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 →

The Science, Art, and Mathematics of Origami

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origami dancing craneOne of my hobbies for a while when I was a young ‘un was origami. It was swiftly overtaken by other arts and crafts, and these were hobbies long before I started taking apart cameras and radios, and the like, to see how they worked, and collecting pondwater and pressing leaves and…

In retrospect, I think it might be obvious that (obstacles aside) I had a good chance of becoming a theoretical physicist. A lot of those arts and crafts hobbies were all about intricate patterns of one sort or another. I loved that stuff, although I did not think of it as mathematics… just a nice pattern. And I was drawn to playing with and creating those patterns. Some of them are amazing, as you know from staring at whatever your mum or grandmother is working on right now. Or perhaps you. I’ll tell you about more of that some other time. Let’s get back dancing crane pattern to origami. I stumbled upon (via NPR) an excellent website, that of Robert J. Lang. It is quite wonderful. The site tells you about Lang’s work, and shows you a ton of it. But the best thing of all is that it tells you about the Art, Science and Mathematics of it all together. The engineering applications of origami are growing as well. These include developing the best way of folding airbags for ready deployment, and the problem of how to fold up a giant array of solar panels on a spacecraft so that they can be successfully unfolded and put into use once the craft gets into space.

Imagine also the problem in a scientific context of how to design arrays of mirrors with Click to continue reading this post →

And Then Two Come Along At Once….

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Roy HargroveSo I learned earlier this week that one of my favourite young trumpeters, Roy Hargrove is going to be at the Catalina Bar and Grill from Wednesday through this weekend…

James Carter …and -bizarrely enough- one of my favourite young saxophonists, James Carter is going to be at the Jazz Bakery precisely the same dates!

So it is going to be quite a weekend. It’s been a while since I’ve seen either of these guys (not since the Village Vanguard in New York, I think… Happy days.). Of course I must go and see them, for old times sake, and to make some new times….

(Photos by Tony Gieske and Zappan (see here, respectively.))

-cvj

When The Levees Broke

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I just happened upon the middle of Spike Lee’s documentary “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” , which is on HBO (it is an HBO film, I think). I was transfixed, and horrified, all over again. I’ve set the system to record the next showing of all four acts in their entirety, and it is at the top of my viewing priorities. If you have not seen it, I recommend it, from the 20 minutes I’ve seen so far alone. Spike Lee looks to have done an excellent job. It is a documentary, to be sure, with the faces and voices of the people affected and involved on camera a great deal of the time, and it is also definitely a Spike Lee film in terms of look and feel and, of course, Terrence Blanchard’s music. See the synopsis (along with interviews with Lee) on HBO’s site here. Extract:

“New Orleans is fighting for its life,” says Lee. “These are not people who will disappear quietly – they’re accustomed to hardship and slights, and they’ll fight for New Orleans. This film will showcase the struggle for New Orleans by focusing on the profound loss, as well as the indomitable spirit of New Orleaneans.”

The first thing that springs to mind (other than the thoughts inspired by the content itself, most of which I am sure you’ve had yourself) is: Why is this not being shown in every movie theatre in the country? Documentaries have come back, right? We’ve all gone to see Michael Moore’s cleverly edited and scripted documentaries on various political issues. We’ve gone to see the even more cleverly edited and (oh yes) carefully scripted documentary “The March of the Penguins” and came away weeping at the thought that in 50 years, all that may be gone…. etc, etc. Should we not all be turning out in numbers to see this, showing events where actual human beings were lost and abandoned, in huge numbers? Families destroyed, lives torn assunder? Where the heart of so much of our culture was destroyed? If not, why not? I don’t care that it is 4 hours long. That’s not a good enough argument.

-cvj

Bullet Not Silver?

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I learned from New Scientist just now that various researchers working on modified gravity theories are casting doubt on the direct evidence of Dark Matter that was presented by Douglas Clowe and collaborators a few weeks ago. Recall an earlier post on it, here, and Sean Carroll’s post with more detail here.

Some quotes from the New Scientist article, written by Stuart Clark:

“One should not draw premature conclusions about the existence of dark matter without a careful analysis of alternative gravity theories,” writes John Moffat, of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada

There’s more in the paper astro-ph/0608675, where there is an analysis of the gravitational lensing seen in the merging cluster observations. Recall that the it is the lensing that was used as a key part of the story to show the separation of the dark matter from the ordinary matter. Moffat claims that this lensing can be explained in his modified gravity theory, “MOG”. There’s a real calculation suggesting this, apparently, although a full computation is still in progress:

Moffat has worked this out for the Bullet cluster using a one-dimensional model, and is now trying to extend this to two dimensions. If he succeeds, it will contradict Clowe’s direct evidence of dark matter.

(In other words, Moffat has not worked this out for the Bullet cluster.)

In related work,

HongSheng Zhao of the University of St Andrews in the UK and his collaborators applied a theory of modified gravity called TeVeS to the Bullet cluster.

This theory uses at least one extra field, which kicks in to affect the modification when Click to continue reading this post →

Help Ads As News

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Impressively, Stephen Hawking seems to have the Guardian newspaper doing his “help wanted” ads for him by cunningly disguising them as news articles. I spotted this here, in the Education section. I’ve no idea what this means, but it seems rather odd to me. Anyway, I’m knowingly passing on the information about the search, I suppose, by blogging it. So there. Go look at it, read the particulars, and get in touch with Cambridge if you’ve got “the right stuff”.

-cvj