Category Archives: science

Looking Forward…

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new_books…to lots of happy reading soon! My new crop of shopping (click for larger view) includes three Octavia Butler novels, two Murakami novels (I think I’ve talked about both authors here before) and a science book by Garfinkle and Garfinkle (I’ve spoken about this excellent book here before) that is a gift for a friend. I actually tend to cluster authors from time to time, meaning that I read something of theirs and then consume several more of their pieces of work immediately after. I did that with Murakami a while back and it is time to come back to him and read some more. Then it’ll be a Butler cluster.

Now… just need to read them. I can’t wait…. but I must finish the astonishingly good […] Click to continue reading this post →

Blue Skies…

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I always like an excuse to look for blue skies, and to have others look too, even in the worst of times. I had a great reason to do it today.

Early this morning before sunrise I settled down to write my ten o’clock lecture for my Electricity and Magnetism class. On Tuesday I had ended with a computation that is the essence of the reason the sky is blue, which is a nice enough thing to talk about, but today I wanted to go more in depth on the whole thing, and show that you can in a few steps show that the blueness has a particular pattern to it. I wrote out the final equations in a few steps and looked at them for a moment or two and realized that with the sun rising at that very moment, it was the perfect situation to have! So I went outside to enjoy the beautiful Autumn day and the beauty there is in seeing an equation writ large in the sky – and it really was all there.

It is particularly at times like this that one remembers why it is that it is hard not to just love Physics! (I hope you’ll forgive my unashamed love of what I do.)

Here is the sky I saw, looking toward sunrise, and directly in the opposite direction:

sunrise_scattering_1 sunrise_scattering_2

Oh, you’re wondering what I am talking about..? Why is the sky blue? What pattern in the sky? Thanks for asking! There are two things I’m looking at. First, light from the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Ask a Nobel Laureate

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mather_youtubeHere’s a fun thing to get involved with. You can ask John Mather (2006 Physics Nobel Prize) a question on YouTube! Go and submit yours!

What might you ask him? Something about physics, or something else? Religion, art, politics? His favourite colour? If you consider asking a question, and whether you go ahead and ask it or not, feel free to mention in the comments what you might ask.

This is how to proceed (from NASA education)*: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Bcycle

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bcycleHey! B all you can B and look at the Bcycle site and then go to the bit that says “I want it more” and add your city and zip and click that box that says tell your mayor.

This is *exactly* what I was wishing for a couple of years ago in an earlier post or two*. (See here and here.) Also fits nicely with a more limited plan a friend is working on that I’m hoping to help push forward… Will tell you more when I get permission to do so.

This is Excellent!!!! Let’s join in to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Don’t Forget the Orionids!

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The Orionids peak today. Well, actually, they peaked a few hours ago, but I imagine there’ll still be some excellent viewing of this meteor shower the next night or two. If you’re up late or very early and out for a walk (in the pre-dawn hours), look up, stay steady for a while, and see what you can see. skymap_north_bigYou’re looking just above Orion’s shoulder (you know Orion since I am sure you are often struck by those three equidistant stars in his belt…see the diagram on right from NASA’s site) for the apparent source of these fragments of Halley’s comet’s tail that we happen to be passing through. It is these chunks of comet-tail that enter our atmosphere and produce what we see as meteors. […] Click to continue reading this post →

A. S. Byatt

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Following hot on the heels of Margaret Atwood coming to town last week (over at UCLA), we have A. S. Byatt over at USC today! Very exciting. It is actually partly one of our College Commons events as well, and last week as a College Commons event (with a Darwin tinge) we had a viewing of the film of her book Angels and Insects, which I thought was really excellent!

Her lecture is entitled: “The Novel as Natural History”, (and will resonate with some of the themes I talked about in my report on the CC event about Collections) and I expect it is going to be quite wonderful. Details here, and the blurb goes:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

They Couldn’t Car Less

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As you know (maybe), for environmental (both local and global) and other reasons I’m not a fan of routine unnecessary car trips, and so I walk, bike, and use public transport a lot. My car is mostly only used on the weekend. This sort of declaration usually results in blank stares, subsequent treatment as a leper (or worse, in many LA circles, – poor!!), serious inquiries as to whether I was convicted of DUI, comments that this is impossible in LA, admissions from locals who’ve lived here for umpteen years that they’d no idea that there was a subway (that has changed slightly in the lastmelba_thorn_by_diane_meyer few years… now at least they know, but typically they’ve no idea where the stops are), and so on and so forth. I will admit to getting annoyed when I see announcements for events and locations that go to lots of trouble to give driving and parking instructions and never mention the subway stop or bus lines that might work for some as well. (Right: Artist Melba Thorn, photo by Diane Meyer for an exhibition on the issue, to be discussed below. Ironically, (at the time of writing) the exhibiting gallery also only gives driving and parking directions on their site. Isn’t that rich?)

Anyway…. you know all this from reading the blog. Check the archives for posts and discussions on a variety of aspects. Here’s part of the executive summary of my main point, and then information about a new exhibit follows after: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Dawkins, Atwood and More – On Darwin!

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As you may know I’m a Margaret Atwood fan (read my immoderately breathless account here), and I also think that Richard Dawkins is an excellent scientist and science communicator. On the other hand, as you also know from earlier discussions, I don’t think that his take-no-prisoners approach to the science and religion discussion is the best way forward. Anyway, I found this marvelous Newsnight special from last month. A celebration of Darwin and his work. It has lots of discussion about Darwin then and now, cultural and scientific impact, the ongoing debates, a new staging of a play, a recent film, and participating is Atwood, Dawkins, and the Rev. Richard Coles and the poet Ruth Padel (who is also a descendant of Darwin.) It is in four parts and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Audience View

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colloquium_audienceA shot of the gathering audience for my colloquium two weeks ago. (Click for larger view. I mentioned the circumstance behind it here.) It was a lot of fun, I must say. I spent a good deal of time preparing the slides in the day and a half leading up to it, and it was worth it. The audience seemed very attentive (or perhaps they are collectively very good at faking) and I got some great questions along the way, and at the end. My hope was to do a short and sweet colloquium […] Click to continue reading this post →

Emergence

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emergence_snapYou might remember a post I did back in January from Cambridge (the one in England), mentioning what I was up to on that quick trip.

It was a board meeting of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM), and I said, among other things:

ICAM has a great deal of interest in outreach -communicating science to the general public- and education, and this is one of the reasons I’ve been added to the board, since I’ve some experience and ideas to share in an advisory role. I’ll be giving a talk about some of these things using some projects of mine as examples (ASTI, blogging, etc). They’ve already been doing wonderful things in education and outreach, and have made it a priority to make it a major part of future activity. […]

I mentioned that one of the projects under development was their site called Emergent Universe, which promised to be rather fantastic to explore. It was under development at the time, and we (the board) spent some time at the meeting commenting on and making suggestions for its improvement. Well, it is finished, and boy it looks great! Suzi Tucker and her team should be immensely proud of their accomplishment.

There’s so much material there, beautifully presented (a still taken from it is […] Click to continue reading this post →

Friday Night Observations

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Friday evening was very enjoyable indeed, with some arts and literature near the start, and live scientific research toward the end. It began with a nice trundle across town on the 920 bus, when it eventually arrived (why are there still so many long gaps in the 720 and 920 schedules at crucial times of the day?) heading over to Westwood to the UCLA campus. I listened to music, read Jonathan Gold’s column in the LA Weekly, and listened to conversations around me. I got to Westwood and Wilshire after half an hour or so and walked up to campus and to Royce Hall, getting coffee on the way and even stopping in to an AT&T store to check on something. The campus was surprisingly quiet at 7:30 or so and I made my way over to Royce Hall, sending a text to a friend about later.

Besides the environmental reason I like to try to take public transport, it is also nice to plan it out and then be 15 minutes early and nice and relaxed before an event, and not be arriving all stressed due to traffic and then worried about parking and so forth. The show started late (as everything does in LA because there is a tacit assumption that everyone will be late due to traffic and parking and so people mostly were late because, of course, they know this assumption is in place. (At the 8:00pm actual official start time only about 20% of the audience that would arrive in the next 15 minutes were actually seated.)

atwood_gods_gardenersThe event, you’ll recall, was all about Margaret Atwood’s new book Year of the Flood. The author and the actors and musicians came onto the nicely decorated set and started with one of the songs specially written for the event. There is a limited set of engagements in 16 or 20 (I’ve forgotten) cities performing this reading and this is one of them. Margaret Atwood was the narrator and there were three actors reading the parts of three characters from the book. A central cult/religion that appears in the book (and the previous book with […] Click to continue reading this post →

Physics Nobel for String Theory Instead?

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So I don’t usually talk too much about raw politics here, but when the news broke early this morning about the Peace Prize for Barack Obama, I was sure it was a joke. (Or perhaps I was mishearing given that it was almost 2:00am and I was just coming home from a long night downtown which finished with several hours at the Edison bar.) When I woke up five hours later and heard that he’d accepted, I was a bit sad. I think it is simply a mistake, and a distraction. You give the prize to someone for having done stuff. Plain and simple. He has not really left the starting gate yet. (And frankly, on almost all counts – not just peace – he seems to be still at the starting gate trying to find his way out of that little box.) But it is nine months into his presidency, so good or great things can happen yet. But they have not yet. So this prize looks like a lazy political slap in the slap in the face of the Bush administration, a cheap political statement that backfires and cheapens the prize. Obama would have had a huge amount of respect from me if he’d at least tried to respectfully decline.

So stepping away from direct politics I was trying to think what might be a fun and instructive thing to think about this. How about alternative prizes for this week’s categories? Prizes to work (or authors of the work) that while extremely promising, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Jane Goodall

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jane_goodall_bovardJust went to a marvellous talk by Jane Goodall here on the USC campus, in Bovard auditorium. She’s signing her new book as we speak! Among the many things she said, she emphasized one of my favourite themes with regards the environment (and so many other things, like community, education, etc): Act locally.

Have a look at her roots and shoots organization for example. It is very youth driven […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Nobel Prize Week is here!

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As you already know, I am sure, it is Nobel Prize week. (See posts below for earlier such discussions.) Physiology/medicine has already been announced (see here: Yes, I definitely approve any effort to encourage research work on how aging and related mechanisms work)…. what was I saying again?… Oh, right …and Physics, Chemistry, literature, Peace and Economics will trot along into the spotlight day by day, into next week. All very exciting.

Now I have to say I don’t have any good ideas or strong feelings for what the Physics prize might be this year. Do you? I’ve a vague feeling that it might be some sort of important experimental effect (you know, like GMR a few years back – perhaps whatever it is that makes my ipod know which way is up all the time) instead of something flashier (but no less important) like inflation (the cosmic kind), which I am sure will have its day one day soon.

Ideas?

By the way, my “Nobel Prize: Who/What/Why” colloquium idea of a few years back has now been converted into a pair of lunches for the College Commons series. […] Click to continue reading this post →

All Went Well…

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When all is said and done (and since it is midnight and there’s nobody else here, I’ll take it that it has been and is) it was a good day at the West Hollywood Book Fair. I made it there in time to wander a bit and take in a number of the things on offer, just flitting from booth to booth and stopping to listen at various panels on various of the stages. chair_at_pdcI arrived early enough to check to see where my panel would be, double check that there were no schedule changes, and then set about to look around. Just before the panel I found a place doing a nice tasty hot sausage on a bun for lunch (plenty of fried onions and a sliver of mustard to top it all) and nibbled on that while listening to some poetry readings. (Or at least I think that is what they were.) (The picture shows the late afternoon sky with the giant chair sculpture at the Pacific Design Center across the street from the park the fair was in.)

Then I went to find my fellow panel members and we, uh, panelled away for an hour. Crucially, I found out what my panel was really about, which is good. The title “Eyeballing the Universe: Big and Small” was intended to invoke not just the act of […] Click to continue reading this post →