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 →

Drawing Room

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While I’m on the subject of art and science, I should point out that QMUL’s David Berman told me about an exhibit of drawings by scientists on various themes in physics. He was looking for contributions too (although it may be too late now, I’m not sure). The website is here. He told me a while ago, and I apologize for neglecting to point it out to you sooner (for a while I was sure that I’d done a post on it, but cannot find one).

David said (back in October):

Sanjaye(Ramgoolam) and I are currently trying to put together a collection of works for a series of exhibitions we have lined up. The idea is to show how physicists use conceptual drawing and just to show some of the
interesting ideas around in a visual rather than mathematical way.

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Essence

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Over on Correlations, I posted about the second of the two pieces I was considering as exhibits for some of my thoughts on science and art for Seed magazine. Recall that my first post on this – about the piece and text that I finally submitted for publication – was done a few weeks ago. The theme I brought out there was “transcendence”. For Click to continue reading this post →

Christmas – Birth and Death – Oscar Peterson

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Well, somewhere in the Holiday Season comes Christmas, and somewhere in there is some celebration of a new life. On the other hand, the great pianist Oscar Peterson died the day before Christmas Eve. (See an AP story/obituary here, for example.) At about 6:00pm on Christmas Eve, I usually pronounce it time to have the first strong drink of the evening, and declare Christmas as having begun (defying everyone else who seem to want to start it earlier every year) by playing Carols, and other relevant music, the Christmas tree having been erected. It was again so this year, and I dug out my only “Christmas CD” and put it on. The first track was – of course – the excellent version of Thad Jones’ “A Child is Born” , by Oscar Peterson. In order to share this with you, I thought I’d see if perhaps the man himself might be playing it somewhere on YouTube, but was unable to find it. However, someone else was playing the piece, styling it after and reproducing Oscar Peterson’s famous version, and so I give you – with warm wishes for Christmas and the New Year – “A Child is Born”, Oscar Peterson’s version, channeled through the playing of an unknown (to me) pianist. (Hang on for some actual Peterson in a mo’):



Oscar Peterson was simply amazing, and (especially, for me, as an accompanist to several singers I love) he brought me a huge amount of musical joy, and it is sad to Click to continue reading this post →

Mars Attacked?

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A little over a month from now, Mars might be hit by an asteroid! There’s a 1 in 75 chance (due to uncertainties about the exact trajectory), according to the people tracking the object’s progress right now. The 50 metre wide object is due to pass within 300000 miles of Mars at about 6 a.m. EST (3 a.m. PST) on Jan. 30, 2008. Quoting quite a bit from the press release from JPL/NASA:

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NPR on Blogging

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Well, it is more or less the tenth anniversary of the blog. Not this blog – the whole weblogging thing. NPR did a rather nice radio pastiche to survey the business of blogging. It was done with good humour – they made a radio blog, with audio versions of hyperlinks, scrolling, and so forth. It’s rather amusing, and even somewhat informative as a bonus. They interview various people including (of course) Justin Hall who is identified as one of the earliest bloggers. He’s an interesting guy. I met him briefly when he was here at USC’s Interactive Media Division, during that meeting on academic blogging I blogged about a while back. You can start out finding out a bit more about him and blogging by google searching. Sooner or later you’ll hit the Click to continue reading this post →

Greg Bear on Correlations

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Over on Correlations, my co-blogger Damon Gambuto has started a new series: “Science Fiction Friday”, and guess who is featured for the first one? Greg Bear!

I’ve really enjoyed his writing over many years, starting with the first books of his I read in quick succession (“Legacy”, and “Forge of God”, along with their follow-up works), right up to the very good “Darwin’s Radio”. I’ve not read anything more recent of his yet.

Anyway, the interview (which will be in several parts) looks really good and interesting Click to continue reading this post →

NSBP and NSHP

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nsbp and nshp conference logoI learned from Chanda Prescod-Weinstein* (an occasional commenter here) that it is time to register for the joint NSBP and NSHP (National Society of Black Physicists and National Society of Hispanic Physicists) conference. It’ll be in Washington DC, February 20th-24th. (Actually, it has been time to register, for some time, but I’m late to the party, as usual.)

Chanda’s been working on some of the organization, and she says on her blog (go there for more):

This year’s conference will feature a plenary on Cosmology and Quantum Gravity, organized by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and starring Abhay Ashtekar (Penn State), Lenny Susskind (Stanford), and Meg Urry (Yale).

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