Finding the Orionids Tonight

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When I was a child, I was fascinated with a straight line of three stars that were evenly spaced. Whenever I looked up in the sky, I would be comforted by being able to find those stars, especially when I was about to embark on a long walk home at night. I later learned that they were actually known as Orion’s Belt, part of the constellation of Orion. So Orion remains my favourite constellation.

These nights, Orion takes centre stage in stargazing circles since the Orionid meteor shower will be originating from a point near the constellation. Of course, Orion has nothing to do with the shower. It merely marks the apparent direction that it comes from (see red dot in image below).

orionids

(Above is the view of the sky looking Southsoutheast from mid northern latitudes at 3:00am today.) We will be traversing a debris field made of stuff left over from Halley’s comet’s tail. That stuff will rain down into our atmosphere, glowing brightly as Click to continue reading this post →

Field Trip, I

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As part of the Freshman Seminar I told you about earlier (e.g., here, here and here), we went on a field trip to MOCA in nearby downtown LA.

We went to see the exhibition of drawings by Eva Hesse. Hesse is very well known for her sculpture, and among the things she did, I think that a rather splendid one in this context is the one below. It is an example of those that resemble three dimensional renderings of her interesting use of line on the paper.

Eva Hesse - Metronomic Irregularity

This one (not in the exhibition) is called “Metronomic Irregularity” (I think it has a number as well… there are several pieces of this title done by her).

field trip hesseThe group is standing in front of the sculpture I posted about earlier. There’s Ashley and Adam, left and middle. Jeff (on the right in the picture) -who is not a freshman, but a senior who does physics research projects with me- came along as well. We had a rather good time, taking the bus up from campus (the horror!) and then walking up through the city, looking at some of the public spaces and public art that nobody seems to look at after hours much. We got to the museum just as it was opening.

A great deal of the work on display was in the form of developmental drawings, some of which were still in her notebooks, or were clearly pages of notebooks. These I found fascinating, for the most part. (Click the following for larger view): Click to continue reading this post →

Flight of Fancy

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Down at MOCA for a field trip today. More later. Took a shot of this old favourite:

Nancy Rubins Sculpture

Nancy Rubins’ “Chas’ Stainless Steel, Mark Thompson’s Airplane Parts, About 1000 Pounds of Stainless Steel Wire, Gagosian’s Beverly Hills Space, at MOCA” (Can never really make out if that is the acttual title, but that’s the bit in italics on the plaque.)

-cvj

Not the Hole Story?

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NASA ozone layer 24th sept 06The hole in the ozone layer over Antartica was recently the biggest it has ever been, I learned from this Reuters article:

“From September 21 to 30, the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles ,” said Paul Newman of
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington.

If the stratospheric weather conditions had been normal, the ozone hole would be expected to reach a size of about 8.9 million to 9.3 million square miles, about the surface area of North America, NASA said in a statement.

(NASA image top right. More about it here.)

This immediately reminds one of the other story on the hole I mentioned not so long ago. There was good news there, since it was supposed to be stabilizing, as a result Click to continue reading this post →

Those Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

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You may recall that we were recently discussing stereotypes as a result of an earlier post. Particularly, I was talking about the effects those sterotypes can produce as a result of modifying the expectations of others, making it hard for some people to be taken seriously, and resulting in them having to go that extra mile (or several) as a result.

Well, I’d like to point your attention to a recent study about the direct effects of those stereotypes on the stereotyped. Quoting from an article by AP science writer Randolph E. Schmid:

[Steven J.] Heine and doctoral student Ilan Dar-Nimrod wanted to see how people are affected by stereotypes about themselves. They divided more than 220 women into four groups and administered math and reading comprehension tests between 2003 and 2006. Their results are reported in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

What they actually did was to provide the different groups with different images and reading materials before they did the tests. They seem to have found significant differences in the results that suggest that having a negative stereotype of yourself in mind actually makes things worse. In other words:

It’s a process psychologists call a stereotype threat, Heine explained. “If a member of a group for which there is a negative stereotype is in a position to test the stereotype, they are likely to choke under the pressure.”

So reminding them of the stereotype affects them.

Here’s what they found:

Click to continue reading this post →

The Lives Of The Stars

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Well, I’m back from the visit to the preview of the Griffith Observatory that I mentioned to you I was going to. It was a rather good visit. They organised it well, and -boy!- have they done a great job on the restorations! I’ll try and assemble the several pictures that I took into some sort of narrative for you, and report soon. While you wait, here’s one of my favourites:

main sequence exhibit

This is particularly poignant, in my opinion. The children are looking at the lovely Click to continue reading this post →

New Colleagues

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Ah! The joy of new colleagues! I have somehow forgotten to tell you one piece of the great news that we had here at USC Physics and Astronomy recently. We got three new faculty, and one of them is here in action (I’ll tell you about the others later), telling us about the physics behind the 2006 Physics Nobel Prize. This is Cosmologist/Astrophysicist Elena Pierpaoli:

elena pierpaoli

She’s one of those people who works closely on (among other things) the data from Click to continue reading this post →

Strings on Sunset

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So I heard something on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip just now. (This is the new show written by Aaron Sorkin that I instinctively started to watch a couple of weeks ago because I like his writing, and it is actually a drama about the process of writing, so what’s not to like? -Ok, I’m a bit bothered by the overall annoyingness of the lead actress’ performance, but I imagine she’ll get better.)

I caught a line that went something like “we’re not looking for a girl with a phd in… string theory or anything, ok? There’ll be at least half a dozen women there who’ve Click to continue reading this post →

Manifold Yau

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calabi-yau sliceWell, here’s yet another discussion of Yau to gobble up. It is a New York Times article by Dennis Overbye on Yau, his life and work*. I’ve no idea why this was written, or what the timing was. I’d like to believe that it was just because it is a good subject -because it is- and that it is worthwhile to do an article about a Mathematician of considerable stature in the field, and about the ins and outs of the world of Mathematics -because it is. But I can’t help but wonder if this would have seen the light of day if there was not the big argument going on about the New Yorker article and Yau’s displeasure with its contents. (Image on the right -click for larger- was taken from this site. It is a slice of a Calabi-Yau manifold. There’s more in the article about Yau’s work on those.)

Well, I don’t care what the reason is. I love to see articles of this type written about this Click to continue reading this post →

The Yankovic Singularity

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So I actually had no idea that Weird Al Yankovic was still doing his, er, particular brand of music. (Singular, one might say.) I actually thought it stopped a long while ago, not long after the Thriller parodies. Well, not long ago he did a video/song called “White and Nerdy”. I looked at it*, and so can you, on Myspace video (wow, I had no idea they had a video service). Here is the link.

weird Al white and nerdy video

Among the things featured in the video’s visuals are Schrodinger’s equation, Stephen Hawking’s BHOT, M C Escher (It’s a rap video, so…) Here are some stills (click for larger):

weird Al white and nerdy videoweird Al white and nerdy videoweird Al white and nerdy video

I laughed, I’ll admit. I find his fresh-faced and cheerful style quite funny at times. But then I got thinking. I can’t decide whether I should be depressed at the potency of the stereotypes he is playing with, or just carry on giggling. For example, why did the guys who were representing the complete opposite of being nerdy (and into science, reading, and the like) have to be cast as black? Worse than that (or at least equally as Click to continue reading this post →

Not In Tower Records

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Well, this arrived the other day:

annenberg dvd1 annenberg dvd2

It’s a rather highly-produced DVD of the “Uncertainty” event from August 31st event, produced by the people at the Annenberg School of Communication. (See description and discussion in this previous post.) Gosh. Well, since this might be my only appearance on a DVD of such vast distribution (i.e., I expect it was in a number of other mailboxes around campus), I imagine I should be breaking open a bottle of the bubbly. But instead, having just got back from the airport, I’ve got to go play catchup, such as introducing the colloquium speaker(s) in a few minutes.

Rather than wait for it to appear in a store near you, or on Amazon (a very long wait), if you are interested in seeing the event, I’ve heard that there is working video at this link. Apparently (I have not seen it) the sound is poor for the first several minutes, and then it picks up.

-cvj

To The River

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to the riverGot to sleep at 6:30am after the post-memorial-conference banquet, and its aftermath…

Up again at 9:45am to rush around to get ready to go for a quick walk (how can one not do that when visiting Cambridge?) and then check out of the hotel.

It is always pleasant to go for a walk around here, no matter how short, so I did a quick jaunt around the alleyways near Trinity, and a little beyond.

punting

Had the sudden urge to buy some handkerchiefs, as so many of mine seem to have disappeared off down one of those household wormholes that I know will be discovered one day. But there was just no time… No, I’ve no idea why I’m telling you this either. Must be the jetlag.

-cvj