Category Archives: science in the media

That Was the Week that Was

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I might be losing my stamina, or have simply taken on more than I usually do, but it sure seems more tiring and hectic than it usually does this early in the semester.

It was a busy week, but I managed to get a few things done here and there that seem worthwhile, so I count my blessings, as they say. (Or used to say – maybe that’s somehow too loaded a phrase to use now? Not sure.)

To attempt to wind down yesterday after a tightly wound day and found myself walking with large sketchbook in hand in the warm evening sunlight to a studio to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Reaching Out

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So I’ve been spending a huge amount of time trying to generate awareness among the students and faculty about the newly launched film competition. I don’t know how much traction I’m getting, but we shall see. Lots of poster posting, and giving packets of postcards to colleagues in College departments such as Physics, Chemistry, and the Writing Program, and over in Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism, and of course the Cinematic Arts School. I need to figure out a way of getting a foothold over in the various areas of the Keck School of Medicine, on the other campus… It’s open to all students at USC, but I need to make sure I target certain concentrations to maximize chances of getting interested students’ attention.

On Monday I did an interview with a student reporter for the Daily Trojan and that appeared this morning. (Have a read.) I’m a bit embarrassed that they missed out mentioning my colleague and collaborator Anna Krylov, but the main thing is that more people will learn about the initiative though the article. It was fun talking to Jasmine, the reporter. The key thing, for me, is that the collaborative aspect of all of this is forefront, since that’s the most important aspect. As I said in an email to another reporter this morning (which may or may not result in an article, we shall see): […] Click to continue reading this post →

Announcing: Science Films USC!

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Ok, so here is the announcement I promised last week. Science Films USC! It is a film-making competition! The first of its kind at USC, I think. Right now, all there is to say is that we welcome teams of USC students from Cinematic Arts, Communications, Science, Engineering, and beyond, to enter the competition. They will present a short film that explains and/or illustrates a scientific concept, principle, or issue, for a wide non-expert audience. The first prize will be $2500. Yes, we are giving a serious prize for what we hope will be a serious competition with some wonderful entries. We’ll have a film festival in January, some prize-giving, and maybe some interesting people connected with the film world at the award ceremony. Of course, we’ll have it early in the award season, in January.

You can learn more at sciencefilms.usc.edu and for those of you who can’t bear to be away from facebook for long, also at facebook.com/sciencefilmsusc.

By August 31st, we will announce the details of the eligibility requirements, rules, and opportunities for those who are not well-resourced to get a small grant to help out with developing their film.

Teams, said I? Yes. As you know from many of my posts here and the work I’ve done in the past, I think that the future of better presentations of science in the media and entertainment, etc, is to get communicators and scientists working together and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Crazy Week…

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Feels like a crazy week so far. Not sure why. I’m sort of recovering from a bamboozling amount of sunlight yesterday, so maybe I’m a bit addled in the head, compromising perspective. I was up in the brown hills somewhat North of LA on an old disused airstrip, shooting a very interesting segment for a TV show. I’ll tell you more later, but it involved being in the unforgivingly intense sunlight from 10:00am to 6:00pm… with only my hat to protect me between takes… long, sunbaked, takes. I’ll tell you more a bit later. It was very worthwhile. The whole thing is what can definitely be thought of as a great “teaching moment” which will be lovingly done in HD, and well-edited and so forth. More later.

Had to find some time today to email and chat with a couple of other writer directors for two other TV episodes that will appear. I was trying to get an idea of what science story they are trying to tell and help shape the kinds of questions and answers we might be able to explore in the (minor) contribution I’ll make to their shows. Tomorrow morning I will have to make myself presentable again in order to discuss the material on camera… one a 3D HD show, the other just garden variety HD. We’ll shoot until well after lunch, and then hopefully I can get back to other projects for the rest of the day once that has done. I’m behind on a number of things.

I’m supposed to be able to point you to the websites where we announce the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales from the Industry XXXVI – 3D at the Fun Fair

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Thursday’s shooting day was tiring, but fun overall. It started in the (highly unusual) June rain that we had in the first area we shot in – Griffith Park. We were at those famous (man made) caves that you may well have seen in one or other movie Western, or TV series like the classic old Batman show, where they played the role of the batcave. Don’t ask me why we were there. I think it was just a nice backdrop for the physics I was talking about to camera, between rain showers and screaming bouts from some, er, Angry Birds*. Crows, I think they were. It was cold, and I was a bit low-spirited and off my game as a result. I did not even remember to take a picture for you…

Then we headed South -and warmer- to Knott’s Berry Farm. Now, I’d vaguely heard of such a place, but I will admit that I had no idea that it was so close to Los Angeles. We were there to shoot lots of moving, interacting bodies, as a series of analogies for some other physics issues…and this is the perfect place for that, with all the various fun rides there are within easy reach. It was fun to enter the park through the service entrance, and then emerge through a secret door in the middle of the special universe they’ve created for the customers! We wandered off to find the various things we […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales from the Industry XXXV -Tinkering with the Universe

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One very good piece of good news from last month was the announcement that one of the TV series I have done a lot of work for over the last five or so years (gosh, has it been that long?) has been renewed for another season. I’m being deliberately vague here and not naming it since I do not know if it has been officially announced yet. (On the other hand, nobody has told me that it is a secret…) (You can see many of my posts on this sort of thing here.)

It’s great that the parent channel has again continued to invest in science programming, and people seem to like the show a great deal. As I’ve said here in the past, I am very encouraged by the very wide range of types of people who stop me on the street (or bus, subway, bar, cafe, plane – yes, I’ve had show-related encounters in all of these places… people who like science shows are everywhere!) to tell me they like the show, ask questions, or just say thanks for my on-screen explanations and demonstrations. It’s a diverse range of people in terms of careers, race, gender, age, and so forth, which I am very pleased to note, and I do very much hope that TV executives take note of this when making decisions about future programming for their outlets.

It is great to get the chance to contribute a little bit again, even though it takes a bit of time away from other projects (particularly right now, The Project). As far as I know, so far I’ll be in two or three episodes, although there may be more (that’s all […] Click to continue reading this post →

Stick with the round balls, for now

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So, apparently, electrons are round. Very very round. So when drawing those terribly wrong but evocative pictures of atoms as a lump in the middle (the nucleus) with a collection of round balls in orbit around them (the electrons), go ahead and make them nice and round. Very round. How “very” are we talking about here? According to this report on the recent experimental measurements in the Guardian:

Were the electron scaled up to the size of the solar system, any deviation from its roundness would be smaller than the width of a human hair […]

So you’d have to be using a pretty impressively sharpened pencil to draw it that accurately round. But give it a try.

Ok, what’s the story here? Well, oddly, this seemed to be on a lot of news sources yesterday, and I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe because it mostly seemed to be pitched as a “back to the drawing board for the theorists” story (two major sources I heard had it spun this way), which editors seem to like running with. And the roundness? What’s that about? Well, what they’re taking about is the result of a long careful set of measurements done by Hudson et. al. at Imperial College (my […] Click to continue reading this post →

Movie Notes

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Going to the movies this weekend? Lots of interesting choices, but perhaps you especially want to see some portrayals of people in academic careers by some of the hot young phenoms. Well, here are two you might not have considered, both films released May 6th.

1. Observe Nathalie Portman as an astrophysicist in Thor. I don’t find this to be too much of a stretch since the actress always seemed to me to radiate an intensity and intelligence that would help make such a role believable, even in films where everything else is rather a disaster as far as believability is concerned. (cough, cough, Star Wars prequels, cough, cough) Well, it turns out that Thor is not the disaster I thought it would be and is rather well put together, all things considered (this is one of several Marvel characters that I was underwhelmed by in the old days). So go for Portman, stay for the hammer, lightning bolts, and other stuff. Turns out the physicist aspect of her performance was not as well studied as her ballet in that other film, but oh well. It was not like it was the central issue of the film. But enjoy all the Einstein-Rosen bridge mentions!

2. Observe Jessica Alba as a mathematics teacher who loves numbers in An Invisible Sign. Now, er, this for me was casting that did not bode well, but to be fair,[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Festive Weekend!

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It has been another rather busy week this week (including a marathon seven-hour video interview!) and so posting was a bit light. I apologize for this, including for not getting to blogging about an event (or cluster of events) that I’ve been gleefully waiting for since the news broke last Fall that (as I’d mentioned back then) the LA Times Festival of Books is now being hosted by USC. This is something I fantasized about many years ago, in fact – I simply think it is a better fit for the city of Los Angeles for many reasons.

Anyway, the first festival of the new era is tomorrow and Sunday, with a wonderful program that can be looked at on the LA Times website. It will continue to be the largest literary festival in the USA (and perhaps beyond?), and it is hoped that it will get even larger… Next year, we’ll have the new branch of the subway system running, giving three stops at the campus (hurrah!), but in the meantime there’s a dedicated shuttle bus connecting USC to Union Station downtown and the Convention Center (not to mention all the many regular public transport links), and so you don’t have to bring your car to the area to deal with parking issues.

As you know from my blogging about all this in previous years (see list of links at the end), in a sense the whole thing kicks off the Friday night before (tonight!) with the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales from the Industry XXXIV – Revisiting an Extra Dimension

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20110221-153433.jpgBefore jumping on to a plane last week, I went to meet some filmmakers to do a quick shoot we’d arranged. They are making a series of shorts for TV and myself and one of my co-contributors/presenters from The Universe, Laura Danly (from the Griffith Observatory) are doing some on-camera bits for them. (There may be others involved too, I don’t know.)

I mention this since there are two bits of novelty, I think. The first is that it is interesting that the company that commissioned these pieces are looking for shorts (4 minutes or so, apparently), and will be interspersing them with their programming in some way that will be somewhat unusual for current TV formats in the USA. I always welcome opportunities to help put some fun bits of science out there for the public, and in short bites mixed up with other things is just great!

The second novelty is that they are in 3D. You’ll recall, perhaps, that last year I contributed to a special show that was commissioned in 3D as part of the drive […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Project – 4

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So, a huge number of decisions went into getting the work to where I wanted it to be, and I’ve shown you samples in various previous posts, some collected here. But where does it all begin? It starts with the idea or concept that I am thinking about, and conversations which will form the dialogue for the piece in question. I start fleshing it out more, perhaps with a setting beginning to form in my mind. Maybe pencil drawings begin to take shape, and I start laying out pages, capturing the beats of the conversation, and the visuals that might get used. Characters (the people who will be in dialogue) begin to assert themselves by this point as well.

Incidentally, this is a place where sometimes the iPad comes into its own, and it is a great tool at several stages of all this. This project is one of the reasons I got the iPad, although I could not tell you at the time I got it back in the early Summer since I was not revealing what I was working on then. (Much of the other stuff I happily discovered about the iPad that I blogged about a while back (here, here, and here) are actually nice bonuses. I got it primarily to help me with development aspects on this project that had little to do with those other features.) I draw rough layouts on the iPad sometimes, and I can store all my rough ideas and print them out, modify them, call them up for later viewing, and so forth. I can carry work in progress with me, reference photos from location scouting, etc. It is also good for practice sketching, and sometimes, using it, I’ve grabbed some nice quick drawings of people in a meeting or in a bar or on a bus. Drawing from life is an important skill to keep up. The iPad is not used in final production on the graphic novel though. I work at a level of detail and complexity that the iPad would not be able to […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Project – 3

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(Monday:) Sitting at the airport waiting for a visitor to arrive. Might as well tell you a bit more about The Project. (This is the third in a series of posts unveiling The Project. See here and here for the earlier ones.)

So the sample I ended with in the previous post was, I presume you have realized, a little attempt at irony and humour. While it does take a while to bring about the transformation of technique that I wanted, and while it has taken some time to explore and then make choices about the various techniques I want to use, it would be hilarious if that was the product so far. But this is not a joking matter. The whole process is very slow indeed, even when ticking along nicely, and additionally of course I’ve got this Professor gig I’m doing for most of my waking hours. So…

Anyway, samples of what I am doing are in order. Well, what I’ve worked up so far, in a prototype story, is only really an example of one story. So the whole thing won’t look like what you are about to see, for better or worse. This is because the outcome of trying to decide what visual style to use for the project was that I would use more than one style. Some stories will call for different styles.

Another key element I mentioned earlier is that I am having the dialogues (by the way, the working title is: The Dialogues. Yeah, I’m tricky that way…) take place in real settings, some of them may be familiar to you. So go right ahead and guess away. Here is a skyline from page one of the prototype story, helping to set the scene*…

arena_extract_1

This prototype story, called The Arena, has a pair of characters accidentally (er…or maybe not accidentally!?) meeting again and picking up on a conversation. You can see one of them below and to the right, in one of my big scene-setting splash panels […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Project – 2

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A graphic novel. Yes, of course. (Continuing a series of posts revealing The Project. This is the second. Read the first to see how I got here.)

It makes perfect sense. Rather than hide the visual aspects of it all away in background, I’ll have it right up front. Having both images and words in my arsenal at the outset frees me up to do so much of what I want to do, in bringing the reader into the conversations through the characters, the locations, and in being able to go wherever I want either realistically, metaphorically, or representationally, in illustrating ideas and story. In fact, it is so utterly natural, given how we, the scientists, actually work on a day to day basis and talk to each other!

Actually, immediately it occurred to me that it is a graphic novel I needed to do, I wondered why nobody else in my subject areas (physics and so forth) has done it before. Before you jump in and start telling me about all the “science comics” out there, please note -given all I wrote in the last post and above- that this is not just more “science comics”, with some fun pictures employed to show things in various subjects. People usually mention things like the Cartoon Guides, and so forth. Those sorts of things are great, but definitely not what I am talking about. I’m getting at, or trying to get at, something quite different, at least in part. We shall see. It seems it me that there is way more to do with this incredibly powerful genre in science than has been done, and certainly in the corners of physics in which I lurk. I want to try.

It is still surprising to me, but when I say graphic novel, it is not uncommon for it to emerge that people have an odd idea of what I am talking about. Some think that it is cartoons for children. No, it need not be for children, and it need not be cartoons. […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Project – 1

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It is midnight and I really should get to sleep in order to wake up and work some more on editing the final exam for my class so that it can go to the printer by noon. But I’ve got several pokes from people clamouring to find out what The Project actually is, and I promised yesterday I’d start to spill the beans. Thanks for the interest! I think I’d better get at least some of it out there or I’ll have an angry mob by morning! So here goes. I will drag out the draft I sketched yesterday and beat it into shape:

So, as you may have guessed, The Project, which I’ve been mentioning here since a post way back in February, is a writing project, but it is somewhat different from what you might expect. The bottom line is that I hope that at some point into future you will be able to purchase a copy of your own, and that you will find it instructive, exciting, and enjoyable. At least.

Yes, it is a book about science. However… Well, here’s the thing. Over many years, people (friends, colleagues, potential agents and publishers, blog readers, etc) have been asking me when I am going to write my book. You know, the popular-level book that every academic who is interested in the public understanding of their field (as you know I am from reading this blog) is expected will write at some point. To be honest, I have given it some thought over the years, and it has been something I figured I might do at some point. In fact, several different ideas have occurred to me over the years, and I may well implement some of them at some point.

But a major thought began to enter my mind well over ten years ago. In my field, there is a rather narrow range of models for the shape of such books, usually involving about 80% of it being a series of chapters covering all the standard introductory material (some relativity, some quantum mechanics, and so forth) for the lay reader, before culminating in a chapter or two of what the researcher really wants to tell them about: some aspect of their research. This is a fine model, and it is great that people continue to write such books, and I will no doubt use that model one day, but to be honest, I don’t think there is any urgency for me to add to the canon yet another one of those books. Moreover, if you line examples of that type of book up against each other, you see that the […] Click to continue reading this post →

I, For One, Welcome Our New Arsenic-Replacing-Phosphorus-In-DNA Overlords

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mono_lakeYeah! This is just the sort of thing I’d hoped that we (human beings) would find soon, in order to strengthen the idea that in looking for forms of life elsewhere, we be not just open to the idea that the basic chemistry for that life may be very different from what we are used to on earth (easier said than done), but that it is maybe even probable that this is what we could find first. Now, given the news today (announced by Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her team in a NASA press conference today and reported on in a paper to appear in Science) we know that it is not just a theoretical construction, but already a reality right here on earth. The researchers have identified a life form with a striking difference. The bacterium (which lives in Mono Lake – see NASA image above right) has DNA (and some other important complex molecules) with a major difference from all other forms we know. phosphorus has been replaced by arsenic!

periodic_tableThis works, by the way, because arsenic is in the same chemical family as phosphorus, being directly below it in the periodic table. Note that this is exactly the sort of thing that has been speculated about a lot in the classic days of science/speculative fiction concerned with alien life, remember? :- Silicon based life forms instead of the Carbon based ones that we know and love on earth. Silicon is again in the same column as […] Click to continue reading this post →