Lousy Book

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louse by louis de vosWell, actually it sounds like a really lovely book, and the louse to the right (among other creatures) features quite a bit. (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 →

Did I Scare Them?

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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 the words “space” and “time” really should be combined into “spacetime”, and that they need to be thinking in those terms. At the end of the lecture and for most of today, I spent a lot of time emphasizing why Special Relativity is really not weird at all, and developed everything from there on as a very simple analogy to rotations in Euclidean space. The only thing that’s different is this minus sign in front of the “t” part, which is either annoying or beautiful. I urged them to pick the latter since without it there’d be just boring Euclidean four-space, with no yesterdays or tomorrows…

Of course, a bit of time must be spent (forgive the unintended pun) developing some Click to continue reading this post →

Asymptotia Attacked!

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Sigh. It was too good to be true. Hours after updating the site (and feeling pleased with myself) because I caught a whiff of something threatening it, a blistering attack came along, in the form of essentially a denial of service attack from hundreds of separate machines/robots all from the same referring site. (See Josh Davis’ report on such things for the Wired Science TV show last year. Video here.) I tried everything I could think of to get rid of it and could not win*. In the end, my hosts shut down my account and suspended the domain (fair enough – actually might have helped), and (not cool) one of their fine technical support people blamed me for the problem Click to continue reading this post →

Upgraded

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Well, due to seeing signs that the blog was partially hacked (although not as badly as last time), I decided to do a full upgrade (long overdue) of the blog software. On that score, Asymptotia is now as current as it is possible to be, for a while. Hurrah! I hope to find some time to clean up my own personal adjustments to various things that affect the look of the blog, and may even dig into why the blog still looks weird on some older versions of the (annoying) IE browser (I never did figure that out, so ideas/experiences welcome). I may even roll out (less likely due to time) some of the other features of the blog’s look that I’d planned way back when I started the blog in 2006, so keep an eye out.

On the other hand, if you see some strange behaviour (resulting perhaps from some incompatibility of older stuff with the new stuff), please feel free to email me and let me know, and/or leave a comment here.

Best,

-cvj

Not Science Fiction

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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).

dirac_equation.jpgIt 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 taking the Click to continue reading this post →

Put Yourself In Their Shoes

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alan alda and kc cole

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 USC Visions and Voices event all about science and the arts – very much in the spirit of what this is all supposed to be about*.

  alan alda and kc cole  alan alda and kc cole  alan alda and kc cole

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 →

Messages from Inside

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“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):

mercury by MESSENGER

Image credit to NASA. Caption taken from a space.com article reads: This photo supplied by NASA Click to continue reading this post →

Lecture One

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lecture notes

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 →

Women in Physics – USC Conference

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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 and Katie started (it has also spread elsewhere – see the site for more conferences, and consider starting one in your area). Parenthetically, I’ve heard that one or two readers of the blog will be attending, so don’t hesitate to say Hi! if you see me around.

Enjoy!

-cvj

Alan Alda Chats With KC Cole

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kc colealan alda scientific american frontiersTomorrow 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 what they’ll be talking Click to continue reading this post →

Two Rings

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Now have a look at this object (and its enlargement on the right):

double einstein rings

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 →

Science Debate 2008 on Science Friday

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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 a debate focusing on science, technology, and the environment? A group of voters has started a petition movement calling for a science debate.”

There’s a bit more information on their site, along with a quiz about the current Click to continue reading this post →