Source
Looking toward the source of some of that lovely evening light I remarked upon in an earlier post. View from the grounds of the Observatory in Griffith Park, not too long after 6:00 pm.
From Instagram
From Instagram
Category Archives: nature
The Urban Homestead
Oh, boy this was fun. Christine Louise Berry organizes a series she calls The Speakeasy, and I’ll tell you below about the really great one that took place on Sunday. You’ll remember my mentioning Christine’s work earlier. She (the main force behind SmartGals) did that marvellous McArthur Park event with the fragments of plays to be found all over the park, and had the excellent taste to combine it with Mama’s Hot Tamales. A couple of months ago, at a party of hers (to celebrate car-independence in LA!), I met Erik Knutzen, with whom I ended up talking a great deal about lots of things because we seem to be on the same page on many things with regards biking and public transport (he’s part of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition), gardening and sustainability (he’s involved in a lot of land use issues for his day job). So we talked about lots of topics, from composting to the Velib system (and why Los Angeles has essentially already decided not to take that wonderful route, sadly).
Erik, with his partner Kelly Coyne, write a really great blog called Homegrown Evolution (excellent title), which is all about urban gardening, and they are passionate about getting more people to do gardening (as am I, you might have gathered). You’ve probably read my posts on gardening from time to time and thought that it isn’t for you since you’re in a big city in an apartment on the nth floor (where n is some integer greater than one or zero) with no access to garden space. I’ve […] Click to continue reading this post
Sharing the Storm
Here’s something I found rather unexpected. It all begins a little more than a year ago in Los Angeles. I was chatting with a friend, Aimee Bender, about our respective modes of work, and about how Summer fits into that in general. As you may know, Aimee’s a fiction writer, (and you may have picked up somewhere that I’m a theoretical physicist), and there are a lot of parallels to be found between professions that both involve lots of sitting around, crafting with symbols, folding fragments of inspiration together into larger nuggets, and so forth. So we chat about that from time to time.
A lot of how that works can be tied to the environment in which you do it, and so we got to talking about the long dry Summer in Los Angeles, with a particularly hot spell we were going through at the time we were talking. It affects how you work, what part of the day is most productive for you, and so forth. We agreed that a rather nice thunderstorm would be a good thing to have come along, even though that was highly improbable. Just the sound of a thunderstorm is a wonderful thing, and then there’s the relief it brings from the conditions before, and the smells in the air during and after. We carried on with the hot LA work cycle, stormless.
I left a week or two later for Aspen.
Shortly thereafter, Aspen went into a typical daily cycle of sunny for most of the day with a rainy downpour in the afternoon. Very refreshing. One of those days, that downpour turned into a long super-violent thunderstorm that lasted well into the […] Click to continue reading this post
Delicate Star
Dandelion seeds just outside my door. (Click for larger view.) […] Click to continue reading this post
Recovery Time
Today’s going to be a slow day, with a bit of pottering about town (groceries, new novel), sitting at home (laundry, reading, writing), and working on some physics things here and there. It’ll be good to slow down. I went on another long hike yesterday, back in my more usual solitary mode. Last week’s to Willow (see a couple of earlier posts) was with my friend and colleague Albion Lawrence who I’d not seen for a long time, and so we spent a very pleasant time catching up on things (mostly sharing about books and film, as we do) as we walked.
Yesterday’s hike, following (initially) the West Maroon trail, was taken up with conversations with myself, both internal and external, and that’s something I enjoy a great deal. I thought I’d spend a lot of time thinking over various issues in physics that I’ve been puzzling over in my work, or that I’d learned about from various conversations and seminars while here at the Center. But I did not, surprisingly. Or not much. It was a very physics-free day, even though I was out there struggling along in the West Maroon area for over five hours (out and back to the bus).
Part of this might be because due to the large amount of snow on the ground in places, I lost the trail, and so spent a lot of time following the river trying to pick it up […] Click to continue reading this post
Crossings
Imagine my surprise (a couple of weeks ago) when this fellow – all four feet or maybe more – passed in front of me just ahead on the path (click for larger view). It was so sudden that I could hardly get the camera out in time, even though it was attached to my belt pack. I was hiking in Runyon Canyon for a short spell on a Sunday morning. It is quite busy at that time, with everyone and their dog (for real) out and about. […] Click to continue reading this post
The Earthquake
[Update 19/05/08: It is expected that well over 50,000 people have died. There are several updates on the NPR sites mentioned below. See a BBC article here for a recent summary.]
Well, they’re estimating 10,000 casualties so far from the earthquake in China that measured magnitude 7.9 on the Richter scale. NPR’s Melissa Block and Robert Siegel were actually in the area when it took place and they are filing lots of reports. Melissa had her equipment running at the time of the quake and so you can hear her reactions here. […] Click to continue reading this post
Jacaranda Time!
Yes, it is that time of year when the city goes purple. Or lavender.
The jacaranda trees go crazy for a while. There are stretches of several blocks long, […] Click to continue reading this post
Major Cyclone
Update: 11th May ’08. Well, as you probably know, estimates have surpassed 100,000. An urgent concern now is the additions to the death toll resulting from the lack of emergency relief, brought on by the restrictions placed by the Myanmar government. See a BBC report here, or an NPR report here, for example.
Update: 7th May ’08. It is much worse. I’ve seen a BBC report with a figure above 22,000.
The news is not good for Myanmar (Burma). The death toll due to cyclone Nargis has apparently passed 10,000 (see CNN and the BBC), making it the deadliest storm since 1999.
Sheril and Chris are blogging about it on the Intersection, (see e.g. here) and so keep […] Click to continue reading this post
Caustics Galore
Taken at the Getty Villa, in Malibu. Well worth a visit. […] Click to continue reading this post
Sand, Man
In physics, most of what we do is look for the simple, often in extremely complicated systems. If you’re asking the wrong question, or looking at the wrong aspect of the system, this quest for the simple is unlikely to work at all, but the right question asked about the right aspect can yield rather striking insights, often with far-reaching consequences. Although it often is not emphasized in this manner during our school or undergraduate (and sometimes even graduate) education, this is the primary skill in the physicist’s arsenal that we teach and learn. (See an earlier article here for a take on this.)
Sometimes, you don’t need the sharp eyes and years of training and drilling in these seemingly arcane (but, I’d argue, most natural) arts (and the requisite sequestering away in monasteries and nunneries with abstinence, self-flagellation, and so forth) – there are times when if just jumps out at you that there’s a simple question or two […] Click to continue reading this post
Texture, II
Texture, I
Light, Water
Warm Yellow
