Well, the video of the Point of View event of a couple of weeks ago is now available. Click here for streaming media. There’s a problem, however. While my opening off-the-cuff remarks are utterly unimportant, and so it is not a big deal that the audio of that is poor, … Click to continue reading this post
Don’t forget the total lunar eclipse Saturday! It won’t be visible over here in the West, (except toward the end – see Amara’s remark), so unfortunately I won’t get to see all of it, but lots of you might, so you can tell us […] Click to continue reading this post
In Physics Today last month, Helen Quinn wrote rather well about the issue of language in science and in common (non-scientific) usage, with a focus on when the two collide. I recommend the article, which you can read here. There are cases in our own teaching where confusions arise, which … Click to continue reading this post
Well, it is almost the last day of Black History Month and I am behind on answering the traditional emails I receive at this time of year. As I said last year (with a few modifications):
Pretty soon after February starts, the deluge of email I get every day gets enhanced a bit by emails from students from all over America. I become part of an assignment, you see. It seems that these students are instructed to find a black scientist and write something about them and do a presentation to their class about them1.
I’m always willing to help with this sort of thing (see the footnote for why), and so I usually send some links: to my personal webpage (here), or one of two profile pages for me at USC here and here (the latter by Katherine Yungmee Kim), a Daily Trojan news story by Diya Chacko here, or the departmental page on me (here), and a list of publications, and I hope that this is all of some use.
As to the standard “what is your date of birth?” question that is usually asked too, I don’t pass out that information over the web, but if you’re an interested student, you can email me for a bit more information if you wish, although I will not give out the exact date.
For a bit of biographical narrative, students can look on the “My Hero Project” […] Click to continue reading this post
On NPR’s finance programme Marketplace yesterday, there was a somewhat unusual piece. It seems that conceptual artist Jonathan Keats is making some money by selling the extra dimensional rights to various properties in San Francisco! (You can see him at the Modernism Gallery there1).
Since there’s no known way to build on or otherwise occupy this new extra dimensional property (let me explain a bit further in an enormous footnote2), the prices are awfully reasonable. Here’s a transcript of a transaction that I found on their website. Reporter Nathaneal Johnson is observing a sale to punters Oscar Villalon and Mary Ladd:
[…] Click to continue reading this post
I’ve been meaning to post about this for a few days*. It has since made it to rather high visibility in the news, I’m pleased to see, generating a lot of interesting discussion. The Australians (another nation not part of the original Kyoto agreement, notably) have pushed ahead on the issue of trying to legislatively encourage (shall we say) the use of compact fluorescent light bulbs over the more wasteful traditional incandescent bulbs.
You’ll recall my posting about this idea not long ago, in the context of proposed California legislation (so yes, I used the same images in the same way). Now, I’ll admit that I was thinking of that as a test case, and when things are ironed out into a workable legislation there one would imagine the model being rolled out to the rest of the world to adopt in their own fashion. I did not expect an entire country to adopt it so soon and at such a rate (they propose to stop sales of incandescents by 2010!).
We had a lot of discussion in that earlier thread about the pros and cons of this. Commenter IrrationalPoint (IP), for example, seems convinced that this represents a serious access problem for people who respond less favourably to the new lights. Such legislation is therefore discriminatory. My response to that was in several parts. The first is that I was not convinced that the cited flicker problems were really problems that referred to the new bulbs. They don’t work like the old nasty fluorescents we remember from years back, or that are still to be found in a lot of public spaces. Their flicker rate is up at tens of KHz, not the 60 Hz of old. IP (and one or two others) then suggested that the issues were with the spectrum. My response there was that the spectrum is quite a bit different from a lot fo the old lights, and where some discomfort might arise with the new ones, this is possibly only a problem for some if direct lighting from the light bulb is used. (I personally find direct light from incandescents pretty disturbing in a lot of cases too.) Why not use the bulbs in conjunction with a simple filter or other decorative fixture that can modify the light to your tastes?
But I am keeping an open mind on this. Perhaps I’m just wrong, and the whole idea of banning incandescents is unworkable and insensitive, but I am not convinced that work cannot be done to make sure that it works well for all concerned.
One of the biggest problems with the discussion is that nobody could point to good […] Click to continue reading this post
It is on the list of my top five all-time favourite feelings. But I know of no word for it in English that properly captures it. This is strange, since so much of our society relies on things that probably came about in accompaniment with this feeling. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Sometimes it come on so strongly that it feels like a switch has been flicked inside my head, with an almost audible “click”, often accompanied by a smile, an oral exclamation, or even a moan. Why can I not think of a word for it? Perhaps my vocabulary is failing me, but if there is not such a word, then we should set about forging a new one, since it is so important.
What am I talking about? […] Click to continue reading this post
Here are some shots from my point of view of last night’s speakers putting their points of view about the theme “Point of View”. The event was a reasonable success, in that people seemed quite engaged, and lots
There’s a nice story about new photographic evidence from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for water having flowed on Mars. It is not really as dramatic as the photographs of late last year, but it is still an important piece of the puzzle overall (so do read about it), if harder to sell to the public as a “stop-the-press!” type of story. So here’s how three different news agencies tried to bring you in:
Not bad. The layering and colour gradations seen are is not direct evidence of water, of course. It could have been some other fluid flow, but…ok.
Next, we have: Click to continue reading this post
Tomorrow sees the next in the series of events here on the USC campus that science writer KC Cole and I have arranged. They’re in the style of the Categorically Not! events I tell you about from time to time (held each month over at the Santa Monica Art Studios) but are over on the USC campus instead, 
as part of the Provost’s Visions and Voices events. You can read more in the links at the end of this post.
The theme is “Point of View”, and we’ll have an anthropologist, a journalist, and a film maker each give their take on the topic. Here’s an extract from KC’s poster about tomorrow’s event (held at 7:00pm at the Gin Wong Conference Center here on the USC campus): […] Click to continue reading this post
This is the Helix Nebula, as imaged by the Spitzer telescope. Another wonderful eye in the sky. See links at bottom for a couple more dramatic eye images. This is a planetary nebula, with a white dwarf star at its core, left over as the late stages of the life of a once vibrant star.What’s the story? Well, you can read at […] Click to continue reading this post
As you may know, Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” has been nominated for an Oscar. If you want to hear more from the man himself (see also his remarks in the previous post), here’s an interview with him on NPR’s Fresh Air. It first aired last year, but it is very current. It’s so good to hear a politician speak so intelligently on these matters.
You know, the last few weeks […] Click to continue reading this post
Calling all scientists and engineers. You’ll get a $25 million prize from Virgin’s Richard Branson if you find a way to extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Get to work!
Continuing his admirable campaign to do more useful things with his money instead of engaging in the (let’s face it) mostly silly stunts that used to characterize news stories about him, Richard Branson announced his new prize today in London (in the company of Al Gore). People are indeed working on this sort of thing, in case you’re wondering (see a post I did earlier, for example).
No, this is not a replacement for increasing our efforts to change our habits […] Click to continue reading this post
Yes, it does matter. And it does matter:
(Simulated ILC collision by Norman Graf, showing production and decay products of the Z particles that areso important in electroweak physics.)
The high energy physics community is excited abut the Large Hadron Collider’s […] Click to continue reading this post
The title of Monday’s colloquium was “The Cryogenic World of Triton”, and the speaker was Gary Peterson of the Department of Geological Sciences, San Diego State University. Here he is in action:
The talk was very qualitative. Perhaps at times too qualitative for a lot of the Physicist audience, I’ve gathered from comments, but everyone agreed that it was still very interesting. Some of the qualitative aspects were necessary, since there’s not much data available for the sorts of things he wanted to talk about. So he was extrapolating […] Click to continue reading this post
