Good News Everyone!
On Tuesday a box arrived in the post. What did it contain? New tyres (or is it tires?) for the Brompton!
I ordered them as a well-earned present for the bike, for all the hard work put in Click to continue reading this post
One sees them a lot around here, given the town I’m in, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
There’s a Spitzer telescope press release about the possible discovery of the most early stars detected to date. These would be the very first stars to have formed in the universe. Remembering that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, pause for a moment to be impressed by the claim of Kashlinsky, Arendt, Mather and Moseley that these stars appeared less than a billion years after the big bang. You should also read some discussion in John Baez’ recent post. [Update: See remarks from Ned Wright at the end of this post.]
The new milestone on the timeline of the universe’s history, if this is correct, would look roughly as in this image (from the press release):
Extraordinary claims (like this one) require extraordinary evidence, and so there’ll no Click to continue reading this post
Oh, man ! Right now I’m seriously jammin’ along to NPR’s Fresh Air. Why? It is a retrospective on James Brown (you’ve heard the news, I imagine). Terry Gross (the show’s presenter) has lined up a 2005 interview with him, and also has cut in interviews with Bootsy Collins, Maceo Parker, etc. It’s all about his music’s history – the influences, the influenced, the ideas, the groove, the politics, the movement, the Movement, and so much more.
If you’ve not listened to James Brown’s music before, this is a good chance to learn what it’s all about. (Image right from concertshots.com.)
Whatever you’re doing, Get Up Offa That Thing and download now and get your groove on!
-cvj
Read about the long lost history of Thermodynamics over at Lounge of the Lab Lemming. There you’ll find out about the 19th Century Boy Band Heat Engine, whose original membership was:
- Rudolf Clausius: bass
- Emile Clapeyron: percussion
- Sadi Carnot: vocals
- Hermann Helmholtz: calorimeter
… and much much more.
In this history, the laws of thermodynamics were motivated by the same old thing that motivates so many things, it seems: Attracting the opposite sex. Why am I not surprised?
-cvj
(Note: It is a (mostly) funny riff starting as a dig (or at least I interpret it as such) at the implication made by a ScienceBlogs blogger during an earlier blogfight that his Click to continue reading this post
Young1 Bee does it again, this time with an excellent post entitled “Anomalous Alignments in the Cosmic Microwave Background”. You’ve heard a huge amount about the success of modern precision cosmology, driven so muchn in recent times by the extraordinary data from the Cosmic Microwave Background measured by experiments such as WMAP. Well, there are some very interesting anomalies in the CMB data that have yet to be properly understood, and Bee discusses them in her post. I’ll do no more than send you over there to read it and join in the discussion if you wish. Nothing wrong with a bit of Cosmology conversation during the holidays.
-cvj
1Just trying to help, in case you’re wondering. See the first paragraphs of her post. 🙂
Some Winter gifts from the garden:
-cvj
Well, I hope that you’re having an excellent (and, especially, peaceful) Holiday season. Here are the two top images that have been produced so far by readers in the LaTeX Holiday Challenge, using the recently installed LaTeX/mimeTeX machine (feel free to keep them coming):
The first, a stylized Christmas tree, is by acornellian…
Commenter acornellian was our first contributor to the challenge, and promptly put this tree together, complete with two decorative ornaments. Excellent! Not as easy to do this as it looks, it has to be said. It has a simple but striking final effect, and it’s pleasing in proportion. Thanks acornelian!
The next one is by Carl Brannen:
It’s a Star of David ornament on a branch of a Christmas Tree. Wow! It’s pretty impressive, isn’t it, given the LaTeX commands needed to be issued to produce all that detail. Thanks Carl!
Holiday Best Wishes to All Readers!
-cvj
…say it isn’t so…
Sad news this Christmas Day. James Brown died this morning. I’ve seen two obituaries up so far, an Associated Press one, and one at the BBC. (Image left from Getty images.) No doubt there’ll be a lot more news and obituaries through the day.
He goes from being a Living Legend to …a Legend. He laid the foundations for so very much of the music we hear all around us. Gotta go dig out some of his music and shake myself up!
-cvj
No, the title is not part of an alternative version of that Christmas song that cumulatively lists things (whatever it is called). It is really that I spotted the display of the entries in something that looked like the aftermath of a gingerbread house bake-off. This was at the Kitchen Academy, the chef’s school next door to the Arclight.
Here are some more pictures, including the top three places, and then I have a question for you:
Well, sort of.
I could not resist:
These are the kittens of Copy Cat, the cat that was cloned back in 2001/2 at Texas A&M. They’re lovely. They were produced the old-fashioned way with a father who Click to continue reading this post
To add to the seasonal mood, I thought I’d point out that there’s a virgin birth about to happen any day now. Maybe even Monday. Fingers crossed. And tail, if you have one. What am I talking about?
Here’s Flora, a proud-looking mum if I’ve ever seen one:
She’s a Komodo Dragon. She lives in Chester Zoo in England. In May, she laid several Click to continue reading this post
Well, there was something I could not tell you about before that I now can. There’s a new TV show called “Wired Science” about to launch. It is made by the PBS affiliate KCET, and will air on your local PBS station (on Wednesday, January 03, 2007, 8:00-9:00 pm ET/PT – double check for local times). It looks like it is going to be informative and fun!
Here’s some of their blurb from the press release:
WIRED SCIENCE is a one-hour program that translates Wired magazine’s award-winning journalism into a fast-paced television show. WIRED SCIENCE brings Wired magazine’s cutting-edge vision, stylish design and irreverent attitude to the screen with breakout ideas, recent discoveries and the latest innovations. The pilot episode takes the viewer into the world of meteorite hunters, where space, commerce and art intersect; travels to Yellowstone National Park to harvest viruses that may hold the key to a technology revolution; and dives underwater to explore NEEMO, NASA’s extreme astronaut training program. Viewers will meet rocket-belt inventors, stem cell explorers and the developer of an electric car that goes from zero-to-60 in under four seconds. As a series, WIRED SCIENCE hopes to span the globe to uncover novel developments in biomedicine, space exploration, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, robotics and military technology.
And you can go to the site to see stills from some of the location work they did in making the show, and some of the studio work too. You can go to this Wired blog post to see the rather nice title sequence of the show, and the teaser trailer. To the right, there’s a screen shot I made just now (click for larger).
I don’t think that they have the go ahead to make a full series yet. This is a pilot. I imagine that whether they get the full series go ahead depends upon whether it is well liked and supported by you, the viewer. I’d say support it. the people behind it really care about getting good science programming out to you.
So what’s the big deal? Why did I not tell you about it if I’ve known about it for so long? Well, nobody told me not to tell you, but it seemed the right thing to do. You see, I have a little secret. How do I put this? I’m going to get so beaten up in the playground for this.
Well, we all had so much fun the other day with the fairground ride that was the newly installed LaTeX capability of the blog -something electric about not knowing if it will work until you hit “submit”- that I thought I’d encourage some more fun, to help out on a quiet holiday weekend.
So here’s the mission/challenge. You must use LaTeX commands to create a Holiday-themed design. It can be an equation, or it can be a fully fledged diagram drawn with LaTeX-picture-drawing skills by those of you who are extremely clever and patient enough. Recall the impressive example from Carl Brannen that kept us on the edge of our seats? I reproduce it at the left (click for larger). You can see how he did it in the comment thread of the earlier post. (Also, mouse-hover over the image of any of the equations there and you will see the LaTeX code they used.)
So yes, if you can conjure up a Christmas tree or a Hanukkah menora, we’ll all be impressed, and you’ll probably win all our admiration… and as a prize I’ll probably single it out for special attention in a later post! So there’s some competition-style incentive, if you needed it.
Of course, equations will do too – the cleverer the better.
As long as it has a “Holiday Theme”, ok?
The Rules:- You get two comment posts in the thread of this post per entry. Other Click to continue reading this post
I was tagged by IP to do this. That’s all I’m saying on the matter.
My instructions:
So here goes:
Time to talk briefly about other uses of blogging. Some time ago I spoke about the idea of using blogging as a sharper tool for exchanging and even developing research ideas. The conversation about the suggestion degenerated into vapour, at some point, and having floated the idea and learned from the conversation, I left it alone. In public at least.
In private, I continued. The fact is that I have other blogs on the go. I’d like to tell you about one of them, since it might be a useful tool for you too. The way I use it is simple. I run my “lab” with it. It’s my virtual lab-space. I have about five students working with me, and a million and one projects, and not enough hours in the day. The students all are working on several projects with me, with each other, and alone…. but all under the umbrella of being part of my little “subgroup” of the larger high energy theory group here at USC. I want us all to have conversations, point at new papers, throw out ideas, show partial computations to each other (and definitely to me) for comment, share drafts of papers with each other, etc.
So far so standard. Normally, this is all done with emails back and forth, one on one conversations, etc. Sometimes those conversations can be supplemented by one or other person from the group (me, or anyone else) dropping in and setting the whole thing straight with a comment. Sure, you can do this with email in the “reply-to-all” mode, but….
A blog is the perfect tool for making this all work seamlessly. On the “cvjlab” blog Click to continue reading this post
