Tales From The Industry XI – The Universe

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The History Channel is diversifying a bit, and doing their first science show. It will be called “The Universe” and will premiere on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 at 9pm ET. It will be a series of 13 episodes. Here’s a blurb I found on the web:

It’s been fifty years since man first ventured into outer space. Now we have robots on Mars, telescopes capturing the birth of the stars and their collapse into black holes, and probes slamming into comets at hyperspeed. What we’ve learned has completely changed our understanding of the universe and our relationship with it – we once thought ourselves to be at the center, now we know we are a small, small spec. This epic series throws light on all the known universe and out to the edge of the unknown – what’s going on out there, what is our place, and is there life outside of Earth?

history channel shootI like the idea of more TV channels (besides the usual suspects like PBS or Discovery) getting involved in making shows that have more science, so given the end that it serves (see the about page) -and because it is interesting and fun work- I was happy to help out when I got a call to do some interviews to camera for use in the show. (The other show I did some segments for last year -see here and here– turns out to be part of a (reportedly somewhat saucy) variety and comedy show, I’ve since heard! It will air on another channel in the Fall, and I’ll tell you more about it then. )

We recorded on Thursday. The original plan was to record in a house in the Hollywood Hills, with access to some Griffith Park backdrop to shoot some b-roll of me doing a bit of hiking, but the fire put a stop to that. Instead, we found another location – a house with a lovely garden overlooking the Topanga wilderness. (Actually, they wondered whether we could use my house and garden, but I decided that the garden was not ready for prime time yet, having just begun to come out of its Winter slump where there was hardly any rainfall… So it remains still just between me and you my dear blog readers, ok? In the end, it would not have worked anyway since on Thursday there was still a lot of activity from helicopters en route to patrolling the Griffith park embers… not good for filming!)

How did it go? Ok, it started well. There were two separate settings, for two separate Click to continue reading this post →

Assassination Complex

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By the way, in case you’re in town here and looking for a good show, I ought to mention Assassins, put on by the Sight Unseen Theatre Group at the Meta Theatre. I saw it with a group of friends on Saturday night and it was excellent. (Friends mostly from a rowing club, go figure. Not a grouping I expected to meet in LA…No, I don’t row, I met them at a party the previous week.) A Stephen Sondheim musical (very clever songs and lyrics therefore), with excellent direction and performances, based on the book by John Weidman. They’re going to be done by the end of the week, so move fast.

assassins
The various assassins and would-be assassins of various US presidents, assembled together, with guns, song and (a bit of) dance.

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Penguin Opportunity?

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So I don’t know whether you’ve noticed or not, but there’s been an awful lot of penguin movies (or movies with a big penguin component) recently. There’s yet another one to come out soon about surfing penguins. I’m slightly annoyed by it already, and I can’t really tell you why. It could turn out to be good, I suppose…

So I got to thinking that this could be theoretical physics’ big break! We can pitch our own penguin movie, since we have up our collective sleeve…

The penguin diagram!

penguin diagram

This is a type of “Feynman diagram” describing how various particles interact with each other in a specific process. (More on Feynman diagrams here, for example.) What does it have to do with Penguins? Well, this picture I got from Wikipedia might help:

penguin diagram

melissa franklinjohn ellisApparently, John Ellis is responsible for their appearance in the literature, pushed along by Melissa Franklin. The usual suspects were involved too (drinks, a pub, darts, etc…) From the Wikipedia article here is the story, in (we’re told) John’s words:

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First Day of the Rest of Their Lives

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Cliché, I know, but I presume that is what calling it “Commencement Day” is all about. Is that not right?

commencement day
(Commencement Day at USC: Part of the crowd of graduates, family, and friends assembled in front of the grand stage set up in front of the Doheny library.)

commencement dayYesterday was both a happy and slightly sad day for me, because I’m a bit of a softy when it comes down to it. Quite a number of the students I taught over the last few years graduated yesterday. While I was so pleased to see them all happy and looking forward to moving on, and meet their parents and siblings, commencement dayI was also a bit sad, since I won’t be seeing them around the USC campus any more. I feel like I’m losing a number of good friends, which seems like an odd thing to say given that I don’t really know them all as friends in the usual sense…. But I got accustomed to seeing them around, spending time with them talking, laughing, worrying, puzzling… getting coffee, milkshakes… They became a real part of my life for a while… Now they are off to take on the world. I feel a bit like a parent… perhaps I’m getting broody?

The campus was lovely yesterday, even more than it usually is. The ground staff Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Recycling

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The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 13th May – Mother’s Day! (USA). The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series – started and run by science writer K. C. Cole – of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See the links below for some recent descriptions (and even video) of previous events.

The theme this month is recycling. Here’s the description from the site:

Everything gets recycled: newspapers and banana peels, the air you breathe and the earth you walk on; some would even say our souls. Our bodies, we know, are made from materials recycled in generations of stars. The mix of genes that makes us who we are is a stew recycled by long lines ancestors—something nice to remember on Mother’s Day. Artists recycle everything from concrete objects to abstract ideas. New musical forms—like new scientific theories—are inevitably reconstructed from pieces of the past.

We’ll start with the ancestors of us all: the stars. An astrophysicist with the Carnegie Observatories, Alan Dressler uses both the Hubble Space Telescope Click to continue reading this post →

The Burning, I

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Well, my previous post (go there for more pictures) went rapidly out of date in just an hour or so… The wind is up and blowing the flames in a way that makes them spread rapidly to new areas… and they’re now evacuating people from some of those houses… Electricity is gone from some homes… Gosh.

fire in Griffith Park
(Click for larger view.) Shot showing the rapidly moving edge of flames…. Griffith Observatory off to the left there… the flames have since crawled West over toward the last major ridge before the canyon that leads to the Observatory.

Really sorry about the photo quality. It’s just my tiny little canon from about a mile away. I don’t have a digital SLR with a longer lens…

A number of my favourite trails have definitely gone. Dante’s view (a lovely garden/oasis in the park) sounds like it is either under threat or already gone… Apparently there are deer and coyotes running around confused, poor things.

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Another Seasonal Indicator

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Ah, yes. In addition to the Jacaranda trees, the temperatures getting up to the 90s, the final exam of my undergraduate courses, and the days of confusion as I try to make the transition from mostly-teaching to mostly-research (I just blogged about it) I’ve had another reminder of the beginning of a long hot summer. Fire.

fire in Griffith Park
Click for larger. Flames and smoke of the Griffith Park fire today. You can see them clearly while carrying on with your business in the neighbourhoods near the park.

This time, it hit close to home. No, really. This afternoon a huge fire started raging in the hills of Griffith park (the one I live near, which I often tell you about). I could see flames licking skyward as I made my way home from the bus stop. Occasionally, a helicopter would fly over and dump a load of water on to the flames. (I just missed taking a photograph of a helicopter water drop for you, but a car came up behind me… I was standing in the middle of the road…)

fire in Griffith Park
Click for larger. Another picture showing proximity to some homes. You can just see the end of a plume of water from one of the helicopters.

It’s all very odd to see the lands where I regularly hike going up in smoke like that. I Click to continue reading this post →

Endings and Beginnings

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jacaranda at hedco buildingWell, an hour ago my Electromagnetism class finished the final exam I set them. Hurrah! There was no immediate sign that it was a total disaster, so that’s good news. Except for the matter of producing final grades and such things, this marks the end of the (standard) undergraduate teaching period for me for the academic year. Nothing until late August.

So you are wondering: – What will he do now? Head for the beach? (Well, it is over 90 degrees F outside, after all. The Jacaranda blooms’ arrival (click left for larger) always signal for me the beginning of those intensely relaxed Los Angeles Summer stretches… Hmmmm….)

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Get One For A Friend

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Science and Society… Science Education. You’ve heard me speak of this issue so many times here, so I won’t repeat myself too much. Seems that Natalie Angier is in agreement – So much so that she took matters into her capable hands and wrote a book to try to change things: “Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science”. I have not read it, but I’ve heard a lovely NPR interview with her today, and she read an extract. You can hear it at this NPR site, and also read an even longer extract there.

natalie angier's canonIn the interview, she backed off a bit from saying that everyone learning a bit of basic science literacy is of vital importance (increasingly so in this day and age, I’d say), although she acknowledges that there are a number of us in the scientific community who do think so. You’ll notice the -perhaps understandably- lighter approach (“these things are fun…” ) that is taken in the book blurb I quote below. While I agree that the fun part is very important indeed (and we really need to get that across a lot!), and that one should always try to persuade rather than scare, I do think that we’re in a dangerous situation sometimes with regards the overall science education and attitude to science of our citizenry. We should definitely not be reluctant to say it. I think that she thinks so too, but does not – when promoting a book – want to make the book seem like it is bitter medicine, but rather, a bit of tasty candy. I’d prefer to think of books like this as a delicious piece of fruit: both tasty and good for you. To be fair, I should mention that in the interview, while declining to subscribe entirely to the view herself, she mentioned a scientist acquaintance who considers the issue as analogous to the urgency for everyone to acquire literacy when the world changed and printing and the written word became common currency. While we are not quite there yet, I’m inclined to agree with that view, on balance…

Well, rather than repeat myself endlessly on this interesting matter, here’s the blurb from her website:

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Spider Jumps Shark

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Well, first major disappointment of the Big Movie season. After doing great work on Spiderman, and brilliant work on Spiderman II, they managed to spectacularly screw up Spiderman III so badly, I can’t even begin to express my disappointment properly, so I won’t try. It started so well, which makes it all the more utterly frustrating that after 45 minutes or so the script irretrievably degenerated into a mess. A total train wreck.

‘Nuff Said.

-cvj

Benny Remembers Clifford and Lee

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There was a lovely piece on NPR about Benny Golson yesterday. You can hear the article again, and more audio clips that were not aired, by going to the website here.

I’m a big fan of Golson, not just because of his remarkable range of performing and especially compositional work (even if you don’t listen to jazz, you’ll know a lot of his work on lots of television shows such as MASH, Mission Impossible, etc.), but also because without him, the pyrotechnic young trumpeter Lee Morgan might never have teamed up with Art Blakey in the Jazz Messengers (Golson suggested him to Blakey, so the story goes).

People often don’t seem to know much about Jazz trumpeters beyond Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie, so I’m going to digress at this point. There is a line of trumpeters which you should know about, as it forms a huge part of the foundation of pure modern Jazz trumpet playing. Miles and Dizzy, important and influential as they were, form only a medium-sized part of that foundation.

lee morganIf you have not heard of Lee Morgan, please stop what you are doing right now and go out to the store and buy some of his work. This is an emergency! If you want to be totally blown away by the most audacious, powerful and raw trumpet playing you’ll probably ever hear, get (for example) John Coltrane’s 1957 album Blue Trane. Don’t focus on Coltrane for a change (who is of course transcendent)… Listen to Morgan, and remind yourself as you encounter the intense heat and urgency of his Click to continue reading this post →