Did you hear Radio Lab’s piece on Falling? I stumbled on it recently and started listening. So far, it’s very good. It’s even got contributions from Brian Greene and Neil deGrasse Tyson on aspects of the physics, and of course, there’s a discussion (by David Quammen) of cats. Perfect.
Enjoy!
“A loose cat in Colorado must wear what?”
(I thought about this for a while, and could only come up with bawdy humorous answers…)
“A tail light.”
(huh?)
[Post written yesterday.] Yes, I am on the bus to work (above was from the on board entertainment system that sometimes asks quiz questions) and it is the start to another week. Another very full one, it is shaping up to be too. I find these days that if I am not careful I tend to measure a week’s potential a mostly in terms of how much time I will have to work on the Project. Like my research, it is not something that is served best by being chipped away at, catching a few minutes here and the between things, but involves a fair amount of immersion. (Having said that, I am getting better at finding tasks that I can allocate to chipping-away time, and I have even found certain things for it that I can do on the bus… A lot of this will become clearer later, I promise.)
There was certainly a lot going on last week, as I mentioned, and I did not even tell you the half of it. Things like going to see Ira Glass talk about his radio show, essentially doing it in the style of the show, and of course about four hours on Friday spent in costume with hundreds of my faculty colleagues marching in a parade and listening to long (but mostly good) speeches from various Vice-chancellors, Chancellors, Trustees, the Mayor of Los Angeles, and of course, the man of the hour(s), our new President Max Nikias, who we were, er, installing. (When people use that term, and they do here a lot, I always think of plugging in a new electrical appliance, or a new piece of software… I suppose the latter is closer to what we are doing than the former.)
This week sees a lot coming up too, the main thing probably being the first of the Nobel Lunches, scheduled for Thursday. I’ve been very pleased with these events – I […] Click to continue reading this post
One of the things I pointed to in my discussion of science writing issues yesterday (see previous post) was this brilliant Guardian article by Martin Robbins. Of course, the classes had already seen it, and it is several weeks old now, but if you have not seen it, you simply must. It is so hilarious and so sharply observed that it should be as widely seen as possible.
Many of the comments left are brilliant too, written in the same style.
Enjoy!
(Waiting for the kettle to boil…)
It has been a rather hectic week for me here in the city of Angels. It is difficult to pull it all together in my mind and recall all the contributing elements, but they have been varied and more or less interesting and useful activities, ranging from various committees, teaching issues, research issues, event planning, event attending, and of course, the Project.
(Kettle’s boiled. Water poured on tea. Assam/Ceylon blend…)
I want to work for a bit before going to bed, although I’ll knock off early (midnight) because I’ve got to get up very early in the morning to get prettied up a bit, walk to catch the bus to campus, and get there by 8:15am or so. This is so I can get to my office and put on a cap, hood and gown and play dress-up (remember last time?) with hundreds of colleagues and so forth. The event? The inauguration of our new University President.
I’ve just returned from a long afternoon and evening in which I appeared in two of the classes of my colleague KC Cole (the science writer) talking about the issue of science, and how I do various aspects of communicating it to the public through various means (writing, film, tv, radio; factual, in fiction/drama, through blogging, in speaking engagements), and the broad issue of writing and journalism in that area. Two groups of extremely engaged and bright students in a row, separated by a quick […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, it is not often I get to say this, but Sunday’s CicLAvia event was, for me, completely perfect. It was simply about community, family, and enjoying the streets. It did not have an overtly political or activist vibe to it (as is often the case when you try to do some things a little differently from others in this town, like ride the bus or walk to the grocery store), and I saw a lot more people simply enjoying (and remarking on it out loud) the fact that they were out on the streets of the city than I saw people proclaiming rabid anti-car sentiments, as I’ve seen at bike-centric events before. I think the former feeling will go a lot further in making lasting change than the latter in the long run. There was some political content around, but it was largely confined to the steps of City Hall, where (when I passed) there were endearingly naive chants being led by a bloke with a microphone about “LA saying no to oil!’ and “no to coal!”. Don’t get me wrong – naive is not necessarily used as a derogatory term here. Noble dreams begin with a heavy dose of naivete, I believe. Hope, against the odds, for significant change, and so forth. (I could use the fully decorated version, naïveté, but it looks a bit pretentious to me today…)
So the event was mostly about people getting out there and enjoying the city streets, and sharing their enjoyment by doing it together. I was impressed with the turnout […] Click to continue reading this post
Getting ready to disappear off to explore. the route. Should be fun, although it is a tad too hot a day for it to be perfect for cycling and wandering long in the sun. On the other hand, that will bring a lot of people out to enjoy their Sunday outdoors, I hope, walking, cycling, rollerblading, skateboarding, running, etc. […] Click to continue reading this post
Seems that carbon might be a theme in this week’s Nobel slate, on the science side, so far. It was graphene in the Physics spotlight yesterday, a two dimensional carbon material, and today’s Chemistry announcement features carbon molecules too:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2010 to Richard F. Heck (University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA), Ei-ichi Negishi (Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA) and Akira Suzuki (Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan), “for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis”
It is all about organic chemistry, and in the press release, you can learn more.
On the other hand, the prize for Physiology or Medicine (to Robert G. Edwards […] Click to continue reading this post
Wow! For Graphene! Excellent:
The announcement:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2010 to Andre Geim (University of Manchester, UK) and Konstantin Novoselov (University of Manchester, UK) “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene”
Oh! I almost forgot to remind local readers that the next Southern California Strings Seminar is happening this week. Friday and Saturday. It will be at UCLA, and there’s a great line up of speakers. As I’ve said here before, graduate students are especially encouraged to come…
…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 and talks are:[…] Click to continue reading this post
I learned from members of my family the other day that Arrow died last week. I’ve no idea if by name you know who that is, and I am sure if I mentioned his given name, Alphonsus Cassell, that won’t make your eyes light up in recognition. But as soon as I say “Hot Hot Hot”, I bet that there’s a good chance a song starts playing in your mind. It is a Soca song (Soca being a more dance-oriented cousin of Calypso, and the name Arrow was, I think meant to pay homage to the Calypso star the Mighty Sparrow), and may well be the most famous Soca song worldwide. So many times when someone wants to inspire heat – usually involving sunshine – or excitement they play a bit of that song and so it ends up in lots of TV and radio commercials and other such places, and of course is played a lot at parties and other places where people are simply having fun. Arrow wrote and sung a lot of songs, and was devoted to his community, and so many are very sad at his passing, feeling that a friend has gone, even though they might not have known him. Seems to me he had a good life. At the very least, to be known for bringing joy and communion through good music well after you’re gone? That’s a great thing right there.
I did know him since I grew up in the community that he was part of. It was on the island of Montserrat where, you might recall from previous posts, I spent ten years of […] Click to continue reading this post
The new season of Categorically Not! starts up on Sunday. This one is entitled Song and is all about song. There’s more on series creator K. C. Cole’s site about the events, and you’ll find there that her event description is:
[…] Click to continue reading this post
Some exciting news today! We’ve had Murray Gell-Mann join the USC faculty! See an article about it here. As you may know, he is the inventor/discoverer of quarks, the particles that make up, among other things, the protons and neutrons that make up the nuclei of every atom in your body.
Speaking of bodies, he’ll actually be focusing on medical issues, as far as I understand it:
[…] Click to continue reading this post
Charles Day on the Physics Today blog asks an interesting question: Why has physics today’s news coverage of string theory been so sparse? I must admit that I had not noticed what the level of coverage is, and so the matter had not sprung to mind, but it is an interesting one. He looks back at the number of major articles written about the subject in recent years (he was a feature editor, and so shepherded some of them through), and concludes that the numbers are low, and he may well be right, but I am not sure I know what the best measure is.
How do we measure the appropriate coverage level? Is it by the number of people working in a sub-field as a percentage of the overall field of physics? If it were possible to break things down that way (I’m happy to see that we have come to a point in the field where I’ve no idea how to define what a “string theorist” is, per se, any more than I know what a “field theorist” is. There are simply people working in various fields who use both as tools to make progress) I wonder what fields would end up appearing under or over covered?
Perhaps a large part of it it is the issue of how many articles on the topic can be written that are of general enough interest, and finding the people who are both able and willing to write. This is a tricky issue, and depends on a combination of the topic in hand and the knowledge and writing skill of the author. There are two extremes that would be a factor here. On the one hand, you have the obvious difficulty of a non-expert journalist either not being able to see the general relevance or value of new results in such a specialist field, or if having seen it, not being able to explain it […] Click to continue reading this post
That was the unmentioned title of yesterday’s group meeting. We try to do this every year, and so one of the first meetings of the year is us sitting together, eating our lunches, chatting about ideas. We basically catch up, and chat about things we learned about from Summer travels, perhaps from conferences, schools or workshops. We also mention what we’ve been up to in terms of projects worked on, work in progress, etc. I find the latter especially useful from the standpoint of student development, since it is often the first time that a student gets to tell a wider audience (but in a safe environment) a little about what they are doing, often their first projects. Even a few minutes summarizing what you have been doing can be daunting at the early stages of your research career, so this is a good place to start.
Talking about things that we’ve learned are going on in the larger community (or […] Click to continue reading this post
Ack! It is September already. Somehow the last few days got away from me and I prepped a number of posts, but then they did not make it to the blog. One of them was another followup to the Friday iPad post (see also here). I wanted to show you one of the things I did in class on Wednesday. Recall that I am experimenting with using the iPad with Note Taker HD in class to simply sit with the students and work through solving problems with them on “paper”… a sort of fireside chat, if you will. The first experiment was on Wednesday, and I did it a little slowly at first, but I think it’ll be just great. Bear in mind I’m just scribbling with my finger here… I think I’ll try using the stylus I got the other day for variety. Click for larger versions.
