What’s in a Name?

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xena and gabrielle (universal studios image)xena and gabrielle (Keck Image)I forgot to tell you about this. The name Eris has been officially chosen by the International Astronomical Union for the astronomical body so many wanted to be called Xena. (Keck image, left) Eris is the goddess of discord and strife, by the way. The moon of the body, that was tentatively called Gabrielle, after Xena’s sidekick in the TV show (Universal Studios image, right) will be called Dysnomia

xena and gabrielleThe Xena supporting community will be disappointed about this decision (watch out IAU, they have sharp swords, see image on left), but maybe comforted a little by the fact that Dysnomia is “a spirit of lawlessness”. Recall that Xena was played by Lucy Lawless (Whatever happened to her, by the way? I think I recall seeing her briefly in something last year.) Anyway, there’s a New York Times article about it, by Kenneth Chang, here. It’s a rather nice account of the saga of the naming, by Michael Brown (of Caltech), who discovered Eris

Pluto, as part of its initiation into the family of rubble known as the Kuiper belt (a mass distribution so important to understanding our solar system…see here), has been given a number. It is minor planet number 134340. I hope you can remember that. Eris has the number 136199.

-cvj

Jam Tomorrow

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Well, it’s been a very busy week here, and today was one of the most exhausting. So I’m ending the day fading quite a bit. I’ll leave you with a shot of Zadie Smith in full flow, chatting to the LA Times Books editor in front of a paying audience at UCLA this evening. (Part of the UCLA Live series, which is regulalrly interesting.) Zadie Smith at UCLAI went along to hear what she had to say, accompanying a friend who had a spare ticket. Ran into my good friend Marc Kamionkowski there, who is apparently a fan of her work. I found the chat to be… nice. Nothing profound, but she’s got a good sense of humour which is vey familiar to me, since it comes from a similar place to mine, I imagine: We have similar backgrounds. I dozed a bit, which was not a reflection on her…. I just doze sometimes during a busy work week.

In terms of the length, I am not sure that it really needed to be as long as 90 minutes, but then that’s probably just me. Frankly, it was better than it could easily have been. Sometimes you go along to hear someone talk about their work, etc, and they end up making great pronoucenments on all sorts of things and you just wish they would shut up and you can go back to appreciating what they do. Not in this case. She is actually quite interesting to listen to, and did not attempt to be an authority on anything other than what she does. There was a lack of depth there that probably comes from the fact that she is young. Were I not so tired, I’d be more charitable and say that she had a “refreshing lightness”… or something like that. Really, I’d like to do it again in 20 or 30 years when she’s had time to really absorb more of life…. to compare and contrast. She has a good ear and eye for observation, so a lot of good stuff will stick over the years, and she’ll be a really special treat to hear from in time.

Was amused to see (the prodigously talented) Tracy Ullman standing just off to my left, while we picked up tickets at the box office. Amused for at least a couple of reasons, and none of them because she stared at me for a moment as though I was familiar. One was because before arriving, I told the friend I was escorting that I might go into stealth mode to avoid the no doubt lots of English people who will turn up, since (1) it is the West LA, and the English Abroad are everywhere on the West side and (2) it is Zadie Smith. Did not expect Tracy Ulman though. Was expecting more anonymous expat English. The other reason? I am not at liberty to explain at this point. Sorry. Maybe later.

The title of the post? (1) Always wanted to use it. (2) I hope that it will be clear tomorrow, or the day after.

Well, I am tired down to the bone and brain, and so will do things involving the following: Gimlet. Sofa. Movie. Pillow.

-cvj

USC has the best GPA

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Well, although we can hold our own on the academic standards side of things, in this case I mean Gay Point Average. I saw in the New York Times today*, in an article by Stephanie Rosenbloom, that USC and UPenn both scored the highest possible score (20 out of 20) for their “campuses policies, programs and practices affecting lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and trangender people”. This was in the Advocate College Guide for LGBT students. This is just great!

Please read the article, which is very interesting indeed, discussing several campuses throughout the USA. I’ll simply end with the closing paragraph, which sums up the response to the “why” question that might be forming in some minds. It quotes Kevin Jennings, the executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network:

“When people feel included they can focus on learning,” Mr. Jennings of the education network said. “When they feel isolated and marginalized they can’t. And what LGBT students want is what everyone else wants when they go to college: They want to feel like they belong.”

-cvj

(*Thanks Caolionn!)

Bikes and the City

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You’ve probably gathered from my writings by now that I think that bike riding is a good thing. Particularly as an alternative to driving, where appropriate. One such place where biking is in principle a perfect alternative is Los Angeles. Mostly flat, wide streets, perfect weather most of the year around. At this point in a conversation about this, people either burst out laughing, or look at me as though I am insane. I sigh. I try to point out that there exists a core (although small… but growing I notice) of people who get on with the business of cycling around this city instead of listening to the (mostly exaggerated and/or coming from total ignorance) stories about how dangerous it is supposed to be (supposedly not just from motorists, but apparently there are very bad men out there trying to do bad things to you). What I say mostly falls on deaf ears. I point out how many alternative routes there are in a city this well connected, so that you do not have to use the main roads if worried about willful or inattentive motorists. I point out how nicely bikes work in conjunction with the (yes, it exists) public transport in the city, since every bus is equipped with bike racks. These do not help either. I point out how much fun I’m having by not having to fight with other motorists every morning, pay an extortionate amount of money for parking, how much gas I save by essentially only driving on the weekends, etc, etc…. I recognise, yes, that it is not a choice that everyone in the city can make, but so very many could, even if it is just a matter of using your bike to nip to the shops for that pint of milk, instead of driving the car… Then I give up, shut up (mostly), and ride my bike. (Descriptions of one of my routes into work here and here.)

Bike Photo by Herman Wouters for The New York TimesAnyway, I keep dreaming that one day that slow trickle of increasing numbers of cyclists I see out there will turn into a torrent, and somehow bikes (and public transport) will not be seen as a situation you must accept as a last resort due to reduced circumstances, but be seen as simply a really good choice to make. Maybe one day it will even become a mainstream hip thing to do (as opposed to the underground hipness it has now…I like to imagine), and increased bike use will be driven by people wanting to jump on that bandwagon. I don’t care how we get there, as long as we do.

To help with the dream, I look fondly at the greater bike use in other countries and cities when I visit them. Here’s a lovely article, by John Tagliabue, that came out today* in the New York Times about the Netherlands. It starts out:

With more than two bicycles per person and a landscape as flat as a pancake, the Netherlands is a cyclists’ Eden.

[…]

with greater affluence, more free time and even greater environmental concerns, the Dutch are turning to bicycles in ever greater numbers. Sales are booming, and there is a proliferation of designs for all sorts of purposes.

And further, there’s a description of a recently opened bicycle dealership that is one Click to continue reading this post →

A University of Wonderful Things

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I’ve come to realise that there are all sorts of really interesting people on the USC campus, involved in fascinating work and interesting projects of one sort or another. This is of course true for any university. However, I am still finding pleasant surprises and connections quite regularly. The last major such discovery for me was in the early Summer, when I found out that the excellent writer Aimee Bender (e.g. “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt”), whose work I knew about in a different context, is on the faculty here. (I mentioned this and described her contribution to one of the Categorically Not! events in this post.)

Now I’ve noticed that the hugely popular blog Boing Boing Cory Doctorow is here for the year as the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, which will be co-hosted by the Viterbi School’s Integrated Media Systems Center and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. Obviously I don’t read Boing Boing regularly enough or I would have noticed the increased flux of USC events and other things mentioned there in the last few weeks. Silly me.

Anyway, it’s nice to have another little blog carry the load of telling you a bit about what goes on at USC. So I can relax a little, right?

Here is an article about it on the Viterbi School’s site, from which I quote:

In his new role, announced this week by the Canadian Fulbright Commission, Doctorow will collaborate with USC faculty and students and deliver guest lectures to the wider community.

and further:

“We are excited by this opportunity to work with such a visionary as Cory Doctorow as we continue our research on experiential media for education, journalism and entertainment, ” said Adam Clayton Powell III, director of the Integrated Media Systems Center, an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center within the Viterbi School of Engineering.

Here’s an April post announcing it from Cory himself. There he mentions his connection with Bob Stein’s Voyager company. Who’s Bob, you ask? He and his work was another pleasant discovery I made last year, in the context of academic blogging. He’s Director of research at the Institute for the Future of the Book, at the Annenberg Center for Communication, and also part of the Interactive Media Division. I blogged about meeting him, and the bloggers meeting here and here. It’s a really small world after all.

So, beyond the exciting Visions and Voices events I told you about, there’ll be even more interesting events and talks on campus as a result, no doubt. Here’s one already. Excellent. If only I had more hours in the day…

-cvj

Categorically Not! – Apocalypse!

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The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 24th September. I’ve posted before about the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. They’re fantastic, and I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. Have a look at the last two descriptions here and here, and the description of the recent special one on Uncertainty that was held at the USC campus is here.

Here is K.C. Cole’s description of the upcoming programme:

The End is near! Or is it? It’s an irresistible question, one that has preoccupied science, religion and art for centuries. Of course, we know the world will end sometime within the next 5 billion years, when the sun is expected to puff up into a massive red giant star and swallow the Earth whole. But the end of our familiar human world will come far sooner. Will the cause be god’s wrath? A stray meteor? Or will we bring on the end ourselves through human arrogance and foolishness?

Our September 24th Categorically Not! will not answer these questions, but will explore them through the lenses of cosmology, the Book of Revelation, and the novelistic imagination. Marc Kamionkowski, a cosmologist at Caltech, usually thinks about the birth of the Universe, but this evening will speculate about how it may end. The particulars of its demise will depend on such exotica as dark matter, vacuum energy, and some of the most elusive particles known (and unknown). Jonathan Kirsch, author of six books on the history of religion and the workings of the religious imagination, will explain why—contrary to biblical prophecy—the world refuses to end on time. His most recent book—A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization—delves into the history of the book of Revelation and how it has been used and abused over the last twenty centuries. The writer Carolyn See, whose dad left a couple of weeks after the first atom bomb was dropped, has always confused personal and public Armageddons. The end is (always) nigh, and how do we live with that? In Golden Days and in her newest novel, There Will Never Be Another You, she addresses the question.

As usual, it is held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, come at 6:00pm for drinks, cookies and a look around the space, and there’s a 6:30 start, and we’ll ask for a small donation. Please contact Sherry Frumkin to tell us if you’re coming. Call 310-397-7449 or email sherry [at] santamonicaartstudios.com. If you don’t get around to letting us know, do come anyway! For more information, visit the Categorically Not! website.

Hope to see some of you there! I hope to report on it here after the event, and -as usual- you can come and chat about it in the comment thread of the post I do about it.

-cvj

Science Library Secrets

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For you physics lurkers at USC (you know who you are!), consider going to the following event (RSVP by tomorrow): Our distiguished (and superpowered -she can fly) librarian, Sara Tompson, in conjunction with the USC Women in Physics Society, have organised a tour and demo of various of the science library’s facilities. Go to this to find out lots of vital information, such as how to use INSPEC, the online catalogue, the scanner…. and maybe even learn where the library is, if you don’t already. Yes, there’s a free lunch associated with this. Poster here.

-cvj

New IPod Shuffle more Nano than Nano

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ipod shuffleipod shuffle details Remember a year ago, the launch of the ipod nano that caught my eye? Even led to a long physics joke explanation

Well, they’ve done it again.

The new ipod shuffle is out! And yes, it is just so lovely. And it is more nano than the nano, size wise The nano has also been updated, by the way. Click the images for more magnification.

-cvj

Clues in the Blood Splatter Patterns

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Kuiper belt from New York TimesThis is the penultimate line in an article today in the Science Times:

“Sometimes how the blood is splattered on the wall tells you more about what happened than the body,”

It is a quote from Harold Levison of the Southwest Research Institute, in the context of understanding the origins and dynamics of our Solar System. The article is by Kenneth Chang, and a link to it is here.

It is a lovely article, focusing on the continuing series of discoveries being made about Kuiper Belt objects (e.g. Sedna, “Xena”, etc…), those cousins of Pluto that, thanks for better detection technology, have turned out to be quite numerous (click on image above… more of it at the NYT site)

More than 1,100 Kuiper Belt objects have been found so far. Astronomers estimate that half a million bodies larger than 20 miles wide are floating out there. At least one appears to be mostly rock with a coating of ice. Some are mostly ice. Some are less dense than ice, indicating a Swiss-cheese-like structure. A surprising number of them have moons.

Levison says:

“The more we learn, the weirder it looks.”

It is quite a fascinating subject, a detective story full of wonderful science, and illustrates -as I have said earlier in the post called “Spinach Blogging”– how the “demotion of Pluto” story opens the door to so much active planetary science. It also illustrates why it it is interesting to keep an eye on the debate about the “demotion”. which is still ongoing. The nature of the Kuiper belt is teaching us a huge amount about the other bodies in the solar system. For example:

The distribution of Kuiper Belt objects has already provided decisive evidence that Neptune was once perhaps nearly a billion miles closer to the Sun and was then gravitationally nudged outward. Astronomers also hope that the Kuiper Belt preserves a frozen record of the earliest building materials of the solar system.

Another nice analogy from S. Alan Stern (of the Southwest Research Institute and Click to continue reading this post →

Nerdium Perpetuus

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In view of the discussion here and here, I feel I ought to remind readers of an earlier post entitled “The Rise of the Nerd” I wrote on the subject of nerds, geeks, the terminology, and the media portrayals. Somewhere in there is a serious point, which keeps getting missed in all of this jolly fun:

(1) Nerdiness is in decline, you would think, since everybody ends up being a nerd (by at least one main popular definition) after a while by adopting their practices (the fact that you are reading this or any blog is just one of myriad examples).

(2) Nerdiness will likely continue forever, though (at least for a very long time), because -frankly- people feel threatened by, inferior to, and are afraid of people who have technical knowledge, especially (but not only) in the scientific realm. The response is to paint them as outsiders, to marginalise them, undermining the perceived threat. This, sadly, will continue for a while. The process is to continually redefine what is the province of the nerd, and what is not. So while, for example, it is no longer nerdy to blog (or even know about blogs), it is still nerdy to, let’s say, know how to significantly change the appearance of your blog, or know about technorati tags. That will continue…. until everybody learns how easy those things are. Etc, etc.

A big extract from my earlier post:

For years, action movies stuck to a very specific division of labour. Your action hero did the “action” stuff…you know, shooting and hitting and the getting of the girl (yes, the action hero was most often male). Meanwhile, from time to time there would be a point in the plot where some technical knowledge was needed. Then the socially awkward technical person (Geek, Nerd, whatever) would be on the set for a while, and they would hack into the computer, make the modifications to the car, shut down the reactor, etc.

Then several years ago things began to change. Did you notice it? Action heroes began to start learning our skills the skills of the nerd. It became ok – cool even- for the muscle-bound hero to know some technical stuff! I remember one key movie that for me at least represented the high-visibility turning point. It was the 1996 movie “Eraser”, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. At the time he was sort of the CEO of Action Heroes, Inc, right? There’s some scene in which he’s fresh from shooting up everything in sight, with a cannon on each arm, etc, etc, and then at a climatic moment (I forgot the plot details which led to this), he sits down at a computer to do some crucial task or other! [ … ]

And here’s the point: Click to continue reading this post →

Seven

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I’m trying hard not to think about this day, five years ago, in Manhattan. Nor the days immediately following. Those were among the worst experiences of my life, being so close (but very luckily, far away enough) to the events. But the whole thing gets replayed by the media every year, and so it is hard to avoid some aspects of it. Besides the memorials -which are absolutely the right thing to do of course- there are endless discussions of how to combat terrorism, the “War on Terror” (in its current configuration, little to do with the first), and what seems to me to be a growing volume of chatter about the conspiracy theory that the whole world trade center site was demolished by construction engineers working for the government. or other organisation with unscrupulous motives. The latter point, when put to me, is usally along the lines of “you’re a scientist – doesn’t the collapse look suspicious to you?”. My only thought on this matter is “How many 7+ skyscraper complexes have we seen collapse before?”. This is not an argument in itself, but just my way of saying “it’s not that simple”.

Enough.

world trade center site overviewWhat I really wanted to write about was something about the events, or their aftermath, that had at least of glimmer of something positive about it, and maybe a science connection. I think I found it. You may know that there’s already been a huge amount of work on the reconstruction of the site, starting with a lot of jostling among superpowered architects for the main tower complex and memorial site. (I recall the lovely exhibits of the architects’ proposals near the site. It was open to the public, and there were models and animations showing all the ideas. The public’s opinion was sought – although I’m not sure it was actually listened to in the end. But it was a great exercise. Personally, I think that they should have chosen the design of [Lex Luthor] Norman Foster, for its mathematical beauty and (apparent) structural integrity, but I understand that there were other issues. In any event, with the new tweaks to the overall scheme, I think that the new plan is rather good now, and there’s a lovely Norman Foster design (tower 2), a Richard Rogers (tower 3) design, and a Fumihiko Maki (tower 4), all featuring prominently. Uh.. the Lex Luthor reference is to Foster’s outfit at the time of his presentation… all in black with 60s supervillain black turtleneck, and shaven head.)

The work has gone well beyond choosing architechts and the like. Actual construction has happened. The new “7 World Trade Center” has already been completed, and I noticed that among the new tenants will be the New York Academy of Sciences. I’m very happy about this, and I don’t quite know why. Among the contributing factors are, I expect, the fact that I used to spend my summers in New York back then making good use of some of the wonderful academic institutions that there are in the city. This includes the excellent libraries at Columbia University, especially the lovely Butler library, but also includes some truly majestic spaces such as the Rose reading room at the New York Public Library. I wrote some of my book there.

I just love the fact that there are so many great institutions of that kind in New York, and so it almost brings tears to my eyes to read that among the first tenants in this newly reborn part of the city will be the New York Academy of Sciences. (They signed the first lease, but they will move in second.) They will have quite a lovely setting, I Click to continue reading this post →

More Than A Hint Of The Old Days

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Roy HargroveWell, Roy Hargrove was as good as I recall from the last time I saw him, in one of my favourite jazz clubs, the Village Vanguard in New York. In view of other live small club music events I’ve been to in LA, I admit that I was expecting a lackadaiscal and unappreciative audience, probably talking while the musicians dared to interrupt their dinner, and because it was after 10:00pm, hardly any audience for a 10:30pm start of the set.

I was wrong, I am happy to report. I readily revise my earlier conclusions about live jazz in LA by quite a bit. For a moment there, I could well have been in any of a number of good New York Jazz clubs. The venue itself, the Catalina Bar and Grill, was very good indeed (even though they managed to annoy me at the start by (1) only having valet parking, which I avoid, and (2) giving directions that assume that you will be driving, and so only telling you to enter the club through the back via the parking garage, rather than giving you the option to just walk through the lobby at the front. Sigh.) and was cozy and inviting, and apparopriately low-lit. The club was not completely full, but decently so, and the bulk of the audience clearly knew and understood jazz, not just applauding the apparently “difficult bits” Gerald Clayton (as audiences so often do), but with several showing their appreciation of a well chosen phrase, or a humourous or evocative musical reference of some sort, within a larger musical line. And sure, the two-drink minimum, or option to instead order food from the overpriced menu is a clear, cynical money-spinner, but it is no worse than in several other clubs in other cities, so I was only routinely perturbed by this, and for a short time.

Roy Hargrove and his band blew away any such minor concerns. I asked for (and got) Click to continue reading this post →

Epic Struggles in Mathematics

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fields medal frontI have this problem: I don’t really have enough hours in each day. One of the symptoms of this problem is a huge pile of unread or partially read issues of the New Yorker. Sometimes I try to catch up. This catching up is incomplete, of course, and sometimes I miss articles of direct relevance to my field. Sometimes I miss them even when they are in an issue I skimmed through, promising to read later more thoroughly. This time, I missed the August 28th article called “Manifold Destiny” (by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber), about the quest of some mathematicians to understand the Poincare conjecture. The subtitle of the article in the table of contents is “Who really solved the Poincare conjecture?”. The story starts out with a report on a talk at the Strings 2006 conference in Beijing.

[Update: After reading the below, do read this post about the letter (apparently from Yau’s lawyer) about the issue. His being painted in the role of villain may have been rather over the top, and the writers may have not behaved very well at all… so the word “masterpiece” I used below may well be totally wrong. I’m so glad that I wrote the cautionary remarks at the end now.]

As a piece of writing for the non-mathematician’s consumption, it is another New Yorker masterpiece. It is of course several pages long, and so there’s plenty of meat Click to continue reading this post →