It is one of my favourite times of the year in Los Angeles. It rained a few days ago and so the air is clear, the sky is blue, and the sunlight is now clear and crisp on everything it touches. On days like this I cycle right past the bus stop and go all the way into work on the bike. There are flowers in gardens everywhere. (There are also wild flowers along the sides of the freeways, for drivers who care to look.) There are flowering trees all over the city.

In particular, there are several long stretches of many blocks all over LA that almost convince you that the city was going completely purple. This is because of the spectacular Jacaranda tree:

Learn more about this lovely tree here. I learned that the horticulturalist Kate Sessions (1857-1940) is responsible for importing and popularising the Jacaranda in Southern California. Learn more about her here and here.

-cvj

You know the metaphor. Somebody’s looking for something, perhaps their keys, in the dark. There’s a lamp-post somewhere, spreading a circle of light. They confine their search to the circle of light, where they can see. Of course, the keys can be anywhere, not just under the light, and so this search has a seriously limited scope.

Well, a lot of research is like that, somewhat inevitably. Often with the additional limitation that you’re not sure what you’re looking for, either. You’re just hoping you’ll know it when you see it. This happens in all fields.

One place where I -as an outsider- always feel somewhat frustrated by the discussions is in the search for life elswhere in the universe. NASA makes some announcement about this sort of thing from time to time and it is always phrased in terms of looking for water. (See e.g., Saturn’s moon, Enceladus (right) where a water geyser was identified recently.) I find that a bit annoying, since they never mention other possibilities. I understand how crucial water can be for life as we know it, but is that really the only sign we should be looking for? And what if it is a red herring?

And what about life as we don’t know it? How do we know we’re not missing huge deposts of life on those objects in the solar system that we’ve ignored because they don’t have water? And one can go to some extremes with this, and have some fun. One thing I especially love to do is speculate about life existing in conditions that are so extremely different than ours that pretty much everything we can imagine about their experiences would be incredibly alien to us. How about creatures that live on the surface of the sun, for example, or in the accretion disc of a black hole, while it sucks the life out of its neighbouring star? What about vast gaseous creatures the size of several star systems, incredibly long-lived and slow to move - but alive, nonetheless. I could go on, but you can have more fun making up your own examples, I’m sure. The problem with most of them is - how would be able to find and recognize them as life?

Coming back to the lamp-post, or at least near it, I was pleased to see an article by Britt Peterson on Seed’s website about two colleagues of mine, USC professors Douglas Capone and Kenneth Nealson. It was about taking a different focus in the current searches for life.

Incidentally, I’d never really known what exactly “Astrobiology” was before this semester, nor met a real practicioner of the craft. Then Douglas approached me at a reception one day and asked me to come and teach a guest lecture to their Astrobiology class on the origins and evolution of the universe, right up to the formation of the Solar System. I was delighted to do it, of course, and in fact invited my colleague from Astronomy, Ed Rhodes, to do the second half of the presentation, focusing on the formation of the solar system, the search for extrasolar planets, etc, topics about which he has much more knowledge than I. We had a great time (and from the questions, possibly the students too), and may well do our double act again next year. (Perhaps even polish it up, get a manager, and take it on the road….)

The article refers to an opinion piece my colleagues wrote in the journal Science. They talk about focusing on Nitrogen. Here are some extracts:

Continue reading ‘Further Away From the Lamp-Post’

So on Sunday, for A Journey Around My People part two (see part one here), I wandered around quite a bit in my old ‘hood in the South West. No, not the South West where I live currently, but in the SW postcode district of London. Wandered the streets looking at the people: Listening to the various tones of voice, ways of speaking, turns of phrase. Looking at the hustle and bustle, the various types of clothing, expressions of face, looks in the eye. Listening to the shouts, yells, laughs, cries, whispers, etc. I love wandering around doing that. This is one of the reasons I like to wander around in public areas and use public transport, in whatever city I happen to be. It is the way you really get to know a city, and then once that city is inside you -through your looking the people in the eye, bumping into them, talking with them, encountering accidental touches, scents, warmth, coldness, as you brush past… in other words, real human to human contact- then you really know it. And you come back years later and drink that all back in, and know that the city is still there - in the people. Some buildings will change, disappear entirely sometimes, but those sounds, sights and sensations of the city, expressed in its people last a long time, passing on through generations. Yes, that essence will last certainly a lot longer than you or any individual will, and so you can be sure that the soul of the city lives on for a long time, when other aspects fade.

…And then you can go shopping!

So I wanted to have a look at some shiny pretty things, and some things less so. I wanted to play around with looking in some of the fancier shops for fun, and because I love seeing how things are displayed. It is sometimes quite beautiful, and sometimes at least as interesting (sometimes more interesting) as visiting a museum. Also, every city and every country has its own character when it comes to how things are laid out in the stores, and it is interesting to see some of a city’s flagships in this regard. Occasionally -but very rarely- I even buy something, if I chance upon the right combination of price, weakness, and desirability…

…so I left Harvey Nichols with exactly the same stuff I arrived with. Maybe less, for I’m sure that there was a little evaporation of the rain from my coat and my umbrella. I’ve never wandered in there at length before and wanted to do so if only to feed the voices in my head from two characters in “Absolutely Fabulous” wittering on vacuously about the Department store “Harvey Nicks”. It’s pricelessly funny, for reasons I can’t explain, to wander around the store and imagine those characters there. Even more priceless when you actually run into them there, as indeed happens.

I’d wandered around there and looked around. Entirely on the women’s fashion/style floors, I have to say. It is much easier and much more interesting, in my opinion, to have a good time browsing and chatting in a fancy store in the women’s section than it is in the men’s. Frankly, I don’t buy men’s clothes very often in fancy stores. I tend to get simple, plain things in simpler, plainer stores. I don’t mean heavily discounted junk that will fall apart in no time. (You spend far more money on really rock-bottom cheap stuff since you have to replace it more often.) I get mid-range stuff that is solid and sensible and lasts for years. No, the real fun is in looking at the displays in the women’s sections, as they can be much more lovingly laid out, and often beautifully so. In the really nicely thought-out stores, it is rather like being in a museum or art gallery. Very pleasant. You can talk at length to the staff as well, since they will fall over themselves to help you, if you take the right approach, whereas they might not give you the time of day normally.
Continue reading ‘Shopping, Sightseeing, Science’

Some splendid groupings of objects seen today in London on my wanderings in my old ‘hood (I’ll be explaining more later):

-cvj

Well, went on part one of my Journey Around My People: shopping in Central London. Was not looking for anything in particular, but although I know it is true from past experience, it never ceases to amaze me how much stuff costs here. Have all the salaries gone up by about 30% since I left? I don’t think so…have they? For starters, the Guardian, which as you recall since last year has been seriously modified from its perfectly-fine format (yes, I ranted about it), costs 0.70p during the weekday! And the Saturday edition today was £1.30!! I’ve no idea how much the Sunday paper will cost….. are they just going to ask for a gallon of my blood, perhaps? (People in the USA….just multiply by roughly two to get the after-tax dollars and cents.) Do you get more for this extra money? More sport (everywhere… bl**dy football, and gossip about footballers and football managers and football club owners and footballer’s wives - this is supposedly real news) and really huge colour pictures.

Another example. Guess what the minimum price of a single ride on the underground (the subway system) is now. Just one stop. £3.00. No, I’m not making that up. I burst out laughing at this at the airport, and people looked at me as though I was nuts. (I sometimes forget how easy it can be for people to tell. Got to hide that better.) Now I know that there are ways around paying that, by bundling things into travelcards, and “oyster cards” and the like, but…it is still symptomatic, imho. I don’t mean to gloat here: We have our own problems with pricing of some things in LA (for a house, you pay an awful lot for basically a wooden box in LA), and as for the transport prices: On the plus side, the coverage, connectivity and frequency of the whole transport system in London seems really excellent compared to how it used to be not so long ago when you were (still) paying through the nose get around the city.

Half-decent sandwich? Decent cup of tea? Indifferently-made cup of coffee? Fork it over, guv’nor. Yep, it is still an expensive city, and getting worse (in that regard) by the minute.

Well, with that in mind, I headed off to Liberty’s for a bit, to just look at stuff. Reason? Well, gift ideas, or just general amusement to see what sorts of things people will be convinced to buy. Sometimes, you see nice things, I must admit. That’s how they get you….they mix nice things in with the pointless dreck, and you can end up buying a bit of both in your bid to bring home the good stuff. Then I went to the new Habitat on Regent Street, as I like to visit such shops selling pretty good home furnishings. I saw several things. Although I hasten to point out that I don’t have the cash flow to afford a ton of this stuff (sorry girls), I must admit that, puzzlingly, a lot of interesting and reasonably well-made “design” stuff can be comparably or sometimes even better priced here than in some stores in the USA. I think that maybe the gap on the high street between the 1980s Argos catalogue (never mind if you don’t know what that is) and the really high end stuff was filled here earlier than in the USA, and so there is a better range of good-to-pretty-good stuff to be found. Maybe not…I have not done a thorough survey. I’m a theoretical physicist, remember: What the bleep do I know? But based on the tube price and the price of a cup of coffee in a cafe you would imagine that your typical Design Within Reach type stuff (basically, affordable to pretend-affordable pretty well made authorized knock-offs of well-known designs by known designers) would be astronomically priced over here. It is not neccessarily so - there is quite a continuum of good stuff. I’m not sure why, but seeing what stores like Pottery Barn, and even Target, etc, are doing, I think that the USA will have caught up soon if it has not already. Anyway, still just looking. Wallet deep in my bag. I can’t transport a lot of this stuff anyway.

A lot of the stuff is just silly, but this is the entertainment part of it all, remember. Some of it I like because it is interesting to see fun use of geometry. Good to see mathematical forms out there in the wild…maybe brought into people’s homes. People appreciating mathematics a little without even noticing it. They or their children might count the sides and edges, notice some patterns. You never know where that might lead. Oh, and it can just look nice for the sake of looking nice. Why not? The hanging shade to the right for example. I really like it. I love it, in fact, but I’ll keep the love in the store since I’m pretty sure that it is one of those things that -if I had more money than sense- I would buy and rush home, only to find that it sparks a “what was I thinking?” self-inquiry which I could do without.

So let’s examine it for its own sake and not worry about where we’d put it. It’s basically a very very fancy version of a stellated regular dodecahedron. Continue reading ‘How Much?!’

Well, I’d better tell you. Before you hear it anywhere else. So remember I was telling you in a previous post a month ago about working with students from the School of Cinema-Television, commenting on their screenplays to be entered for the Sloan Foundation’s fellowships? Here’s a reminder of the Sloan’s statement of purpose in this endeavour:

The goal of the film schools program is to influence the next generation of filmmakers to create more realistic and dramatic stories about science and technology and to challenge existing stereotypes about scientists and engineers through the visual media. With Foundation support, prizes are now awarded at six leading film schools to stimulate top students to write and produce new film and television shows about scientists and engineers: American Film Institute ; UCLA School of Theater, Film,and Television ; Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama ; Columbia University Film Department ; NYU Tisch School of the Arts ; and USC School of Cinema-Television . In addition to screenwriting and production awards, there are now prizes in animation and a first feature film.

Well, it turns out that the Sloan also supports similar efforts in Theatre. See some of their descriptions of their work at this link. I knew about this for a while (although not the full extent until just the other day). They support, for example, the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in commissioning and developing new plays. See this link for more information. The statement of purpose:

The Magic Theatre / Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Initiative has been created with a generous three-year grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Sloan Initiative is designed to commission, develop and produce compelling plays exploring the worlds of science and technology, to foster long-term relationships between scientific and artistic institutions, and to challenge the stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the public imagination. The Sloan Initiative will be awarding more than $40,000 in commissions each season.

Recall also that I’ve been working with a playwright, Oliver Mayer, for all those reasons I keep blogging about concerning science and the public, science outreach, science education, science and the media, etc, etc. I’ve been telling you, for example, about the wonderful process of having real actors read your words, and how interesting and instructive the whole experience is. See posts here, and here.

Just before I flew off to hide in Taiwan for a month, in December, Oliver and I dashed off a quick letter to the Magic Theatre, together with a draft of the first act of the play, entering it for consideration for one of those grants. I forgot all about it for several months.

So here’s the punchline. A month ago, while in the act of actually filling in the forms to accompany the students’ screenplays that they were entering into the Sloan’s competition, I got a call from Oliver:

We won one of the Magic Theatre’s Sloan awards to develop the play.

Continue reading ‘Tales From the Industry, VII’

Well, as Summer wedding season is almost upon us, I’d like to urge all of the readers out there, who might be still dithering over what wedding dress to choose, to consider Eri Matsui’s zero gravity wedding dress design, pictured on the right. There it is with gravity, and with no gravity. I suppose you’ll have to also work on how to get all the guests -and the ceremony- at zero gravity as well.

To solve the latter problem, consider booking tickets on the Rocketplane, which will be taking tourists up to space for 15 miutes for about $250,000 each. This will start next year though, so hold those wedding plans.

But wait. While you have this extra time to wait for the Rocketplane ride, get your invited guests to start designing their own space fashion designs. They can enter their sketches into a contest (closing date August 15th), and maybe get them made in time to wear to the wedding, since, as I learned from Dennis Overbye’s article in the New York Times science section, while waiting for a flight on Tuesday**:

[...] the Japanese space agency, JAXA, and Rocketplane Ltd., a space tourism company in Oklahoma, are sponsoring a space fashion contest for clothes that look good in zero gravity. The best designs will appear in a fashion show in Tokyo this fall.

(No, I don’t know what it was doing in the science section either, but, well… just go with the flow, cvj…go with the flow.)

Notable quote:

“I hope ‘fashion in space’ makes everybody happy,” said Eri Matsui, a Tokyo fashion designer who presides over the Hyper Space Couture Design Contest.

Seriously…get sketching! It can add a new dimension to your doodles during those not-so-interesting parts of the meetings at work. Also, designing clothes can be fun, whether you’re entering it into a contest or not.

-cvj

(**Also: Thanks for the reminder, John Branch.)

Ahhh….London. All of a sudden, here I am in South London. It is early in the morning, and everyone is still asleep. I’m sitting here with an excellent cup of tea (title of this post refers to this other post) and a plate of Jacob’s cream crackers (since I’m desperately hungry and it was the only thing I could find without disturbing my host’s kitchen cupboards) and looking at lovely cloud patterns through the window, and some beautiful shafts of morning sunlight from time to time. And I’m listening to the birds…. and some seriously loud snoring from upstairs.

Would not have predicted that I’d be here at this time. Tuesday saw me doing hectic things at work back in LA, as usual. Then I decided. I called the airline, got a seat, and that afternoon (after a mad dash across town, making it to the gate one minute before the flight closed) saw me in the air, headed to London.

And here I am. Purpose of trip? Just to be there for my sister, Carol, who yesterday was giving birth to her first child. All went well. Hurrah! We are an Uncle, again.

What else shall I do while here? Well, I’ve got jetlag, my laptop, and a wireless connection and I’ve three more papers to be working on, using this convenient setup - one came out last week; I’ll be telling you about that physics very soon - and I’ve got several other writing projects to work on…. and I will probably be helping out with things like shopping and other errands from time to time.

And then, when I can get away, I think I’ll go to some old haunts to drink it all in, such as South Kensington, Bloomsbury, and Soho. I’ll go to a John Lewis to buy some household items like one or two more pieces of the Denby Greenwich dining set and a set of placemats and coasters, have a look in some museums and bookshops, and -oh yes- I’ll definitely buy some essential food items to take back with me: Green and Black’s chocolates, Maldon Sea Salt, good English Breakfast tea, etc, etc. (Must also remember to get some Hendrick’s gin on the way back through Heathrow.) See here for a previous haul my mum brought me when she visited last.

Sure, I could get all that latter stuff (but not the gin) from one of the English shops in Santa Monica. But it is such an effort to go all the way over to the West Side. If I’m going to go all the way over there, might as well go all the way to London.

Time for another cup of tea.

-cvj

You’ll read on a blog or hear on the news that it is Bike to Work Day in California on Thursday May 18th. On your way to buy that pint of milk, you’ll smile indulgently at the well-meaning cyclists out there during the whole of California’s Bike to Work Week, trying not to curse them (as perhaps you usually do at other times of the year) for getting in your way as you pilot your nice comfortable car past them, probably over-revving the engine and driving way too close to them as you do so.

You click on one of the websites of a participating local transport organisation and cleverly remark to yourself how amusing it is that the prize you could win for bringing your bike onto their subway, train, or bus system that special day is…. a bike. So if you don’t have a bike, you can’t participate, and so can’t win a bike….which would allow you to participate. Well, maybe you could borrow one and give it a try…..? Anyway…..

You’ll agree that it is in principle a good thing that those cyclists do (and you noted before that you’ve seen many more of them in the last few weeks due to the rising gas prices), and that it is a pity that your own special situation makes it impossible for you to join them, or perhaps use the bus or train, or some combination of them. Or does it? You make a mental note to try it next year. Or perhaps the year after…..

Happy Bike to Work Day!

-cvj

Again, apologies to Girls Are Pretty.

Today you go outside and find that several of your roses are blooming splendidly, just in time for Mother’s Day. You decide to post a photograph of one of them on the blog, to send good wishes to all mothers everywhere (even where it is not officially Mother’s Day):

Happy Mother’s Day!

-cvj