Pope in Retreat on Evolution

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Er… I had in mind the other sense of the word “retreat”. Although the Catholic Church does officially agree that:

[…] the earth is roughly four billion years old and that species changed through evolution.

But then it gets a little messy after that, as you know. Although not utterly and manifestly silly like the hardcore “intelligent design” proponents, who would deny all the evidence of evolution staring them in the face. It is indeed a relief to read:

[…] scientists and church experts say they cannot imagine the study session ending with any alignment of the pope or the church with intelligent design or American-style creationism, which often posits that Earth is only about 6,000 years old.

“I suspect they will try to avoid it,” said the Rev. Joseph Fessio, an American priest and former student of the pope’s, who is taking part in the meeting, “because intelligent design has been represented either as a religion, which it is not, or as a science, which I think is indefensible.”

Study session? Pope? I’m quoting (above) from a New York Times article on the (now underway) annual meeting that the current Pope has every year at Castel Gandolfo (excellent satellite photo below from Amara via Google Maps!), where he has scholarly debates with other members of the clergy on various matters.

Castel Gandolfo

This year’s topic is evolution. Sadly, unlike (for example) the field of theoretical physics, there won’t be any streaming or downloadable video of the seminars and discussion sessions. Pity, really.

Anyway, the article, by Ian Fisher, is very interesting, so have a read here.

-cvj

Hot Holiday Weekend

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It is Labor Day here (for once I use the weird spelling, in deference to geography, etc) and, as usual it is incredibly hot. Already at 92 degrees by lunchtime, and I’m in a relatively cool part of the city. Tomorrow will have lots of pictures in the newspaper of amazing scenes of people sunning themselves on the beach, filling up Santa Monica and Venice beaches in a way that is impressive, given how huge those beaches are.

I don’t actually understand this traditional cooperation from the weather. It seems to consistently get super hot just in time for this symbolic “last day of summer”, at least for the last three years I remember. Back in England, the traditional set up is that on a long holiday weekend, by time the holiday Monday comes, it is raining. People are used to this and plan for it. There are exceptions from time to time, but that’s the tradition as I recall it. Has this changed in Blair’s new Britain, I wonder?

Well, here are some shots from other traditional holiday weekend activity…
measurementsdrillingplugsscrews

I should go and cycle by the beaches or something, but it is way too hot to go out right now (although I managed to get a couple of hours of morning hiking in the park to test out my boots’ repair). So I’m going to hibernate for a while. Then I’ll do some physics. Plenty of time for holiday fun once the sun sets.

-cvj

Rebooting

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At about 12000 ft up a mountain, near the supremely beautiful Willow Lake (my destination… I’ll tell you about this and why I was doing it in a little while, now that I’ve managed to get the pictures off my ailing Mingus) my faithful companions of 14 years -my Asolo AFX 530s- decided to disintegrate on me. I’ve had those boots since 1992/3 when I started hiking and backpacking properly in the USA, doing some trips up from Princeton (where I was at the time) to the Adirondacks in upstate New York, occasionally disappearing into the wilderness there for a few days with just enough equipment to do the job reasonably comfortably. They’ve stuck with me through thick and thin all these years, and I’ve given them a lot of work to do, especially in the mountains in the Aspen area.

Well, that last half hour sprint/hike after the waterfall over sharp rocks up to the lake was the last straw for one sole, and it shattered into pieces, and continued to shred to the footplate just beneath my left foot. Upon closer examination, the right sole was also cracking and leaving the boot in some places too. It was as though they’d both had enough and agreed to end it all together.

Some hours later, I (with two other members of the party – the others stayed at the Lake to camp overnight and then make an early assault on the 14000ft + peaks of Kit Carson and Challenger point) hiked back down toward the 8000ft point from where we bagan (near the village of Crestone, Colorado), and within 25 minutes were overtaken by torrential rain and a wonderful lightning storm, which had settled right on top of us. We hiked down the mountain for the next couple of hours or so in silence, broken only by the sounds of grand pianos falling down the stairs (thunder and lightning) and -at least to my ears- the loud squelching noise of my soggy-socked foot (now sticking out of the boot) as it sampled every puddle and rivulet made by the downpour.

Being sentimental, I brought them home back to California. Here they are:

sick boots

Yesterday I decided that it was time to begin the arduous search for a replacement pair. I was not looking forward to this because: Click to continue reading this post →

Fig Emergency

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Saturday morning’s fig harvest.

fig harvest

I think you’ll agree with me that this constitutes an emergency. I need to make some tasty thing or other in order to use these up. I’m thinking of something in the pie department. I have a few ideas of my own, but nothing is blowing my skirt up at this point. Recipe suggestions welcome… So dust off those recipes… Help!

-cvj

The Uncertainty Event

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Well, we had a full house. Really full. The auditorium at Annenberg has a seat capacity of 220, and all of those were in use, with people standing at the sides and sitting on the floor. In view of the fact that I was prepared to live with the fact that only ten or fifteen people might show up, this was a pleasant bonus. I think it helped that we were the first of the events of the Visions and Voices program (not counting the big gala opening last week), a fact that I did not take note of until I began to notice several of USC’s big cheeses milling around. This is a manifestation of the (relatively new) Provost’s vision, and so why would they not be there?

The audience was exactly what I’d dreamed of -or more appropriately, what the Provost had conjured up when he pitched the Arts and Humanities Initiative to all of us (see my earlier posts for extracts of his speech, here and here)- there were students and faculty from from an astonishing cross-section of the numerous schools, departments and programs that one can encounter by tracing a random 20 minute path through the campus on foot. I’m lucky enough to know a lot of these people, so it was a pleasure to look into the audience and see faculty, students and other friends from from Physics and Astronomy sitting next to faculty, students and other friends I know from the music school; and behind friends from the English department; right across from friends from political science who in turn were near students and faculty from the school of theatre, of cinema-television, etc. It was rather like happens when you invite friends from lots of different cicles to all come together to meet each other at a dinner party at your house. You’re excited since you’ve always wondered what it would be like to bring these people together, but you don’t know how it is going to turn out….but you’re sure it will be interesting. And maybe that’s enough to make it worthwhile.

It was worthwhile. We started off much closer to the appointed time than one can reasonably expect for any such large event. We had the Executive Vice Provost Barry Glassner deliver some introductory remarks, and then he handed over to Michael Parks, the Director of the Annenberg School of Journalism, who welcomed everyone to the Annenberg School and who in turn introduced KC Cole. He introduced her by recalling what he called a “typical KC Cole moment” back when he was her employer Click to continue reading this post →

Mingus and Ella

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Well, it’s the morning after. I did not wake up with that sort of cringing feeling that you get when the night before had an event you’d rather forget such as that time you said something incredibly stupid at a dinner party, or some other such thing. No, I woke up at 6:00 am feeling fine, even though I went to sleep at 2:00. The evening before was in fact rather enjoyable. Earlier I participated in the “Uncertainty” event, about which I’ll tell you shortly. I was up that late partly because I was trying to recover the data from the hard drive of my ailing powerbook, Mingus. It was a success! I was able to get it to start up from the recovery disc (by holding down the “C” key as I started), so that (after a partially successful attempt to get it to repair the main disc) I could restart it again with my finger on the “T” key. The latter operation meant that when it came on, Mingus would make itself available as an external hard drive to my imac (connected to it by a firewire cable), which is called Ella, by the way. I was then able to go to Ella’s screen and (lo and behold!) see all of my precious data that’s on Mingus. Dragging and dropping copied over 10-15 GB of stuff from Mingus over to Ella’s hard drive. So easy. I love macs. Especially when they have souls of great musicians. I can now try to arrange to send Mingus off to the doctor for surgery, some TLC, and some rest and recuperation. Time for Ella to do the hard work.

I’d better tell you about the event last night. Next post.

-cvj

Reminder of Uncertainty

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This is a reminder of today’s event here at the USC campus. I’ve no idea what is going to happen. Uncertain, I suppose I should say. That’s the fun of it…. we’ll just see what serendipity brings.

To kick off the events, I’m going to show that lovely clip from one of my favourite Coen brothers movies, “The Man Who Wasn’t There”, where the fancy lawyer from out of town, Freddie Riedenschneider, (played wonderfully by Tony Shalhoub) all of a sudden does this long speech about the Uncertainty Principle. I couldn’t believe it when I first saw it…. – it is rather overstated by the end of the scene, but as a piece of drama, it is excellent. Have you seen it? If not, get it. It’s an excellent movie all around.

Anyway, for more information on the event, see earlier post here. See poster below (large pdf here). Come back here for more discussion, or just give your impressions of the event!

uncertainty at USC poster

-cvj

California Steps Forward, Again

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You’ve probably heard the news wherever on the planet you are. California’s legislature is commiting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels (so, by 25%) by the year 2020. I’ve got a class to prepare, and so can’t spend a huge amount of time writing a long cheerleader-type post about this, but I am so delighted. (Stories in the BBC, LA Times and New York Times, for example.)

This is so important for so many reasons. Besides the obvious one of us just getting on with the task of doing this sort of thing, there is the symbolism. This flies in the face of the Bush administration’s lack of leadership on the whole issue, and will help nullify that lack of leadership, since the other states will be able to look to California’s lead on this as a powerful example. The world takes notice too, since California is -as an economic force in its own right- the number 8 economy in the world. None of this will happen if the economics are not done correctly.

The point is that it can make economic sense (despite fears that possible resulting Click to continue reading this post →

When Stars Go Bang

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supernova CAS-A

This is the lovely composite Hubble space telescope picture that is going around, showing the debris of a supernova – a star’s explosion. This is Cassiopeia A, and the explosion happened in 1680 AD, our time. See HST’s website for more on this , and discussion on the Bad Astronomy Blog

In other supernova news, there’s a lot of news today (Wed) about a new supernova explosion, recorded this year (2006). This particular event is highly significant since astronomers were able to watch most of the entire event in real time. The thing that signalled that something was about to happen was a (relatively mild) gamma ray burst (GRB060218 – it was seen in Feb. 18th) picked up by the Swift telescope. After the burst (really it was an X-ray flash… a GRB’s younger sibling, as it were) faded, the star exploded -essentially on camera.

Quote from an AFP (via Yahoo News) article:

“Usually these events are not detected until after the supernova has brightened substantially in the optical wavelength, many days after the initial explosion,” said Keith Mason, chief executive of Britain’s Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), which operates an ultra-violet/optical telescope aboard Swift.

“But on this occasion we were able to study the remarkable event in all its glory, from the very beginning.”

Other articles at the BBC (with images of the event – an article is due to appear in Nature tomorrow), and Reuters (via Yahoo).

-cvj

Keeping the Flame Alive

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[Updated, see below.]

hubble space telescope image of Pluto and CharonYou’ll recall the news I reported about a number of members of the astronomy and planetary science community asking people to sign a petition to get the IAU to reconsider their Prague decision to accept the planetary definition that resulted in the “Pluto demotion”. See this link where you can find the precise language of their objection. (HST image of Pluto and Charon on right. Click for larger.) The short statement at the header of the petition itself is:

We, as planetary scientists and astronomers, do not agree with the IAU’s definition of a planet, nor will we use it. A better definition is needed.

Well, this is an update to let you know that they have gathered all the signatures that they wanted, from members of the scientific community. The petition is now closed. I don’t know if I’m allowed to point to the website where you can see the list of signatures (I hope someone will let me know), but I can report that there are 300 signatures (after a quick count), from a truly international group, from every continent, and from pretty much every astronomy department (or other institution) that I’ve heard of. [Update: I’ve got permission from Mark Sykes, one of the proposers of this petition, to make public the website. It is here, and has the list of signatories. There is now a press release there. If you’re a member of the press, I imagine it might form the basis for an interesting story.]

Also on the website is the following:

Click to continue reading this post →

Longing

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I don’t know about you but I melt each of the (very few these days) times I receive a real letter, by post, that contains… stuff we used to put in letters. Not the endless formal letters from business, nor the fake personal ones from businesses (like the amazing fancily embossed wedding invitation I got a while back that turned out to be from HBO… it was an ad for the new TV series on polygamy, “Big Love”… did anyone else get that? Must have cost them a huge amount…. I’ve been to a few fancy weddings, and that invitation was in fact comparable in quality to some of those…)

It is all so rare to get real personal mail the old fashioned way these days. So many things done by email. Hundreds of emails. Too many sometimes. Fast. Too fast sometimes. Or is it just me?

I love the look and feel of a nicely addressed (airmail especially) envelope, with firm, flowing writing by an actual human being… I really miss that. I loved getting this one so much, loved the look of the exterior so very much, that it took me a while to actually (carefully) tear it open to get at the contents.

the letter

In fact, at the beginning of this Summer in a fit of good intentions, I bought some airmail envelopes and a pad of writing paper, with lots of mutterings about starting to actually write real hand-written letters again. It has not happened yet. Sigh….

-cvj

Cute!

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Lovely yellow folding bike, spotted on campus outside my building. Soooo cuuuuuute!

cute folding bike

Two comments:

(1) I wish they’d raise the seat on this bike, give it a bit of self respect so that it does not look like a children’s toy. (Assuming it is not… I am not familiar with this model. [Update: It is a “Zport” folding bike.]) Granted, I guess that it could be a small person riding it…. but most bikes are so often mal-adjusted to suit the rider, so I’m betting the person is taller than it would appear.

(2) Love the yellow. Obnoxious on a Hummer… cute on minis, beetles, and folding bikes.

(3) Ok, three comments. Poor thing, left outside on its own. Sad thing to do to a folder. Very sad. Should always be picked up and taken inside.

On point (1), since people can’t get past the small wheel prejudice….. you can have a properly adjusted seat post, and -on well designed models like the Brompton and others- have enough spread to allow as comfortable ride as on any bike regardless of size…. actually, sometimes more comfortable.

Here they are (the bike and my B) in conversation, in their respective park modes:

two cute folding bikes

My student, Tameem, almost got an injury from laughing at this picture. I’ve no idea why. He said, over IM (which I’ve cut and paste here with permission):

it almost looks like a bike bully trying to get money from the smaller bike….

wow, my head hurts from laughing so hard….

My response was to be “So how’s that calculation coming?” But he might have thought I had a sense of humour failure….. and actually, it is sort of funny.

-cvj

Mama Never Said There’d Be Two Contiguous Days Like This

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So yesterday continued the stretch of unfortunate events. I decided to hide and work on the paper to make up for the lost time from the day before. Got a good start, and then after a couple of hours, the computer started its weird behaviour. Slow….. applications hanging up for a long time… etc. Then I realized that it was super hot, perhaps more than it ever has been before. Perhaps brought on by it being a really hot day. Then I realized that I can’t recall the last time I have heard the fan on the computer. In fact, I’m not sure I ever have. A check via IM with one of my students confirmed that it is really obvious when the fan is on with this computer. So I formulated a theory that somehow the computer is not able to cool itself down in these extreme conditions. The fan needs repairing, the system is overheating and it is producing problems. I put it to sleep and into the freezer for a little while. A few minutes later, nice and crisp and cool (like a KitKat straight out of the fridge -delicious!) I started it up again. Runs perfectly. Aha!

So I went like this for a couple of cycles… Computer overheats, I cool it down, I get another hour of work or so done. But I’ve begun to worry that I’m about to lose my hard drive. This is a particular horror for me, since I’ve not backed up this computer for a long, long time, because….. The LaCie d2 250gb external hard drive I bought for the purpose mysteriously started to remain in stealth mode, i.e., not allow itself to be recognised by any of my computers.

So I spent several hours in the afternoon trying to figure out how to resurrect the drive Click to continue reading this post →