Blackberry Thoughts

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I learned today that there was a problem with RIM’s Blackberry network for about ten hours yesterday, and the wireless devices were cut off from the mother ship, or each other, or the hive mind, or whatever. (see e.g. a Reuters story here.) My thoughts went out to some of my friends at the PeRIMeter Institute in Canada, such as Bee. I hope the withdrawal pangs were not too severe!

I find it particularly sychronicitous (if it’s not a word, it should be one) therefore that probably during some of that outage I went for a bit of a walk to clear my head last night and found myself at Pinkberry (see earlier post). I had a small “original” flavour with…. blackberries:

tasty blackberry

It was only looking through some pictures just now that I connected this with the news today of last night’s outage.

-cvj

New Tolkien!

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tolkien novel coverI don’t care what they say – I’m excited!

Having consumed (a number of times) the several books worth of J. R. R. Tolkien material scraped together from his papers by his son Christopher Tolkien (they sit here on my shelves…. The Book of Lost Tales (I and II), the Lays of Beleriand, Sauron Defeated, Morgoth’s Ring, and so forth…), and thirsted for more, this is just excellent news:

From Reuters, in an article by Mike Collett-White, I read:

More than 30 years after his death, a “new” book by J.R.R. Tolkien goes on sale on Tuesday which may well be the author’s last complete work to be published posthumously.

Tolkien’s son and literary executor Christopher, now in his eighties, constructed “The Children of Hurin” from his father’s manuscripts, and said he tried to do so Click to continue reading this post →

Sex and Physics

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No, this is not a blog post of full disclosure or anything (sorry, but come back later), but just one to note* that -to my delight and amusement- Nick Evans’ free physics+sex+murder novel (that I told you about a while back) has now been pointed out in the Times Higher Education Supplement (no less). There’s a few choice (shall we say) quotes from Nick there, bringing up matters/phrases I never thought I’d see in the THES. You trailblazer, Nick!

I still have not read it yet, but people seem to like it. And Nick is apparently thinking of working on a sequel. (Have a look at it at this link.)

-cvj

(*Thanks Oliver!)

Red Square

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Have a look at this lovely image of the Red Square nebula:

red square nebula

It’s been making the news recently because (in addition to being a rather strikingly beautiful image – the colours should not be taken too seriously, as it is actually an infrared image) it is an extremely symmetrical object. Surprisingly and unprecedentedly so, apparently. A nebula of this sort (with a dying star, MWC 922 Click to continue reading this post →

Saturday Scenes

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alonys red
(The striking central red piece above is by the artist called Alonys (as are the ones surrounding). You can see more things of hers at her myspace space.)

Well, it’s been a busy week here, and I had tons of things to tell you in about five or six extra posts (beyond the quick ones I did) that never made an appearance. I had several for last weekend too. I ought to start by catching up from there. Here goes a bit of recollection and reflection:

Saturday was interesting since I ended up cramming three different activities into the evening, after a day of gardening and errands (mostly the latter), if I recall correctly.

gatherd crowdThe evening began (as it did the Saturday before) with a trip to an opening at an art gallery. This time it was downtown, near Gallery Row, (it is called Crewest) and it was featuring the work of some up and coming female artists. Overall, I was not overwhelmed with things I thought were great, but the exhibition was not without some interesting pieces on the walls (see above – some of her 3D sculpture-meets-painting works were fun too) and sometimes interesting people milling around. There was even a DJ, but sadly no wine (I’d been spoiled by the last gallery reception, I suppose.)

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Point of View, II

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The second of the Point of View campus events in the Visions and Voices series is on Thursday. It is at 7:00pm at the Gin Wong conference center (which is near Fine Arts and Architecture, by the way.) See the bottom of this post for some earlier events of this type, and this post for the background on Visions and Voices.

This time we’ll have a Poet, a Dancer, and a Physicist! Here’s some blurb that KC Cole (my co-conspirator in this business) wrote about who is appearing and what they’ll be saying:

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MiniBooNE for Neutrinos

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MiniBoone
(Image from the MiniBooNE archive. This depicts a neutrino signal in the detector. )

There was a new result announced today. The MiniBoone collaboration has confirmed the more “standard” scenario for neutrino oscillations, and ruled out suggestions by an earlier experiment (LSND3) from a while back that might have implied the existence of sterile neutrinos. Two commenters, Scott H. and Bee, alerted me to this in another thread. Rather than me trying to paraphrase things, I’m going to first reproduce Scott H.’s comment here (he came back from a colloquium by Jocelyn Monroe on the topic earlier today):

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Quark Soup Al Dente

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Here’s Rob Myers in action, giving Monday’s excellent departmental colloquium, entitled “Quark Soup Al Dente: Applied String Theory”:

robert c myers quark soup al dente

Here was his abstract:

In recent years, experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have discovered an exotic new state of matter known as the quark-gluon plasma. Simple theoretical considerations suggested that this plasma would behave like an ideal gas, however, the experiments show that it actually behaves very much like an ideal liquid. Thus the standard theoretical tools, such as perturbation theory and lattice gauge theory, are poorly suited to understand this new phase. However, recent progress in superstring theory has provided us with a theoretical laboratory for studying very similar systems of strongly interacting hot non-abelian plasmas. This surprising new perspective extracts the fluid properties of the plasma from physical processes in a black hole spacetime. At present, this approach seems to provide some of the best tools which theoretical physicists have to understand the heavy ion collisions at RHIC.

For a very good blog post on this issue, see Bee and Stefan’s post at Backreaction.

It was really excellent to see Rob and spend some time with him at dinner afterwards and at lunch the next day with my students. We got to chat over a nice Tapas-style meal and catch up a bit on what each other has been up to (both in and out of physics – Rob is one of my most long standing friends and collaborators in the field), and he even gave us a seminar on Tuesday before leaving.

Now, here’s a physics question for you:
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Small Things Considered

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What small things? Elementary particles! The second of David Kestenbaum’s excellent report on CERN’s LHC aired yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered. You can see what I said about the first part here, and the second part can be listened to on the NPR website here. There’s also more video, extra audio, and a transcript.

atlas detector
(Image: The seven story tall Atlas detector at the LHC. (photo: Serge Bellegarde))

The focus on this one broadens out to marvel at the sheer scale of the experiment as a civil engineering feat, and also as a feat of human cooperation (consider the many countries, languages, different people, etc, who are collaborating to make this happen). It’s great to hear the many voices of the various scientists he talks to.

(It’s also great, on a personal note, to hear Jim Virdee (the CMS spokesperson) Click to continue reading this post →

NPR goes to LHC

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National Public Radio’s David Kestenbaum, who’s quite reliably an excellent reporter whose field reports I always enjoy, did a report on CERN’s (soon to be switched on) Large Hadron Collider (see also a Wiki here) today! Or rather, it was played on this morning’s Morning Edition. Here’s the site where you can listen to an archived version of the report, and read a transcript of some of it. It’s rather well done.

CMS Higgs simulation event

(Image: A simulation from the CMS experiment – part of the LHC – showing the decay of the Higgs particle after being created in one of the high energy collisions.)

It starts with a few theoretical physicist clichés in the introductory remarks leaving up to talking to Alvaro De Rujula, but it’s fine – not really too over the top, and done with good humour. Really good is that fact that once the physics issues start being discussed and described, he focuses on doing that well. The bottom line is that if your subject -the science- is good, that should take center stage in forming the core of the report for attracting and holding the audience’s attention.

And report does it well. Through interview and Kestenbaum filling in with further Click to continue reading this post →

Happy Easter

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babianaBabiana. (Click for larger view.)

This will serve nicely as my Easter greeting to all who readers care to be greeted in that way (Happy Easter!), but especially to my mum and sister who actually sent me Easter greetings cards in the post. Thank you!

I picked the lovely Babiana because (besides loving the name …this led to an ichat conversation with my sister about whether or not I’d name somebody this, to which I replied (not fully seriously) that I happily name a daughter Babiana… only to withdraw that when my sister suggested that the name would be shortened to Babs… and I was immediately put in mind of Carry On movies – I mean no offense whatsoever to any Babs in the readership, of course)…. because these were planted, partly with mum’s help when she was last visiting here, and so she gets to see how they are doing. They are in the same batch as the gladiolus plants I mentioned about two or three weeks ago, and I still have yet to get to tell you the story about my getting these bulbs, which is sort of interesting, Click to continue reading this post →

Mexican Superlattices

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I grew some decent crystals once when I was younger. Perhaps you did too? It’s an excellent (and cheap) science project for a young person to do, so do encourage them to have a go, whenever you get the chance.

Whatever you do, perhaps it is not a good idea to show them these giant selenite (gypsum) crystals first:

mexico crystals

Fantastic aren’t they?! (Click for larger view.) They are in some truly extraordinary Click to continue reading this post →