So this is where you can smoke in California. I’ve found it! Santa Monica pier:
Don’t all rush at once.
I just remembered seeing this after hearing this morning that they are beginning to Click to continue reading this post
So the mexican sage (salvia leucantha) has started its new crop of flowers. The purple bobs pictured below right 
(click for larger – yes, there is a little bee resting quietly on a leaf there for some reason) will turn into long purple fronds with lots of individual bells containing flowers. Soon they will come, and they will keep coming. They’ll come and examine each flower closely and attentively, and I’ll be waiting for them, since they are so magical – appearing suddenly and dramatically as though dropping out of warp, with a wonderful and powerful hum. I’m talking about hummingbirds, of course. They love these flowers, and come and feed on them regularly.
The warp reference? They are fast – incredibly fast, and they can accelerate and decelerate astonishingly effectively. So if you’re lucky and standing still at the right point, there’ll be a hum and suddenly one Click to continue reading this post
Gosh, a thoughtfully-written general level (more or less) article on some of the general outcomes of string theory research! It’s written by Matthew Chalmers, and is in the Sept. ’07 edition of Physics World*. The article can be read online here, and downloadable pdf is here. The graphic on the right came with the article. I don’t fully understand what it is, but the title, like that of the article, is “stringscape”… Look, let’s not over-think this cvj – it’s a pretty decoration.
I’ve done a quick read of it (should re-read more carefully later on – it will no doubt have some emphases with which I disagree somewhat**) and I’d say it is very much worth reading. While not a perfect summary (what is?), compared to a lot that’s been out there, you’ll find it rather more informed, less sensational, (refreshingly unpoisoned by various prejudices, such as the presentations of Smolin and Woit – see numerous earlier discussions in the “More Scenes from the Storm in a Teacup” series of posts, and others), and unafraid to go to some length to unpack the issues somewhat carefully.
Very importantly, it contains numerous quotes from various respected researchers in Click to continue reading this post
That’s such a lovely sound. Chicken wire, or maybe better: “chickenwire”. (I would put it alongside “cellar door”…[update: almost. I suppose it is not as transcendent, really.])
I digress. I just thought I’d share with you a picture of the things I went to the hardware store to get last night1 (Click for larger view):
Yes, you guessed right, I’m going to be constructing something. Any idea what the project is?
But I won’t start now. Just got back from a hike over at Runyon Canyon among the Click to continue reading this post
This is very interesting to me. I just heard a story (by Nancy Mullane) on NPR’s Weekend Edition about home schooling. (The link is here, and audio will be available at that page shortly). It focuses on the issue that African Americans are the fastest growing group of adopters among minorities in the US. I was also not aware that homeschooling is on a rapid rise.
This raises all sorts of questions for me. Very basic ones. How well does homeschooling work? Does the “product” – an educated person – perform well afterwards, once they’ve rejoined educational settings with the more traditional social environments (colleges and universities). Does the reduced level of social interaction during those homeschooling years have an adverse effect, or is it compensated for by social interaction that presumably takes place after school? Perhaps there are arguments that the reduction in social interaction even helps in some ways? I really don’t know much about this. Do you? I presume there’s all sorts of statistics on this, but I’d be curious to hear a bit of anecdotal discussion in the comments. Perhaps you were homeschooled? Have friends who were? Are homeschooling someone now? Are being homeschooled now? Tell us what you think!
I wonder about this since I’m curious as to whether this results in a different (better, Click to continue reading this post
Ok. So I want to make this post timely, but it means that it will begin to let a cat out of the bag. We’ll see how much I can save for a later post as I write1.
So, as I walked to the subway this morning (yes, they have one in LA), I went through my little checklist of things I take on self-assigned assignments of this sort.
Notebook for scribbling: Check
Pen for scribbling: Check
Camera: Check
Phone (now with decent back-up camera): Check
Spare battery for camera: Check
Decent excuse/reason for being spectacularly late: Check
Water: Check
Good footwear for endless walking back and forth: Check
By now you get it. I’m either doing one of my parade reports, or perhaps a street fair/party, museum exhibit, or some random science fair, object or installation or other. Yes, but which? Well, apparently I was going to the future:
The scene: The Los Angeles Convention Center. The event: The NextFest, brought to Click to continue reading this post
Well, I’m reporting on this as part of a longer blog post (update: it is here) about an event I attended today at the Los Angeles Convention Center, but since it’ll take me a while to finish, and it will be buried in all the other stuff (including pictures and so forth), I’ll snip out a bit of what I’m saying there to inform you of this interesting development:
So what were some of the big ticket items, at least in terms of where all the regular press were? Well, the biggest was of course the X prize. There was a long movie with lots of stuff about space, and dreams about our future in space, and animations and things of roving robots on planetary surfaces, and all that good stuff…. very nice, I thought, and began to wander off…. and then there was a round of applause from everyone and I came back as a voice announced “The Google Lunar X Prize”, and various other people showed up on the stage (like one of the founders of Google – forgot his name, and later, good ol’ Buzz Aldrin, who seems to be required at these sorts of events). The Google co-founder guy began his speech by acknowledging all the Google engineers… and announcing that they’d just launched a new version of the moon. Applause. (I’m pretty sure that they mean Google Moon, by the way.)
Drat.
Well, maybe on the next flyby. Flyby page here. AP (via Yahoo) story by Alicia Chang here. Interesting extracts:
The international Cassini spacecraft went into safe mode this week after successfully passing over a Saturn moon that was the mysterious destination of a deep-space faring astronaut in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
..and intriguingly:
My contribution to the food at a party (to celebrate Rosh Hashanah) last night. Took Click to continue reading this post
Well, the time came last week. After several years of service, and a valiant attempt to stay in service even with illness and infirmity, there was nothing to do but go for retirement, and let a replacement take over.
Wait – No, not me! I’m talking about my trusty Sony Ericsson T616, of course. A bit of gadget babble follows. You’ve been warned: It is a wonderful phone, and of course, being the conservative (read: boring old) person that I am, I pretty much wanted the same phone again. Of course, progress (as they ironically call it) meant that it can no longer be found in any store, so I tried to find whatever phone Sony Ericsson had made to replace it. (Side note: I’m waiting a few years for the iphone to get to a sensible price and go through an update or two before I go in that direction.) They’ve made some good-looking ones with excellent specs – proper grown-up looking phones with grown up capabilities. Not hip toys for the (post post) MTV generation, you understand. They’re fine (and often full of great features too, I know), but just not me.
Does my phone company (AT&T) do them? Strangely, not any more, and hardly any others, as far as I could see. Meanwhile, you can get them in Europe all over the place (what with their being so far ahead on these things, as usual), which is really no use to me here. So this put me into a bit of a haze for a few days since I really don’t want to go the way of the cutesy flip phone – like one of those RAZR, KRZR, etc., models that everybody -and I mean everybody- seems to be getting. I’m not a huge fan of flip phones in general (I went through that phase a while ago) and furthermore a lot of Click to continue reading this post
Ok, so here goes. A bit of physics linked to this all so significant date. There’s this term that people in string theory were using a lot in the middle to late 90’s, called the “9/11 flip”. I think maybe the Verlinde brothers, Erik and Hermann, possibly in conjunction with Robbert Dijkgraaf, made the term popular but I am not sure about that and I welcome a correction. [Update, since there is some confusion: I’m talking about the term here, not the technique itself, which is older.]
(On right (click for larger) is a snapshot of one of the figures from their influential 1997 “Matrix String Theory” paper. You can see the use the term there, and it is in the paper’s text too, and soon everyone was using it in seminars and other papers to follow.)
The flip became particularly useful when people were discovering the wonders of “M-theory”, which is the catch-all term for whatever is the parent theory of string theory, something we are still trying to formulate. There are a number of narrower uses of the term, however – some more justified than others. For a while, everyone was thinking about the five ten-dimensional supersymmetric string theories (“type IIA”, “type IIB”, “type I”, and two types of “heterotic” theory) which, prior to the middle of 1995 (actually as early as late 1994 or early 1995) all seemed like totally distinct theories, and in the post middle-1995 era (after Witten’s remarkable talk at strings 1995 here at USC: paper here) were recognized to be all part of the same theory. The universe (at least the continually expanding string theory one) changed radically overnight.
(One of my preferred ways of presenting the puzzle that is M-theory, and how the ten dimensional string theories fit in the puzzle. This is a slide from one of my general talks on the subject.)
The 9/11 flip is really simple, although when a setting is complicated enough, it can Click to continue reading this post
Yes, it has been that sort of time. The last several days have been full of far too many things – several of which it would be fun to blog about – but none of which have left me any time for doing the actual blogging part. What sort of things? Well, everything from social gatherings like a couple of parties and salon-type events on the one hand, the usual work-type events on the other (like yesterday’s reception to welcome new USC College faculty – I find those especially important to show up to as a means of re-engaging with a cross section of one’s colleagues, old and new, at the beginning of the year*), and on a third hand (sorry) there’s been a big crunch on the research side of things. The big crunch saw me in my office until about 3:00am after a long night of finishing up two companion papers with three of my students (this included breaking for a walk across campus at about 8:30pm to get some tasty mulitas at the excellent La Taquiza) and submitting them to the arXiv. Sensibly, the students went home by 1:30 or so, leaving me the silly one to tinker some more until the end. It was a really fun couple of projects uncovering some rather rich physics, and I’ll try to tell you about them some time soon.
So anyway, my plan today was to write you a 9/11 post, but not quite about what you Click to continue reading this post
In case you missed this earlier this week, there was an intriguing detective science story that, if correct, has yielded remarkable news about the past of our planet, and of course, us. From an AP story by Richard Ingham (via Yahoo):
The extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago can be traced to a collision between two monster rocks in the asteroid belt nearly 100 million years earlier, scientists report on Wednesday.
The smash drove a giant sliver of rock into Earth’s path, eventually causing the climate-changing impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs and enabled the rise of mammals — including, eventually, us.
(Image above: Simulation images (AFP/HO/Don Davis) of the asteroid collision event, and the resulting extinction collision event on earth, and the collision with the moon.)
The scientists are William Bottke, David Vokrouhlicky and David Nesvorny, working at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado. They traced the rock to a collision event that took place in the inner parts of the asteroid belt somewhere about between 140-190 million years ago, producing the family of fragments collectively called the Baptistinas, the largest being Baptistina 298. Over time, some of the fragments found Click to continue reading this post
Here’s another image or two that I captured for you of the very large and dramatic pieces of Dan Flavin. This is from my July visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA’s) retrospective of his work. You’ll recall the two earlier posts here and here. (Click them to enlarge.)
It is easy to dismiss these as very simple coloured baubles writ large, and that would be a mistake. I’m sure that the artist was very aware of one hugely striking thing that one cannot convey in the photographs, and that is the powerful effect the presence of one single striking colour can have on one’s feelings. The intense blue from a previous work I spoke of was remarkable, and then shortly afterward you come to this giant Click to continue reading this post
So far. I forgot to point this out a couple of weeks ago. There was a nice story in the Guardian giving a one month update on the progress of the Velib program in Paris. Recall I blogged about its launch here, and expressed hope that the expectations that it would not work were wrong (I’m such an optimist). Well, the news is that it is working! The whole article (by Angelique Chrisafis) is here. A quote:
Day and night, tourists, commuters and returning party animals cruise by on the chic new machines. People have joyfully discovered the cheap new way of exercising en route to work or getting home drunk after the metro closes, hence a rush of hires after 1am. There’s a glut of bikes deposited at stands at the bottom of hills and none left at the top, as people freewheel down from the heights of Belleville and Montmartre.
(Now I’m in the mood to get out the wonderful movie “Les Triplettes Des Belleville” (or “Belleville Rendezvous” or “The Triplets of Belleville”) for an enjoyable evening.) Further:
