Entertaining Saturday

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Eight o’clock on Saturday morning. I’ve been up since before six (I don’t know why) and somehow I’m still late. The car wakes up easily, eager to go for a run. It seems to have extra enthusiasm, as though it knows that somehow I’m going to tear all the way across the city and back as quickly as I can, an adventure it is always willing to participate in. I’ve got a guest coming over for lunch at eleven and I think I’ll assemble a nice meal from scratch. I’ve made my mind up to go for ingredients to the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market instead of the more local, smaller one in Silver Lake. Although I’m more of a fan of shopping locally, my usual market run is on Sunday, in Hollywood, and the Silver Lake one does not have most of the vendors that I know well from the other two markets, and I want to take no chances with my menu today. So, the highway for me this time.

The plan is to wander the market in head chef mode, looking for which items look good, choosing some of them and planning something simple and tasty around them. At the back of my mind is a salad, and maybe asparagus or artichoke as a central feature. I’m open to ideas, however, but the watchwords are fresh and simple. But I’ve got to get there, find the ingredients, and get back and make it all before eleven.

farmer's market and saturday lunch menuI break some kind of record for getting over to Santa Monica. Road was pretty open, and while I’m not saying whether I violated any speed limits, you can be pretty sure I hurt their feelings a bit. The market is still pretty empty and I can wander through at a good pace with my basket and check out the whole scene, retracing my steps on a second pass in reverse, this time buying things as I go. Three different kinds of tiny potatoes to form the base of a salad (after roasting them) along with two colours of carrot from the same people. For dessert I pick up three types of delicious berries -blackberries, strawberries, and blueberries- making a mental note to get some whipping cream (for hand-whipping later) as a topping.

farmer's market and saturday lunch menu

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Yellow Pear Tomatoes

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Tasty yellow pear tomatoes (click for larger):

tasty yellow tomatoes

They have been showing up all of a sudden (it seems) on this plant from last year. I’d read that this is quite a hardy plant and it certainly is, lasting through from last season, through the cold snap, and now coming back more strong than last year. Apparently, it is quite an old variety, going back to at least the 1750s.

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TASI@Home

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This year’s month-long Theoretical Advanced Study Institute -TASI- looks especially good, from my point of view, with a great combination of topics and lecturers. As usual, it is held in Boulder, Colorado. It’s all about current ideas and experiments and observations in particle physics and cosmology. Three USC students are there and I’ve heard from them that things have been great so far.

raphael bousso at TASIWell, the great news is that the TASI people are making the lectures available online a fairly short time after their delivery. The link is here. So even though not there, you can schedule some time to take these lecture courses if you like. I glanced for a while at Raphael Bousso’s first lecture in the series “Cosmology and the Landscape”, and it was clear and very well presented. (This is not entirely surprising – Raph is always an excellent lecturer.)

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Hunting the Higgs is not a (D)Zero Sum Game

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D0 data shotWriting in Slate magazine, James Owen Weatherall seems a little confused about how particle physics works. Based on a rumour that there’s a new and significant signal seen at the DZero detector at the Tevatron at Fermilab (Illinois), one of the article’s titles is “Why the rumored discovery of the Higgs Boson is bad news for particle physics”. Supposedly, the big new machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC – see more about it here, and what physicists are hoping for from it), about to switch on later this year, would have nothing to do, and would be a waste of billions of dollars. You can read about the original rumour here. (Above right: A random collision event I grabbed from the DZero experiment.)

Well, this is wrong for so many reasons. It is hard to know where to start with this. The major fallacy with the whole thing is that these machines are just somehow discovery devices (in the most naive sense) of some sort. You build it, switch it on, see what’s there, write the paper and the press release (not necessarily in that order) and then you’re done. Completely neglected is the notion of such an experiment as a device for Click to continue reading this post →

Wave It Like You Just Don’t Care

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Although we care deeply. It’s just late, I’m a bit woozy as I write this, and so I’m stretching a bit for a good title. This post is about gravitational waves. More accurately, it is about a rather good BBC programme about gravitational waves: What they are, why they are important, why we care, and what we’re doing to detect them. It’s Melvin Bragg and some guests on the “In Our Time” prime time programme. I recommend it as a pleasant, unscripted chat which has quite a bit of good introductory information. Even if you’re a bit busy, you can listen to it while doing some other task. Go on. Also, even if you know this stuff, it’s always amusing to hear the host apparently getting terribly confused and hung up on some points while trying to get to grips with the material. I can never tell if he’s faking it because he has decided that he has to reinforce the cliché –it’s physics so it must be hard, especially at this time in the morning– or whether he’s for real at these points. Either way, it makes for a rough-and-tumble conversational feel to the programme which is not altogether disagreeable.

Anyway, the key thing is this (and you’ve probably not heard this here first): In the entire history of science, every time we’ve figured out a new way of looking up at the sky, we’ve revolutionized our understanding of the universe. We’ve every right to expect the same of gravitational waves, once the technology matures. It’s exciting just thinking about it!

ligo detector

I’ll end with some relevant things to look at. Above is part of the LIGO detector (photo from NASA’s website). Here’s a link to the LISA detector that everyone hopes will Click to continue reading this post →

That Ain’t Workin’

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dire straitsRemember the Tune “Money for Nothing”, by Dire Straits? It was a big hit in the 80s. (Remember those?) Well, Warren of the new blog A Strange Universe* wrote a rather brilliant physics version of it, to be sung to the same tune. The “stringer” is the object of the ridicule of the song’s character. The original post is here, where he’ll tell you his thoughts on the song. I can’t resist (I hope he forgives me) posting the entire thing here, rather than an extract, which would break up its impact. (Original song’s lyrics are here, by the way, for comparison.)

So here it is:
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Masterclass, II

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Don’t forget to catch the latest installment of Joe Polchinski’s rather thorough deconstruction of the nonsense, obfuscation, selective memory, and other confusions that constitute the bulk of Lee Smolin’s attack on string theory.

All the points I’ve had the energy to raise have been made here on Asymptotia Click to continue reading this post →

Poor Pluto!

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Remember our discussions of Pluto’s demotion/reclassification? (Lots of link reminders at bottom of post.) Well, here’s a sad (and amusing) image* created by artist Mathias Pedersen:

poor pluto mathias pedersen


You can see a high resolution version of this image here. Don’t forget to look at more of the graphic art of Mathias Pedersen**.

Poor Pluto indeed!

(Take some time to appreciate how good a job he’s done on colours and other Click to continue reading this post →

NASA’s Wrong Stuff?

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Have a listen to Greg Easterbrook (of Wired) in conversation with NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition. The issue is whether NASA’s focus on setting up a manned base on the moon, and then heading for Mars, is really the right focus for a huge (multiple billions of dollars) expenditure, given other scientific priorities. The link is here. See also his Wired piece here, entitled “How NASA Screwed Up (And Four Ways to Fix It)”.

That was yesterday. Today, also on NPR’s Morning Edition, I heard NASA’s chief administrator Michael Griffin attempts to defend the policy. There’s a link to audio here, and be sure to listen to the audio (the transcript offered there is only partial, for a start). I find it revealing. He seemed to have a great deal of difficulty answering certain key questions, such as “Do you think it is the best use of money or not?”. “Are there priorities that you have had to cut…?” His answers on climate change and global Click to continue reading this post →

The Meddler, II

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[Continuing an earlier post…which you’ll need to read to understand this one. Link here.]

recycling symbolSo, unhappy with the state of affairs, I was on the warpath. I began to consider how to deploy my shiny weapons of war. I considered what to do. I could not believe that this really is the policy of the people overseeing the whole operation of Trojan Hospitality (the organization that oversees the whole of campus catering) – it must have been a unilateral effort on the part of the manager and staff in that particular cafe. Or I least I hoped so. So before calling on even higher powers from, say, the Provost’s office, I thought I’d talk to the head person at Trojan Hospitality. If I got no joy there, then I’d go higher. (Ironically, not long ago I’d politely turned down an approach for me to consider a position in the Provost’s office to become a sort of official campus-wide trouble-shooter on an ad-hoc basis for problems of precisely this sort.)

Another reason why this is all so frustrating to me is the fact that USC recently scored abominably in a recent report/survey grading college campuses according to how much effort they make in the area of sustainability. (Sustainable Endownments Insitute here, USC’s report card explaining its “D” score here.) While the report’s results seemed to me to be likely a bit harsh, I’ve always wondered whether anyone at USC actually cared about this issue enough to take the report seriously. (I’ve my own issues with Trojan Transportation with regards environmental matters -not the least because pedestrians, cyclists, and people who use public transportation seem to be lower on the food chain than people who buy parking permits- but have not got around to making noises about it to date beyond using the suggestion box in their office, and some comments in the campus surveys they sometimes circulate.)

So, here was the letter I wrote on Friday:
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Griffith Observatory: Entertainment, Education, or Both?

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partial view of and from griffith observatory at night, by c.v. johnsonYou may recall a post I did some time ago about a worrying development at Griffith Observatory, just before it reopened after the splendid three year refurbishment. (See here for my long post -with pictures- of my visit to the facility around the time of its reopening.) Various reports said that they’d decided to hire actors (not trained in the subject of astronomy) to largely replace the lecturers (trained in the subject of astronomy) for the new planetarium show. This seemed a very disturbing turn of events, and so I did the blog post about it.

Well, I’d put the issue out of my mind until a few weeks ago when Jerry Weil, one of the show’s creators, showed up in the comments section (I love Google) and made his case for why the new show was just fine. Among the things he said in his comments were:

With the new structure of the shows, there is no time for a Q&A period, so there is no need for the lecturers to have any knowledge of astronomy. It is important to keep the show exciting and entertaining, but the star of the show should be the visuals.

Now, I have not seen the show, and so cannot comment in detail on its contents, or the setting, but I am -to say the least- very worried about such a statement. So I asked him to unpack the statement a bit more, thinking that I may have misunderstood. His clarification:

As far as the role of the lecturers, I was certainly one of the people who originally thought it was an unnecessary burden to have live lecturers when a canned narration would work just as well. After seeing the show, I have to say that having someone there live really adds to the excitement of the show. It makes it “feel” more interactive, and it certainly keeps your attention knowing there is a live human there speaking. However, since it is all scripted and there is no Q&A, it is not necessary for the lecturers to have any knowledge of astronomy. I am also an actor myself (in fact I had coincidentally worked with the actor/lecturer at the show I saw), and I have certainly played many roles in areas where I had no prior knowledge. In this situation it’s more important to have people who can convey the excitement and wonder of the Universe than to have a deep understanding of the subject matter.

Not wanting to repeat my often-made point that education and entertainment need not be thought of as mutually exculsive, I made a mental note to see the show and revisit this issue if I thought I could contribute further.

Remarkably, a few days later I was at a party at a neighbour’s house (Cinco De Mayo), and it was a great opportunity to meet some more neighbours. Among those were Click to continue reading this post →