Almost Back

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Well, I’m standing here at 11:45pm slowly stirring some tasty custard I’m making to pour onto a slice of steamed homemade date pudding. A while ago the wonderful Margaret Atwood was on the radio (talking about an influential editor who died recently – can’t recall the name), which is bliss for me since I love hearing her talk about anything. Absolutely anything. I just love her voice, tone, and turns of phrase. There’s a cold wind blowing outside…

Why am I doing all this? Well, it’s really cold outside for a start (yeah, I know) so I need some warm comfort food, but mostly I’m treating myself after a long night of writing php scripts and css code, remembering stuff I learned two years ago, with the aim of rebuilding the old look for the blog. I’m really tired of the clunky default style I’ve had Click to continue reading this post →

Gandalf, Balrog, Physics…

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So while you have a look at the following enthusiastic and amusing discussion about how far the Balrog and Gandalf must have fallen (in the film version of the Two Towers), involving discussions of terminal velocities and Balrog profile approximations for air resistance estimates (and so forth)…

(links here, here and here*)

…ask yourself why on earth nobody in the discussion (as far as I can tell from a quick Click to continue reading this post →

Bookcases

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While the wonderful downpour carries on outside (the whole of Southern California is in the grips of a powerful storm), I’ll continue with the discussion of the re-invigoration of the study that I started a short while ago…

study project - plane
(One of my all-time favourite wood-working tools. The good old-fashioned plane. Planing a bit of wood is jolly good therapy too.)

One of the main things I envisioned, and put into my sketches, was lots of space for books. Lots. I wanted big bookcases that fit the room, and so I planned a simple but robust design that stretched them eight feet from the floor to the ceiling. Of course, I wanted to make them myself – Building them myself would be more fun and much Click to continue reading this post →

Planck Meets Fleming

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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 →

Clinton Fun

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Taking a break from scribbling equations, I confirmed the he-must-be-crazy suspicions of people around me in a cafe the other day by bursting out laughing out loud at this Onion article: Bill Clinton: `Screw It, I’m Running For President’:

After spending two months accompanying his wife, Hillary, on the campaign trail, former president Bill Clinton announced Monday that he is joining the 2008 presidential race, saying he “could no longer resist the urge.”

You’ve probably heard about it already (it was even mentioned on today’s Morning Edition on NPR), but in case you have not, it’s a timely read. My favourite bit:

“No longer will I have to endure watching candidates like Hillary Clinton engaging in single-pump handshakes with voters, as I use every last Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Science Goes Hollywood

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Reza Aslan at Categorically Not!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 Reza Aslan at Categorically Not! – 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 →

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 →