In Which I Fail Physics 101…

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… but pass it on a retake!

While quickly building an ad hoc washing line pulley assembly from a bag of hooks, eyes, and pulleys, and a 2×4, I put this together at first (blotted out some background for privacy of myself and neighbours – click for larger view):

bad design

Huh. Does not want to hang level. Why? A tenth of a second after the thought, I burst out laughing loudly at my error. Ironic since I love teaching about pulleys in basic physics, and for some reason students are scared of pulleys. (Not as scared as they are of torque (why?), but scared nonetheless. I try to help them overcome those fears.) I made an obvious mistake. (Do you see it?)

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Tales From The Industry XVI – Correlations Meetup and More

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It all began over dinner on Thursday night, before the rains began. Some of us met up at Ciudad (a favourite place of mine to eat in downtown Los Angeles, primarily for the mojitos) and the began to get to know each other in person, as opposed to online. I’m talking about the Correlations bloggers, and members of the team who work on the entire Wired Science website (which is excellent, by the way) with which Correlations is embedded. I met most of the latter group at various KCET events (the first screening of episode 1, the wrap party a few weeks ago I never got around to blogging, etc). This however, was the first time I got to meet Sheril Kirshenbaum, although we’d got to know each other so well online I have to say that it sort of felt as though we’d already met. Co-blogger (and show producer) Damon Gambuto arrived a bit later – I’d met him before at the party. The other bloggers coming from out of town to the meeting, Tara Smith and Michael Tobis, I would meet the next day since Michael’s flight was coming in late, and Tara was not feeling well. Tamsin Gray, being stationed in Antarctica, was not going to attend. Of the show host co-bloggers, Chris Hardwick (who I’d already met at the wrap party) would be there next day too. Ziya Tong was away.

Here’s a shot of some of us chatting at dinner (see also Sheril’s thoughts on this here):

correlations meetup dinner

Damon Gambuto is second from left, and there’s Sheril Kirshenbaum and cvj on the right – click for larger view. There’s also Liz on the left, and Philip Dunn in the centre, both from New Media.

The main purpose of all of this from the bloggers perspective was simply to meet and Click to continue reading this post →

Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold

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Has the ring of a Harry Potter novel’s title, doesn’t it? Well, it’s about physics. The history of the physics of cold, particularly its extremes. It’s a TV show on PBS’ Nova (based on the Tom Shachtman book of the same title), to appear this week, and it looks rather good! You can see the PBS website for it here. The good news is that this program has been a while in the making, with lots of physicists involved behind the scenes to get it right, so I’ve got my fingers crossed that it will not just be entertainment for the moment, but actually a rather good information resource (as well as being entertaining – the two are not mutually exclusive). It first airs on January 8th and 15th (there are two hours, one on each day). There are preview videos to look at Click to continue reading this post →

I Am Cranky

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will smith in i am legendSo I took my mum and my brother (passing through on his way to the CES) to the new Arclight (Sherman Oaks) to see “I Am Legend” last night. I’ll admit that it has some things going for it. Overall it is not the disaster one might expect, given the direction in which big-budget “science-fiction” projects like this headed by action stars usually go. Furthermore, it might be said to be a bit of progress to have the main character be a scientist, and one of African descent as well, although I’d have been more impressed to see the scientist character actually using the scientific method – inference, deduction, hypothesis testing. The placeholder for being a scientist here was still the usual – surround the character with fancy equipment, give them glasses and a lab coat, and get them saying a few sciencey-sounding things. Hollywood – please listen up: That’s not what science is!!

So it was basically an action movie with more than the usual puddle’s worth of emotional depth, for a change. Very good performances and so forth and more or less well put together. It did not have the feeling of being written by committee, and so forth. So worth a look.

On the other hand, one main thing has been bugging me all day. If the rabid infected Click to continue reading this post →

Comets and Meteors for the New Year

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On Space.com, Joe Rao talks about comet Tuttle’s return, and reminds us that comet Holmes (see here and here) is still worth a look. In fact, he gives a little bit of history of Tuttle, which is worth a read.

He also tells us, in another story, about the Quadrantid meteor shower. The what? I hear you cry. Well:

The meteors are named after the obsolete constellation Quadrans Muralis, the Mural or Wall Quadrant (an astronomical instrument), depicted in some 19th-century star atlases roughly midway between the end of the Handle of the Big Dipper and the quadrilateral of stars marking the head of the constellation Draco. (The International Astronomical Union phased out Quadrans Muralis in 1922.)

(Cartoon shaking of fist… “Curse you, IAU!!!”) (Er…. remember Pluto.)

This is not the most well known of meteor showers, but this year it was set to have Click to continue reading this post →

A Retreat

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sketches for studyAs I get older and busier, I seem to increasingly value quiet spaces. I always loved them, but now they seem more vital to me than ever. So I seek them out constantly. It’s important to note that it is, as they say, all relative. My whole house is a quiet space in a quiet part of a neighbourhood, which is itself in a relatively quiet part of the city. Nevertheless, I’ve been monitoring my working patterns of late and noticed quite a bit of fragmentation, which bothers me a lot. Sure, a lot of it is self-inflicted (email, blogging, and so forth can always be managed better – that’s another issue to discuss), but some of it has to do with finding good spaces to work, depending upon the type of mood and type of work to hand.

I’ve lots of favourites, and many of them are cafes and bars around the city, some places on campus (my office is not high on that list though), the odd bench in a park here and there, and so forth. But those are mostly for working in my “public space” mode. Sometimes I want to work in a different mode, or sometimes I want to just stay Click to continue reading this post →

Chinese Checkers

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Discovered a new trick accidentally. Go into the wrong folder in your database of photos and stumble upon things you photographed a year ago to the day with the intention of blogging but never did.

A year ago today, after a meeting with my playwright collaborator Oliver Mayer to work on our play, I took some snaps of some old “Chinese Checkers”* boards on the wall. We were at the Brite Spot, a legendary cafe in Echo Park. I found them rather pleasant to look at, and wish I could have got a better angle to photograph them properly, but it was not practical. Anyway, here they are (click for a larger view):

      chinese checker sets at Brite Spot   chinese checker sets at Brite Spot

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Anticipation

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mum's coconut bread

Well, for some of you, the title of the post should be “Frustration”, since I’ll get to try these (click for larger view) later when they cool down, and (sadly) I can’t share them with you in that way. But I thought I’d share the common and special memory of the warmth of baking smells… good thing to start the year off with. Especially if you’re somewhere a bit cold.

There’s been a lot of cooking and eating here over the last week and a half. I’ve done Click to continue reading this post →

Unexpected Music

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baby z rocks and rollsI’ll admit that I was quite surprised by this. First, let me say that this is not one of those tedious “ooooh, isn’t he special” stories. It’s just interesting.

I sat my nephew Baby Z at my digital piano, switched it on, and stepped back. Sure, he found it interesting, as you’d expect, and he started to bang on the keys quite randomly at first…. but he began to experiment quite interestingly, listening, tinkering, trying new things, and singing along to some of his creations… his stuff sounded just great too! I’d never have guessed it would sound so interesting.

How come nobody told me that babies make such excellent avant-garde music seemingly without trying? Fascinating. Why is nobody releasing albums of this stuff?

-cvj

Reflection

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It’s time to do that other thing that people do at this time of year: Reflect upon the year that is coming to an end. People start doing highlight programs on the radio and tv, surveying the year of blog posts on blogs, and so forth. Also, various science editors start doing their “top science stories” of the year. They are usually smart enough not to try to rank them, but even so, I do find myself wondering about what makes it to the lists and what does not. I’m particularly curious as to the nature of the discussions that must have taken place in order to compile the list.

Of course, science does not work to a tidy calendar (even though that would be rather nice and neat for our funding agencies), and – more significantly – it is often very hard Click to continue reading this post →

Nitrocellulose

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How about a bit of chemistry? My Correlations colleague Chris Hardwick, one of Wired Science’s presenters, did another excellent demo on the show. This time he did it with chemistry teacher Chris Schrempp, who showed us how to make nitrocellulose in a few simple steps, using common cellulose sources such as the cotton balls in your bathroom cabinet. He does a nice job of explaining all the steps and the chemistry going on, and, of course, in the end there are rather lovely residue-free fireballs – just like the ones magicians do!

Enjoy!

-cvj

Small Person in the House

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shoesNo, I’ve not been keeping a low profile in the Far East for a month, as I did a couple of years ago. Nor have I been doing the same in the desert. Actually, I was pondering doing one of those, or something else along those lines, when my sister got in touch and said that she was going to visit me, along with our mum, and my sister’s 18 month old son. This news meant that I’ve been somewhat preoccupied with things over the last few weeks, as a lot of my spare time has been devoted to a project that needed to be accelerated (pictures later) so as to not have too much dust and chaos at the beginning of their visit, and since they arrived, well you can imagine…

They arrived, and it has been a great visit so far. All my plans to think hard about Click to continue reading this post →