Blogs / Cosmic Variance

So, when a Physicist has had a busy starting week to the semester (combined with one of the worst weeks of their entire personal lives), and it is a really, really hot weekend outside (sunburn before 8:00am possible), what do they do? Well, what everyone else does: Go and try to have some fun and fuh-gedda-bouditt!

Witness… Sunset Junction.

It so happens that in my neighbourhood every year, there is a big street party. They close down several blocks of Sunset Boulevard for two days, and turn it into a combination of old-fashioned funfair, a mini streetfood extravaganza, a giant nightclub, and a music festival. (In other words, a microcosm of the much of the rest of the city’s normal state.)

I did not know it was this weekend and so would have missed it, having been away all Summer and being caught up with other things, but Michael Gutperle, a well-known theoretical physicist (like me, he works a lot on string theory) who also lives in the city (he works at UCLA) got in touch to find out if I was intending to go. He was especially keen to see John Cale (above right), who was going to perform that evening on one of the three separate stages on which they have musicians performing from 10:00am to 11:00pm over Saturday and Sunday.

Can you spot the Physicists in the photo below?

So it was great. The weather was perfect by time I got there (with some more friends I contacted) in the early evening (it was searingly and scorchingly hot earlier in the day), and there was plenty to eat and lots to drink, from freshly made lemonade at one of many stands, to cocktails at restaurants like The Cliff’s Edge, or beers at one of the number of parking lots that had been turned into beer gardens. I told several of the graduate students at the USC Physics department about the event too, so I do hope that they found a little time to go.

The concert was great, and the conversation, music, walking, eating, drinking and dancing was enough to clear the head for a while.

The funfair part of the proceedings put me in mind of a story told to me by my graduate advisor (Tim Morris), many years ago, when I was a Ph.D. student at the University of Southampton, England. Tim went to a fair with his dad (or possibly his father-in-law, I don’t recall precisely enough), and they decided to join in a “guess the number of jelly babies in the jar” contest. Their trick was that Tim would tell his dad a formula, and his dad – very good at mental arithmetic – would compute the result. They were sure they’d be closest, because the jar was cylindrical, and all Tim had to do was (by eye) measure the height and radius of cylinder in jelly-baby units and tell his dad the simple formula for the volume of a cylinder given its radius and height. His dad would quickly compute the volume of the cylinder, and the number would be in jelly-baby units, which is what they wanted, of course. So they did this. People were giving their entry fee and giving all sorts of numbers, e.g. “2500″, “2400″, “2600″, etc, and Tim and his father said something like “2498″, which generated a round of gentle teasing and hilarity of course. (”Are you sure sir, you don’t mean 2499?”…)

So I don’t recall if they got the prize or not, but that is not the point of the story (it’s not one of those tiresome Feynman-esque self-generated “I’m so much smarter than all you regular folk” stories, thank goodness) . The point of the story is that they were puzzled as to why their computed result was so close to the numbers that everybody else was just guessing. It was not until later that Tim realized that in his haste to give the formula to his father in time, he’d given the formula for the surface area of the cylinder, and not the volume. This raises the question (which Tim had thought about and which was why he was telling the story): Are we, as human beings, better at estimating the number of things that we can see (i.e., the jelly-babies near the surface of the jar), instead of things that we have to imagine (those deep in the interior of the jar)? Probably there are lots of studies on this sort of thing…

Anyway, tonight at Sunset Junction, there’s some ironic retro stuff…Chaka Khan! See you there maybe?

-cvj

Update: Just got back from the Chaka Khan extravaganza. Well, what can I say? Only one word says it all – fabulous, in the truly ironic sense of the word. I’m so behind the times, as it had not occured to me that all the old disco/funk divas had become huge gay icons. There’s something to be said for standing in the middle of Sunset Boulevard with what seemed to be most of the gay community of Los Angeles (who turned out specially for tonight’s gig), belting out “I’m Every Woman!” at the top of your voice.

As far as I can tell, I was the only straight guy there. …nevertheless (or as a result) I got an unually high number of compliments on my hat, interestingly enough, although it was far less dramatic than the very, very many cowboy hats that were in evidence.

Quite an evening. Quite a weekend. Back to regular life on the USC campus tomorrow (a place that has its own, different, sort of fabulousness…).