So yesterday at Pinewood Studios they announced the name of the upcoming second James Bond film in the new series that (excellently, in my opinion) re-envisions the Bond movie universe. Last year’s first one was “Casino Royale”, you may recall. Did you hear what the next one will be called? […] Click to continue reading this post
The next Categorically Not! is on Sunday January 27th (upcoming). The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series – started and run by science writer K. C. Cole 
– of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area.
Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See also the links at the end of the post for some announcements and descriptions (and even video) of previous events. (Above right and left: Reza Aslan speaking on the origin of various ideas in Religion at the event entitled “Beginnings” on 16th December, 2007. Click right one for larger view.)
The theme this month is Science Goes Hollywood. Here’s the description from K C Cole:
Despite our prejudices to the contrary, Hollywood and Science have a lot to say to each other. Take special effects: Nothing Disney dreams up can […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, actually it sounds like a really lovely book, and the louse to the right (among other creatures) is featured. (Photo by Louis de Vos.)I read about it in a splendid little article in LA Weekly today on the bus home on a wonderfully rainy afternoon here in LA. The book’s all about the common creatures in our homes – “bugs” of various sorts, and the LA Weekly article by Gendy Alimurung is mostly an interview with the authors, Joshua Abarbanel and Jeff Swimmer. The book is called “A […] Click to continue reading this post
Brief note before running off to a long meeting… Can’t work out whether today’s second long class on the structure of Special Relativity was scary or not. Last lecture we did the classic thought (and real) experiments that lead to the deduction of the Lorentz transformations, and the realization that … Click to continue reading this post
By the way, do you remember that I had to do that presentation entitled “What Matters to Me and Why”*, last semester? (Blog post here, with follow-up post with transcript and audio here.) Well, it turns out that science writer and journalist KC Cole (of USC’s […] Click to continue reading this post
Anti-matter. Seeing the previous word, you immediately glance back at the title, right? Strangely, it has been 80 years since the discovery of anti-matter, and we use it routinely in our technology. Nevertheless, anti-matter is still thought of as something from science fiction (and mostly bad science fiction at that).
It all goes back to one of my favourite theoretical physicists, Paul Dirac, and you might like how he found it (roughly). He essentially did it by […] Click to continue reading this post
Excellent evening on Wednesday night. As I expected, KC worked her magic and steered the conversation in many interesting directions, with Alan Alda turning out to be – not unexpectedly – quite the character. I suspect that it was recorded (on video) and so I will update this post or do a later post with a pointer to it later. Alda was swamped by people buying his book and getting is signed and so forth at the reception. It was great to see such a good attendance at this Visions and Voices event all about science and the arts – very much in the spirit of what this is all supposed to be about.
Among the many things of note that were said, one thing I liked a lot was the telling by […] Click to continue reading this post
Inside meaning the inner part of the Solar System. Messages meaning the new pictures from MESSENGER spacecraft.
MESSENGER is short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging. Now you and I know that they spent a bit of time coming up with the unpacking of the name, wanting of course to have the name MESSENGER because that’s what the Mercury of mythology was – the messenger of the Gods, among his other duties. Nice. However I’d have been really impressed if they’d managed to call it QUICKSILVER, and found a way to unpack that – any takers?
Anyway, I digress. In more news showing the triumph of the wisdom of relatively cheap unmanned exploratory craft, MESSENGER sent some wonderful pictures of Mercury this week, along with lots of other scientific data that will help us learn a great deal about the innermost planet. Here’s the one that’s been going around a lot (click for impressive larger version):
Image credit to NASA. Caption taken from a space.com article reads: This photo supplied by NASA shows […] Click to continue reading this post
So it is that time. A new semester is upon me, and a totally new course to deliver. Today was my first day back on campus after the break (at least during a regular working day).
Sunday saw me sitting down (in the newly completed study) thinking about how I was going to structure the course. This usually has me sitting with the textbook, a pen, a hand drawn calendar on a big sheet of paper, and a frown on my face trying to figure out roughly what topics I will cover, how many lectures I will devote to each, how many class worksheets (see earlier post) I might have, when the midterms will be, and so forth.
What I am teaching? Why, only one of my most favourite topics to teach in the entire […] Click to continue reading this post
This is a quick note to point you to the Women in Physics conference (aimed primarily at undergraduates) being held at USC again this year. It’s on Saturday and Sunday coming. It looks like another excellent program (see here), so well done to the organizers for keeping going what Amy … Click to continue reading this post
Tomorrow afternoon at 4:00pm there’s be an interesting conversation on campus for sure. It’ll be between the science writer and journalist KC Cole and the actor Alan Alda. He’s such an interesting person, and (among other things) currently presents Scientific American Frontiers.
KC’s always so good at steering these conversations, so while I’ve no idea […] Click to continue reading this post
Now have a look at this object (and its enlargement on the right):
What is it? It’s a double Einstein ring! An Einstein ring is formed by gravitational lensing – the bending of light from one object by the gravity of another object – and is typically formed when a distant galaxy lines up with another, closer galaxy. The result is a rather nice ring shape.
To find a double Einstein ring is rare! In fact, this is the first one that’s been announced. Not only is it novel, it can also use used to do a good deal of science, such […] Click to continue reading this post
This is a quick note to let you know that today’s Science Friday will feature the Science Debate 2008 (which has been nicely gathering momentum since I blogged about it): Friday, January 11th, 2008 Hour One- 2pm EDT The Call for A Science Debate “Should the presidential candidates participate in … Click to continue reading this post
Being a loyal fan of Scottish single malt whisky, I never thought I’d be blogging about Irish whiskey, but this is why we get out of bed in the morning – we seek the stuff we can’t guess*.
So I was going to point out to you an amusing distraction. The series of radio ads for Jameson Irish Whiskey that you can listen to here. There’s one featuring a physicist, you see, and a friend of mine sent me the link for that reason**. There’s the idea of attraction, and so gravity is brought in by the ad man trying to use the concept to sell the product, and the physicist is obviously not having it… a short bit of fun play between segments of some program on some station somewhere or another. I can see that they’d work rather well. Have a listen.
That was going to be it, until I found another – real – physics connection. Turns out that Guglielmo Marconi – he of the use of electromagnetic waves for telegraph communication, Nobel prize, and so forth – is the the key to the connection. Do you know what it is?
[…] Click to continue reading this post
… but pass it on a retake!
While quickly building an ad hoc washing line pulley assembly from a bag of hooks, eyes, and pulleys, and a 2×4, I put this together at first (blotted out some background for privacy of myself and neighbours – click for larger view):
Huh. Does not want to hang level. Why? A tenth of a second after the thought, I burst out laughing loudly at my error. Ironic since I love teaching about pulleys in basic physics, and for some reason students are scared of pulleys. (Not as scared as they are of torque (why?), but scared nonetheless. I try to help them overcome those fears.) I made an obvious mistake. (Do you see it?)
[…] Click to continue reading this post
