Category Archives: science

February for the Chop?

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februaryThis post would be better suited to three weeks from now, but the subject item is so very good, so here goes…

Astronomers Declare February No Longer a Month

Emboldened by their success in declaring Pluto not a planet, the International Astronomical Union determined this week by a close vote that February is too short to be considered a true month. It has, however, been granted the newly created status of “dwarf month.” It shares this dubious distinction with several other calendar time spans, including Labor Day Weekend, Christmas Vacation, and the Time Between When You Were Supposed to Get Your Oil Changed and When You Actually Did.

“It only seems fair,” said IAU President Ron Eckers. “February reaches a peak […] Click to continue reading this post →

Kepler Ready!

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kepler planet seekerI learned* that the Kepler craft (NASA artist sketch on right – this is the device that will look for “other earths” – see below) is all go to try for launch later today! Extract from an announcement that went around:

On 6 March (EST, 7 March in UTC) there are two opportunities for a launch into the Earth trailing orbit. The first window is at 6 March, 10:49:57 p.m. EST (UTC: 7 March, 03:49:57) and the second window is at 11:17:44 p.m. EST (UTC: 7 March, 04:17:44). If Kepler is not launched tonight there is a another possibility at approximately the same time tomorrow night.

Countdown will begin 3 hours before launch and Kepler separation into Earth trailing solar orbit will take place 3709 sec into flight. First contact after separation is expected 4640 sec into flight.

For more information, and to follow the launch live, here are some links: NASA TV, Launch Blog, Spaceflight.

I noticed that Amy Mainzer is over at the Kennedy Space Center to see the launch. She begins to talk about it here on her (excellent) blog. You might want to check back there in case she does a nice report on it. Check out Phil’s Bad Astronomy blog for more on this too. He says he’ll be tweeting and all. (Yes. Tweeting. There, I have used that word in its recent new context/meaning in a sentence for the first time. I feel a bit silly.)

What is this all about? It is very exciting. Here are some sources of information for […] Click to continue reading this post →

Twirling, Twirling, Twirling…

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Oh, yes, the midterm. Well, apparently the students don’t hate me as a result of it. (Actually I have not seen any of them since before the midterm (I was away during the actual midterm itself), so I’m not entirely sure about that…)

notebook and coffeeI stayed up until 2:00am or so on Wednesday writing and typesetting the thing, and in the end I think I set a relatively straightforward exam. Furthermore, after I finished writing it, I realized that a good chunk of the computation I’d prepared for them had already been done in a previous midterm. I’d completely forgotten. You can see a (bit blurry, sorry – in a cafe trying not too look too conspicuous taking photos) snap of my notebook with the computations that I did in preparation for the midterm in the little photo to the right.

Since Elliot asked (thanks!), I’ll say a bit more about what they had to do. I decided to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Midterm One

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electrodynamics midterm preparationWell, it is that time again. The first midterm exam for my electrodynamics course is scheduled for Thursday and I have to decide today what to put on it.

A key factor is that it is an open book exam. Last week I explained to the class (I have another excellent group this year) that an open book exam is in fact more challenging than a closed book one, since some of them seemed to be under the opposite impression.

The point is that since we all know that if they have the textbook and their class notes and so can look things up, I certainly can’t ask them anything that they can lift from those sources without thinking. Therefore I will be able to focus on testing their ability to think and apply the techniques that they have been (I hope) studying. This is, after all, the point of the exercise, isn’t it? More so than remembering equations, in any case. (Although one hopes that all physics students can remember Maxwell’s equations…)

The drawback to all of this is that I myself have to think harder in preparing the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Bikes and the City, 2

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blog on a bikeYou’ll notice that I often talk about alternatives to driving everywhere in Los Angeles. Sometimes I talk about bikes (see for example the last post) as part of a range of options. Well, in December last year a student at USC doing a project in journalism (Lauren Lee – she’s at the Annenberg School) did a short report on bikes and the city for her project. (See also some of my posts about this issue, such as here, here, here, and several posts in the list at the bottom of this one). In her research, Lauren found this blog, gave me a call, and I agreed to make a few comments to camera for her as part of her larger report on some of the changes that are happening here in Los Angeles. (She also interviews Adam and Josef Bray-Ali, owners of the Flying Pigeon LA bike shop (hey, they have a blog)- a bike that might interest you.)

I should preface it with some remarks of my own. It is a nice report, but she edited out all the things I said that I think get at a central and key point. (To be fair, she was trying to make a two minute report, and I was babbling on enough for a Spike Lee four-part documentary…) I’m not advocating that everyone cycle everywhere they need to get to. Instead, I’m trying to get across the idea that cycling works really well in combination with the public transport system that already exists. One of the reasons people give most often for not using public transport is that the bus or subway stop is not quite close enough to where they want to get to, and/or close enough to their home. Leaving aside the cases where that sometimes this means “more than one block” or “not right next to my garage”, I’m trying to get across the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Daily Planet

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ziya tong on daily planetHey, remember Ziya Tong, my colleague at the short-lived blog Correlations, and one of the presenters of PBS’ inexplicably short-lived science show WIRED Science? Well, I heard from her the other day and we caught up a bit on what each other is up to. Turns out that she’s the new co-presenter of Daily Planet on Canada’s Discovery Channel! […] Click to continue reading this post →

Some Articles

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Well, as I mentioned in the last post, Sunday’s symposium at the AAAS meeting in Chicago went very well, and we successfully communicated a lot of the physics results, ideas, and excitement to the audience. One of the team, Peter Steinberg, did a blog post, and he’s also got some more pictures that you’d perhaps like to see.

Some of the journalists who were there have already produced some pieces reporting on the physics. It is actually interesting to see all their different takes on the same presentation and discussion event. So far, I’ve seen the one by Glennda Chui at Symmetry Breaking, which had the mixed blessing of being tagged by Digg (the server was down for hours as a result!), one at Physics World by Margaret Harris (this one sort of missed the key physics point a bit – see below), one at the Discovery Space Blog by Dave Mosher, and one by John Timmer at Ars Technica (He misquotes me a little here and there, but I do like the “String Theory Officially Useful” phrase in the title!). [Update: There’s also an AAAS publication here.]

Anyway, as I said, I think that the Physics Today one sort of got sidetracked a touch and so I placed a comment there to clarify some points. I realized that they might be useful to some reading here, and so I reproduce it here. Enjoy: […] Click to continue reading this post →

24 – Physics Edition (Day Two)

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February 14th 2009: Valentine's Day.

9:00pm – 10:00pm

…Must be here somewhere. Maybe inside the monolith? No. Seems it is not inside the jumbo suitcase, which I have not used since Aspen last year anyway, and I’m pretty sure that I did not use it on that trip. Where can it be? That box over there? No. (But I found that bag of plastic book covers that I’ve been using sparingly since I left Preston for London in 1986. Excellent. The things I don’t throw away…) Well, never mind, would be silly to make myself miss a flight over an inflatable pillow that I have not seen in over a year. If I play my cards right, I won’t need it anyway….

9:10pm Now to put all those things I set aside earlier into my trusty little day trip bag. Change of clothes, electric shaver, toothbrush and so forth. I suppose I will bring the laptop. And some bits of equipment that might be useful as backup for Peter’s plan. Or whatever. You never know. Yes, I throw in my copy of Accordion Crimes. Almost finished it, and if I do, would be good to get another Annie Proulx to continue enjoying her wonderful writing…

9:17pm Will someone tell me how I managed to be perfectly on time, and then fritter away some of it to make sure I’m slightly panicky late again? Sigh. I was more or less ready at 9:00, when I should have left. Despite all the events of the previous 24 hours ((Day One) – Valentine’s Day Diary – Available on DVD) I got everything together on time, and wouldn’t it be rich if I missed the flight?

9:23pm I leave finally, using the batcave, slowing to check that entrance closes, then vanish into the night toward the airport. Saturday night late in LA. Surely everyone is out having awkward dates? The roads will be clear this late on a Saturday night, right? I can make my 10:07 check-in cutoff, I’m sure.

9:33pm. 101 Freeway. Full of traffic. Don’t you people have dates you’re supposed to be on!!?? This is my road! My! Road! […] Click to continue reading this post →

From the Earth to the Moon?

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bill stone at TED 2007Bill Stone is quite an engaging speaker, it has to be said. I heard him on the BBC World Service, being interviewed about his hopes and plans to change the way we do things in space. It is a spirited case that he makes, where he deliberately invokes the spirit and the words of Sir Ernest Shackleton and other great explorers going off into the unknown. The audio is here. (If you come to this late, search their archive here.)

Then I checked and sure enough there was a TED talk from him last year. See here. You can see him in action as well, although the BBC interview is complementary […] Click to continue reading this post →

Happy 200th Birthday, Darwin!

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Well, as you’ve read here and elsewhere, this is a big year for (among other things) Darwin celebration. There are all sorts of wonderful essays, documentaries, discussions, lectures and so forth all around. Be sure to look at some of this work, and get involved. In addition to it being the 150th anniversary of the release of the Origin of Species, it is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday year, and the actual birthday date is today, the 12th February. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Once More, With Feeling?

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Well, the good news is that there’s a definite schedule in mind for the restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). (See related posts below for more.) We can resume licking our chops in anticipation of exciting new physics of various sorts! I learned about this from US LHC Blogs with posts by Steve and Peter. Some key things (apparently from a widely circulated email that heralds an official press release to follow soon) are as follows. First, Steve’s synopsis of the schedule: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Light Thoughts

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Last night, for one reason or another, I decided on the spur of the moment to head to the beach, in order to wander there with the darkness clinging to me while I faced the bracing wind and cleared my head of many things. Although not quite like walking, for example, the Northumbrian coastline, even this part of the Pacific can be wonderfully restless, rugged, and alive when there are strong storms in the air, as is the case right now in the area.

santa monica led ferris wheel

On my walk, heading Northwest, I saw the Santa Monica Pier in the distance, with its new (as of last Summer) Ferris Wheel sporting some 160000 LEDs (I read this – did not count them) and putting on a light show. It is interesting to look at for a number of reasons. They’ve programmed in a lot of patterns that it cycles through, some of which are nice, but the most interesting thing to me (and not depicted in my snaps) […] Click to continue reading this post →

Another Approach?

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No, it’s not my solution to things (you know, when patient, tiring, endless, circular discussion and explaining that it is work in progress does nothing to stop the whining of those who’ve made up their mind in advance…) but it certainly makes me laugh out loud! Enjoy:

arguing with a string theorist by abstruse goose

(Click to go to larger version.)

Taken from Abstruse Goose, which is hilarious!* This follows on nicely from […] Click to continue reading this post →