Category Archives: personal

What Matters?

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palm flower frondsI’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 →

Rain!!!

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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.

griffith observatory with storm clouds
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 →

Chicken Wire

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That’s such a lovely sound. Chicken wire, or maybe better: “chickenwire”. (I would put it alongside “cellar door”…[update: almost. I suppose it is not as transcendent, really.])

I digress. I just thought I’d share with you a picture of the things I went to the hardware store to get last night1 (Click for larger view):

    chicken wire project

  • Several feet of chicken wire (it really is called that on the labeling, but better: Poultry netting. Excellent. I like the idea of going home to construct an enclosure for my wayward happy fat chickens), 3ft high.
  • A collection of bricks (I chose some nice miniature ones… they called out to me while I was trying to find the regular bricks).
  • Large black plastic bags. Heavy duty.
  • Steel wire.
  • A 25 inch machete. Annoyingly, it comes from the store so (deliberately) blunt I’d be better off using a wet fish to perform the tasks intended for it2. Going to have to put an edge on it later.

Yes, you guessed right, I’m going to be constructing something. Any idea what the project is?

But I won’t start now. Just got back from a hike over at Runyon Canyon among the […] Click to continue reading this post →

I’ve Got Next

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Ok. So I want to make this post timely, but it means that it will begin to let a cat out of the bag. We’ll see how much I can save for a later post as I write1.

So, as I walked to the subway this morning (yes, they have one in LA), I went through my little checklist of things I take on self-assigned assignments of this sort.

Notebook for scribbling: Check
Pen for scribbling: Check
Camera: Check
Phone (now with decent back-up camera): Check
Spare battery for camera: Check
Decent excuse/reason for being spectacularly late: Check
Water: Check
Good footwear for endless walking back and forth: Check

By now you get it. I’m either doing one of my parade reports, or perhaps a street fair/party, museum exhibit, or some random science fair, object or installation or other. Yes, but which? Well, apparently I was going to the future:

nextfest visit photo

The scene: The Los Angeles Convention Center. The event: The NextFest, brought to […] Click to continue reading this post →

That Sort of Time

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Yes, it has been that sort of time. The last several days have been full of far too many things – several of which it would be fun to blog about – but none of which have left me any time for doing the actual blogging part. What sort of things? Well, everything from social gatherings like a couple of parties and salon-type events on the one hand, the usual work-type events on the other (like yesterday’s reception to welcome new USC College faculty – I find those especially important to show up to as a means of re-engaging with a cross section of one’s colleagues, old and new, at the beginning of the year*), and on a third hand (sorry) there’s been a big crunch on the research side of things. The big crunch saw me in my office until about 3:00am after a long night of finishing up two companion papers with three of my students (this included breaking for a walk across campus at about 8:30pm to get some tasty mulitas at the excellent La Taquiza) and submitting them to the arXiv. Sensibly, the students went home by 1:30 or so, leaving me the silly one to tinker some more until the end. It was a really fun couple of projects uncovering some rather rich physics, and I’ll try to tell you about them some time soon.

So anyway, my plan today was to write you a 9/11 post, but not quite about what you […] Click to continue reading this post →

Funky Hideaway

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lost souls cafeI love downtown Los Angeles. No two ways about it. It’s rapidly getting better, as you may have heard, and there are so many interesting things to find down there. I hope to do a report sometime on an extended walkabout I did down there last month, but that’s for another time. It is also great to cycle around, as I do quite a lot.

Today, still in the heatwave, I left campus to go and hide downtown, first stopping by the excellent Grand Central Market for a bit of shopping for ingredients for a special dish I am going to prepare for a Salon-style gathering at some friends’ on Saturday. More on that later. Then I went to work in one of my favourite cafes in the city. I shouldn’t give away my hideouts, but there’s only you and me reading, right? It’s the Lost Souls Cafe, hidden down an alleyway (Harlem Place Alley) off fourth street between Spring and Main. Perfect for the subway at Pershing Square, and one of the few non-bar type places open until 10:00pm downtown. (Wish it would go until 1:00am or so.)

It’s a fantastic place, as you can see from their website, but relatively few people that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Paneful Jigsaw

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Temperature update: Going to be 106oF today. I think at 7:30am when I got up today it was already in the mid 80s (although that might have been partly due to reduced airflow indoors – I had to rush outside to take a deep breath). Gosh.

window shatter pattern
Above is part of a puzzle I was working on for a while on Saturday. A more detailed and larger image will follow below. I did pretty well, but then I got distracted after a while (see below). The last puzzle pieces came from (I suspect) a single puzzle piece shattering in a secondary event. The primary event? Bit embarrassing. I was preparing dinner on Thursday night, a guest was about to arrive, and a fly entered the kitchen. I hate flies in my kitchen at the best of times, and this was just too much. I tried to open the window to encourage the beast to depart, and it refused. I tried to open the window further and exasperatedly wafted my hand in its direction to scare it off the window pane, misjudged that action and pushed my hand through the window. Felt like a real idiot, of course: An expensive mistake, an awkward thing to explain, and of course a million flies and other creatures now had unrestricted access… The good news is that I only got a slight nick from the razor sharp edges, my guest did not think I was too insane (or no more than I usually am) and dinner was tasty. So all’s well that ends well.

The next morning I woke up and immediately thought “I can’t believe I put my hand through my window”. Went downstairs to check. Yes, it was true. There was a nice shatter pattern (notice the cracks radiating outward from the reconstructed impact point – see photo and discussion below) to admire, and lots of bits of glass on the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Switching

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Back in LA, and down at the USC campus. Good to be back! Click below for larger view.

campus overhead from google maps Well, it is the first day of the new academic year’s teaching cycle. I’m here in my office at 7:30am (the power of jet-lag) and somehow have to switch my mind back firmly onto teaching and other matters. It’s always tough to do this, since there are always lots of intensely interesting research issues that continue on my mind from the Summer, and I know that some of those will gradually begin to fade (if I am not careful) as my other duties take up so much of my day to day. My first class (part one of the upper level electromagnetism course) is at 10:00am, and I want to plan out the structure for the whole semester, and write a syllabus to hand out and discuss. As well as the first lecture, of course. I’ve not taught this part of the cycle before, and so I’ll have to be writing new lecture notes.

I want to try some new things this year. In particular, I’ve become increasingly concerned […] Click to continue reading this post →

Congratulations Brian May!

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brian may receiving his phd from paul nandraFor what? The story is here. Ok. Full disclosure – I was quite a Brian May fan as a teenager, and as a physicist in training while at Imperial College, London. Now I was going to do a long post about playing electric guitars, building electric guitars (because I was into electronics, physics and music, not because Brian May did it too),, analyzing his guitar solos, endless listening to Queen, endless teenage arguing with anyone who would engage about why he was a much better guitarist than [pick the flashy guitarist from some other rock group], probably permanently diminishing my hearing a bit at two huge Queen concerts, and maybe best of all …practicing music with my friends in the same room (it was said) over in Beit Quad that Brian used to use for practice in the days before Queen began! That was quite a thing for me back then. Here’s a little interview with him about his Imperial College days from the IC student newspaper Felix.

There would have been pictures of the guitars and so forth, a clever post title playing […] Click to continue reading this post →

My Superpowers Revealed

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Ok, I can’t resist. From an earlier post:

…and of course video footage of me effortlessly squashing a star much larger than our own sun down into a tiny space should help out enormously later on with classroom control, and so forth…

Since my cover is now blown, here are some stills** (click for larger) from Tuesday’s (unexpected) episode of the History Channel’s “The Universe”*: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Reading, Writing, and ’Rithmetic

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Yesterday (depending upon who’s counting) was the 16th anniversary of that thing we call the World Wide Web becoming a public entity. The Web is not to be confused with the Internet, which is much older, of course1. I’m talking about Tim Berners-Lee’s idea and implementation thereof. (I should not neglect to mention that this was done at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Europe.) His original posting (on the newsgroup alt.hypertext) proposing the structure can be viewed here, and here’s an extract:

The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.

Reader view

The WWW world consists of documents, and links. Indexes are special documents which, rather than being read, may be searched. The result of such a search is another (“virtual”) document containing links to the documents found. A simple protocol (“HTTP”) is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword search by a remote information server.

The web contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme.

To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire world of data.

What am I going to do to celebrate?

letter to anonSince everyday I celebrate the WWW by using it a lot, to commemorate the event I think I’m going to pay a visit to the (real, physical) library, then read a good old-fashioned book for a while, and then hand-write a letter. I used to write so many letters, long ago, and from time to time I try to stop everything and pick up a pen and write one. I got in the mood the other day while in Aspen, and went and found some letter-writing paper and envelopes, curled up on a sofa, and wrote for a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Return to the Nest

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Sorry about the silence. Odd thing: As a result of my (I think) growing absent-mindedness, it turned out that my flight was on Sunday night and not on Saturday night (as I thought when I did the previous post), so I suddenly had an unplanned 24 hours on my hands in Aspen.

ground dove nextI decided to spend the extra day lying low getting some work done – various things I thought would get undone on this trip suddenly had another chance to get done! Mostly administrative stuff. It is amazing how much one can get done when there’s a whole extra day suddenly appearing in your schedule, and so that’s what I worked on.

One thing I could have done was reminded you that the Phoenix was due to launch Saturday, and indeed it did! Be sure to check out a post about it on the Bad Astronomer with some links to really nice launch videos. The Phoenix mission plans rather wonderful things when the craft gets to Mars (including making the old reverse-thrust landing maneuver vogue again), as you can learn from their site.

phoenix spacecraftToday, Monday, saw me running errands. Boring things, really. Things you do after being away from the nest for three weeks. Anyway, I’m trying to get to used to all the extra oxygen, and the unbelievable dryness. There’s still been no rain. I will miss the daily downpours and thunderstorms of Aspen. This leads me to the garden report. Nothing to say except that there’s been a bit of loss – the relentless sun and dryness […] Click to continue reading this post →