Category Archives: Los Angeles

Mountain Astronomy Party!

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Mount Wilson 60 inch telescopeI was at an unusual and splendid event on Saturday. My friend and colleague, the writer Aimee Bender, organized a group of 25 of us to go to the top of Mount Wilson and spend the evening, mostly sitting in the dark, right up to well after midnight! What were we doing? Astronomy. We had the Mount Wilson Observatory’s 60 inch telescope entirely at our disposal!! This is not any old 60 inch telescope – it is one of the historic telescopes that’s up there, used since the early part of the 20th Century to discover things about our galaxy and beyond. (See also a post I did about the 100 inch, and the hike you can do up the mountain to see the site. [Update: Note – For this trip, we drove up, carpooling!])

Shelley giving information during the Mount Wilson observing sessionAimee had reserved the space well in advance, and we had a guide and a telescope operator (the excellent Shelley Bonus and Arbi Karapetian, respectively), and we brought food, which was spread out on a large table alongside vats of coffee and hot water supplied by the observatory.

This is an excellent way to spend an evening. Shelley is informative and enthusiastic, and does a great job of selecting various objects to be viewed (she also takes requests!) and giving lots of information and anecdotes about them, and much else besides. Arbi was also a gold mine of information.

The party was of 24 non-scientists (there were a lot of writers of various types, for example – poets, screenwriters, novellists, experts in poetry and literature and language…) and one physicist. As the latter, I tried to remain undercover, so as not to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Communion

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Today I was at a Catholic church, attending the First Communion of the daughter of some friends and colleagues. This was a bit of a nostalgia trip for me, since I was brought up in the Catholic tradition. The mass was entirely in Polish, and the congregation was almost entirely Polish, and I enjoyed saying all the English responses on top of the Polish ones and seeing how well they fit (I also did it sotto voce over the bits the celebrant said too). Yes, the rituals are evidently frozen into my memory.

It’s exactly the same structure as the masses I attended hundreds of times during my upbringing, and I’m amused that I remembered everything even without being prompted by the company of English speakers in my surroundings. Very enjoyable to see the kids all done up in their finery, all nervous but excited, as they know it is all about them. Fun to see other remnants of my childhood imagery in the form of a super-splendid Sunday hat – so rare these days – and generally people of a certain look that’s so familiar from Catholic churches I’ve see in several places around the world. With that and the excellent food and conversation at the reception afterwards, despite my being tired from having only two hours sleep last night (more later), it was a lovely day.

Here’s a thing, though…

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The Universe Laughs

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So here’s a little irony. On Wednesday which was, I note:

(1) The day before Bike To Work Day in California…

(2) The day after I replied to a commenter that the extra investment in getting a folding bike like mine was well worth it (over getting a cheaper model) since -among other reasons- cheaper models would be more likely to fall apart while mine will last a lifetime…

I set off at 1:10pm on my bike to head (via the bus) to my office at USC, photocopy the final I’d spent the morning refining, and arrive at class at 2:00pm to set the final. Everything went fine, as usual, and as I did one last turn after waiting at the lights to head into the home stretch to catch the bus…

…my bike suddenly lost power. The chain had not slipped or broken though… An examination revealed that the crank arm/lever had completely broken away from the wheel holding the teeth and the chain. To be fair, I put an awful lot of regular stress on it (see below), but isn’t that ironic?

I got off the bike and wheeled it briskly to the bus stop I was headed for, managed to [..] Click to continue reading this post →

Ferrous Thoughts

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I spent an awful lot of time as a child and teenager tinkering with various projects. I’d have lots of projects on at any one time, brewing in my head for a while, and making their way to notebooks and scraps of soldering iron, meter, …paper, then to elaborate drawings showing the technical details, and ultimately to some sort of realization in the real work, some percentage of the time. In the Summer time, I would probably have one Big Project and that would occupy my thoughts for a great deal of time, and would involve a lot of hiding away doing things. Lots of these projects would involve electronics (increasingly as time went by and I Learned more and my various part time jobs could support more) and there’d be lots of tinkering with all sorts of items, and a constant feature would be the soldering iron, one not so different from the one that you see to the right.

Well, one of the many things I liked about the Iron Man movie (yes, I was right there to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Final Thoughts

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Well, it was a full day. Since this morning I’ve been putting the last touches on a paper with my student, V. I’ve been working at my home office (something odd going on with my office computer) while he’s elsewhere but present via IM. We can chat, exchange equations, drafts, and so forth, so it is good medium. Then mid-morning, I had a moment of confusion for a while, and progress stopped while I sorted that out. Discussions with V and another student, T, via IM about this and some other matters ensued, and then I was back on track, inputting edits from a session yesterday of reading it with pen-at-the-ready in a bookstore, inputting edits from V, and then another printout and review to add more.

duvel, bike, etc

Every now and again, a check of email, a walk around and a pull of the odd weed in the garden, and then back to it. Somehow this went on until 3:00 – three hours […] Click to continue reading this post →

Idiocracy

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Three things:

(1) Did you, like most people, miss the movie Idiocracy* last year? It looks like yet another lame comedy, but bear with it. It actually isn’t, really. It is one of the best indictments of what seems to be happening to a large part of the core of our society that I’ve seen in a while. You know what I mean… lower and lower thresholds for waiving all sorts of basic things that were once part of our required education… not just the awful spellings on signs that some of us whine about (sometimes too much, I’ll admit), but the necessity to use a severely reduced vocabulary to make yourself understood in the local store…or the lack of patience people (and the media) have for a reasoned, structured argument, focusing rather on looks, personalities or sound-bites (look for example at some the political headline discussions in both US and UK news at this moment)… the worry that fewer and fewer people seem to read a book from time to time**… The fact that nobody who works in stores seems to know anything about the merchandise they are employed to sell you… Or that situation you’ve had where the person behind the counter gets confused and can’t serve you because the item that you want to buy does not have a little picture of it at the checkout that they can click on in order to ring up your order/total…

Well, this film imagines a future where that sort of thing has become the least of your worries. The “dumbing-down” has just continued unabated. Everybody is essentially […] Click to continue reading this post →

It’s Bike to Work Week!

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blog on a bike!It’s bike to work week here in [LA] California again! Do consider participating (even if it isn’t where you are…) The MTA here in Los Angeles is doing a good job of pushing the idea that biking to work is a good alternative to fighting with other drivers on the highway*. Have a go! (I’ve been noticing more cyclists on the roads in the city in recent times, by the way, so you won’t be alone.) [Update: Click here for the website of the California Bicycle Coalition for events near you.]

If in LA, pop over to the MTA website. They’ve got a number of things going on. There are pit stops along the Red Line today, and on Thursday, if you show up on a bus or the subway with a bike helmet, you can ride for free! (I wonder if they actually bother to check if you have a bike with that helmet…?)

And get this… I’m a bit shocked by this, but if you pledge/register for the bike to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Good Company

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Brian May. Photo from: http://www.guitar-poll.com/BM.phpHey, guess who was at Griffith Observatory recently? Brian May! He’s that astrophysicist who took some time off to play (excellent) guitar and compose songs in the band called Queen. Ring any bells? (I found the nice photo here.) So why was he in town? Well, a slightly giggly (but always great) Madeline Brand (of the NPR program “Day To Day”) went along to interview him, and you can listen to the interview here, and read a transcript, as well as see extracts from him book (written with Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott), charmingly and blatantly (but knowingly?) unrealistically called “Bang! The Complete History of the Universe”. I actually looked through it in a bookstore the other day – looks rather nice. Wonderfully produced and I read some well-written passages, so might be worth picking up if you’re looking for a fresh read about the universe.

As a side note, I was a huge fan of his during my middle to late teenage years and early 20s, and […] Click to continue reading this post →

So Have You Been There Yet?

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I’ve mentioned it twice (here and here) in other posts, but I think it is worth a post of its own.

Have you been yet? I’m looking at you, USC-area person. There’s a fantastic new wine-bar in the neighbourhood, a relatively short walk north of campus at Union and Hoover. I’m so pleased to see it, and it is extremely welcome as far as I’m concerned. It is called Bacaro, and I’ve been there a lot already with several different groups of friends and colleagues.

   bacaro interior   bacaro interior

Why? Well, the wine is just great (various Italian wines) and the menu is fantastic too […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tired

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It has been rather a tiring last several days. I’ve been focusing on writing a big report on various internal matters that my committee was charged to study for the whole academic year. The issues are rather large, and the solutions I was trying to present require not just cosmetic tinkering but major changes in the way things are done. So the key thing to get right in writing it is a tone that is critical of what there currently is in place while at the same time painting a picture of what could be in its stead, while also beginning to show how to get there. If you don’t balance all three just right, there’s no chance that anything will change, since either lots of people will just be pissed off that you trashed their system, or threatened the status quo, or they’ll agree but say there’s nothing that can be done, or they’ll say you have not really thought it through. I think I’ve managed to get the balance right.

It was due on Monday. On Sunday night, I had something down, but I did not really like […] Click to continue reading this post →

JPL Open House!

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Oh! It is the open house for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory this weekend! I almost missed it since it was two weekends later last year. Image composite brazenly taken from their website.

JPL Open House

I went last year and had a great time and so I strongly recommend it. Go along for your own interest, of course, but if you have any kids, take ’em along*. If interested, have a look at my detailed post from last year entitled “JPL the new Disneyland?”

As I said there: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Sad Ending

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sam smith’s oatmeal stoutThat’s it. The class is over… I have to admit that I’m pretty sad to see the end of it, although I’m very very tired. It was such a great group. (I’ll be toasting the end of it all with some of the splendid stuff to the right.)

Recall that we stepped away from black holes. After a look at cosmology for some lectures, where we understood the role of four crucial components in determining a universe’s properties (curvature, matter, radiation, and vacuum energy) we dove back into formalism for a short while (one lecture) to develop a little more the tools we needed to properly under stand how to formulate Einstein’s field equations.

It did not take long… You need only the idea that it makes sense to formulate everything in terms of objects that allow you to express the full sense of an equation in any coordinate system you care to write. Once that is done (the objects are called tensors, and the idea and how they work is pretty simple to get to grips with) the key to formulating the field equations of gravity is to have a look at the structure of other familiar systems. The field equations of electromagnetism (Maxwell’s equations) and the field equations for Newton’s formulation of gravity give the required clues. A rummage around the geometry to find the appropriate object to express the physics in terms of uncovers the Riemann tensor and its cousins (“contractions” to get Ricci and so forth), and you’re almost there. A step back to learn how to package energy […] Click to continue reading this post →

Center For Inquiry: Chris Mooney on The War

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Well, here’s a turn up for the books. I pass the buildings of the Center for Inquiry (West) in Hollywood quite regularly on my to-ings and fro-ings, and always wondered what it was. About what were they inquiring? My inquiring mind wanted to know, but by time I got back to a computer, I’d forgotten all about intending to Google it. I was sort of expecting that it might be some, er, fringe organization, given the neighbourhood (not 1/4 of a mile away is uncle charles - center for inquirythe mother ship (or one of them) for the Scientologists, and a similar distance in the other direction is the “Scientology Celebrity Centre” too, where John, Tom, Kirstie, and others from the remarkably large movie star Scientology set presumably go and hang out and feel… celebrated).

Well, it turns out that it’s not like that after all, but a place where, as far as I can tell, serious reason-based inquiry into issues surrounding the places where, e.g., science, religion, culture and superstition intersect (such as, you know, real life) is encouraged. I like that poster of theirs I found, for example (image to the right).

They have a number of speaker series, where all sorts of interesting people come to speak, and people come to […] Click to continue reading this post →