Henri Poincaré and the Order of the Polynomial

By | | , , , ,
14 Comments

I’m conflicted. I read the first Harry Potter book and decided that while it is a good thing that many people are reading more as a result of them, I could not really recommend it highly as great work because it’s just so derivative. Having grown up reading all those boarding school books J. K. Rowling borrowed from (for example) without adding anything to them much, I was frustrated

Well, of course, in the scheme of things, it does not matter. Not all things we like have to be Great Works. And I eventually convinced myself that there’s nothing wrong with people (who did not read those works that she’s imitating) discovering the genre for themselves in the pages of her books. Then others told me that the books got better. harry potter special relativityThey got darker, and more grown up (do they approach the excellence and relative originality of the once largely ignored Philip Pullman books I wonder?), and better written, I’ve been told, by people whose opinion I trust. Well, good.

The films came out and they were all very ho-hum and then happily Chris Columbus stopped directing them after the first two and – Wow! They were suddenly really rather good. (The third one was by the wonderful Alfonso Cuarón, so – of course!) (Clickable above right for clarity: Extract from my own attempt to tap into the mania some years back by using characters from the books/films to illustrate the derivation of time dilation in a class on Special Relativity.)

Anyway, I saw the fifth one last night*, and I was very impressed with it as a film. Not having read the book, I find myself hoping that there was more to it than the film, since it still seems all rather derivative. There’s a bit of 1984 and a lot of Lord of the Rings mixed in with the Boarding School motif. I suspect that’s all as a result of stripping it down to look for something to hang a film on? I’m going to assume that, since there’s an awful lot of transparent (but entertaining) dark motifs about the Click to continue reading this post →

Purple not Pants

By | | ,
Comments Off on Purple not Pants

Or becoming less “pants” every day. Fantastic! On Wednesday, the House appropriations committee repealed the ridiculous and trumped-up 1986 Congressional ban on tunneling to complete the Wilshire subway line project. This was pushed through by Congressman Waxman, the same person who misguidedly got the ban instated in the first place. Funny how nimby-ness (and, arguably, fear of people who don’t look like you getting access to your neighbourhood) about public transportation projects crumbles when you finally realize that your SUV is at a standstill in traffic more often than not…. and all you were doing was driving five blocks to get a pint of milk from Whole Foods. (Found a bit more here on LAist.)


System Map LACMTAThe Purple line right now is either two stops long, or several stops long depending upon how you count. (Click on map to right to see what I mean.) It’s effectively two, since all the other stops are Red line stops – it just runs two stops more to the West stopping a few long block away at Wilshire/Western. Hence the post title, expressing the hope that it will be several stops long, all the way out to the Pacific. It would be just great to go all the way to Santa Monica from downtown on a train. Why is that not obviously a super-wonderful thing to be able to do? Dinner and drinks on the Santa Monica pier at Sunset followed by a concert in the Disney Hall. No faffing about with traffic and over-priced parking. Is that not a dream worth running toward with open arms?

Next step, finding a ridiculous amount of money to build the thing because an overlapping constituency of narrow-minded people are not open to the idea of just Click to continue reading this post →

LHC Podcasts: Science Meets Science Fiction

By | | , , , ,
6 Comments

Confession: I’ve no idea what Torchwood is, and I find the current Dr. Who shows annoying overall (there have been some good episodes that I’ve seen, but they’re swamped in a sea of such poorly thought through and simply phoned-in crappy episodes that I find it too annoying to take the risk of wasting an hour I could have better spent with my head in the oven…) Feel free to disagree with me, and I have not seen the most recent season, so maybe things are better.

LHC You TubeBut anyway, where was I? Oh, right. Someone called John Barrowman (apparently one of the stars on those shows? He plays a scientist? I honestly don’t know, but you will, if you’re a fan) took a visit to CERN (the particle physics lab in Europe you often read about here and elsewhere) to better inform himself about the intersection between science and science fiction. One of the resulting jumpy noisy and (reportedly) fun videos can be found on YouTube here. There are some somewhat interesting animations alongside some of the, er…jolly madcap fun, illustrating the physics. Following the particles along the beam-pipe to the collision is not a view I’ve seen before, I’ll admit.

Much more interesting is something they mention at the end. A series of podcasts on the LHC (the big experiment at CERN we’re all interested in and excited about). This is driven by Brian Cox (no, not that one, this one, the physicist), and seems to be in a Click to continue reading this post →

Water World, II

By | | , ,
Comments Off on Water World, II

spitzer telescope team artists renditionI’ve not had time to look at this closely, but there’s been some remarkable news about the possible detection of water in the atmosphere of an extra-solar planet. Wow!

Like I said, I’ve not a lot of time to look at this (Nature paper here), but thought you should know. I can point you to a press release by the Spitzer Space Telescope team, which starts:

A scorching-hot gas planet beyond our solar system is steaming up with water vapor, according to new observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

The planet, called HD 189733b, swelters as it zips closely around its star every two days or so. Astronomers had predicted that planets of this class, termed “hot Jupiters,” would contain water vapor in their atmospheres. Yet finding solid evidence for this has been slippery. These latest data are the most convincing yet that hot Jupiters are “wet.”

“We’re thrilled to have identified clear signs of water on a planet that is trillions of miles away,” said Giovanna Tinetti, a European Space Agency fellow at the Institute d’Astrophysique de Paris in France. ” Tinetti is lead author of a paper on HD 189733b appearing today in Nature.

Click to continue reading this post →

Physics, 101

By | | , , ,
4 Comments

physics at 101 cafeIt’s been one of those days. I just got back home, at 2:30am, after a very pleasant bit of work in a cafe. I was writing up my thoughts of the day into my notebook (I’m old-fashioned that way) and crafting new ones. Where was I? The 101 Coffee Shop, of course, an LA landmark – with those lovely booths, the counter, the lighting, all classics – over near the Capital Records building (another LA landmark) just where you join the 101 heading up to North Hollywood – hence the name, and hence the title of this post.

It’s been one of those days in a good sense. After a long couple of weeks of muddling and being rather down about a project I’m working on that had run into problems, things suddenly made sense today over the course of a long IM conversation (six hours) with one of my collaborators, Jeff Pennington. Things just started to fall into place during the brainstorming… we’d exchange facts and observations, explain thing to each other….muddle along for a while… ask questions… calculate separately for a bit…. suggest computations to each other…report results…get confused… and then it all broke open quite nicely and every single fact seemed to fit into place by the end. A lot to do still, but it seems rather robust and tantalizing.

After taking a break after the long brainstorm to do a bit of gardening work, this Click to continue reading this post →

Waiting for the Storm

By | | , ,
8 Comments

No, not a metaphor. We’re really supposed to have a thunderstorm today. High probability they say. It’ll go up to the 80s and 90s again first, and then it’ll crack open…I hope. I’ve not seen rain for so long I’ve forgotten what it is like. Please let’s have some rain. We’ve seen three inches here in the last year (about 12 short of what it should be), and boy do we need it… (Apparently it’s all over in Europe. There are floods, I hear.)

So I sit here, trying to calculate, while hoping for rain – and a real grand-piano-falling-down-the-stairs thunderstorm!

-cvj

There Will Be No Dawn

By | | , ,
2 Comments

Well, not until September at the earliest, that is. (Oh! That feels so good to have finally been able to use that as a post title!)

Dawn concept image: William K. Hartmann Courtesy of UCLAWhat am I talking about? NASA’s Dawn mission, of course. Dawn is a spacecraft that will go to the asteroid belt to study more closely the two largest asteroids, Ceres and Vesta. (Image right is an artist’s impression of the spacecraft. credit: William K. Hartmann, Courtesy of UCLA) In addition to the mission page linked above, there’s also a nice Wikipedia article about it here.

Last Thursday was to be the launch, but there were problems due to weather (mostly) – you don’t want to be fueling the tanks of the launch vehicle when there is high risk of lightning, as there was that day. There’s more about the matters on the NASA site, and also and Amara’s post on Scientific Blogging.

Actually, her post there is extremely informative about the goals of the mission, and Click to continue reading this post →

Boot Camp

By | | , ,
4 Comments

Boot CampYesterday afternoon, feeling a bit down in the dumps for a variety of reasons, I decided to head for the hills to clear my head. A good hike often helps these things. My other mission was to begin the painful task of breaking in some new boots. The fantastic repair job that I got done on my faithful old boots that died last year (see here for the full report) held up marvelously, and in fact still holds up, but I will admit that they lost a fair bit of flexibility with the new sole, and although they are great for the medium grade sorts of hikes I do in the immediate surroundings, I’m not really sure that they’d be great on the longer ones. I have not taken them up Mount Wilson, for example. The repair extended their life for quite a bit longer, and they will still be useful, but I decided last week that I should start breaking in a new pair to last me (I hope) another 15 years or so. I decided to try to get something as close to the ones I had as before, and so the Asolo TPS 535s were the ones I got (supposedly the natural successors to my Asolo AFX 530s). So I laced them up (already unhappy with the wimpy laces they have as compared to the big rope-like ones on my old boots) and set off from the trailhead in Topanga.

Boot CampMy goal? Eagle Rock. A favourite of mine. There it is in the photo on the right (click for larger). It’s a relatively quick hike, about 3 miles out, along the Musch trail (not the fire road) and a 1000 foot elevation gain, with mostly nobody around since it is insanely hot at 2:30pm and only mad dogs and Englishmen (so the Noel Coward song goes) go out in the midday sun. I’ll leave you to decide which I am (remember, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog). So I was able to speed up the mountain to the Rock and stay there for a while, only meeting four other people heading that way the whole time.

You might wonder why it is called Eagle Rock. I did for a long time, as probably have Click to continue reading this post →

Teesandees

By | | ,
4 Comments

I forgot to post this yesterday, when it was more relevant, but here I go anyway. I’m not looking to offend anyone here, I’m just curious, and have been puzzled about this for years. I’m reminded of it every year at about this time. What am I talking about? Wimbledon.

venus williams wimbledon 2007 (AP Photo/Andrew Parsons, PA)Not the event itself (which I have not followed in over a decade or so) but the word, or rather its pronunciation. I’ve noticed that a lot of people in America – from people I encounter day to day to newscasters on NPR – seem to get very confused about the “d” and pronounce it as a “t”. So you get people talking about the “Wimbleton” final a lot at this time of year, especially when someone from the US is in it (see photo at right [credit: AP Photo/Andrew Parsons, PA]). Has anyone else noticed this, or is it just my hearing? (Or worse, perhaps it is pronounced with a “t” and I’ve just not been paying attention all these years, and somehow I just hear it more clearly over here when some people say it.)

I’ve been wondering why this happens. Here’s some additional data, I’ve painstakingly Click to continue reading this post →

Fluored

By | | , ,
4 Comments

Dan Flavin

Dan FlavinFrom a shockingly* effective retrospective exhibit of the fluorescent light works of Dan Flavin, now on at LACMA. (The image on the right with a person next to a similarly-sized piece is to give you a sense of scale.)

Here’s a little bit about how fluorescent lamps work, from Wikipedia. The old-style big fluorescent lights you recall from a while back (with that more industrial or corporate feel) are very different than the modern compact fluorescent lights many people would like to see used more in your homes (and elsewhere). This produces a lot of Click to continue reading this post →

Memorising Mingus

By | | ,
5 Comments

Mingus Lives!

Just now I noticed to my horror that it was on the 1st of September of last year that I intended to get around to repairing Mingus, my G4 powerbook , at the time the main workhorse of my away-from-campus computer arsenal. There was an unexpected failure which I could not figure out the source of, and I managed to get it partly alive -alive enough to drag about 12 GB of data from the hard drive via booting it as a target disc of an iMac, Ella. Well, I never sent it off as I was (1) thrown by the fact that I had no warranty or repair contract coverage on it, and so any repair would have to be paid for, and (2) in the middle of the semester – a really busy one – and so I did not really have that much time to devote to the issue.

Well, it all got put on a back burner because I decided to use my teaching laptop (a little iBook) as my main laptop -just for a week or two, I told myself. Eventually, last Click to continue reading this post →