Blogs / Cosmic Variance

So on the walk back from the Cat and Fiddle that night (the night described in the previous post), as a result of a question from someone (I forgot who) about it, I got to thinking about the naming patterns for pubs in the UK. There’s an awful lot of pairs of things. In fact there are two of them in the previous post…. “The Cock and Bull”, “The Cat and Fiddle”, and there are several other well known ones like “The Dog and Duck”, “Rose and Crown”, “Fox and Hounds”, “Swan and Three Signets” (ok, that’s four). It’s also in newly made up names for chains, like “The Slug and Lettuce”, “The Hedgehog and Hogshead” (I love that one….) Notice that there’s often a sort of adversarial character to the pairing, which is rather nice…… There’s also possessive-type names like “The King’s Arms”, “The Nag’s Head”, etc. Those can be good too.

So on the way back from a cancelled concert just now (see previous post), I got to thinking….. In that topsy-turvy universe about which I plan to write a book or a screenplay one day, where the everyday popular culture is all based around science and scientists, the pub names might also reflect that. So what would be some good names for pubs, coming from science? I thought of a few really lame ones, but did not get any truly good ones. Then, I thought it might be a game you’d like to join in! Let’s try to make it challenging by having the names be in the traditional pub-type formats, such as those above.

Here are a few, off the top of my head:

The Particle and Wave
The Action and Reaction

Those fit the adversarial idea ok, but I just don’t like ‘em very much, frankly. I’m surprised how hard it is to think of good ones, but that might be because I’ve not had any dinner. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to put concepts together. How about some scientific instruments?

The Astrolabe and Compass.

Ooo! I like that… not quite adversaries, but a nice pairing with lots of history and the smell of damp leather. Always a good thing. Let me try another….

The Microscope and Spyglass.

Less good. Swapped Telescope out for the latter. Seemed better. But not a real success.

The Crucible and Calipers

Ha! That’s better on a second reading than I first thought.

The Mortar and Pestle

Of course! That’s nice. So nice there must be a pub named that already, no? If not, remember me what you steal the name….

Moving away from instruments for a moment, I just thought of:

The Glass and Crystal

Hmmm, interesting name. That takes a bit of explaining. Those are actually adversaries in a sense. One is disordered at the microscopic level and is in some senses is rather more like a liquid than a solid (there’s a long discussion to be had here….. second vs first order phase transition upon forming,….. etc etc…), while the other’s molecules are highly ordered.

The Cryostat and Furnace

That could be a fun one….

Ok, I’d better do some work now. I’m pretty sure that you can do better with this theme than I have. Have a go.

-cvj

I am supposed to be at a recital (here on campus) of songs by Purcell, Haydn, Beethoven, Vaughan Williams, and others, sung by the baritone Peter Lightfoot, a colleague from USC’s Thornton School of Music faculty, who I met when we were both new here. He was a neighbour in the excellent faculty residence complex in which you can rent a house when you’re new to the city. The TAs are working hard on grading the midterm we set earlier today (see here) and so as I have to stay on campus until they’re done (we try to get everything done immediately after the exam has been taken, and finish it all and announce the grades the same night) it was an opportunity to relax for a while and listen to some wonderful singing, before coming back to work on entering and analyzing the grades, etc. Well, I went to the recital hall and found that it was cancelled. Drat. So I’ve come back here and thought I would blog for a bit instead, since it is so much more attractive than having to write my Annual Activity Report, which is due tomorrow….

So last Friday I seriously needed cheering up, and so decided to go and see the newly released film by the often excellent director/writer Michael Winterbottom, “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story”. I was excited about this film when I saw the trailer, because many years ago I started reading the book “Tristram Shandy”, by Lauwrence Sterne (I never finished…I will one day). A dear friend, Richard Lee, who is the father of Zoe, who I tutored in Physics when I was a graduate student, insisted that I have his copy and that I should read it. It was around the time of writing my thesis, and focussing on that (among other things) meant that I never finished….

The book is well known in England, although not many people have read it. It is just well known, for some reason. It is quite bizarre, and pretty much unfilmable, which is why I wanted to see the film, especially when I heard who had made it. From the trailer, it was clear that they decided to build in the unfilmability of the book into the film itself, and the cast was so excellent (Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon), it was bound to be a treat.

Where was I? Oh, yes, so went to see the movie. It was clearly going to be a better “performance” of the film if one went along to a place that had a good audience (the Arclight, of course) and maybe with some like-minded friends, so I took some students along on a sort of “field trip”, like I did for Proof last semester (see post here). Admittedly, the connection to mathematics and physics is a bit harder to argue for in this case, but what the hey…. So there was Arnab and Rama from Team cvj, (that’s a sort of in-joke…see Wes Anderson’s wonderful “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”) , and Amy Cassidy from the Condensed Matter Theory group, and she brought along her friend Sam, who is not a student, but a web page architect. (Yes, she did use the word “architect”…. not a mere “designer”, I gather.) Anyway, Sam is probably way hipper than any of us, but she didn’t seem to mind being seen with us for an evening, bless her.

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The nominee lists for the 2005 Koufax Awards continue to appear, although I don’t think voting has opened yet. The most recent category is Best Expert Blog. Sadly, our hopes for a respectable bronze medal in this category have been dashed, as we apparently did not make the short list (despite being, you know, nominated a couple of times). But that’s okay, since we did get a nomination for Best New Blog (where we will doubtless be crushed), and more importantly because there are a passel of great blogs that did get nominated. Go check them out, and be prepared to vote!

Update: Never mind. We were nominated after all, just a little computer glitch. So, that bit about a “passel of great blogs”? Rubbish. Those are terrible blogs. Uninspired hackwork. An embarassment to the very idea of blogging. Really, we should win by process of elimination, and it’s up to you to provide the honest votes needed to ensure that just is served.

(Actually, in this crowd CV will be lucky to finish in the top half. We are happy to be the George Clooney of the blogosphere.)

I learn a lot from reading Brad DeLong or the economically-inclined folks at Crooked Timber, but I get special enjoyment from Marginal Revolution. (I’m actually not being sarcastic for once, in case it’s unclear.) Much like training in physics affects they way you view the physical world, training in economics affects the way you view — well, almost everything. All of life becomes an exercise in maximizing returns and minimizing costs, subject to constraints. Consider for example the Tennis Ball Problem.

How many tennis balls should you play with?

Let’s say you had many, many balls and you could open the cans for free and never run out. Opening a new can every four points (four balls fit in a can) would lead to a massive clean-up and carry problem at the end. Furthermore how much help is it having more balls? Once they hit the net you still have to deal with getting another ball into play. In other words, the real trick is to manage your stock well (read: aim for good volleys), not to just to speed up the flow of balls into the court.

Just one ball is not efficient, because when it falls out of play it is probably far from you. The greater the number of balls, the more likely at least one will be close.

Many problems in life, including those of dating, the number of children you should have, and optimal inventory management, resemble the tennis ball problem.

I do not know how to solve the tennis ball problem, but I feel that twelve balls is too many.

Those last two sentences just about sum it up, don’t they?

I have a soft spot for Ohio, having spent three wonderful years there as a postdoc at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). I am therefore delighted that, as reported, for example, in The New York Times

The Ohio Board of Education voted 11 to 4 Tuesday to toss out a mandate that 10th-grade biology classes include critical analysis of evolution and an accompanying model lesson plan, dealing the intelligent design movement its second serious defeat in two months.

(I can imagine that some people will jump to wonder how a scientist can be against critical analysis, and so I’d like to preempt that by pointing out that this mandate wasn’t really about critical analysis; it was, of course, about intelligent design.)

Beating back the IDiots takes a huge amount of work and I really think all scientists should be grateful to the people who devote some of their time to dealing with it. For example, when I was at CWRU, Lawrence Krauss and I frequently discussed the battle for reason against the forces of nonsense, and I’m delighted that Lawrence has become one of those people publicly fighting against creationism, both in Ohio and beyond.

Beyond individual efforts, an organization which can be relied upon to help out in any battle against ID/creationism is the National Center for Science Education, headed by Eugenie C. Scott, who does a tremendous job.

… Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, called the Ohio vote “a significant victory” and said it should give pause to school districts and states considering changes in how evolution is taught.

The Discovery Institute had offered Ohio as a national model for its “teach the controversy” approach on evolution. Kansas, Minnesota, New Mexico and Pennsylvania have adopted similar “critical analysis” standards, and the South Carolina Board of Education is scheduled to vote next month on whether to add a similar phrase to its curriculum guidelines.

“This language from Ohio, the critically-analyze-evolution type language, is sprouting up all over, in both the local level, as well as with other state standards,” Ms. Scott said. “The Ohio board has recognized its error, and other school districts should not make that same error.”

I’ve been a member of the NCSE for a few years now and encourage as many of you as possible to join and help them out, at least financially, with their great work. You can join right here; it’s not too expensive and you’ll be doing a very good deed.

NCSE keeps track of all the school board challenges to evolution in all states, and is prepared to send rapid response teams to help concerned parents and educators fight back against often well-organized creationists. On their website you can learn about these battles, and better equip yourself to help out, should nonsense spring up in your own community. If you become a member, you’ll even receive a regular newsletter with all the relevant news, book reviews and more.

Well, all you other single types out there on Valentine’s Day night, why not dream with me a bit about food? It’s rather pleasant to share my memories of more excellent food from the south of Taiwan, the city of Tainan. I’ve already told you a bit about it in previous posts, (see here, here and here) so this continues the story. Recall that - after dashing off after my seminar in Tapei, a four and a half hour bus journey - I’d just arrived in the city late at night, and was promptly taken off to an excellent restaurant, where we spent some considerable time eating into the wee hours (and a rather drunk restaurant hostess was trying to seduce me with the aid of Taiwan beer)….

That first meal was the first of several where I could really dig deep into the considerable and wonderful culinary depths of the culture. For the next 48 hours I’d not be just sampling things I could figure out how to order on my own…I’d have help (such as with that last meal) from a fellow food lover, my dear friend Huei-Shih Liao, who lives in the city. So I could discover the really advanced stuff, get things that aren’t even on the menu, and learn a lot about the food and history too. It was actually Huei-Shih I came to see in Tainan (having met her in Taipei back in 1997), and to meet her husband and young daughter. The fact that Tainan also happens to be a fantastic historic city with arguably the best food in Taiwan was just a lucky bonus. It was enough for me to see my old friend in her home country again. That was the highlight of the whole Walkabout actually.

Well, anyway, the next excellent meal was in the morning. In a specialist breakfast place somewhere in the city (there are several by the side of the road), and I got to try several of those tasty eggy-things I recall from my first random samplings in Taipei eight years ago (see here). Basically, delicious variations on spring onion omelettes and savoury pancakes of some sort.

A major component of the meal that I would never have been able to appreciate without Huei-Shih’s patient guidance through the menu: Soy milk drinks of various sorts. Perfect accompaniment, along with hot milky tea (which I knew about from the last visit and am addicted to)!

After that, visits to temples and old forts…. excellent, but more later… let’s stay with the food here. I’m a big fan of buns of various sorts (steady now…), and dumplings….. basically the whole range of soft, warm, yielding things you bite into to reveal some delicious filling or other. There is an infinite variety there that you can pick up for lunch or just a quick restorative snack between temples. Actually, it is quite common to find really excellent food places near temples. This is not an accident, I’m told. The visit to the temple would be followed by a stop for a good meal, going back numerous generations, so why not have them conveniently adjacent to each other, to this day?

I love the containment paraphenalia associated to the food as well. The kit. The equipment. Case in point, those woven containers that the various dumpling sorts come in….. Have a look. Lovely. I just love those. I think I’ll get some for my own dumpling experiments later. (Which reminds me… my noodle experiments have been going very well. I should report on them some time.)

That night (after wandering around Tainan’s original street, packed with edible goodies (more…)

The next Categorically Not! is next Sunday (26th Feb.). You may recall my post on 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.

This one is about “Attraction”. I suppose that it is appropriate to do this announcement today, as it’s Valentine’s day. (I remembered this not because anyone sent me a Valentine’s day card (sigh… sniff), but because today almost every street corner I passed in the city has someone standing there with a sea of supposedly cute white bears with pink/red hearts, balloons with hearts, and other weird things with hearts on. What’s wrong with just selling some nice flowers, I wonder?)

Anyway, here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

Birds do it; bees do it; so do molecules, magnets and stars. The force of attraction is one of the most complex and mysterious influences in the universe. Why do people fall in love? Why is electromagnetism trillions upon trillions of times stronger than gravity? For that matter, why does peanut butter stick to the roof of your mouth? Poetry, theater, and music all are moved (and move us) by the force of attraction one way or another.

For this month’s Categorically Not! Robert Winter—the first Presidential Chair in Music and Interactive Arts at UCLA—will tell (and show) how Western music developed “rules” governed by principles of attraction (whether voice leading, harmonic motion, rhythmic design, or overall structure)—and how this “language of attraction” has come to express its core values. An accomplished pianist in several styles, Robert is equally renowned as an author of scholarly works on Beethoven, a multimedia performer, the creator of digital outreach programs for Carnegie Hall, and the force behind music festivals from Malibu to Aspen (where he serves on the faculty of the Aspen Festival).

Getting physical, chemists Robin Garrell and Kendall Houk—whose labs at UCLA investigate how molecules recognize and attract each other, stick or slip, grab or let go—will use a PowerPoint “tag team” approach to describe the physical origins of attractive phenomena—including gravity, magnetism and electrostatics. They’ll draw from their own studies to explain how mussels adhere to ship hulls and also how computational studies allow chemists to “see” molecules reacting—revealing, for example, how pharmaceuticals are attracted to biological receptors.

For drama, Nancy Linehan Charles will explore manifestations of attraction to God, goats and even people as seen through the eyes of poets and playwrights. A two-time winner of the L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Ovation Award for Toys in the Attic, Nancy’s TV appearances include 24, The West Wing, E.R., Joey and recurring roles on Huff and Six Feet Under; she played the bad guy’s wife in Spielberg’s Minority Report, and has adapted four Shakespeare plays for middle schoolers. Nancy’s currently performing in Ayckbourn’s Woman in Mind at the Pacific Resident Theatre (until 2/26).

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. For more information, visit the Categorically Not! website.

Hope to see some of you there!

-cvj

GREENBELT, Maryland (AP) — Bad news continued to accumulate for the Bush administration today, when senior government officials revealed that someday the Sun will go out and the world will end. Despite attempts to classify this sensitive information, whistleblowers at NASA confirm that our planet’s star does, indeed, have only a finite amount of hydrogen with which to produce energy via nuclear fusion.

Evidence of this scandal came to light only slowly, after investigation of comet dust around a white dwarf star far from our solar system.

“We are seeing the ghost of a star that was once a lot like our sun,” said Marc Kuchner of the Goddard Space Flight Center. In a statement that was edited out of the final news release he went on to say, “I cringed when I saw the data because it probably reflects the grim but very distant future of our own planets and solar system.”

This alarming prognosis was quickly suppressed by officials. Senior sources insist that, in a post-9/11 climate, it is the government’s duty to reassure the public of the stability and security of heavenly objects.

An e-mail message from Erica Hupp at NASA headquarters to the authors of the original release at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said, “NASA is not in the habit of frightening the public with doom and gloom scenarios.”

The Bush administration and its allies in Congress have recently been buffetted by a series of setbacks, including the absence of WMD’s in Iraq, the continuing failure to capture Osama bin Laden, a ballooning budget deficit, increasing anti-Americanism abroad, corruption scandals that have forced Tom DeLay to step down as House Majority Leader, an unworkable Medicare prescription-drug plan, fallout from the disastrously inept response to hurricane Katrina, continuing investigations into the outing of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and Vice-President Cheney’s habit of shooting his friends in the face with a shotgun. These troubles were recently compounded by revelations that NASA had been moving to expunge any mention of troublesome scientific facts from its public presentations. Officials insisted that political considerations played no role in the dying-Sun scandal.

Dean Acosta, NASA’s deputy assistant administrator for public affairs, said the editing of Dr. Kuchner’s comments was part of the normal “give and take” involved in producing a press release. “There was not one political person involved at all,” he said.

A high-ranking White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, insisted that the finite nature of the Sun’s fuel had first become known during the Clinton administration, although apparently no action had been taken to deal with the problem.

Much has been said here about the image that the public has about scientists - how we dress, how we work, what makes us laugh…In particular, one study concluded that children did not picture scientists as “normal young and attractive men and women.” Fermilab did their own study, asking 7th graders to draw pictures of scientists before and after visiting the laboratory - with markedly different images resulting from meeting real scientists at work.

And this topic came up at SLAC over the weekend. The annual DOE Bay Area Science Bowl was held at SLAC on Saturday. I unfortunately had a conflict this year and could not participate, but it’s a great event and a pure delight to watch the kids think about science and reason their way through problems The winning team was from Harker School in San Jose and they will compete in the national Science Bowl held in DC at the end of April. Good luck to Harker School!

In the midst of the action last Saturday, this group of science-oriented teenagers saw this picture:
Their comments were:

Gosh, scientists obviously work hard because in this picture they are working late at night, have used up the blackboard, and are wearing their pajamas.

You know that’s a real quote, because no one could make that up if they tried! Next time I put on a skirt and heels, I will try hard not to think of it as pajamas! However, note that the kids did not think it strange that a group of women would be discussing science….now that’s real progress! Pajamas and all…

One of the reasons I love teaching is because there are times when you’ll never know what will occur to you mid-sentence, and then get incorporated into the lecture. No two lectures on the same material are ever alike… they get created afresh by your mood, your state of health, mind, body, the questions that get asked, and….. bad physics jokes!

Today I was demonstrating in my physics 408b class -Electromagnetism- what I consider to be one of the greatest (and most accessible) triumphs of theoretical and experimental physics working together: The fact that you can take Maxwell’s equations and show that they predict a wave-like phenomenon - which would have been interesting enough - but the prediction includes a specific value for the speed of propagation of of that wave, deriving it out of already known constants whose values were known from laboratory experiments in electromagnetism - and that speed is the speed of light! I still think that this is just one of the coolest things you ever see as an undergraduate in physics, and it still blows my skirt up even now.

So what was the bad physics joke? Oh, well, it really is bad. I was in the middle of saying that Maxwell’s equations are coupled differential equations, but that we can decouple them and see something interesting (what will turn out to be the wave equation) by simply curling, a practice which still survives to this day as an Olympic sport…..

There’s a lot of pleasure to be had in gagging with laughter while twelve young faces sit there stonily looking at you as though you’re nuts. That reaction just makes me laugh even more, and it feeds on itself. Took me a bit of time to recover.

Sorry about that joke (I won’t explain it….you had to be there and it is sort of an in-joke). It just occured to me mid-sentence. I can’t stop these things. (By the way, I saw somewhere on the web that my ipod Planck joke, an excellent opportunity to explain a bit about the physics of the holographic principle, was called the “nerdiest joke ever”…..I’m actually secretly very pleased about that. You won’t tell, will you?)

One of many bad physics jokes/puns I recall from my undergraduate years came up in a quantum mechanics lecture. We’d just learned about operators and commutators. Now I can’t recall if this showed up as a result of passing notes to each other during the lecture, or after, (and was probably thought up by my incredibly sharp and funny classmate Andrew Waters…. I wonder what happened to him) but I remember plainly the excellent groans it provoked in all who saw it:

I hope that made you groan too. I particularly like its resonance with the Los Angeles lifestyle.

To compensate for the curling remark, I’ll end with a better bad physics pun, or collection thereof. (more…)