Memorising Mingus

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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 →

The Cat

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The Cat

  by Ryan Alexander

She came to me skittish, wild.
The way you’re meant to be,
surrounded by cruelty.
I did not blame her.
I would do the same.

A pregnant cat, a happy distraction;
some sort of normal thing.
Calico and innocent.

The kittens in her belly said feed me.

And I did.

She crept with careful eye,
Body held low to the dirt,
Snagged a bite,
And carried it just far enough away.

She liked the MREs,
the beef stew, the chicken breast, the barbeque pork,
but she did not like canned sardines.
I do not blame her.
I would do the same.

She came around again and again
finally deciding that I was no threat,
that this big man wasn’t so bad.

I was afraid to touch her as the docs warned us.
Click to continue reading this post →

World View

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Physics World did a small piece on Asymptotia for their July issue. You can read it at this link (and find links to profiles of some other blogs). This means that we’ll have several visitors who might not have been by before.

Welcome everyone! Come in and sit down, and join in the various conversations if you’d like to, or just listen in. Help yourself to tea, coffee, (or something stronger from the drinks cabinet), and the various nibbles and don’t hesitate to flick through the reading material – including the archives of earlier posts, done by category, or via a site map. You may also search for things using the search engine in the upper right hand region of this page.

If you like what you find, do stay awhile and/or visit again, and bring friends. If you don’t, that’s ok. Thanks for visiting either way.

Enjoy.

-cvj

Consider a Spherical…

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So I went out to get a new kettle a few days ago. I’ve now given up on a rather lovely design by the company Chantal that I’ve been using for many years since on two models in succession (or is it three?) the same flaw has revealed itself – the plastic parts of the Hohner whistling lid began to loosen gradually (probably from too much heat up the sides, which may be my fault) and then you eventually end up with a non-fitting non-whistling lid.

I began to assess other kettle designs, and in doing so found myself thinking idly about a number of physics issues. One of the main ones was energy. If I got a smaller kettle (the one I had before had a capacity of 1.8 quarts, and I was considering ones as big as 2 quarts and ones as small as 1.5 quarts), which I was leaning heavily toward, it would probably encourage me to save energy and not boil so much water. On the other hand, maybe that’s really silly, since I might just be putting the same amount of water into the kettle anyway… I’d never fill either up all the way in any case. But if I put the same amount of water into both kettles, would the smaller one end up using less energy anyway as I don’t have to heat up the extra air in the chamber, or does that not matter…? It’s not that simple since the chamber is not sealed. Hot air (and later, steam) is escaping all the time. Well, this is all complicated by the fact that the smaller kettle has less of its base in contact with flame, so I’d have to turn down the flame, and heat it for longer on a lower flame than with the larger kettle… would that make a difference? Perhaps a smaller chamber at lower flame means slower steam escape velocity, and so a quieter whistle. Not good if you’re prone to forgetting that you’ve put the kettle on during an absorbing computation…downright dangerous, in fact!

This was not an entirely serious discussion, you see, but it’s sort of fun sometimes to find these things floating around in one’s head. Physicists (and I imagine, other scientists) have this sort of thing flit through their heads a lot. The key thing -especially as a Theoretical Physicist- is knowing when to engage with one of these problems, and when to ignore them. Is there are clear route to tackling the problem? Is it worth it? Is there something to be learned from solving this problem that might be useful elsewhere? In fact, I was trying to explain this all to a writer friend of mine Click to continue reading this post →

Science Woman

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I don’t know if you read ScienceWoman’s posts at the blog “On being a scientist and a woman”, but if you don’t, go over there from time to time. The same thing can be said for the blog “Female Science Professor”. They are both very internal sorts of blogs. You won’t find overly-opinionated rants and pontifications about various things nearly as often as you’ll read thoughtful anecdotes and internal debates about what it is like to be a scientist (who also happens to be a woman) in a science department somewhere in America*. They are both anonymous, which allows them to speak more freely, and probably makes them more interesting blogs – especially when they talk about the difficulties of being both a scientist and a woman in their job.

Here’s a simple but poignant post from Science Woman that should motivate you: It is entitled “I will not be a foregone conclusion.” I thought it was great, and so that’s why I thought I’d point you to it.

-cvj

(*This is a good thing, from my point of view… ranty and/or overly-opinionated blogs have their place, but I find that they can tire me out… and very easily these days. So I tend to look at other types of blog in my downtime.)

Just for Me

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As they did with the Incredibles, Brad Bird and the team at Pixar made a movie just for me! No, really! How could they know so accurately about my likes, loves and interests in conjuring up such a perfect combination of the various themes, story elements, images, scenes, characters (and rat facial expressions and gestures)? This time it is all about food – good food – cooking, and kitchens, and you know how I feel about those topics.

ratatouille

Ratatouille is wonderful and I imagine that (even though they made it just for me) you Click to continue reading this post →

iPhone Madness

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As you might have guessed, I could not resist having a look at the line for the iphone at the Grove shopping mall/village/whatever. Here’s an overhead shot of a cluster near the Apple Store’s entrance just after the launch at 6:00pm:

iphone madness

(Click for larger.)

line for iphoneWhat you can’t hear is people cheering as people either enter or emerge (with their new acquisition) from the store (I’m not sure which). It’s not everyday you see this many people (in a very long line indeed – see one of four segments at right) waiting to shell out so much money for something that they all know will be very obsolete a year from now. They just want to be part of what is (seriously for a moment Click to continue reading this post →

Making Real those Imagined

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la bloggers liveA few hours ago, I got back from a rather pleasant event – LA Bloggers Live! What was it? LA Bloggers Live! Exactly what it says on the packet. So there were several bloggers from the Los Angeles area who met (at Tangier) to read out loud some of the posts from their blogs, listening to each other and meeting each other in the “real” world, as opposed to online. It was really great – there were several great readings, and it was excellent to meet and chat with some of the people whose blogs I’ve read from time to time. It was good old-fashioned community, plain and simple. There were readings on lots of topics, from joy and pain in relationships to learning how to swim and ride a bike as a child – the hard ways. Over on Leah Peah’s blog (she conceived and organized the event) (and also here) you can see the list of readers, and later there’ll be some links to the posts that were read along with some audio. (I was particularly pleased that Will Campbell, whose blog I read from time to time, read a post that I recognized fondly – in it he’s on his bike, and he gets to do one of those things that all cyclists have wanted to do at least once, Click to continue reading this post →

Rapid Changes in Los Angeles

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Good News, Everyone!

Well, you know (if you’ve stumbled upon one of the posts in my long series of attempts -see end of this post- to remind one or two people that they should not believe all the myths about LA not having any public transportation) that I’m continually excited about the steady stream of improvements that are being made by Metro in response to the increased pressure of usage put on the system by the general public.

local long busWell, in addition to adding more and more of the red “Metro Rapid” bus routes*, which are faster than the locals (which -ridiculously at times- stop every block) because they stop mostly only at major intersections, and in addition to adding more of the nice and roomy double buses (“bendy buses”) they’ve done something just great (which I’d been hoping for for years) – introduced true express routes! It makes sense to have three levels of granularity on the bus service here since it matches the three levels of granularity on the road system! Click to continue reading this post →

Philosophia Naturalis

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powers of eleven distance scale chartI noticed that the eleventh edition of the blog carnival Philosophia Naturalis has been posted at Highly Allachthonous. Do follow the link and have a read of the various Physics (and related) posts that have been collected there*. The host Chris Rowan has organized things by distance scale (in powers of eleven!), and it’s at least worth seeing how he used the chart on the right. Also, you can read past such carnivals here at the home blog.

-cvj

*I see that my post describing my internal struggling with factors of two was selected – I have noticed that a lot of people related to that. It is nice to know that I’m not alone in such practices…

SciTalks

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I learned from Jonathan Shock and Sara Tompson about SciTalks. In Jonathan’s words (from a comment on another post):

There’s now a site where people can link to, review and rate scientific videos online. This is a great step as there are so many wonderful lectures online but currently they’re spread all over the web and it’s always hard to tell the quality and level that a lecture is going to be.

Jonathan has also done posts about online resources in theoretical high energy physics, including a recent one where he discussed SciTalks a bit more.

jennifer goldbeck on the semantic webThis got me thinking a bit about where we are going with all these resources, how useful they are, and -very importantly- how easy it all is to find, and then to search through. (Imagine there are 10 hour long talks broadly on your favourite topic. Assuming there are no accompanying files, how can you search them to find a specific fact that they might mention, without sitting through ten hours worth of material?) Well, ironically, one of the first things that caught my eye on SciTalks was a rather nice talk by Jennifer Golbeck (given at FermiLab last year) entitled “Social Networks, the Semantic Web, and the Future of Online Scientific Collaboration”. She’s quite interesting about this very topic… She describes online collaboration, data sharing, social networks, etc, all in the context of helping us do science (not just physics by the way!). She also illustrates her subject matter -still staying on topic- using examples of data sets from Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Click to continue reading this post →

99

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The other day in the Hollywood Farmer’s Market I was having my regular moment of pure bliss (spinach and corn tamale from that amazing tamale stand) for lunch after a nice bit of shopping when I found myself sitting at a big outdoor table with a number of other people. Two of them were headed to the convention center for the afternoon and were wondering whether they might be able to find anything good to eat down that way. Of course, as a public-spirited person I had to tell them a bit about the options that popped into my head at that point (starting with La Taquiza of course), and ended up patiently explaining how to squint your eyes to look past all the fast food places to the culinary bliss that lurks just below the surface of the city. We had a delightful conversation and then they moved on, leaving me soaking up the sun for a while longer.

image from Jonathon Gold's 99 restaurants articleA woman who’d been sitting on her own (also enjoying a tamale) spoke up and said that she’d been interested to hear that I thought there was a lot of good food in LA since she could not really find much of it (and she’d been here for four years). Happily I’d finished my tamale and so did not choke or splutter at this revelation, in equal parts horrifying and deeply sad, and spent a few more moments listing some recommendations at her request. Unfortunately, the conversation turned (as it so often does) to one where I find myself defending LA against someone’s expectations of it based upon their own city, and their own requirements (instead of them learning how to navigate and understand the place they’ve chosen to live). Usually it is New Yorkers I have this sort of conversation with, but this time it was someone from Chicago. Her thesis was that good food is hard to find in LA and you’re just falling over it in Chicago. Two other diners arrived (also with tamales that they loved, I’ll point out) and guess where they’re from? Chicago. And so on it went… next they were bonding with each other about their favourite places in Chicago, which was fine, but… I wanted to get back to this nonsense about good food being rare in LA. I hate that myth almost as much as the “no public transport” one (but not quite since it is not as dangerous and destructive)…and particularly despise that habit people have of worshiping the thing they love about their home city by dragging down LA. Can’t people learn to just like what they like without having to enhance it by trying to dislike something else, as though Nature has a conservation law about the total amount of “liking” that can go on? (Above, Anne Fishbein photo from an article to be discussed below.)

I find it a cheap and lazy practice, in general – although to be fair to the woman of this Click to continue reading this post →