Well, Tuesday was a big day in class. We reached a landmark – the introduction of one of my very favourite thoughts of the 20th Century: the Equivalence Principle. This is the realization of Einstein’s that there’s something profoundly odd about Newtonian mechanics and Newtonian gravity that hints at something deeper.
Quick reminder from high school (just two formulae, please bear with me): You know […] Click to continue reading this post
This is one of my most favourite features of the landscaping on the campus here at USC. It’s one of the very earliest features that made me feel very much at home on the campus when I first arrived. I remember coming around a corner, seeing it, and […] Click to continue reading this post
I decided to do Griffith Park for my Sunday morning hike today. It’s been a while – I’ve mostly been doing Runyon. I thought it would be nice to see how things were doing up there since I last went and saw them dramatically spraying the hydromulch to protect the ground from erosion until regrowth from the fire damage (see here and here). The (very) occasional rain we’ve had in the last couple of months seem to have begun something wonderful – there are hints of green everywhere. I saw this beautiful photograph at one point – which sort of says it all – only to find that my camera (which seems to be on its last legs these last few days) had died again. So I had to take it with my camera phone, and so it is a bit below par:
I think this is wonderful (blurriness aside) – it has the striking image of the burned tree […] Click to continue reading this post
Over on the Intersection, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Chris Mooney are wondering why on earth there’s been little or no US media coverage of Cyclone Sidr, the monster storm that is bearing down on Bangladesh. Given the size of the storm, its approach, and the low-lying nature of Bangladesh, the landfall of this storm could be utterly catastrophic (it has already begun to take many lives) – beyond Katrina, for example. Please go and have a look at their series of posts (and more to come I bet) about the storm. For example, here, here, here, here, and here.
I’ll let you know.
Huh? Today, I’ve to think about two things I have to talk about over the next couple of days. I’ve to give a physics seminar on Thursday at UCSB, but more urgently, I have to think about What Matters To Me and Why. Why? This is because in the Spring I agreed to be one of the presenters of the four-times-a-semester USC event of the same title, hosted by the Center for Religious Life. This excellent series is run by Rabbi Susan Laemmle, the Dean of Religious Life, with a committee of students. Here’s how it is supposed to work (extract from their site):
At each WMMW session, the featured guest spends about twenty minutes addressing the topic “What Matters to Me and Why,” and then the floor is opened to informal dialogue for the remainder of the hour. Just as there is no one way to address the topic, so there will be no one direction in which dialogue will proceed. The student contact from the WMMW committee introduces the speaker and makes sure that the session goes forward in a professional yet friendly manner. An indirect purpose of WMMW is to maintain an arena in which people can talk about important, personally charged questions in an open, mutually respectful way.
A typical session is described here. This is going to be a tough one. Not because nothing matters to me but because everything seems to matter, and I cannot effectively rank these things to say what matters most in any way. I only learned yesterday that I only have about 20 minutes to say what it is that matters. This either makes things harder or easier, I can’t decide yet. Probably harder. Now I really have to think.
I jokingly thought a few months ago that I ought to just look at my last few blog posts the day before and just talk about what’s in those. What can I see… Well, there’s public transport, community and the environment, composting and gardening, science and television (and scientific honesty). Not bad. (Good thing I did not do that post on dating. Probably not a good topic for WMMW…) I can probably weave something out of those. Do I blog about those things by accident, or because there are some themes there that are being brought out? What are the big themes in those then? Random scattered thoughts follow…. […] Click to continue reading this post
So finally I completed the project that began with the chicken wire matters I spoke of a while ago. Work and such things have a way of intervening for weeks, preventing a good idea from going from conception to completion in what should be a day or two. The plan? To stop throwing away lots of wonderful organic matter and keep it instead, turning it into compost. This makes sense because so much of my garden has rather poor soil, for a start, and for a second matter it just seems wrong to not do it. for a third, it’s fun to do experiments with some microbiology for a change. Microbiology? Well, the object of the exercise is to let nature turn any organic material that you have into compost – full of nutrients for growing new things. Compost is also good for moisture control, good drainage, and a host of other things that are beneficial to plants in the garden. How does nature do this? Bacteria, mostly. But for the bacteria and other microorganisms to do their job (digesting the material), one needs to give them good conditions to live in. Conditions involve the right amount of moisture, air, and food, and the point of my project was first to prepare containment for the compost manufacturing process, and then to prepare a good combination of raw materials, place them properly, and then leave the little organisms to their own devices to do their thing. Here’s a good webpage at Cornell about the various stages of composting, the temperatures involved, and the various organisms (bacteria of various sorts, actinomycetes (a kind of filamented bacterium), fungi (various molds and yeasts), protozoa) that come into play at the various stages.
So, phase one: Containment. Well everything is going to be kept together with a cylinder of chicken wire, and so measurement of the desired radius [tex]r[/tex] followed by a quick computation ([tex]d=2\pi r[/tex]) to give me the length I needed to cut, and I was away. Shortly after I realised that my measurements were to be determined by the size of the mouth of the large trash bags I’d bought to add as the liner of the containment cylinder. So I ended up readjusting everything to fit that. I cut everything a bit big to allow for the overlap I […] Click to continue reading this post
Finally. I never thought I’d see the day again. Finally and end to the seemingly perpetual sunshine. It has not been since March (unless I’m very mistaken) since there’s been any serious rain here, and more than five months since there’s been any officially measurable rain of any sort in Los Angeles (as measured by the official station down at USC).
I was beginning to despair a bit. I need rain, psychologically as well as for more mundane reasons like wanting my garden to get a good soaking. There’s something about the way my outlook on the world works that needs to have good rainfall sometime. Rainfall where I live, I mean. I’d seen some wonderful rain over the summer (almost daily afternoon thunderstorms in Aspen for a few weeks, nice rain and drizzle for a week in Cambridge), and that did help me with the waiting, but I’ve been needing rain at home.
Photo (added later): Griffith Park’s Mount Hollywood with the Griffith Observatory and rain-filled clouds above. Mount Lee with the Hollywood sign (just visible) is behind.
And so here it is! There’s the wonderful sound of it on the roof, and then there’s the […] Click to continue reading this post
So the mexican sage (salvia leucantha) has started its new crop of flowers. The purple bobs pictured below right 
(click for larger – yes, there is a little bee resting quietly on a leaf there for some reason) will turn into long purple fronds with lots of individual bells containing flowers. Soon they will come, and they will keep coming. They’ll come and examine each flower closely and attentively, and I’ll be waiting for them, since they are so magical – appearing suddenly and dramatically as though dropping out of warp, with a wonderful and powerful hum. I’m talking about hummingbirds, of course. They love these flowers, and come and feed on them regularly.
The warp reference? They are fast – incredibly fast, and they can accelerate and decelerate astonishingly effectively. So if you’re lucky and standing still at the right point, there’ll be a hum and suddenly one […] Click to continue reading this post
This is simply fascinating to see for so many reasons. Will Campbell (over on his blog [sic] – see the posts here and here for background), who has been doing some fun experiments with his camera and computer to make time-lapse photography (you’ll recall an amusing one from before) has captured an entire day of cloud formation in the skies above some mountains near Los Angeles during the heatwave day of Sunday.
Click the still to go to the site with the movie (or find it at YouTube here):
It is both beautiful, interesting (scientifically and otherwise) and frustrating (why don’t […] Click to continue reading this post
Let’s talk about aliens. I don’t mean people coming across the borders of whatever your country happens to be (although I did giggle a decade ago when I was given an official “alien number” by the powers that be back then – though I always regretted bypassing the “alien with extraordinary ability” status that the O1 visa gives you), I mean living creatures from beyond planet earth (it’s also interesting to consider the possibility that the seeds for life on earth may also have come from elsewhere).
It’s one of my favourite topics to consider, which is why I like to follow a lot of the remarkable things we are learning about our neighbouring planets (and other bodies like moons, asteroids, comets, and, yes minor planets like our old friend Pluto), and of course the ever-increasing variety of extra-solar planets (the ones we are discovering orbiting other stars). Overall, it gives one the sense that it is overwhelmingly likely that we are not alone (to use the tired old phrase), which to me is tremendously exciting.
I think we’ll find lots of compelling evidence that there’s lots of simple life on other bodies relatively soon, and I think that when people on the street hear of this, they’ll find it interesting enough. But I suspect that this will completely different to an […] Click to continue reading this post
The tree from which the town Aspen gets its name. This shot is from the nearby Maroon Lake area.
It’s interesting to note that this is probably mostly all one tree, as the visible trees are […] Click to continue reading this post
No, not a metaphor. We’re really supposed to have a thunderstorm today. High probability they say. It’ll go up to the 80s and 90s again first, and then it’ll crack open…I hope. I’ve not seen rain for so long I’ve forgotten what it is like. Please let’s have some rain. … Click to continue reading this post
Yvette (one of our regulars here) let me know about a photograph that she took of a sundog the other day. It appeared on the Spaceweather website (you’ll need to set the calendar there to June 14th to see it in context), and since there may be a few of you (like me) who wonder what a sundog (or sun dog) is, here it is:
Yvette also put it up on her blog (which is an interesting and nicely illustrated read, by the way) together with a picture of the broader view showing the nearby sun.
My confession today is that I had no idea that is what those optical phenomena were called! No, really. You’ll also find them called parhelia (the plural; singular “parhelion”)…. they are always near the sun, you see. (Less common are the images that form somewhat further away from the sun (a “paranthelion”), or quite a bit further away (an “anthelion”). These are not, as I understand, properly referred to as sundogs.). I always used to wonder about them (and their cousins, the halos you sometimes see around the sun) when I was a child, but never talked to anyone about them back then (I kept a lot of wondering to myself) and the urge to find out what they were called was never strong enough I suppose. I think I’d satisfied myself that they were caused by refraction in the atmosphere, but again, I’ll admit that I’d never really gone and verified this anywhere. (Same for the effects around the moon you can sometimes see.) So I never learned of the significance of 22o, which is the angle the light from the sun bends through when it passes through the hexagonal ice crystals floating in concert in the upper atmosphere. (The other, further away ones are formed at larger angles.) It was when Yvette said sundog that I went a-Googling (as one does) […] Click to continue reading this post
Fantastic hike yesterday. More later, perhaps, but now I want to write about a couple of other things. In the meantime, here are some lovely butterflies that obligingly posed for the blog on some (type of sage?) flowers:
