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Crunchy
Very crunchy bit of mountain, on the final approach to the overlook of Willow Lake this weekend. It’s like a reward of a giant piece of Cadbury’s Flake after a long hike over Click to continue reading this post
Black Hole Battles
Somehow, I only learned about this today, and it is already standby tickets only, but you never know. If you’re in LA and interested in a different kind of conversation, consider taking in the event (part of the Aloud series) at the downtown Los Angeles Central Library tomorrow night at 7:00pm. It’s between two friends and colleagues of mine, the science writer K C Cole and the scientist Lenny Susskind! The event is entitled, “The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics”, and presumably will be about Lenny’s reflections on some of the exciting squabbles over various important issues in black hole physics that took place (and still take place) in our field of physics. The above turns out to be (I just learned from a Google search) the title of a book he’s written, so you might be interested in it for your Summer (or other) reading.
Some of you may recall her really great conversation with Alan Alda that took place at USC earlier this year. I reported on it here. K C tends to run these sorts of Click to continue reading this post
On Good Ideas
A commenter, slim potato, implicitly asked a really good question earlier. It was a 
comment on a post I did yesterday about my struggles with a computation I was working on. I gave an answer, but since I know that a lot of readers don’t read the comments, and because one of the missions of this blog is to give a window on what scientists such as myself do and (importantly) how we do it, I thought I’d elevate the comment and my response into a post. Feel free to add your own thoughts to it in the comments, either as a non-scientist, a scientist, a specialist from another field, or other.
I would have assumed that most of your time when working on a paper was involved on catching good ideas, not getting muddled with conventions and calculations.
Hi,
Thanks. That’s a common misunderstanding of what we do. What makes a field of physical science like physics work is computations – all of that business with calculations (including checking that your computations conventions are internally consistent) is vital to the field.
Frankly, “Good Ideas” are a dime a dozen. Anyone in my field ought to be able to think of at least six of them before breakfast. What makes a good idea go Click to continue reading this post
Once More Unto The Breach…
Ugh. A night of computing (while making and eating dinner and recuperating from a strange day-long headache – dehydration? side effects from the big hike the day before?) and muttering to myself at various points left me in a state of confusion last night. I went to bed tired and confused after getting into a muddle and realizing that I’d been probably mixing conventions in parts of my computations over the last few days, leaving me with a flipping minus sign in a result. No, I really mean “flipping”, since sometimes a 1/16 was -1/16, and sometimes that represents a physical truth and other times it represents a computational mistake – and I got confused as to which was which. Ugh.
All of this was coupled with occasionally wandering outside into the late night air filled with hungry insects in order to seek the fragment of wireless signal (I accidentally discovered it nearby on the weekend) in order to download the odd reference to check an idea or a fact. I’d have a few minutes before the bugs would find me and start to chew (I suffer from being particularly tasty to insect life – always the first person to be multiply bitten at any outdoor evening gathering), at which point I’d have snagged the download of the paper and can then run back in to the safety of indoors, flapping my arms around my head like a madman. It is an amusing dance, since I can find the Click to continue reading this post
Yellow Lamps
I don’t know what they’re called [update: glacier lillies*], but they were so lovely, I thought I’d share:
They look a lot like little street lamps, if you look closely, having a lovely curve to their Click to continue reading this post
UK Physics Education and the Olympiad
You might be interested in this for all sorts of reasons, whether you’ve interest in science education in the UK or not. It relates to similar issues elsewhere, such as the USA. It’s a rather good (if a bit depressing) report on physics education in the UK, and how the UK does in the international Physics Olympiad compared to other countries. There’s a visit to the “training camp” for the Olympiad, and interviews with students and teachers. Have a listen – it is only nine minutes long.
The UK does not do very well, to cut to the chase. Not very well at all. China is the powerhouse, with the US and Iran also being very good. Notably, all three countries invest heavily in serious training and educational programs for the Olympiad, and it is also notable that Iran has very strong female representation.
More worrying, perhaps, is the decline of students’ knowledge of physics overall, since Click to continue reading this post
Some Saturday Shopping
Well, of course I made it to the Aspen farmer’s market. Why would I pass up the opportunity to pay $3.50 a pound for assorted squashes? (And that was some of the more reasonably priced stuff…) I like to support these things, and mingle with the people, so I go anyway. Also some of it is very good, even though there are very few actual fresh produce vendors compared to the farmer’s markets I’m used to in Los Angeles. (This latter fact is not entirely traceable, I think, to having a smaller target population, or being at high elevation.) (Of course there’s a lot of selling of knick-knacks of various sorts of the tourists…. you know: hand carved dual dog bowls with Western outdoor themes and so forth…)
Here’s the (half-folded) bike with some of my findings:
You can get a closeup on the basket by clicking the image on the right. Some apricots, Click to continue reading this post
Altered Saturday Plans
Well, I was supposed to go for an early morning hike to start off the day, but it has not happened. It was just meant to be a short one, since I’m staying in a little cabin out of town not too far from the start of a lovely trail. Then I was to go to the farmer’s market (more on that later) and then after lunch go to pick up my ticket for the chamber music concert I’m to go to this afternoon. (I say “pick up” and not “buy” since I was the lucky winner (well, one of them) of a little ticket lottery at the Aspen Center for Physics for tickets to concerts in the neighbouring Aspen Music Festival. Hurrah!)
Well, the hike did not happen. Why? Well, at about 6:30pm yesterday while scribbling fragments of equations and furrowing my brow while sitting in a cafe in town (a change of venue after a day at the Center(re) sitting in the office, you see), I began to realize that a computation I was stuck on might actually be becoming unstuck! Various parts Click to continue reading this post
Science Cartoon Contest!
The Union of Concerned Scientists is running a science cartoon contest* (mostly political cartoons, really), and would love you to vote. Here’s one:
Although No News is Good News…
…(as the saying goes) it’s nice to get the real thing from time to time.
I’m almost fully in retreat mode now, being back at Aspen and settled in to my office at the Center and so forth. It’s good to see some familiar faces and catch up a little on physics news, and gossip (still waiting for some good juicy stuff there). I’ve settled into my accommodation (which on the plus side has no wireless or other web connection, but on the minus has HBO, which I shall have to studiously avoid), and have done a quick cycle around town (brought the Brompton again of course) to check that everything is in order. So by mid-afternoon on day one, yesterday, I was settling into my project(s). All good.
The good news of the title? Well, usually when someone contacts me about my book, Click to continue reading this post
Stuff
Spent Sunday intensely preparing to leave on a trip, starting at 6:30am, with few breaks. This involved time spent preparing the garden to look after itself (I’d added several plants over the last six months that were not on the drip system), preparing various rooms to be more easily traversable for some contractors to do some plumbing and other work while I’m away, doing endless bits of paperwork and related things that I don’t want to deal with while I am on retreat thinking (almost) exclusively about physics, and so forth. At 3:30pm, in a panic I began the run around the house grabbing all the stuff I wanted to take with me, and going down to storage to bring up the two large bags I always take with me to Aspen.
Stuff includes notebooks, computer, hiking boots, bike, helmet, books, water bottles, drawing equipment, raincoat, umbrella, sketchbooks, shorts, t-shirts, underwear (yes, I did fly to a workshop one time and discover that I’d forgotten all my underwear…), various cables for charging various bits of consumer electronics, consumer electronics, shopping bag, small hiking pack, the pens I like to write with, the pencils I like to draw with, good tea, medium hiking pack, cloves, black peppercorns, good sea salt, whole nutmeg and a big stick of cinnamon (sort of hard to explain why these last several are important unless you’re also into a certain sort of cooking, and are familiar with Click to continue reading this post
Fourth Thoughts
Have a Fantastic Fourth of July, to everyone who is celebrating it!
It’s been several days since my last confession. Sorry about the silence. I’m honestly not sure exactly what I’ve been doing, since it has been a mostly fragmented set of things, coupled with a generally down mood of introspection over matters personal. Hmm… So nothing new there.
Physics-wise I’m a bit stuck. Not on a particular project this time, but stuck on Click to continue reading this post
Launch of an Idea
150 years ago today, Charles Darwin presented his theory of evolution to a group of his peers for the first time. It was read at the Linnean Society, and the reading didn’t really rock the world. That came later when Darwin published the Origin of Species. Either way, it is quite an anniversary today, since evolution is without question one of the single most important scientific discoveries ever made about how our world works. (Have a look at my earlier post on the Darwin Online Project, by the way. Lots to see there.)
Actually, Wallace had the idea some 20 years before Darwin, it is said, but few remember him. A recent NPR piece quotes the author David Quammen (“The Reluctant Mr Darwin”):
Goodbye to Correlations and WIRED Science
Over on Correlations, we’re in the process of saying goodbye. The PBS experiment with a genuinely new (for them) and fun science format, WIRED Science, along with its really fantastic online component (with resources for schools, the general public, the blog Correlations, and so forth), is officially over.
I don’t know exactly what went on behind the scenes at the PBS mother ship, but frankly, it seems that they just did not have the guts to try something new at this time, and are returning to their standard stuff. I thought that the show had a lot of good work in it, including several shining portions, and deserved a bit more time to find its feet. It may well have got there, building followers that would have tuned in regularly for years, becoming a sort of US (and science-oriented) version of the UK’s Tomorrow’s World (a BBC show that ran for 38 years and -despite its flaws- is fondly remembered by many generations). Oh well.
The mood at KCET (the local Los Angeles PBS affiliate that was making the show) was Click to continue reading this post
