes of Purple Haze), as his fingers were getting chilly. I applauded, and he looked around, thanked me (not having previously noticed me listening there) and then started to pack up. Then he changed his mind and began playing just one more tune. Wonderfully, he started on one of my favourites, “Redemption Song”, which fit my mood then perfectly, fit with many people’s moods a week after the Presidential elections, and also fits my somewhat brooding and contemplative mood now. It certainly works well on this Thanksgiving Day here in the USA.

It was a lovely few minutes there in the low golden sunlight, with a sense of rest and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXVII – Light Speed

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Here we go again! Tonight sees another new episode of the new series of The Universe on the History Channel (you can watch it as a warm up to The Atom Smashers, on PBS), and the episode is all about the speed of light! I’ve no idea how this one will turn out, but for my segments we did some rather fun things to illustrate some of the key concepts. The main idea is that the laws of physics are rather different from ordinary Newtonian/Galilean ones when you are moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed the light. This is what we learned from Einstein’s Special Relativity. How do you illustrate this for a TV viewing audience? Well, one way is to imagine what would happen if the speed of light was a lot closer to everyday speeds. Then you could illustrate some of the effects in a fun way.

Well, one thing led to another and somehow (after a lot of email discussions of the physics with Darryl Rehr, the writer/director) it ended up that I was supposed to do […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXVI – Science and Entertainment Exchange

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Well, I probably am not worthy of the press credentials I was carrying around with me on Wednesday, as several days later I had still not done my “report” on the event. Well, here it is.

science entertainment exchange

I went to a press conference and a symposium that relates directly to the issues I was talking about in my Tuesday post and its comment stream. All the things I was talking about with regards better contact between the science community and the filmmaking community so as to make films (and shows) that better represent science and scientists more accurately through something closer to a collaborative mode were brought up in these meetings and discussions. It was great to see this issue being taken seriously, and a well-meant effort being made. The core of the idea is to set up an office that will coordinate things – acting as a sort of clearing house that will put filmmakers (of all aspects of the process whether screenwriter or director) in touch with willing scientists who can be helpful in various topics. This is the Science and Entertainment Exchange.

A key thing that I have mentioned here many times before is the issue of it being about more than just fact-checking near-completed work. If scientists are involved at […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXV – Parallel Universes

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While most of the episodes of the History Channel’s The Universe series are firmly about scientific knowledge of the universe that has been tested and verified (from planetary science, to solar physics, to stellar evolution, and various topics in cosmology, and so forth), they also like to treat topics that have a higher component of more speculative material. This is of course fine, as long as it is made clear what is speculation, and what is established. Recall that I took part in a really fun episode called Cosmic Holes, which talked about white holes and wormholes -entirely speculative objects – right alongside the physics of black holes, objects that we know are physically realized in our universe. (See here, here, and here.) I think that Laura Verklan, the writer/director, did a really excellent job of separating out the speculative from the established. Similar things can be said for the episode Cosmic Apocalypse, done by writer/director Savas Georgalis (see here), which focused on scenarios about how the universe might end, given what we have already established about how it was in early times and how it is now.

I’m hoping that the upcoming (tonight!) episode entitled Parallel Universes will also be a nice and clear piece of work discussing the speculative ideas concerning the possibility of parallel universes – what the ideas are, why it is a fun idea, what it […] Click to continue reading this post →

Einstein on Monday

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You’ll perhaps recall that a few days ago I mentioned some upcoming science shows in which I talk about various science ideas. I said, among other things:

[…] one is called Parallel Universes and the other is called (I think) Light Speed, both doing more or less what it says on the packet. I’ve not seen the final cut of either show this time, so I’ll be curious to see how they put the material together. They’ll air in the upcoming new season of the series, on the 18th November and the 25th November, respectively. I think – not 100% sure – that is all that is coming up from me on that series for the rest of this year (there is another thing due on that channel in December, and then that’s certainly enough of me showing up in your living rooms for a while), not counting the reruns […]

Well, I was wrong about the latter. It is on Monday, I was recently informed! This is, i think, going to be a really very good documentary on Einstein and his work, from a somewhat different angle than maybe you’ve seen before. It’ll focus quite a bit on the ideas and concepts and, importantly, the process by which Einstein developed his […] Click to continue reading this post →

Apollo

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I’ve been running around so much today I forgot to actually mention the event for which I’ll be acting as host tonight, here at USC. This is how I quickly described it to my colleagues, but bear in mind that it is open to all:

apollo poster
I’d like to remind you one last time about the Apollo Visions and Voices event today. Whether it interests you or not, please encourage your students to go. It is the College Dean’s V+V event for the semester, and was chosen to have a focus that would attract science and engineering students and faculty to sit with our friends and colleagues from the arts and humanities. It is at 7:30 pm in Bovard, with a reception at the end. I think that it will be very interesting and enjoyable.

Information about it is here.

It should be fun!

-cvj

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Hollywood Halloween

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hollywood halloweenHollywood Halloween. How about that…. two perfectly matched words side by side like that, and in context. Well… last night’s West Hollywood Halloween Carnaval confirmed my faith in Los Angeles (in the broader sense) as a city where people can indeed come together in vast numbers in if there’s enough will to do so. And boy do I mean vast. I’ve never seen this many people in good spirits in such […] Click to continue reading this post →