You Can View Point of View

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Well, the video of the Point of View event of a couple of weeks ago is now available. Click here for streaming media. There’s a problem, however. While my opening off-the-cuff remarks are utterly unimportant, and so it is not a big deal that the audio of that is poor, the big problem is in the third segment. Apparently (according to the A/V person) the Bluetooth microphone that they were using to capture the sound for the video camera must have used up its battery, as all the audio for USC’s Cinematic Click to continue reading this post →

On Language in Science and Beyond

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In Physics Today last month, Helen Quinn wrote rather well about the issue of language in science and in common (non-scientific) usage, with a focus on when the two collide. I recommend the article, which you can read here.

There are cases in our own teaching where confusions arise, which mostly get resolved as the students learn the concepts associated to specific words….

A few words in elementary physics— force, work, momentum, and energy—have carefully defined physics meanings. Their much broader everyday usage causes students a great deal of confusion until they learn the precise physics concepts.

…but she’s much more interested in the cases where some words -often powerful ones, commonly invoked- contribute to “considerable public misunderstanding of science”:

belief, hypothesis, theory, and knowledge.

None of these words has a unique physics meaning, but their meanings as we use them among ourselves and as non-scientists hear them are very different. We need to be much more careful how and when we use them in talking to the public.

She goes on to discuss them in turn. I recommend reading it in full. One of the things I like most about the article is that she talks not only about the process of using those Click to continue reading this post →

Show and Tell

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Well, it is almost the last day of Black History Month and I am behind on answering the traditional emails I receive at this time of year. As I said last year (with a few modifications):

clifford v. johnson at the board Pretty soon after February starts, the deluge of email I get every day gets enhanced a bit by emails from students from all over America. I become part of an assignment, you see. It seems that these students are instructed to find a black scientist and write something about them and do a presentation to their class about them1.

I’m always willing to help with this sort of thing (see the footnote for why), and so I usually send some links: to my personal webpage (here), or one of two profile pages for me at USC here and here (the latter by Katherine Yungmee Kim), a Daily Trojan news story by Diya Chacko here, or the departmental page on me (here), and a list of publications, and I hope that this is all of some use.

As to the standard “what is your date of birth?” question that is usually asked too, I don’t pass out that information over the web, but if you’re an interested student, you can email me for a bit more information if you wish, although I will not give out the exact date.

For a bit of biographical narrative, students can look on the “My Hero Project” Click to continue reading this post →

Random Travel Matters

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Well, I’m sorry if things have been a bit quiet around here for a bit. I’ve been very busy, and also eight hours out of sync with my usual cycle. Couple this to also being disconnected from the web in the second hotel I was staying in because of me being too cheap to pay the extortionate amount that they were asking for a connection (the other place had a free connection in certain public lounges, and luckily the signal leaked into my room enough to get me a good connection a lot of the time) and you get quite a bit of quiet.

merrion square and st stephen's church

I was in Dublin and London again. Dublin mainly on a work mission, London on the way back for non-work. I was having panel deliberations once again on a range of Click to continue reading this post →

New Directions in Real Estate?

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keats real estate imageOn NPR’s finance programme Marketplace yesterday, there was a somewhat unusual piece. It seems that conceptual artist Jonathan Keats is making some money by selling the extra dimensional rights to various properties in San Francisco! (You can see him at the Modernism Gallery there1).

Since there’s no known way to build on or otherwise occupy this new extra dimensional property (let me explain a bit further in an enormous footnote2), the prices are awfully reasonable. Here’s a transcript of a transaction that I found on their website. Reporter Nathaneal Johnson is observing a sale to punters Oscar Villalon and Mary Ladd:

Click to continue reading this post →

Light Seen Down Under?

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compact fluorescent bulbincandescent bulbI’ve been meaning to post about this for a few days*. It has since made it to rather high visibility in the news, I’m pleased to see, generating a lot of interesting discussion. The Australians (another nation not part of the original Kyoto agreement, notably) have pushed ahead on the issue of trying to legislatively encourage (shall we say) the use of compact fluorescent light bulbs over the more wasteful traditional incandescent bulbs.

You’ll recall my posting about this idea not long ago, in the context of proposed California legislation (so yes, I used the same images in the same way). Now, I’ll admit that I was thinking of that as a test case, and when things are ironed out into a workable legislation there one would imagine the model being rolled out to the rest of the world to adopt in their own fashion. I did not expect an entire country to adopt it so soon and at such a rate (they propose to stop sales of incandescents by 2010!).

We had a lot of discussion in that earlier thread about the pros and cons of this. Commenter IrrationalPoint (IP), for example, seems convinced that this represents a serious access problem for people who respond less favourably to the new lights. Such legislation is therefore discriminatory. My response to that was in several parts. The first is that I was not convinced that the cited flicker problems were really problems that referred to the new bulbs. They don’t work like the old nasty fluorescents we remember from years back, or that are still to be found in a lot of public spaces. Their flicker rate is up at tens of KHz, not the 60 Hz of old. IP (and one or two others) then suggested that the issues were with the spectrum. My response there was that the spectrum is quite a bit different from a lot fo the old lights, and where some discomfort might arise with the new ones, this is possibly only a problem for some if direct lighting from the light bulb is used. (I personally find direct light from incandescents pretty disturbing in a lot of cases too.) Why not use the bulbs in conjunction with a simple filter or other decorative fixture that can modify the light to your tastes?

But I am keeping an open mind on this. Perhaps I’m just wrong, and the whole idea of banning incandescents is unworkable and insensitive, but I am not convinced that work cannot be done to make sure that it works well for all concerned.

One of the biggest problems with the discussion is that nobody could point to good Click to continue reading this post →

That Feeling

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It is on the list of my top five all-time favourite feelings. But I know of no word for it in English that properly captures it. This is strange, since so much of our society relies on things that probably came about in accompaniment with this feeling. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Sometimes it come on so strongly that it feels like a switch has been flicked inside my head, with an almost audible “click”, often accompanied by a smile, an oral exclamation, or even a moan. Why can I not think of a word for it? Perhaps my vocabulary is failing me, but if there is not such a word, then we should set about forging a new one, since it is so important.

What am I talking about?

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Phew, What a Scorcher!

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I remember UK newspaper headlines like that from the 1980s when you’d have an unseasonably warm day. I wonder if they still have them? (The headlines, I mean, not unseasonably warm days…) Anyway, we had a day like that yesterday, with the high temperature in the mid 80s for a while. It came about all of a sudden, seemingly out of the blue.

So of course every other person in the city (and their dog, blades, bike, etc.,) went to the beach. (Or at least at times it felt like it was half the population…)

hot day at the beach

I wonder if the other half went to the mountains?

-cvj

B Flat, but Stay Sharp

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b flat key

Bâ™­, C, D, Eâ™­, F, G, A, Bâ™­

There’s something that resonates with me about the B flat scale. I don’t know why. I like the sound and feel of it. A lot of pieces of music are written in it (although I do not know if it is actually the most popular key), incidentally, and so I imagine that others like it a lot too. I wonder why that is? Is it just the result of convention? Is there something about the way we (those who like it a lot) are constructed that fits that frequency rather well?

Consider having a listen to Robert Krulwich’s NPR piece called “Have you heard about B flat?”. It’s got light humour sprinkled around liberally, and some amusing music. And there are a few pieces of information about the (apparent) unreasonable ubiquity of the note B flat in Nature. He tells you about B Flat and alligators, B flat and a staircase, and he ends with B flat and a black hole, and I’ll quote from the website for this one:

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Mars Attracts!

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mars water rocksThere’s a nice story about new photographic evidence from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for water having flowed on Mars. It is not really as dramatic as the photographs of late last year, but it is still an important piece of the puzzle overall (so do read about it), if harder to sell to the public as a “stop-the-press!” type of story. So here’s how three different news agencies tried to bring you in:

  • The BBC: Rocks reveal Mars’ watery past

    Not bad. The layering and colour gradations seen are is not direct evidence of water, of course. It could have been some other fluid flow, but…ok.

Next, we have:
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Point of View, I

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amy parishTomorrow sees the next in the series of events here on the USC campus that science writer KC Cole and I have arranged. They’re in the style of the Categorically Not! events I tell you about from time to time (held each month over at the Santa Monica Art Studios) but are over on the USC campus instead, amy wilentzas part of the Provost’s Visions and Voices events. You can read more in the links at the end of this post.

The theme is “Point of View”, and we’ll have an anthropologist, a journalist, and a film maker each give their take on the topic. Here’s an extract from KC’s poster about tomorrow’s event (held at 7:00pm at the Gin Wong Conference Center here on the USC campus):
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Waiting for Kenny

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The time: Saturday just past, just before 4:00pm.

The location (wide): The the splendid old May Company building, at Wilshire and Fairfax. It’s now the LACMA West building. (LACMA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Image: Carol M. Highsmith)

Isn’t the building just great? So utterly LA:

may company building

The location (zoom in): The rooftop penthouse of said building. What were we doing? Click to continue reading this post →