One of the things I pointed to in my discussion of science writing issues yesterday (see previous post) was this brilliant Guardian article* by Martin Robbins. Of course, the classes had already seen it, and it is several weeks old now, but if you have not seen it, you simply must. It is so hilarious and so sharply observed that it should be as widely seen as possible.
Many of the comments left are brilliant too, written in the same style.
Enjoy!
-cvj
*Thanks Yvette!!!!
(Waiting for the kettle to boil…)
It has been a rather hectic week for me here in the city of Angels. It is difficult to pull it all together in my mind and recall all the contributing elements, but they have been varied and more or less interesting and useful activities, ranging from various committees, teaching issues, research issues, event planning, event attending, and of course, the Project.
(Kettle’s boiled. Water poured on tea. Assam/Ceylon blend…)
I want to work for a bit before going to bed, although I’ll knock off early (midnight) because I’ve got to get up very early in the morning to get prettied up a bit, walk to catch the bus to campus, and get there by 8:15am or so. This is so I can get to my office and put on a cap, hood and gown and play dress-up (remember last time?) with hundreds of colleagues and so forth. The event? The inauguration of our new University President.
I’ve just returned from a long afternoon and evening in which I appeared in two of the classes of my colleague KC Cole (the science writer) talking about the issue of science, and how I do various aspects of communicating it to the public through various means (writing, film, tv, radio; factual, in fiction/drama, through blogging, in speaking engagements), and the broad issue of writing and journalism in that area. Two groups of extremely engaged and bright students in a row, separated by a quick Click to continue reading this post
Well, it is not often I get to say this, but Sunday’s CicLAvia event was, for me, completely perfect. It was simply about community, family, and enjoying the streets. It did not have an overtly political or activist vibe to it (as is often the case when you try to do some things a little differently from others in this town, like ride the bus or walk to the grocery store), and I saw a lot more people simply enjoying (and remarking on it out loud) the fact that they were out on the streets of the city than I saw people proclaiming rabid anti-car sentiments, as I’ve seen at bike-centric events before. I think the former feeling will go a lot further in making lasting change than the latter in the long run. There was some political content around, but it was largely confined to the steps of City Hall, where (when I passed) there were endearingly naive chants being led by a bloke with a microphone about “LA saying no to oil!’ and “no to coal!”. Don’t get me wrong – naive is not necessarily used as a derogatory term here. Noble dreams begin with a heavy dose of naivete, I believe. Hope, against the odds, for significant change, and so forth. (I could use the fully decorated version, naïveté, but it looks a bit pretentious to me today…)
So the event was mostly about people getting out there and enjoying the city streets, and sharing their enjoyment by doing it together. I was impressed with the turnout Click to continue reading this post
Getting ready to disappear off to explore the route. Should be fun, although it is a tad too hot a day for it to be perfect for cycling and wandering long in the sun. On the other hand, that will bring a lot of people out to enjoy their Sunday outdoors, I hope, walking, cycling, rollerblading, skateboarding, running, etc.
This morning’s announcement reminds me of an author I’ve yet to read any works from:
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2010 was awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.
The press release is here. I hope to hear more about this man and his work next week. I’m organizing the Nobel Lunches again this year (and event I told you about last year that I started with the support of the College Commons) and so I will be spending the next several days trying to find Click to continue reading this post
Seems that carbon might be a theme in this week’s Nobel slate, on the science side, so far. It was graphene in the Physics spotlight yesterday, a two dimensional carbon material, and today’s Chemistry announcement features carbon molecules too:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2010 to Richard F. Heck (University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA), Ei-ichi Negishi (Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA) and Akira Suzuki (Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan), “for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis”
It is all about organic chemistry, and in the press release, you can learn more.
On the other hand, the prize for Physiology or Medicine (to Robert G. Edwards Click to continue reading this post
The first CicLAvia is this Sunday! Don’t forget! The sudden Winter weather we’ve been having will have vanished by then, and it will be a lovely day. There’s a seven-mile route of city streets for you to walk, bike, run, etc. Should be fun!
See my description of one I saw in Morelia, Mexico, here. More information on this first Click to continue reading this post
Wow! For Graphene! Excellent:
The announcement:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2010 to Andre Geim (University of Manchester, UK) and Konstantin Novoselov (University of Manchester, UK) “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene”
I like the opening descriptive paragraph in the press release: Click to continue reading this post
Noticed this on the shelves in a supermarket yesterday. (I was hunting for clotted cream, but that’s another story.) I can’t recall if I’ve known before that “quark” was also a kind of cheese.
I suspect that this might have potentially amusing physics joke uses in the future.
To further my education, I looked up quark cheese on Wikipedia. All very interesting. Click to continue reading this post
Hmm. Well, after the kerfuffle of before, it seems that some people have got together and raised money to keep the monthly Art Walk going! So there will apparently be one this month after all, with certain aspects modified. Hurrah! In other news, the group that has broken off to set up a quarterly one that makes it all more about the art (after the shocking! (not) revelation! that the Art Walk had stopped being about Click to continue reading this post
It has been a quiet week here on the blog, and there are many reasons for this. They are mostly all to do with me having a very busy week at work and at play. Work has seen a great deal on the usual fronts of teaching, research, and service, and I’ve also made some progress on The Project. Play has been good, varied, valuable and constructive.
Right now, I’m popping off to bed to get some sleep before getting up to go over to UCLA for the second day of the Southern California Strings Seminar. Today, day one, was excellent.
I will be giving you an update on various aspects of all those above things shortly, but right now I will leave you with a moody photo of some strings of lights at the Edison, that bar downtown I sometimes mention here. I had an excellent evening down there on Thursday night.
-cvj
Oh! I almost forgot to remind local readers that the next Southern California Strings Seminar is happening this week. Friday and Saturday.
It will be held at UCLA, and there’s a great line up of speakers. As I’ve said here before, graduate students are especially encouraged to come…
…since special effort is made to make sure that each talk begins with a pedagogical portion to help non-experts in that subfield navigate and see the motivation.
The speakers and talks are:
Click to continue reading this post
The West Hollywood Book Fair was fun to visit yesterday, even through the huge heat wave we’ve been having. I struggled through the heat to a bus stop and was rewarded with one almost immediately I arrived, to my relief. Even the bus seemed tired as it trundled along through the sweltering city to West Hollywood, where I jumped off and wandered into the grounds of the event. I poked around the stands with books, authors, and other people on display, chatting here and there with interesting people.
I was not on a panel this year (see last year’s report here and here – I don’t think there was anything on science or science-writing this year), so decided to listen to a Click to continue reading this post
Last night, Glow, the biennial evening to late night gathering down on Santa Monica beach, was fun. There were even some interesting exhibits to look at and interact with, as sort of a bonus! Below (and above) are a few images I took while down there. Click for larger view. Look at the guide on the website to figure out which piece you might be viewing, and go here for links to more photos and so forth. The piece captured in the photograph above, Day for Night, (Santa Monica pier and the carousel in the background) was one of my favourites. See description and information about its creators here.
…And in other news about changes to events I frequent and blog about (see list at end), the downtown LA ArtWalk, which had turned into a monthly street festival (that had very little to do with art, but so what?) that brought downtown alive by attracting people from all over the city, has been canceled, to the surprise of many. I’m shocked by this but at the same time not entirely surprised as I have seen the seeds of this before. (The photo is of a piece entitled “Faith Machine”, by Robert Reynolds, that I saw in Bert Green’s gallery in 2008. Click on the photo to jump to the post about it, and a video showing its lovely breathing action…)
As much as it has moved to being more of a walking city than it is given credit for by most people, something I talk a lot about here, I have to admit that Los Angeles still does not really know how to deal with too many people on the streets. And by “too many” I mean levels that would be regarded as normal in so many other places. The expectation is that too many people (especially in neighbourhoods that are not in the, er, supposedly more genteel West side of the city) is simply a bad thing that is prone to turn into a “problem”. That is always the first reaction. In any case, it is certainly reasonable that some level extra policing is needed for safety, etc., but this is where things get sticky. The increase in policing that is needed to deal with the extra people puts a strain on resources, and there ensues an argument for who will pay the bill. So crowds are simply regarded as clearly negative, instead of an opportunity to build community, express humanity, and for other things involving positive person-to-person connections that this city needs more of. So the thing seems to have been killed because a model for how to foot the bill for extra policing could not be worked out… There may be more to it than that, but that rough model seems to fit the pattern I’ve seen before**.
My main point here is that by LA standards the ArtWalk had grown to become a large crowd, but it was no larger than a typical Summer’s weekend evening in Times Click to continue reading this post
