Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Well, what can I say? I normally don’t put photos of myself here much. Sparing you. But this photo shoot was fun. Perks of the job for all concerned. We took tens of photos, and this is the least of them. I’ll try and get you one of the more professional shots to giggle at.

What was the photo shoot about? Never mind, I’ll tell you later. All I know was that at some point (about 5 seconds into the shoot) the whole thing degenerated into a sort of comedy act (with me the straight man), and there were all kinds of poses cooked up by my creative team-mates, KC and Tara, encouraged by the photographer.

So you get to make up your own stories about what this is for:

A new local TV news show?

(My favourite:) A new crimefighting TV show? (”Law and Order – USC”, or maybe an annoyingly stupid misspelling like: “Alg3br4″)

A new blog team?

A new fashion show for academics? (”Gravitational Dressing”…..)

(My other favourite:) A new science news TV show? (”Serious Science, for Serious People”; Tagline: “We read the science news so you don’t have to!”)

I could go on, but I have errands to run…. and I’m pretty sure you can do better.

-cvj

Ok. You are probably tired of me enthusing about how so many things in LA are just great. (Well, those things I say are true, it is great, blah, blah, blah). However, sometimes things are just annoying in that “if we all agreed to fix this it would easily not be this way” sort of way. Here’s one such example:

Tuesday night. I went with two friends, Carol and Ilaria, to see an excellent group called Brazilliando play at Vitello’s in Studio City. It was a reminder of one of the frustrating aspects of LA nightlife. Basically, it was raining a bit outside, and combined with the fact that it was after 9:30pm, this just wiped out the audience. People don’t stay out very late much here especially during the work week (there are several nightspots, some of which I’ve mentioned in previous posts, which are exceptions to this rule, but not nearly as many as you would imagine for a city this size) even when the weather is fine, and when you combine that with a slight chill in the air, or a bit of moisture on the road, people just scamper off to their homes. So we turned up there to catch the second set and maybe hang out for maybe an hour and a half. The people at the font desk looked at us like we were nuts as we came in so “late” (9:30pm), and were not even sure if there was anything going on upstairs (the performance space is above the main restaurant floor).

They let us go up anyway…. The band was beginning to pack up, and there was nobody -absolutely nobody- in the room (upstairs at the back). Just lots of empty tables with solitary candles. It was 9:35pm. Carol knew the percussionist (Ami Molinelli), and so after fond greetings and introductions all around, they agreed to play a bit more. Just for us. We sat at a table and tried to order food. Nope, kitchen closed early. At 9:45pm!!? (After Ilaria pressed a bit, they agreed to go and see if they could find a salad and some bread, which did materialize.) The bar was eventually convinced to produce me a gin and tonic, and we settled down for a personal performance. I tried to put out of my mind my memories of struggling through the snow to get to various Jazz clubs in New York and finding it pleasantly packed with other intrepid music-seekers willing to brave the weather. (Wonderful freezing cold snowbound trips up from Princeton to the Village Vanguard spring to mind….) I tried to put out of my mind memories of listening to excellent performances into the wee hours of the morning in any number of jazz clubs….. What on earth is wrong with these soft Los Angelenos? Sigh.

They ended up playing for us for at least 45 minutes, and they were really great! If you’re in town looking for a sweet, understated, swinging, small (Samba, Bossa Nova…. Brazillian flavoured) Jazz group, look out for Brazilliando, with Robert Kyle (Saxophones, flute), Kleber Jorge, (vocals, guitar) and Amy Molinelli (percussion…really making the whole thing swing). See Kyle’s website for dates. [Update: That night we had Mitchell Long on guitar and vocals, by the way, (see photo) and you can look at his website here.]

-cvj

From a footnote on page 69 of Seth Lloyd’s new book Programming the Universe (about which more later):

I happened to be in [Nobel Laureate Norman Ramsey's office in Paris] when two members of the Academie Francaise came to call. “Why, Professeur Ramsey,” they inquired, “is French not the international language of Science?” Ramsey immediately answered them in his fluent French, with a thick midwestern accent. Horrified, they dropped the subject. In fact, the French Academy of Sciences caused the adoption of English as the international language of science in the seventeenth century by being the first national academy to abandon the previous international language, Latin, and publish their proceedings in their own language. The English and the Germans followed suit. The rest is just an accident of history.

That’s the debate that sprung up in the comment thread of a recent post. We’ve all seen the boxed beverage labeled as wine sitting on retailer shelves, but the issue is whether it actually qualifies as wine. CV readers decided that an experiment needed to be performed to settle the issue. This is a science blog, afterall. Being a theorist, I already had my favorite model to describe the outcome of this experiment – namely, wine does not come in boxes. So I was disqualified from participating in the analysis.

Luckily, one brave CV reader, Elliot, stepped up to the challenge. Here are the results, in his own words:

Before I share the results of the wine tasting experiment with boxed wine, I should do a bit of level setting on the experimental apparatus. (me)

I am by no means a wine expert. However I have developed (over many years) a sense for what I like and what I don’t. I exclusively drink red wines mostly Merlot and Cabernet from Calif. I like some reds from France as well. My favorite grocery store selection is Clos DuBois vineyards. I tend to like stuff in that price range and up, where and if the wine is in the $5-$10 range, I really don’t care for it that much.

With that said, I went to Wild Oats and got a “box” of French Rabbit Cabernet.

Bottom Line: It was horrible. I wouldn’t give it to my dog.

Now there was another “wine in a box” choice appropriately named Black Box wine. My gut feel was that it might be better but the smallest container was the 3000 ml or 4xbottles. So I backed away.

Thank you Elliot for settling this question! My theory is confirmed – wine does not come in boxes!

Time for a gardening picture, methinks. Well, this is so odd I thought I’d share. A while ago I spotted a weed growing out of the steps out at the front of the house. This happens a lot, which is fine. What does not often happen (in fact, it has never happened before) is that I reached to pull it out and noticed that it is an unusual weed, but familiar-looking. I touched it, and immediately could detect a distincitve smell – it is a tomato plant. A tomato plant!

Well, of course, I could not bear to do anything to it, and left it there thinking it would eventually run its course and die. Well, I had a look the other day and it is getting really big and healthy! Thing is, I’ve no idea how it got there. I’ve never had tomato plants or seeds out at the front. How come it just started growing there spontaneously? Bizarre. You’re welcome to make up your own explanations at this point. I can’t think of a plausible one.

Since it continues to do so well, I decided I would transplant it to the back garden where I actually do have tomato plants, but now it is stuck in the steps, and I cannot pull it up. It is well and truly stuck. Surely it can’t grow any more without damaging its stem…. I’ve no idea what is going to happen.

-cvj

From Ernie’s 3D Pancakes, perhaps the best holiday gift ever — the Plush Plagues Bag for Passover!

Yes, you can have soft fuzzy representations of each of the ten plagues sent by Yahweh to annoy the Egyptians into letting Moses and his people go. Types of pestilence represented include:

• A spooky eyed drop of blood
• A Frog — for frogs, of course
• A Giant Lice for lice.
• Cow for cattle disease
• Black Locust for locusts
• A white satin lump of hail
• A black cube of darkness
• An icky boil on a piece of flesh!
• A snarling lion’s head for wild beasts
• and last of all a very sad head – for death of the first born.

Descriptions taken verbatim from the vendor, who goes on to say — “The frog, lice, cow and locust wriggle and roll their eyes, quiver, buzz and move when you pull their string and are apx 4.5″ long.” With toys like this, how come Judaism isn’t the world’s most popular religion?

I mean, seriously. A black cube of darkness! With eyes. Nothing could be more awesome than that.

I was talking with a friend over dinner last night about Death Valley (she’s leaving for a trip there soon) and this reminded me of the fact that I was supposed to do a few more posts on my recent “off-planet” trip to the same place. So here goes:

Why Do I Need All That Other Stuff Day.

Right now you’re thinking, “Why do I need all that other stuff?”. It’s the feeling you get (for a while) when you’re out in the desert, just you and the tent, and the stuff on the picnic table. You’re cooking asparagus to go with your red pepper and avocado salad, to have as a side with your delicious stewed chicken (with a bit of red wine in the sauce) on a bed of couscous. You’re feeling content with the world (the sandstorm of the night before that filled every crevice with sand while you were trying to put up your tent in the middle of it is just a distant memory), and the sun will soon set, beautifully, behind the mountains to the West.

Ahead of you to come that evening is some quality thinking on a full belly, some dozing by a crackling campfire, the murmur of other campers in the (you hope) distance, the small chunk of dark chocolate you’ll break off the bar you brought…. and that single slow-burning shot of the 15 year old Dalwhinnie that you always treat yourself to later in the tent when on a camping trip, before eventually blowing out the candle lamp and sleeping.

(more…)

John Horgan was one of the first batch of Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellows in Science and Religion. As he reports,

The 10 fellows were to spend several weeks at the University of Cambridge, listening to scientists and philosophers pontificate on topics related to science and religion. The fellowship not only sounded like fun, it also paid all expenses and threw in an extra $15,000 — a tempting sum for a freelancer, which I was at the time. On the other hand, as an agnostic increasingly disturbed by religion’s influence on human affairs, I had misgivings about the foundation’s agenda of reconciling religion and science.

Horgan took the money and went to Cambridge, but what he encountered makes me feel all the more certain that allowing oneself to be used to blur the line between science and religion is absolutely the wrong choice.

For the whole story, read his piece at Edge.com. For now, let me give you a couple of gems from the meeting he attended

Simon Conway Morris, a biologist at Cambridge and an adviser to the Templeton Foundation, ridiculed intelligent design as nonsense that no respectable biologist could accept.

[...]

And yet Morris, a Catholic, revealed in response to questions that he believes Christ was a supernatural figure who performed miracles and was resurrected after his death. Other Templeton speakers also rejected intelligent design while espousing beliefs at least as lacking in scientific substance.

It gets worse:

The physicist F. Russell Stannard, a member of the Templeton Foundation Board of Trustees, contended that prayers can heal the sick — not through the placebo effect, which is an established fact, but through the intercession of God. In fact the foundation has supported studies of the effectiveness of so-called intercessory prayer, which have been inconclusive.

[But lets not forget that some studies have been conclusive, and found intercessory prayer to be, not to put too fine a point on it, a load of bollocks. Actually, to be fair, the main page of the Templeton foundation site, today reports that the Templeton-funded "Largest Study of Third-Party Remote Intercessory Prayer Suggests Prayer Not Effective in Reducing Complications Following Heart Surgery". I must confess to being impressed by them reporting this on the main page, although they do say in the statement that "Prayer research is a fascinating topic...", whereas I would have said that "Prayer research is a waste of time, since intercessory prayer would violate well-established laws of physics". But you can't have everything.]

And finally, back to Horgan’s story; here’s the money shot

One Templeton official made what I felt were inappropriate remarks about the foundation’s expectations of us fellows. She told us that the meeting cost more than $1-million, and in return the foundation wanted us to publish articles touching on science and religion. But when I told her one evening at dinner that — given all the problems caused by religion throughout human history — I didn’t want science and religion to be reconciled, and that I hoped humanity would eventually outgrow religion, she replied that she didn’t think someone with those opinions should have accepted a fellowship.

My views on all this are well-known. However, Horgan ends his essay with an interesting suggestion

First, the foundation should state clearly that it is not committed to any particular conclusion of the science-religion dialogue, and that one possible conclusion is that religion — at least in its traditional, supernatural manifestations — is not compatible with science. To demonstrate its open-mindedness, the foundation should award the Templeton Prize to an opponent of religion, such as Steven Weinberg or Richard Dawkins. At the very least, the foundation should post this essay on its Web site.

So in order not to be negative the whole time, I will state (and don’t pretend like I don’t wield awesome power in these matters) that I am prepared to apply for Templeton money if they award the Templeton Prize to Richard Dawkins.

Some of you may know that I’ve been on the job market. The good news is that I’ve officially accepted a position at Caltech, starting in September. It’s a fantastic research environment, and they are building up in cosmology at the moment. Also I understand the weather is pretty nice, so I’m excited about the move.

The job itself requires a little explication: I’ll be a Senior Research Associate in Physics. According to Caltech’s classification system, this is a faculty job (”Caltech’s equivalent of a research full professor,” as they put it to me) but not actually a “professor” job. Basically I get to concentrate on doing research — no teaching required, although I’m allowed to volunteer — and can apply for grants and hire postdocs (and even serve on committees!) just like any other faculty member. The downside is that there is no tenure, although it’s not a term-limited job; I can in principle stay forever if the money holds out and they don’t want to fire me. In the meantime, I’ll have the freedom to work on some of the more ambitious cosmology ideas that have been percolating in the back of my mind for a while.

I have to express my gratitude to everyone who has been incredibly supportive during the entire process, from my close friends to strangers on the internet to famous scientists around the world to Marc Kamionkowski and the others who did such a good job recruiting me to Caltech. I’m sure I will miss Chicago at times, but the future looks really bright, and I can’t wait to get it started.

A noteworthy event for folks interested in numerology, or just plain odd things, occured in the U.S. last night. At 1:02 AM and three seconds on April 5, 2006, the time and date on digital clocks read 01-02-03-04-05-06. Cool, huh. Happens once a century. The world’s atomic clock timekeepers got all excited. I must confess that I slept through it nonetheless. The rest of the world, which uses the day/month/year format, can enjoy the event on the 4th of May.

You can check out the USNO master clock here – home of the Official source of time for the U.S. Department of Defense.