The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 4th June. 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. Have a look at the last two descriptions here and here.

Here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

It’s perfectly clear. Or is it? Actually, the notion of transparency is surprisingly murky. The clear night air is opaque to much of the light raining down on us from the rest of the universe. The daytime sky blocks even the light of stars. Your body, on the other hand, is perfectly transparent to radio and TV signals; to a neutrino, you’re not even there—trillions passed through you as you read that sentence. Transparent objects can cast shadows. Perceptive people can see right through you. Institutions—including governments—often try to hide what goes on inside, and it’s the job of other institutions—like the press—to make sure they remain at least reasonably transparent.

For our June 4th Categorically Not! UCLA astronomer Matt Malkan will take us on a tour through the universe as astronomers see it, or try to see it, right back to the beginning of time where (and when) newborn galaxies were just coming into being. The birthplaces of galaxies, stars and planets are shrouded in dust, so astronomers, “like aggressive papparazi,” must go to great lengths to get images. (Having spent 20 hours in a delivery room on two occasions, Malkan says he can “appreciate this cosmic modesty.”)

For an artistic perspective, Melinda Smith Altshuler will show how she uses transparency to create works of art with astonishing mystery and depth in her studio at the Hangar. Melinda has shown locally with Sherry Frumkin and most recently with Sara Lee Art Projects at Bergamot Station—as well as in France, Italy, Korea and Central America. She has taught Studio Arts at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, and is an Associate at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles.

And finally—accounting! What are credits and debits anyhow? To find out, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose enlisted the help of the 50,000 year old Thog family of mastodon hunters (who will not appear with her) and former Microsoft CFO Mike Brown, (who might) to write the Thog’s Guide to Quantum Economics—which she’ll be giving out Sunday. USC’s PricewaterhouseCoopers Auditing Professor, Zoe-Vonna has been a key player shaping the U.S. financial reporting environment, where transparency is today’s buzzword.

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

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’

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.)

Oddly enough, a huge number of people really thought that the utterly hilarious show Down the Line (see here), airing on Tuesdays at 11:00pm on the BBC’s Radio 4, was actually a real phone-in! Rather than seeing it as a wonderful spoof, parody, and commentary (which it clearly is), they thought it was a crass attempt by Radio 4 to broaden the scope of its programming. Angry of Tunbridge Wells got out the pen and paper to write a letter……

For a full discussion, see this lovely Guardian article [update: and this from their blog]. Don’t forget to listen to the episode I posted about.

-cvj

(Thanks Samantha, donncha.)

Pure genius. You have to listen to the 9th May edition of the live phone-in Down The Line! At some point I had to shut my office door, as I was laughing so much but trying not to be too loud so ended up with tears streaming down my face.

This week’s topic: Religion, and Korean scientists’ discovery of a new colour.

Make sure you’re not operating heavy machinery, or driving fast, before you listen.

(I don’t know if there is an archive, so you might have to listen to it before they replace it with next week’s edition.)

Continue reading ‘Painfully Funny’

For years, action movies stuck to a very specific division of labour. Your action hero did the “action” stuff…you know, shooting and hitting and the getting of the girl (yes, the action hero was most often male). Meanwhile, from time to time there would be a point in the plot where some technical knowledge was needed. Then the socially awkward technical person (Geek, Nerd, whatever) would be on the set for a while, and they would hack into the computer, make the modifications to the car, shut down the reactor, etc.

Then several years ago things began to change. Did you notice it? Action heroes began to start learning our skills the skills of the nerd. It became ok - cool even- for the muscle-bound hero to know some technical stuff! I remember one key movie that for me at least represented the high-visibility turning point. It was the 1996 movie “Eraser”, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. At the time he was sort of the CEO of Action Heroes, Inc, right? There’s some scene in which he’s fresh from shooting up everything in sight, with a cannon on each arm, etc, etc, and then at a climatic moment (I forgot the plot details which led to this), he sits down at a computer to do some crucial task or other! My friend Samantha, who was at the cinema with me, spotted this. She laughed out loud at that point, and explained afterwards why she thought that was significant, and she was right.

Of course, several of you are thinking “what’s the big deal?”. Perhaps you’re too young to remember how it was. That’s because now everybody in the movies uses computers routinely, sending email, surfing the web, checking message boards, grabbing files from other remote computers…. and, just as in society at large, Hollywood caught on to the fact that everybody is much more comfortable with the computer. A little technical knowledge in computers is no longer the province of the nerd. We’re all nerds now. And so nerdiness is a little diminished, as a result. Of course it then just gets redefined, since there must always be an outsider, to allow the insiders to better define themselves. So even the biggest action stars started using computers alongside their guns.

Well, I saw another significant moment last night, I think. Maybe the next step.

I was working on a paper during the evening and had the urge to see Mission Impossible III at the Cinerama Dome at the Arclight. I love seeing action movies in the Dome, and thought that it could be fun. So I booked a seat for a late-night show and took some time out from my paper-writing (best not to tell my collaborators…it was supposed to be ready in time for the morning) to nip down to see it at 11:10pm. There was a great late-night crowd there, and it was a lot of fun down at the Arclight, as always. Did not even matter that the movie was… ok, at best. I was not as impressed with it as I was prepared to be. Too many long scenes with Tom Cruise staring into the eyes of whateverhernameis in slow motion from endless different angles. I went there to see things blow up for goodness sake! And see some clever deceptions, double-crossings, hoodwinkings, bamboozlings….etc. This is Mission Impossible!

Well, where was I? At some point, Tom Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, is in Shanghai with some of the rest of his Impossible Mission Force buddies, and they are trying to figure out how to get into some super-secure building (part of the skyline to the right) in about 30 minutes. Cruise is hell-bent on doing it (for reasons I won’t go into in case you want to see the film) and starts planning a daring approach. He starts drawing the various buildings, noting the distances between them and their heights, and then he starts writing equations! He’s trying to figure out something or other to do with swinging from one building to another, and he’s -I repeat- writing equations. And mumbling to himself a bit as he calculates, if I recall correctly!

Continue reading ‘The Rise of the Nerd?’

It is Friday, and time for some fun. This time the fun is in a good cause. (Well, actually, it always is, but….)

I was touring our Senior Labs here just half a hour ago, as I’m part of a committee looking at what we’re going to do in the future with regards purchasing new equipment, syllabus issues, etc (these are instructional labs). Standard stuff of the professorial day that I won’t bore you with further.

I was wandering around looking at the equipment (I always get a bit giddy with excitement when I go into labs….I really love doing experiments and building things in general……) when my eyes fell upon a printout of a chart reminding students of the colour coding scheme for determining the properties of a resistor. For those of you who never had the pleasure of building electronic circuits, basically there are bands of colour put in given sequence on the resistor (and electronic component) that allows one to determine how much electrical resistance it has at a glance. Much better than writing numbers onto the side, or something like that, if you take into account the size of the devices, durability, etc. Each colour corresponds to a number and you can reconstruct the value of the resistance in no time, given practice.

When I was a kid, bent over a soldering iron in my room for way too many hours, I learned from a book that the way of remembering the sequence of colours (black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Grey, White) was to use a mnemonic. Unfortunately the mnemonic was:

Black Boys Rape Only Young Girls But Virgins Go Without.

Sigh.

Anyway, I was excited to see that there’d been some progress, and somebody had made the effort to make a change, but then I read it:

Continue reading ‘Resistance is Futile’

The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 23rd April. 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.

Here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

Really?

Look around you. Is the scene you see “real”? Or a story made up inside your head? What about atoms? Are they real? What about love? Physics tells us that familiar space and time are illusions (while black holes and quantum weirdness are real). Artists reveal deep truths by pretending. What does it mean to say something is “real,” anyway? Physicist Steven Weinberg says it means we are granting it a measure of respect.

For this month’s Categorically Not! we are delighted to have Bay Area artist Bob Miller, whose explorations into the nature of light, seeing and believing are embodied in museum exhibits through-out the world. Bob will TALK A LITTLE about, and SHOW A LOT (capitals his) about what we’re REALLY seeing when we open our eyes. It really has a LOT to do with “The Wholeness of Seeing and Being,” he says.

From a scientific perspective, neuroscientist Richard Brown will demonstrate several engaging and powerful illusions currently being studied by scientists, present current views of why our brains evolved to produce illusions, and discuss the significance of illusions in our and understanding of “reality.” Richard studied neuroscience at Caltech and UCSF, and researched human color vision at UCSD’s Center for Brain and Cognition before moving to the Exploratorium in 1998, where he continues to develop interactive exhibits about perception, behavior and minds.

For a literary trip behind the looking glass, Pushcart prize winner Aimee Bender will lead us in a group writing exercise, as well as read and talk about her reality redefining fiction. Aimee is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own, and Willful Creatures, which feature a girl with a fire hand, a character obsessed with numbers, and pumpkinheads who give birth to children with the recessive gene that produces a head made of an iron. Aimee has published in Harper’s, Granta, The Paris Review and is heard on This American Life. She teaches creative writing at USC.

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

Not far from where I do my shopping in the Hollywood Farmer’s market is the Hollywood walk of fame, where various stars of screen, stage, radio, etc are celebrated with a star in the pavement/sidewalk when they rise to a certain level. I never thought I’d see the day when someone would get a star for contributions to the popularisation of science on television (Carl Sagan never got one), but look what I stumbled upon earlier this week (I was so impressed I asked a tourist to take a shot of me):

Brian did do superb work in telling the story of fundamental physics in that series of documentaries on PBS (“The Elegant Universe”, for those of you who’ve not seen them, same name as the best-selling book), and captured the imagination of a whole new generation of viewers. Well deserved.

Yeah, I know that some people who just have it in for string theory are going to be annoyed at this, but please try to keep your eye on the big picture. This is good for science. May it open the door for more recognition of science in mainstream popular culture, which as you know from reading this blog, is a subject dear to my heart.

-cvj

So for the first time ever, I stepped into our fancy new Molecular Biology building (it’s been finished for a year or so now….). I was expecting to be accosted by security the moment I walked in, because, I don’t really expect that they’d let us poor theoretical physicists walk around in such splendid surroundings! Luckily, the first person I saw as I walked in was Mike Waterman (he who helped host the reading of our play last month), whose Computational Biology group is now also in this building. So all was ok.

Why was I there? Well, it’s been an incredibly long day (all day committee meeting retreat in a hotel boardroom in downtown LA) and now it’s Friday night…. and so that means fun, of course! Seriously, I went back to campus for a short while and ran into my colleagues Gene Bickers (condensed matter physics) and Leonard Adleman (biology, see below), carrying a blue cask. They turned out to be on their way back to Leonard’s lab (he’s both a Computational Biologist and a Molecular Biologist) to make ice-cream using liquid nitrogen! Better yet, they invited me along to have a look and try some! (Above is Leonard and his daughter Stephanie.)

So, remember our last cooking time together when I made beef lo mien? Well, it’s time for desert…. So, pour in the ice-cream mix, which one of the experimenters (Pablo) had prepared earlier (his secret recipe, perhaps):

Pour out some liquid nitrogen (boiling point is 77 K = -196 °C = -321 °F) into a handy container for accurate pouring….

Continue reading ‘Friday Night Tasty Fun’