In one of my recent posts, about the Quantum to Cosmos meeting, I was enthusing about the beautiful physics of cold atoms. While writing, I was reminded of a wonderful Java applet about this topic, which I learned about in a colloquium that I saw Carl Weiman give a few years ago, before he won the Nobel Prize (but when people were sure he was going to get it).

The particular applet I was thinking of was one on evaporative cooling, which is a method used to obtain an extremely cold collection of atoms. The way this works is simple in principle, but difficult in practice. First, atoms are contained (or trapped) by a magnetic field in the shape of a bowl, (see screenshot below).

As time passes, occasionally some atoms will borrow enough energy from the group that they are able to escape the trap, taking all that energy with them. Next, after doing this for a while, one gradually reduces the strength of the magnetic field and waits again. The trick is to let the very few atoms carrying just the very highest energies escape at each step. If one repeats, being careful to reduce the magnetic field slowly enough, one can end up with a rather large collection of extremely cold atoms in this way.

The applet is only part of an extensive educational site called Physics 2000 from the University of Colorado, Boulder, physics department. Physics 2000 contains a number of different parts, but the piece that is most directly related to the physics I was discussing in my post can be found in The Atomic Lab, which has excellent pedagogical discussions of Interference Experiments and of Bose-Einstein Condensation.

The discussions are at a level that can be enjoyed by professional physicists (I enjoyed them and learned things from them) but also should be fun and informative for interested non-physicists, including kids. They are arranged as question and answer sessions between two people. Here’s the bit that comes just before one plays with the laser cooling applet, describing the apparatus necessary a couple of steps before evaporative cooling comes in

[Professor] Shining light on your hand makes it get hotter because the light is absorbed and turns into heat. The trick to making atoms colder is to make the light bounce off of them. In fact, it bounces off with more energy than when it hits the atoms.

[Student] That sounds like quite a trick.

[Professor] It is. It took physicists quite a while to figure out how to do it. (Click here to find out more about laser cooling and the winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics.) You start with the idea that laser light comes in a stream of photons. These photons are very light, so to speak. Compared to an atom, they are like ping-pong balls compared to a bowling ball. But in just the same way you can push a bowling ball around if you shoot a big enough stream of ping-pong balls at it, you can push atoms around by bouncing laser light off them. Try to adjust the laser power and laser position to slow down the atoms.

The applet being talked about here looks like this

I hope you have as much fun as I did playing with the applets.

Incidentally, a measure of Weiman’s commitment to science education is that he is moving to spend most of his time at the University of British Columbia working on just that - quite remarkable for any physicist, never mind a Nobel laureate.

I’ve been meaning to post about the claim that experimenters have demonstrated that the proton/electron mass ratio is changing with time. Although it’s a fascinating discovery if true, there’s something that doesn’t quite smell right about it. So I hit on the idea of first posting about the idea of physics claims not “smelling” right more generally. But then I thought that such a post would necessarily involve a careful exposition of one particular example. So it’s time for the story of the Screwy Universe.

In April 1997, while a postdoc at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, I received an email from George Field, who had been my Ph.D. advisor. He was suggesting that I take a look at a news article that had appeared on the front page of the New York Times. George is one of my favorite people in the whole world, and I owe whatever success I may have had as a scientist to his insightful guidance in my early career. But okay, I was busy, and didn’t immediately look at the article — lots of crazy stuff appears in the NYT, after all.

But George wrote again, gently suggesting that I really should take a look at this article, which I finally did. And it was indeed striking. Two scientists, Borge Nodland of the University of Rochester and John Ralston of the University of Kansas, were claiming that they had detected a violation of a fundamental principle of modern cosmology — isotropy, the idea that space looks the same in every direction. In particular, they had considered the polarization of radio waves coming from distant quasars, and looked for a rotation of the polarization angle as the waves traveled through space. And they had found evidence of just such a rotation! If N&R were right, there was a preferred direction in the cosmos — along that direction, polarized radio waves would gently corkscrew as they traveled through space, while in the opposite direction they would twist the other way. Completely contrary, of course, to our conventional expectations, which are that (1) polarized waves maintain their polarization angles in empty space, rather than rotating, and (2) every direction in the sky is basically equivalent to every other direction.

Clearly important stuff. But for George and me this hit particularly close to home, as we had previously collaborated with particle theorist Roman Jackiw on a very similar-sounding project, looking for gentle rotations in the polarization of distant sources (and not finding any). In fact, this work with George and Roman was the topic of my first published paper. Our motivation was to test Lorentz invariance by searching for the effects of a constant vector field spread throughout spacetime. It turns out that such a vector can couple to ordinary electromagnetism, but only in certain specified ways. We showed that, if the vector pointed mostly in the time direction of spacetime, its effect would be to uniformly rotate the observed polarization of distant radio sources; we then searched for such an effect in the existing data, and didn’t find any. My job as the beginning graduate student was to look in the literature for measurements of the polarization angles and redshifts of as many galaxies as I could find. I managed to scrape up 160 such galaxies, which was enough to put a good limit on the effect we were looking for. (I should say that, as a nervous beginning graduate student, George was extremely intimidating because of his formidable intellect and amazing accomplishments, but in other circumstances one would recognize that he was extremely gentle and easygoing. Roman, on the other hand, was intimidating, period. But also fantastically smart, and an excellent collaborator once one calmed down and got into the science.)

At the time, anxious young ingenue that I was, I was somewhat worried that writing my first paper on a topic as outlandish as Lorentz violation might spell the premature end of my career. Nowadays, of course, it is all the rage, and we are proud pioneers.

So the news of Nodand and Ralston’s work had a personal resonance — it sounded like they were investigating something similar. And then I noticed in the NYT story — 160 radio galaxies! These guys were using the very data I had typed in as a first-year grad student. (Although, as it later turned out, they were careful enough to check everything, and had found a few typos.) In fact they had basically done exactly the same thing that we had done, except that they had considered a Lorentz-violating vector field that was pointing in a spatial direction instead of in the time direction. As a result, they were asking whether there was a direction-dependent rotation of polarizations — clockwise if you looked at one side of the sky, counter-clockwise if you looked at the other — rather than a uniform one across the sky. And, remarkably, they seemed to be saying that there was such a rotation!

But I didn’t believe it, not for a second. True, we hadn’t carefully placed a limit on such an effect, but I was convinced that I would have noticed it in the course of playing around with the data. Not to mention, there was no good theoretical reason to suspect that such an effect might exist. In short, it didn’t smell right.

As it turns out, Nodland and Ralston had simply made a mistake. Continue reading ‘The Screwy Universe’

I’m typing this with one hand, while with the other I’m picking up the remaining pieces of my recently exploded head. “Why would Mark’s head explode?”, I hear you ask. Because he saw this!

It’s about a new video game called Left Behind: Eternal Forces. Here’s a taster:

You are on a mission - both a religious mission and a military mission — to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state - especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is “to conduct physical and spiritual warfare”; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice.

You really have to read the whole thing for the full effect. One usually hears from evangelical groups that a lack of Christian morals and the influence of violent television, movies, music and video games are to blame for atrocities such as school shootings. It may be a little harder to make that point now.

More seriously, I would be interested to see the reaction of mainstream Christians and other religious groups to this. I’d also like to see what Republicans (who rely on this constituency more than ever) and even Democrats like my junior Senator - Hillary Clinton - who have spoken out about the supposed detrimental effects of violent media, have to say about it. One would hope that a chorus of condemnation would follow, but I’m not exactly holding my breath.

One can’t help but think of the following. Suppose that a fundamentalist Muslim game designer came out with an analogous game in which the goal was to systematically exterminate Christians and Jews until they were wiped from the face of the Earth. I expect we’d see outrage on a national level.

If you’ve ever thought about getting me a present but didn’t know what to get - a believable explanation of why this is a hoax would be just lovely, thanks!

(via Pharyngula)

Barack Obama has a new book coming out in October, The Audacity of Hope. Here is a sample (pdf).

For me, none of this [disagreement in the Senate] was entirely surprising. From a distance, I had followed the escalating ferocity of Washington’s political battles: Iran-Contra and Ollie North, the Bork nomination and Willie Horton, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, the Clinton election and the Gingrich Revolution, Whitewater and the Starr investigation, the government shutdown and impeachment, dangling chads and Bush v. Gore. With the rest of the public, I had watched campaign culture metastasize throughout the body politic, as an entire industry of insult—both perpetual and somehow profitable—emerged to dominate cable television, talk radio, and the New York Times bestseller list.

And for eight years in the Illinois legislature, I had gotten some taste of how the game had come to be played. By the time I arrived in Springfield in 1997, the Illinois Senate’s Republican majority had adopted the same rules that Gingrich was then using to maintain absolute control of the U.S. House. Without the capacity to get even the most modest amendment debated, much less passed, Democrats would shout and holler and fulminate, and then stand by helplessly as Republicans passed large corporate tax breaks, stuck it to labor, or slashed social services. Over time, an implacable anger spread over the Democratic caucus, and my colleagues would carefully record every slight and abuse meted out by the GOP. Six years later, Democrats took control, and Republicans fared no better. Some of the older veterans would wistfully recall the days when Republicans and Democrats met at night for dinner, hashing out compromise over a steak and cigar. But even among these old bulls, such fond memories rapidly dimmed the first time the other side’s political operatives selected them as targets, flooding their districts with mail accusing them of malfeasance, corruption, incompetence, and moral turpitude.

Reading this, straightforward description of political machinations though it may be, is enough to make me cry. I’m usually skeptical of rosy descriptions of how much better things were in the good old days, but it’s pretty clear that our political culture has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Sadly, I think that the splintering of communications channels has a lot to do with it — and yes, that includes blogs. Not only can everyone get news and information from sources that confirm their worst prejudices, but there is plenty of nonsense available on the other side (whatever that may be) for them to make fun of and feel superior. I don’t have any clever prescriptions for making it better, but increasing polarization and scorched-earth tactics will be an incredible barrier to political progress for decades to come.

Obama, of course, has a magical gift for overcoming (or at least seeming to) these barriers. What he says makes so much sense, and he says it so well, and it directly speaks to a yearning that so many people have for a more dignified and respectful dialogue, it’s hardly surprising that he’s become such a hit in such a short time. Too bad, people say, that he’s not more experienced, or he’d make a great candidate for national office — but for 2008 Democrats seem to be stuck with a field so uninspiring that Al Gore is thought of as some sort of savior.

Well, screw that. I think Obama should run in ‘08. (And I’m sure his strategy team is hanging on my every word.) What’s wrong with being young and inexperienced? Obama will be 47 that year — Teddy Roosevelt was 42, John Kennedy was 43, and Bill Clinton was 46 when they were elected, and they did okay. Sure, he’s had less than one full term in the Senate, but that seems like an advantage rather than a liability. The Senate tends to gradually strangle its members’ suitability to run for President, as they become accustomed to its lethargic rhythms and hamstrung by awkward voting records. Now is the perfect time! Obama should run while he’s still a hot property. (Not that I think he actually will.)

Of course, there is an elephant in the room that Obama would have to deal with if he ran for the White House — namely, he’s black. Pundits like to contemplate African-American candidates like Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice, but my suspicion is that there are a substantial number of Americans who just aren’t going to vote for a black candidate, even if they won’t admit it to pollsters. And that certainly doesn’t only include Republicans. On the other hand, Obama could set an inspirational example just by running a competitive campaign, regardless of the outcome. It’s long past time that the U.S. had a President who wasn’t yet another white male; now is as good a time as any.

Update: As usual, I find myself ahead of the curve (via Kos). We all know what happened to Cassandra.

One of the reasons I like this blog is the extended community that we have been able to build, due to all of you who read us, spread the word about us, and carry on the discussions offline. Thanks. We have readers from quite a diverse set of walks of life, careers, ages, and locations. I think that the letter I received a few days ago was from one of the most remote locations I can think of on this planet. I find it quite exciting! The writer, Denis Barkats, permitted me to reproduce it here:

I browse you guys’ blog now and then and I have to admit I really enjoy it. I decided to write to you today about the post named Jacaranda time, because I know exactly the feeling when those start blooming in the LA area and given my current situation, It has a special ring to me right now. I am a postdoc at Caltech with Andrew Lange’s observational cosmology group. And I clearly remember the time when I came to interview for the position during the Month of Mai. I could not belive the intense color of those trees (Jacaranda trees whose names I did not know at the time). I absolutely loved it and eventually accepted the postdoc offer ( not just for the trees). And right now, seeing your post on your blog, I am reminded at how beautiful spring can be in Pasadena. Right now, I am at the South Pole at the US Amundsen-Scott South pole station. I’m the winterover for the BICEP experiment (a CMB polarization telescope aiming to look for B-mode polarization).We are in the middle of the austral winter. It’s -80F outside on average although it can dip down to -100F sometimes. It’s pitch dark. And we are in the middle of a sterile, arid, desertic, moon-like landscape, at 11000ft, on the polar plateau. So the sight of the deep purple trees, strikes a special string in my memory. Anyway, so enjoy the spring there.

Best,

Denis

Wow! Antartica! I don’t know why, but it’s just great to know we’re helping a little bit to spread some warmth to the furthest corners of the Earth. It is nice to be contributing to global warming in a positive way!  

Denis was kind enough to share something with us as well:
Continue reading ‘To the Ends of the Earth’

I’ve always been under the impression that readers could pick and choose what they wanted to read here, by using the filtering tools provided, or just the scroll bar. In that way you can slice the blog to get any sort of flavour that you suits you. In line with what we’ve always said the blog is -or isn’t- about, and in line with my original statement of purpose, I’ve been trying to provide some snapshots about several aspects of what I do and get involved in as a scientist: academic life, outreach projects, thinking time, playtime, life in general, etc. This is in addition to a number of posts on science, the arts, and other ideas such as science education, science and the media, environment, etc. Throughout, I’ve tried to involve you, the reader in as much discussion, sharing, and sometimes fun and silly stuff, as you care to participate in. The idea was to sort of have a giant break room where we -scientist, non-scientist, junior, senior, professional, non-professional, here, there and anywhere- could come to and kick off our shoes and share from time to time, just like friends and colleagues do in person. I really thought that was all part of the mix, and that those who don’t like my contribution to this effort could simply choose to ignore it and read the other excellent material provided.

Well, it seems that I’ve misunderstood this, since I learned today that a number of my Cosmic Variance colleagues apparently don’t agree with the emphasis. Puzzlingly, rather than provide more of what they want to see, they’d like to see less of what I’m choosing to provide. I’m a bit stunned by this, but recognize that I could have gotten things wrong, so (after the next post I’m going to pop up in a few seconds) I’m just going to shut up for a while, saying thanks and au revoir to those of you who have read, enjoyed, participated, discussed, etc. Perhaps I’ll pop in with the ocassional post from time to time, but I think that for a while I’ll just sit back and leave the blog in the capable hands of my wise colleagues. Maybe in this way I’ll learn by example what they actually have in mind for the blog and, since it is a joint effort, toe the line.

Best,

-cvj

[Update: I may have written the above a little too strongly, since some readers are under the impression that I’ve been censored, or that they have to make a choice of some sort. Gosh, no! The first wrong impression would not reflect well on my colleagues and I won’t have that. It was not my intention to give the impression that anybody wants to control the content of what I say. I apologize to my colleagues if I gave that impression, but I thought what I wrote was clear. As clarification, I placed this in the comments:

(1) This is not intended to be a beauty contest!
(2) There is no sense in which I have made “illegal posts” as one commenter put it, or have been in any way banned from posting anything. My friends are just concerned that the overall emphasis might have gone askew. I did not think that this was possible in view of the fact that readers can filter with the tools provided. We don’t agree on that, it seems. Disagreement is just fine. So -allowing for the possibility that I am simply wrong on this issue- I’ve made the decision -on my own and with no encouragement- to sit back for a while and give the others some space, in case that helps. I just felt I’d explain to you my reasons.

That’s all.

Actually, your constructive input -positive and negative- will be informative to all of us…. so please go ahead, but please keep in mind point number (1).

]

Well, not all of it. Some of the Moon’s pale fire is actually snatched from cosmic rays, as seen in the Astronomy Picture of the Day from last Friday.

This is an image of the Moon in gamma rays, taken by NASA’s EGRET telescope. The gamma rays are produced by cosmic rays (which aren’t electromagnetic radiation at all, but mostly high-energy protons) striking the lunar surface. There is no equivalent process for the Sun, and in fact the Moon is much brighter than the Sun in gamma rays.

The Sun has some tricks of its own, of course. The Moon picture reminded me a bit of this one:

They’re both circular false-color blobs, so I suppose the resemblance isn’t so surprising. But this is an image of the Sun in neutrinos, reconstructed using data from the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector in Japan. (Yes, the one that was essentially destroyed in a freak accident. But it’s now back online, and meanwhile I’m sure Koshiba’s Nobel Prize was some consolation.) The Sun, of course, makes its own neutrinos, but it’s amazing that we can actually image a celestial object using something other than photons!

Besides photons, cosmic rays, and neutrinos, there aren’t that many ways we get to observe the universe. I’m looking forward to the first images of either the Sun or Moon in gravitational waves.

Update: As Alex R. mentions in the comments, Ray Davis passed away on Wednesday. He was the pioneer in solar-neutrino measurments, overseeing the Homestake mine experiment, and shared the Nobel with Koshiba.

As promised, I’m ready to provide a fuller report of the science at the meeting I was at last week - From Quantum to Cosmos: Fundamental Physics Research in Space, held by NASA at the Airlie Center in Warrenton, Virginia.

I mentioned last time that I had seen some exciting talks by people involved in cold atom physics, which is quite far away from what I do, but which fascinated me. This time I wanted to report, albeit idiosyncratically, on discussions that were more closely related to my fields of expertise.

In the first session of the conference, there were a number of talks on cosmology. The meeting was kicked off by a nice overview of the dark energy and dark matter problems by Orfeu Bertolami, from Lisbon, which led into my presentation on Cosmic Acceleration and Modified Gravity. You’ve heard me go on about this topic before, so let me move on to other people’s talks.

Right after me came someone I’ve known for a long time and who it was really nice to see again here - Joao Magueijo, from Imperial College. Joao is perhaps best known for his popular science book - Faster Than the Speed of Light, but here he gave an excellent presentation focused on how one might be able to perform a definitive test of MoND with a space-based solar-system experiment. Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MoND) is an innovative attempt, proposed in its original form by Mordechai Milgrom, to modify gravity to explain the phenomena usually attributed to dark matter. It is very difficult to do this by merely modifying the Newtonian force equation because, although one might manage to describe galactic rotation curves, the gravitational lensing signal will differ from that in dark matter models. However, recent years have seen a covariant version of MoND, proposed by Jacob Bekenstein and nicknamed TeVeS (Tensor, Vector, Scalar theory), in which lensing should work just fine. Although this model is not yet seen as an equal competitor for dark matter, it would be great to come up with a clear test through which it could be ruled out.

Joao’s claim (with Milgrom) is that if a form of MoND is correct, then one may be able to measure the behavior inside the solar system. As described in the abstract to their paper

… in particular near saddle points of the total gravitational potential. Whereas in Newtonian theory tidal stresses are finite at saddle points, they are expected to diverge in MOND, and to remain distinctly large inside a sizeable oblate ellipsoid around the saddle point. … Space missions, such as the LISA Pathfinder, equipped with sensitive accelerometers, may be able to explore the larger perturbative region.

Certainly this seems like the kind of science that NASA should be doing.

After Joao was HongSheng Zhao, from St. Andrews, who discussed Constraining Modified Gravity and then came my good friend Tanmay Vachaspati, under whom I was a postdoc at Case Western Reserve University, and with whom I split a rental car from Dulles. Tanmay’s talk was on Light Superconducting Strings in Our Galaxy. I’ve mentioned topological defects before, so if you need a primer, I hope you’ll look back and that it is helpful.

Tanmay is interested in a particular variety - cosmic strings - line-like solutions that develop in certain field theories and which may have a variety of important cosmological consequences. In particular, in this talk, Tanmay was proposing that particle emission from cosmic strings at the TeV scale might provide an explanation for the 511keV photons observed in our galaxy. What is particularly interesting about this suggestion is that if this were the correct physics, then it would imply new physics at the TeV scale - for example an extended gauge group, such as a new U(1) symmetry - which might be accessible at the next generation of particle colliders (the LHC and the ILC).

Since I’m focusing on cosmology in this post, I’ll skip past great talks by Alan Kostelecky and Tom Weiler and jump right to the Monday evening session in which David Spergel gave a tight and crystal clear review of the WMAP3 results, and then Sean spoke on Cosmological Constraints on Modified Gravity. I will be deliberately sketchy about Sean’s talk because most of it described work which will appear in a couple of papers, one of which we are writing together with our graduate students, within the next week. But a broader part of the talk concerned how one might differentiate between dark energy and modified gravity as explanations for cosmic acceleration. Sean discussed how, in modified gravity, Newtonian potentials can grow differently than in General Relativity (GR) (even sometimes at different rates on different scales), and how this might be used not only to distinguish it from dark energy, but to distinguish between different suggestions for modifying gravity.

Tuesday was a big cosmology day, starting with thought-provoking talks from Alexander Kusenko (UCLA) on Detecting Dark Matter in Space, David Cline (also from UCLA) on The Future Search for Warm and Cold Dark Matter in Space, and my friend Katie Freese (University of Michigan) on Inflation after WMAP

After other talks including Dark Energy Task Force presentations from Bob Cahn (LBNL), and Andy Albrecht (UC Davis), and a nice talk by Bruce Winstein (University of Chicago) on Scientific Targets for “CMBPOL”, came the session I chaired, on Modified Gravity and Experiment

First up was Gia Dvali from NYU, whose talk was titled Large Distance Modification of Gravity as Dark Energy Alternative. Gia, along with Gregory Gabadadze and Massimo Porrati, has developed an interesting extra dimensional model which has become known as “the DGP Braneworld”. In this model, matter fields are confined to a four-dimensional submanifold and gravity is described by two different terms; one five-dimensional gravitational action and another four-dimensional action. As a result, gravitational physics looks four-dimensional at short distances and five-dimensional at large distances. The model has interesting cosmological consequences, including a way to explain the accelerated expansion (essentially through a modified four-dimensional Friedmann equation), as were described by our next speaker, Cedric Deffayet, from the IAP in Paris.

These two intensely theoretical talks were then followed by two experimental talks. In the first, Eric Adelberger from the University of Washington discussed his precision tests of the inverse square law of gravity, and in the second, Ho Jung Paik from the University of Maryland discussed complementary measurements in space.

Well, I’ve gone on long enough about the cosmology aspects of the meeting. I hope you agree that, on the scientific front, it was a pretty exciting and varied meeting. I’m hoping to find time to discuss the political parts a little later.

It will be no surprise that I am not a regular reader of the “Billy Graham - My Answer” column of our local newspaper. Nevertheless, while flipping through today, it happened to catch my eye and I was sucked in by a strange and remarkable response.

This particular question was from someone who is a Christian but is worried because sometimes they have doubts. Graham’s answer is, until the final paragraph, essentially the opposite of what I expected. He tells the reader to recall the story of Thomas, who, referring to the resurrection, says

“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it”

Already, to my shock, I’m enjoying the column, and I’m really liking Thomas - he sounds like a good skeptic to me - but I’m prepping myself for Graham to tell the reader that he needs to have faith. However, instead, we get the following

How did Jesus respond? He didn’t rebuke Thomas or tell him just to have more faith. Instead, Jesus came to him and showed him that He was alive. The response was immediate: “Thomas said to him, ‘My Lord and my God!’” (John 20:28).

Awesome! When faced with doubts about a far-fetched story that seems to contradict common sense and established knowledge about biology and medicine, the correct answer seems to be that God needs to provide incontrovertible proof of the claim in order that the sensible skeptic believe. This is science! From Billy Graham! And it’s so matter-of-fact; Thomas doubts - of course Jesus isn’t mad, the doubt is understandable and so easily fixed - Jesus shows up, proving the resurrection - and Thomas’ doubt is gone. At this point I’m excited at the possibility of a real attitude shift, with Christians being told by their leaders that they should look for definite proof of the things they have until now been asked to accept blindly, no matter how much they seem to contradict reality.

Unfortunately, this eminently sensible paragraph is interpreted further as

When doubts come, don’t let them take root in your soul. Instead, turn them over to Christ.

Sneaky! There I was, giddy with the thought that I was present at the moment of triumph of reason over superstition, only to have Graham pull a 180 on me at the last minute! Who would have thought it?

Oh well, close but no cigar. Damn.

So today I got involved in an exciting weekend activity subculture for the first time. Yard/Garage sales! I had no idea about several aspects of it. I got up at 7:00am to go over to a friend’s house to help her move a ton of stuff from her garage to her front yard, and get it all set up.

Two of her neighbours also pitched in to help, and also sell a few of their own things that did not sell in their own sales last week. For my own contribution to the spread of loot, I took a couple of dreadful yard chairs that I’d inherited (from the previous owner of my house). She provided coffee and freshly baked scones to help the work along. This was very welcome indeed (Tip: Don’t stay up to 4:00am talking about braneworlds and extra dimensions if you’ve got to get up three hours later).

The amazing thing to me is the dedicated group of people who are on the streets early in the morning trying to be the early birds, to get the good stuff. While we were setting up they were already pulling up in pickup trucks and vans, trying to buy things out of your hands!

And it is really well organised. Apparently, people routinely advertise their yard sales on Craig’s List (I’ve been hearing more and more about this thing every day… I’m still behind the times though, having never even visited the Ebay website in my life) and other people scour the region looking for all the sales that are happening. Then there is lots of haggling and rummaging and more haggling.

You get everything in these sales, and some of it is just great. I helped myself to three lovely glass storage jars before the wolves came. They were supposed to be $2 each, but I got them for free for my lifting services. Whoo-hoo! But I want to know who buys the really…. unusual stuff…. such as the Western Union slippers (above right!), or the Nevermore Thing (as I call it) pictured left. I’ve no idea what it is intended to be. My friend is an actress, and gets invited to a ton of those Industry things where you are given gift baskets and other bizarre free stuff. She thinks that this piece came from one of those events, held at Halloween. Have a closer look. There is a black crow/raven on the top of the handle, and the entire basket itself -painted entirely black, of course- is lined with black feathers. I was told by one of the neighbours, who works in production, that no doubt someone who works in the Industry will buy it to use as a prop for something or other. You never know what is useful to someone else.

Continue reading ‘Yard Sales!’