101

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mark bittman 101 coverHere’s something to shake up the cooking doldrums. Rather than bring you a report on one of my own efforts in the kitchen (and rest assured there’ll be more to come), I’ll step back and let you look at 101 ideas from a master. Mark Bittman, the food writer behind (among other things) the column “The Minimalist” for the New York Times, is extremely good at finding ways of producing more (in terms of taste) with less (in terms of substituting less costly ingredients while making a version of a more fancy recipe).

He’s recently tackled another cost factor: time. The claim (I have not tried any yet) is that these are ten minute preparation time recipes. This might be perfect for that busy schedule you have going there, or just a welcome shortening of hot kitchen time during the remaining long Summer days.

Don’t turn your nose up at the substitutions (sometimes discussed in his column) and Click to continue reading this post →

Newton in Bronze

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newton by Eduardo PaolozziI’m writing from the courtyard of a particularly fine and (to my mind) vitally important institution, using their (surprisingly) free wireless (which runs at a charmingly-then-frustratingly glacial speed) to pop up these images of a huge statue, entitled “Newton”.

It is by the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi.

Any idea where I am?

newton by Eduardo Paolozzi

(Of course, I’ve given you enough information to find out by using Google… but maybe Click to continue reading this post →

So in SEED…

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seed august coverMy hand hovered over the August issue of SEED last night in the magazine section of a bookshop. I was not really sure whether I was going to buy it or not, to be honest. Then I glanced through, and two things made me go for it. The first was seeing that there’s something on Chuck Hoberman. I love his designs and constructions, and am dismayed by the fact that they are not just everywhere in our cityscapes. The second was a photograph. There’s some extracts from the collection of photographs of Nobel Prize winners taken by Peter Badge (beware, the cover makes you think that all 295 are in the magazine… there’s actually eight). I flipped to that part of the magazine and landed immediately upon the one of David Gross. It’s just great, in that it captures certain aspects of David just perfectly. There’s the intensely penetrating gaze of a great physicist combined with playful movie-star quality of the same. You end up convinced that if Hollywood was casting an actor to play the physicist, they’d have no choice but to use him to play himself.

There looks to be some interesting things in there to read. I see that there’s a piece on Science Journalism by Chris Mooney (also available here), and there’s what reads a bit like a commercial by Paul Steinhardt for his cyclic universe models with Neil Turok, and a discussion about the definition of life by Carl Zimmer. I hope it’s all as good a read as it looks.

-cvj

My Springfield Persona

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cvj simpsons avatarThis was the best I could do for a Simpsons avatar for me. (Click for larger.)

(I usually wear plain things with nothing written on them, but I suppose this particular design will do, for fun! Also, I could not really find the right hair.)

So what’s yours like? (Email me them and I’ll post them in the comments if you like. Or give a link to one on your page.)

-cvj

P.S. The movie? Oh, it’s a pretty good extended Simpsons episode. I don’t know if it qualifies as a movie to see in the cinema, but then there’s an awful lot of really bad stuff out there that supposedly qualifies and can’t hold a candle to even a half hour Simpsons episode. Fun with a group out for a lark, I’d say.

Stargazing

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(Shooting stars, that is. In other words, meteors. I’ll get to them eventually [or jump].)

runyon canyon bench

The evening started with a 10:15pm movie at the Arclight. I saw the excellent biopic “Talk to Me”, (all about Petey Green and his manager Dewey Hughes) which arclight cinemashappened to star two actors whose work I like a great deal, Don Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor, who both seem to grow and get better and stronger with every performance. I could be very wrong, but they’re also both among that (much) shorter list of actors who seem to me like people it would be interesting to get to know and talk to as well (missed a chance earlier this year with the latter, who was rumoured to be one of the people they were trying to get to take part in that New York shoot for King Magazine I told you about here and here).

Then, at 12:30am I wandered over to my “local” (well, they treat me like one, which is good), and favourite English pub outside of England – the Cat and Fiddle. Said hi to and chatted briefly with the guy at the door (about Stephen cat and fiddleDonaldson books, of all things) and then ordered my customary thirst-quenching Hoegaarden and sat in the lovely courtyard for a while, reading some detailed notes of a series of what turned out to be startlingly excellent computations by my student Jeff Pennington. (Well, I don’t know if I should not call him my student any more. He’s graduated now and is off to do graduate work up North.) The Cat was relatively quiet (as it can be late on a Sunday night – it’s a very conservative town when it comes to staying up late; my theory is that it is partly because of all those early starts for shoots – and everybody seems to be connected to the Industry in some way), although I did get treated to the conversations of a group of people at the table near my bench. It seemed that all of a sudden, I was immersed in an episode of Entourage. The five women, dressed in severe (for a Sunday night) regulation “high powered 30-something person out on the town in Hollywood” outfits – more of the scary heel height and mercifully less flesh than the 10 years younger equivalent – seemed to be unabashedly discussing their various liaisons with members of the opposite sex, and two of the men from the group stepped aside (in my direction) to have a conversation about “the deal”, where one guy seemed to be seeking reassurance that he could pull off asking someone for 60 million. Ah, yes. It’s good to be back. Been several weeks since I intersected with this stuff.

The next stop – meteors. There’s nothing like a romantic evening under the stars – even if it’s a solo outing. I went to Runyon Canyon Park of course, getting there at about 1:45am. As I’ve mentioned before, it is another of those LA gems that most Click to continue reading this post →

All The Sweet, Green Icing

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MacArthur Park Theatre Event

Since, once again, the temperature is knocking on the door of insane outside, I’ll sit here on the sofa indoors for a while and tell you about the really fun thing I was doing earlier today. Back when it was much less hot.

MacArthur Park Theatre EventThe mission: First show up at Mama’s Hot Tamales Cafe. (So since at the very least, ridiculously tasty tamales are involved, clearly anything beyond this is just a bonus.) This is located across 7th Street from the South side of MacArthur Park, just West of Alvarado (map link).

Next, after saying hello to the friendly peopleMacArthur Park Theatre Event who are happy to see that you showed up for the event (a friend of mine and I were the first to show up), you sit at a table for a little while and read six plays. Don’t worry, since the average length of one of the plays is less than a page, so it won’t take long -and they’re all rather good!

MacArthur Park Theatre Event

Next, you go outside, cross the road, and spend some time in MacArthur Park. Why? Well, it is park with a bit of a bad reputation that is seriously underused and under-appreciated by many, so that’s a good reason right there…

MacArthur Park Theatre Event

…but the main reason for this visit at this point in the mission is to wander the park and see if you can spot some of the performances or, as one woman put it, Click to continue reading this post →

Perseids!

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Over the next few nights, you should have a good chance of seeing some of the Perseid meteor shower. They’re going to put on a rather splendid show this year, I hear. From the NASA news site, I’ve grabbed a a diagram of the region of the sky (containing the constellation Perseus, of course – that’s where they’ll seem to be coming from, and so that’s what gives them their name) that you ought to be looking toward. (The red dot is not a star, but the central point of (apparent) origin, and the red lines are some example paths of the streakers that you’ll see):

perseids where to look

Concerned that you don’t know enough astronomy? No idea in any amount of detail Click to continue reading this post →

My Superpowers Revealed

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Ok, I can’t resist. From an earlier post:

…and of course video footage of me effortlessly squashing a star much larger than our own sun down into a tiny space should help out enormously later on with classroom control, and so forth…

Since my cover is now blown, here are some stills** (click for larger) from Tuesday’s (unexpected) episode of the History Channel’s “The Universe”*:
Click to continue reading this post →

The Universe On TV

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Something funny happened to me last night. I was reviewing some television programmes that my system had recorded earlier, by fast-forwarding through them. In particular, I was skimming (I’ll admit) through an episode of a series that I was wondering whether to do a quick blog post about, in order to remind you to watch it. It’s the History Channel’s venture into science programming called “The Universe”, which has been running for some time now. Well, I was zipping through the one about stellar evolution called something like “The Life and Death a Star”…. and someone familiar popped on and off the screen. It was me. Took me a few beats to register full recognition, which was amusing.

I’d forgotten that I was to appear in this episode. Or, better put, I was not aware I would be in this one. I thought the ones I contributed to would air later, like next month or something. I thought there was a separate episode on neutron stars, but I see now that they included it all in an episode about the whole life of a star, which makes sense. (I chatted a bit about the filming of it in an earlier post.)

Anyway, as I was going to say (whether or not I was in it) was that it’s a nice series so far, and so consider having a look at it. If you have not been watching it, I imagine Click to continue reading this post →

Supporting the STEM

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Your opinion is needed.

The National Science Board at its August 8, 2007 meeting approved a draft “national action plan” for improving the quality of elementary and secondary education in science, math, technology and engineering and ensuring an adequate supply of teachers in those subjects. The plan, which will be available for public review and comment today on the science board’s Web site, calls for a range of actions by the federal government, states, and school districts, including creating an independent, non-federal National Council for STEM Education, establishing a new assistant secretary position in the Education Department, and developing strategies to pay teachers in those fields at “market rates.”

They are inviting public comments through August 30th, 2007.

Not a lot to say here except that you (as a member of the public who knows the value Click to continue reading this post →

A Bit Jittery

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endeavour at cape canaveral getting ready (AP photo)

Working by remote control, engineers at the Kennedy Space Center began pumping a half-million gallons of super-cold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen rocket fuel into the shuttle Endeavour’s external tank early Wednesday, setting the stage for launch on a space station assembly mission at 6:36:42 p.m., ….

(That’s Eastern time.)

…if all continues to go well, Endeavour’s crew — commander Scott Kelly, pilot Charles Hobaugh, Tracy Caldwell, Rick Mastracchio, Dave Williams, educator-astronaut Barbara Morgan and Al Drew — will begin strapping in around 3:15 p.m.

I always get a bit uneasy when one of these things is about to launch or land. This mission has added significance (re: Challenger), as you may know. There’s more in the story by CBS’ Bill Harwood, from which I quoted above. (See also an AP/Yahoo story by Rasha Madkour…and there’s a slide show.)

As a means of distracting myself (and maybe you) from the whole thing, here’s a bit Click to continue reading this post →

Reading, Writing, and ’Rithmetic

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Yesterday was (depending upon who’s counting) the 16th anniversary of that thing we call the World Wide Web becoming a public entity. The Web is not to be confused with the Internet, which is much older, of course1. I’m talking about Tim Berners-Lee’s idea and implementation thereof. (I should not neglect to mention that this was done at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Europe.) His original posting (on the newsgroup alt.hypertext) proposing the structure can be viewed here, and here’s an extract:

The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.

Reader view

The WWW world consists of documents, and links. Indexes are special documents which, rather than being read, may be searched. The result of such a search is another (“virtual”) document containing links to the documents found. A simple protocol (“HTTP”) is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword search by a remote information server.

The web contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme.

To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire world of data.

What am I going to do to celebrate?

letter to anonSince everyday I celebrate the WWW by using it a lot, to commemorate the event I think I’m going to pay a visit to the (real, physical) library, then read a good old-fashioned book for a while, and then hand-write a letter. I used to write so many letters, long ago, and from time to time I try to stop everything and pick up a pen and write one. I got in the mood the other day while in Aspen, and went and found some letter-writing paper and envelopes, curled up on a sofa, and wrote for a Click to continue reading this post →

Return to the Nest

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Sorry about the silence. Odd thing: As a result of my (I think) growing absent-mindedness, it turned out that my flight was on Sunday night and not on Saturday night (as I thought when I did the previous post), so I suddenly had an unplanned 24 hours on my hands in Aspen.

ground dove nestI decided to spend the extra day lying low getting some work done – various things I thought would get undone on this trip suddenly had another chance to get done! Mostly administrative stuff. It is amazing how much one can get done when there’s a whole extra day suddenly appearing in your schedule, and so that’s what I worked on.

One thing I could have done was reminded you that the Phoenix was due to launch Saturday, and indeed it did! Be sure to check out a post about it on the Bad Astronomer with some links to really nice launch videos. The Phoenix mission plans rather wonderful things when the craft gets to Mars (including making the old reverse-thrust landing maneuver vogue again), as you can learn from their site.

phoenix spacecraftToday, Monday, saw me running errands. Boring things, really. Things you do after being away from the nest for three weeks. Anyway, I’m trying to get to used to all the extra oxygen, and the unbelievable dryness. There’s still been no rain. I will miss the daily downpours and thunderstorms of Aspen. This leads me to the garden report. Nothing to say except that there’s Click to continue reading this post →