Beverly Hills, that is. The Da Camera Society (a chamber music society I mentioned last year) arranged a concert by the Janaki String Trio in the Beverly Hills Women’s Club. Click the (no-flash, not-while-they-played) photo for a larger version. I’m a Beethoven nut, and so having two of his string trios on the program was excellent. There was also a trio by Shubert that I liked a lot. There were two bonuses however.
Click to continue reading this post
Ok, it’s really the evening – 7:00pm – but I could not resist the post title. Most of you won’t know (let me know if you do) what I’m playing with in the title, but that’s ok. I’m really, really pleased with it.
Amazingly, we have a free concert tomorrow here at USC with an introduction by the composer Steve Reich. Here is the weblink with complete information. Here’s an extract of the heaps of gushing remarks collected together to encourage you to go:
As part of a citywide festival celebrating his 70th birthday, Reich himself introduces a concert of his music played by three USC ensembles.
Widely regarded as one of the major “minimalists,” Steve Reich has composed music with a profound impact on art, film and popular music in the 20th century. He was recently called “…America’s greatest living composer,” (The Village Voice), “…the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker) and “…among the great composers of the century” (The New York Times). From his Click to continue reading this post
Gosh, where do I begin? It’s going to be a hugely busy day on Monday. I’m excited about Monday first and foremost because of the colloquium. Charles (Chuck) Stevens from the Salk Institute generously accepted my invitation to come and visit USC and give a special colloquium to an audience made up of people from both the Physics and Astronomy Department and the Neuroscience Research Institute. This is because his talk is going to be about thing of interest to both camps! He’s applying physicist approaches -the sort that I do- to biological problems. This is a big deal to me because it is very hard to know when problems in biology actually really need or care about the sorts of things that physicists care about. The last thing you need as a biologist… when you’re happily gathering all those juicy data on various systems and finding out all sorts of highly specialized context-dependent mechanisms… the last thing you need is some arrogant physicist coming in an babbling stuff like “symmetry Click to continue reading this post
Last week Saturday morning, I stepped out to the garden to do maybe forty-five minutes’ worth of much needed pruning. Sometime late in the afternoon saw me finish. Things just got way out of hand. More and more tools were assembled:
…there was much in the way of climbing of ladders and parts of the roof, and I’ve now got about three huge piles of stuff to deal with -here’s one:
…and one tiny garden waste bin that the city to picks up (I cannot compost much of this) each week. At that rate, cleanup will take about a month or so… By then, half the stuff will have grown back.
It’s all in a good cause though. It is what ensures that I can share all those photos of Click to continue reading this post
You learn something every day. I only allowed myself one shot at this, and did not go back to try to change it. I found that:
 |
Apparently, I am:
This inimitably unique storyteller created a future with so many deep layers of history that all the world we know is practically lost in it. |
Go on then, find out which Science Fiction writer you are and come and tell us…
-cvj
Via Dynamics of Cats, via Pharyngula (where does he find this stuff?)
On Wednesday night, accompanied by Tameem, a student of mine, I wandered across campus to attend the “Mathematics in Music” event. I blogged about it earlier. I don’t really want to talk about the event itself in this post. It was a nice enough recital of three pieces. I don’t know why, but the promised “mathematics” was disappointingly virtually non-existent. I’m not exaggerating, I’m afraid.
Keep in mind that it may simply just be my misunderstanding of the intent of the event, but there’s simply next to nothing to report in the way of what was said about mathematical aspects of music. There were plenty of opportunities, but (almost) none were taken. I got out my notebook and pen, all excited at what the presenters might say at various points… and the mathematics never showed up. There were a few extremely elementary remarks about tonal ratios in chords, about scales, keys, and time, and that was it, more or less. This was a bit of a shame, since I suspect that Elaine Chew could have talked at length and with some authority on the matter (given the projects she’s involved in – see e.g. here), but mathematics was almost completely missing in the event – despite the title. I imagine there were what seemed like good reasons for this. I was not party to decisions made behind the scenes, so cannot comment further.
More interestingly on that front was what took place in the minutes leading up to the delayed start of the event. First, although it was a free event, they pointed us to the box office where an attendant printed us two tickets from the computer so that we can show them to someone at the door who wasn’t really looking anyway. Fine. We got into the recital hall, but rather than sitting at the obvious available seats, I suggested that we move to the other side of the room where one can get a better view of the piano keyboard. I’m less than happy when I can’t see what a musician is doing, you see, so I always try to sit with the pianist’s view of the piano. So we did that, and found two seats. While we chatted and looked around us at the growing assembly, I spotted a friend and colleague of mine, the composer Veronika Krausas. She was in the company of someone who she introduced as Brian Head, who is a composer, performer (guitar) and music theorist (a “triple threat”, Veronika joked), also in USC’s Thornton school of music. They were looking for seats and there was one on either side of the two we were sitting in, and so they joined us and we chatted some more.
When the event start was about ten or fifteen minutes late -they were trying to get the reassuringly large crown all seated, they announced- Veronika idly looked at her ticket, pointed out that they were numbered, and wondered if we should have been Click to continue reading this post
Have these always been these way everywhere and I just did not notice before? Or is it just a Venice Beach thing? The cycle icons in the lanes along the beach are wearing little helmets! Good for them:
(Click for larger view.)
Oh, this reminds me. Some time ago, I was sent a link to a “cycle facility of the month” Click to continue reading this post
I accidentally used the term “de-gauss” (or perhaps “degauss”) in conversation the other day, referring to something I had to do for my well-being. I was asked for an explanation. Thought I’d explain what I meant to you too:
One of many effective ways to de-gauss: Get the best gin ever (Hendricks’), a decent tonic water, the very tastiest of lemons (it’s from the tree in the garden), a glass, some ice*…
…and a really comfy chair. Hey, it’s been a long and busy day.
-cvj
P.S. Oh. There’s some other use of the word involving getting rid of trapped built up magnetic fields, etc., etc. You can google that.
(*Yeah, I know it’s not a great snapshot, but you get the idea.)
I love teaching undergraduate electromagnetism. It has such an elegance, logic, and completeness about it. It introduces such a host of powerful techniques and ideas to the student, taking them across the threshold into maturity in their physics studies: Once you’ve done electromagnetism, you don’t usually think about large chunks of Physics in quite the same way ever again.
Today saw me give one of my favourite lectures, in any subject. It’s always a thrill. Summarize all that has gone before in their studies of electromagnetism – Gauss’ Law for the electric field produced by charges, the statement of the absence of magnetic monopoles (the Law with No Name), Faraday’s Law for the electric field produced by changing magnetic fields (induction:- another really fun set of lectures there), and Ampère’s Law for the magnetic fields produced by a current density. Write them all down next to each other and stare at them. Realize that they are not internally consistent, in general, as Maxwell did (he was motivated slightly differently, but in an essentially equivalent way). The culprit is Ampère, and the problem is fixed by Maxwell’s realization of the existence of the displacement current term. Ah… symmetry. Changing electric fields produce magnetic fields. All is well. Do some nice examples to show how it all works in concrete terms.
The resulting beautiful and consistent set of equations sent a shiver down my spine when I first saw and appreciated them as an undergraduate. They still send a shiver down my spine, and I hope your spine shivers too. Maxwell’s equations:
After the shiver, a lovely warm feeling. From here to light, radiation, Relativity, and beyond…
Every time, I especially love giving this lecture. It never gets old.
-cvj
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a spacecraft that studies the sun, has been taking rather spectacular photos of comet McNaught. See here, for example. But the recent news that’s been exciting everyone are the comet pictures from the newer twin-spacecraft Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories (STEREO), such as this one of the comet’s tail (the sharp lines are artifacts due to bright objects in the background):
Click the image for a larger version. They put together a number of images to make a rather impressive movie of the comet, with a great deal of detail in a sort of fly Click to continue reading this post
The BBC1 are calling her the proud “mum and dad”. I’m talking about Flora, who is the parent of five baby Komodo dragons so far. Read the story at the link above. 
You’ll recall my earlier post about her, back when she featured in the “virgin birth” story leading up to the Christmas period. Just to remind you, she is one of the first Komodo dragons known to Click to continue reading this post
I’m watching my email for an invitation to fly suddenly to the Southern Hemisphere. Perhaps the Latin American Summer School (being held in Argentina this year) needs an emergency strings lecturer? I’ll be happy to reprise my lectures from the one I taught at in Mexico city in 2000…
Why do I want to go South with such urgency? This is largely because Comet McNaught continues to put on a wonderful show in the Southern Hemisphere. Amara Graps has kindly put several links for us to look at in the comment stream of my Look Up Down South post. Have a look here, here, here, here, and here. I did, and I found this lovely shot (by Mary Fanner – click for larger) of the comet over the beautiful city of Cape Town, which I miss a lot from the days when I helped run the ASTI science education program in 2004:
There are several more to be found on the various sites Amara linked to, some that Click to continue reading this post
On the comment stream of my Light Cone post, commenter Neil pointed out something you may find amusing. I quote:
At this website, you can generate an RSS feed of your personal light cone (starting from your date of birth), which notifies you when it passes a stellar object. Quite cool!
He’s right.
-cvj
I don’t know why this possibility did not occur to me before. So let me give you a heads up if you do demos in your lectures. In Physics 100 (which I taught last semester) and in Astro 100 especially, we do a lot of demos to demonstrate various physics concepts. I did a post on the Newton’s third law jet propulsion demo some time ago (linked photo right). My colleague Ed Rhodes did this same demo in his Astro 100 class.
He received an email from one of the students in the class recently saying “Congratulations, you’ve been YouTubed…”.
Apparently, one of the students in the class used his or her mobile phone camera to Click to continue reading this post
Want to have a confidential email conversation about a sensitive issue? There’s not really been such a thing so far, really. Better to pick up the phone and talk in person. Or meet at random near that noisy fountain in the park. But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to send an email and not worry about it being forwarded on, saved – or “reply-all”-ed to the entire organization? I just heard a piece on NPR about a company that claims to offer this service. It acts as the place where you can send and pickup these mails. Once they are read, they are gone. Self-destructed. All very Mission Impossible.
The service is called Vaporstream, and you can hear more about it in the NPR story, by going to the NPR site. I can’t give you a link to the clip directly as it does not seem to be on their site anywhere, so perhaps you will just have to listen to the whole program. (All Things Considered- The Monday 22nd Jan show, toward the last half hour or so.)
Interestingly, it seems that there’s only 8 posts tagged with it on Technorati. It’s been a long time since I saw something with so few entries there! I wonder how long that will last?
I wonder if Vaporstream will catch on and we’ll all be using it regularly in a short time. Will it be one of those things, like YouTube and Google, where we’ll all be wondering what life was like before them?
I find myself confused by why this elementary possibility is not a problem: While Click to continue reading this post
