Missed Chance

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The show on television called “24” has an interesting format. It is sort of meant to be in real time, and so each episode – roughly an hour long, including advertisements – charts what took place in an hour of a particular day. A whole season is one day. A very harrowing day for the characters in the show, particularly agent Jack Bauer. They are part of an counter-terrorist unit (CTU) trying to save the America from various highly complicated terrorist plots. The terrorists are obsessed with Los Angeles, it seems, which is convenient given that the unit is based in Los Angeles. Having watched two or three seasons of the show now, I’ve also come to appreciate the fact that the terrorist plots hand over to more and more complex and dastardly ones as the show goes along through the day. And the “controlling mind” bad guy earlier in the day is hardly ever the worst and most dastardly person our heroes will meet. There’ll be a really really bad guy along later on with an even worse plan than the one before lunchtime, and so forth. Another reason that it’s lucky that they’re obsessed with Los Angeles, since there’s an excellent supply of theatre and television actors here to be cast in various partsa.

What I’ve really been hoping to see is an episode of the show when Jack Bauer is not saving America/LA. Instead, he’s just… chillin’. Imagine it now:
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On the EDGE

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Golden-rumped Elephant ShrewEDGE here stands for “Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered” and is a term that was coined to refer specifically to certain threatened species of animal around the world. They’re not always your big marquee animals (Lions and Tigers and Bears! Oh My!), and a great deal of them will be unfamiliar to you. (I’d not previously encountered the Golden-Rumped Elephant Shrew (Rhynchocyon chrysopygus), and I’ll admit that my life has been all the poorer for not having known about it before now. For a start, it’s soooo cute! Furthermore, it has a golden rump. What’s not to like? Apparently, it is related to an elephant, somewhat distantly. Yes, it has a trunk, but it takes more than that to detemine its relationship to elephants! Update: – Here’s a Wikipedia article on elephant shrews, which could be a starting point for finding out more. The EDGE site has a lot of information too: here.)

That unfamiliarity – blissful ignorance on our part – is part of the motivation. There’s a campaign to highlight them more, and raise both funds and awareness to enable Click to continue reading this post →

Look Up Down South

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We’re more or less all done with comet McNaught up here in the North. We’ve handed it over to the Southern hemisphere viewers. That lucky lot are getting quite a show, since the comet seems to be outgassing more and producing a longer tail of debris. It is spectacular. Here is an image from New Zealand:

comet mcnaught from down south

It was taken by Andrew Drawneek and I found ita on the SkyTonight site here, where Click to continue reading this post →

Citrus

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lemons “..It’s pretty serious.”

“Yeah…” (chuckle) “…right!”

“No, it is serious… Your smoothies are going to be more expensive.”

(Silence, as the enormity of this economic revelation sinks in…)

* * *

Part of a conversation I overheard between two students while I waited for a class to start. One student was apparently a bit dismissive of the other’s concern about the effects of the recent sustained cold temperatures on the local farmers. He did not see why she was concerned about the farmers. She could have Click to continue reading this post →

Video Physics

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An American Physics Student in England has a nice post about physics resources online in the form of video. In addition to the resource list provided by Serkan Cabi, which he discusses, he provides some favourites of his own. Check out his list.

I am pleased to see the ASTI website on his list. ASTI was designed (by yours truly) as a means of giving access to science to those who were less able to have such opportunities (I focused on Africa and got – with the help of Robert de Mello Koch, Jeff Murugan and Amanda Weltman – several students from as many as 11 different African countries to attend – I hope to do it again in various fields of science at a variety of levels, if I can find a financial donor or donorsa) and I hoped that by videoing everything and putting it on a site that the school’s lectures could serve people all over the world for a long time to come. So it is nice to hear about someone using it. (I’ve heard that there are some links with problems on that site, so I will try to get them fixed.)

By the way, in another excellent post a few weeks ago, the same blogger chatted about several physics textbooks and other resources that give an introduction to quantum field theory. Go over there and compare notes, or get ideas if you are looking for a way into that important subject.

Finally, I’ve also noted a number of mentions of Durham on that same blog. One of them was apparently inspired by an earlier post of mine, and was in fact a sort of Click to continue reading this post →

200 Calories

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What’s a calorie? Well, it is a unit of energy. If you take a gram of water and put some energy into it, you’ll raise its temperature (assuming it is away from its boiling point). If you succeed in raising the gram of water’s temperature by 1oC, you’ve put one calorie of energy into it.

But that’s not the calorie you probably have used in your everyday conversation. You’ve probably been talking about the Calorie. (Note the upper case C.) The Calorie, or the kilocalorie. It is 1000 times larger than the calorie of the previous paragraph. It’s the energy needed to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by 1oC (assuming it’s not at its boiling point). That’s the Calorie you find discussed in the context of nutrition – the energy content of the food you eat.

Without further ado, let me show you what the Calories “look like”. Let’s take a reasonable number of them – 200. Each of the pictures below represents 200 Calories of a food, which you’d get from eating it. Mini peppers, gummy bears, and kiwi fruit:

peppers 200 calories gummy bears 200 calories kiwi fruit 200 calories

They are part of a series of rather beautiful photographs of lots of different foods, Click to continue reading this post →

Better and Better

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rapid busLast year in early January I was pleased to see that the MTA had improved things dramatically by changing the express buses (Metro Rapid) on my route from normal buses to those lovely long spacious ones – essentially two normal buses joined together with a giant hinge to allow the bus to bend and go around corners. That’s a crude description, of course. They still come equipped with bike racks (just like the typical LA city bus), and my Brompton fits under many of the seats quite easily. There’s a whole lot of space for everyone, and the buses are very well designed indeed. One of the amusing aspects of the sudden change was watching everyone’s behaviour. For about a month or so, and markedly in the first week, people would act as thought the second half of the bus did not exist. No, really. They would walk down the bus to the hinge, and stop. If there were no seats left in the Click to continue reading this post →

Look Up!

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Comet McNaught seems to be a gift that keeps on giving. Last night here in Los Angeles, just after the sun set, I stepped out to look from a nearby elevated spot – and there it was. With binoculars, it’s an impressive sight, and possibly the last naked-eye visible comet sighting for a long time. Unfortunately, I have no equipment that I can use to take a decent photo for you, so I can’t share what I saw. (Some pictures from around the world are here.)

But you can go out and look. I give some viewing tips below. [See update at end, however.]

What you’re probably puzzled about now is why the experts kept getting the “last chance to see” message wrong. People seemed very sure back on Wednesday that it would be gone from view -and I did a post to that effect myself- and and the same thing was said on Thursday and then on Friday.

I’m guessing that this is because although they can track the position rather well, they Click to continue reading this post →

Conference in Progress

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Well, I checked in on the Women in Physics conference today, and it seems to be going very well. I went to lunch and sat with a number of the students (and some faculty) and I also chatted to some in private about their interests, current stages in their careers, etc. It’s always so wonderful to hear people so enthusiastic about physics, and listen to them wondering what their part in the great story of science will be.

Here are a couple of shots of the delegates at lunch – it is a sort of panorama (click each component for larger view):

  women in physics conference   women in physics conference

I’m off to paint the town red, so I’ll post a bit more about this either later tonight or Click to continue reading this post →

Just Go

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From time to time I manage to make it to a movie theatre and sit down to watch a film that I have heard nothing about (which is really hard to do these days), and then am treated to the pleasure – if the film is at least half-decent – of having a film open before me like a box of delights, letting me discover all the things it contains completely as the film-makers intended: right in the moment. When a film is half-decent, novel, or merely pretty good, it can be made into a very enjoyable film-going experience by doing thisa. When a film is very good, or extremely good, this business of having seen it cold can really make it a truly wonderful experience, reminding me of when I went to see movies for the first few times as a youngster. Remember those times?

It’s not easy to pull this off these days with so much (too much!!) information out there about the content and story and back story of a film everywhere in the media, well before you see it. For particular films I want to see, I try to ignore as much as I can by not reading reviews, not listening to stuff that comes on the radio, or tv. But sometimes, it all sneaks through because often you don’t know in advance whether you want to see that film. You might not have even heard of it, and then it is spoiled a bit by too much detail. It has to be said that even a film tht

Anyway, I’ve had that lovely see-the-film-cold experience happen with a small number of films in recent times, and it happened last night. I was set to see another film, but my brother (who showed up in town to stay overnight unexpectedly) arrived Click to continue reading this post →

De-Lurking Week!

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delurk buttonApparently it is De-Lurking week everywhere in the blog world. This means that even if (especially if) you have not commented on the blog before, this is the time where you come in and say hello, before (if you prefer) returning back to lurker status for a while. You can do it as “anon” or under another assumed name if you wish to. I know – you’re shy, you don’t think that anyone cares, or that you have anything to say at all… No. We (that is, the community of regulars and me, your host) care, and what you say will be interesting!

You can just say hello, or tell us how you found the blog, how you find the blog (if you see what I mean), tell us something about yourself, or not, or just make a little noise! Or pick a topic that you prefer.

(And of course, even if you’ve commented before -rarely or frequently- we’ll be happy to hear from you too!)

-cvj

(*Via Uncertain Principles and Adventures in Ethics and Science.)