Blogs / Cosmic Variance

So it seems like an age ago, but it wasn’t really…..

[Flashback, Apr. 21st '04]

Roberto Emparan had come to give us a seminar entitled “New Horizons in Higher Dimensions”, (on higher dimensional black holes and their cousins) which was excellent. As he is a good friend of both of us, my wife and I took him on one of our standard (back then) guest routines wcih we enjoyed very much: Dinner out West (that time at Joe’s on Abbott Kinney in Venice), and then ice cream at that excellent place two doors down with the very authentic tasting ice cream (Massimo’s?….. closed down not long after….have not been to the new one, whereever it is). From there, take the ice cream the four or five blocks to the beach and walk along the isolated (why oh why isolated? -It’s great at night!) beach and walk. So we got to the beach and headed South, since in the distance, there was a very clear white light, unusually bright, and we wanted to know what it was. So we walked until we got to the source. There was a large number of people milling around, and quite a few people who were also out walking (yes, it happens in LA) had stopped to look. It was in front of one of those fun-looking mostly-windows Venice beachside houses, and they were filming a movie in one of the rooms on the upper floor. Well, as you may know if you have hung around a movie set for any length of time, there was a lot of standing around with nothing happening. But people have this fascination with movie-making, and so people stayed. (It is not hard to tell the difference between movies and commercials or other projects…there are several signs.)

Now two things helped people stay despite that fact that not much was happening.
(1) A rumour had gone through the assembled on-lookers (I’m talking about 20 people at most) that it was “some new Val Kilmer movie”. My (and others’) reaction was “oh, let’s be off then”, but then ……
(2) There was a giant, huge, enormous – humongous – pile of cardboard boxes being slowly glued together, layer after layer, below the balcony of the upstairs room. Clearly there was going to be a stunt! So people hung around – this is not something you see every day.

So they built and they built and they stopped. Then there was a rehearsal. You could just in the distance see into the room, and there was a guy in a really cheesy-looking robot suit. We rolled our eyes, and I thought “yep…..Val Kilmer movie…”, but we stayed. The robot guy seems to be in the room, there are shots fired, he jerks as though hit, and then staggers backwards to the balcony….. Oh. So you can see the setup. This ought to be interesting to see, people thought. Then there was a consultation……and they decided to build another layer onto the boxes……this took another half an hour, twenty minutes at least. More standing around. A huge amount of time went by. Roberto had an early plane to catch (if I recall correctly), and frankly, watching the assistant to the assistant to the assistant to the chief box-taper build a huge pile of cardboard boxes gets a little old really fast.

…and it was only a Val Kilmer movie that I’d never go to see anyway. We took him back to his hotel and said goodbye.

[Present day. Today (Saturday night 3rd Dec. '05 ) in fact!]
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The other thing that’s nice about the Categorically Not! gatherings is the fact that you can wander in the other parts of the space (a giant aircraft hangar) and find interesting displays of art, and run into interesting people. One time, I ran into Julie Weiss! You’ve no idea who that is, right? Thought not. Well, you probbaly know her work. She is a designer in the film industry, and she’s helped set the overall look of several films, including American Beauty, Frida, The Ring (oh yes!), Twelve Monkeys, etc. Wonderful work that is understated and unsung….the overall look of a film is so important to how you see it, but we forget this and just credit everything to the director…… She’s just busily designing in the room next door while we’re doing our Categorically Not! stuff. Who knows what film I’ll be looking at sometime soon and seeing work that I could hear being done in the studio next door….we shall see!

Last time, I was introduced to an artist, Gurpran Rau, who had some pieces up. (You can see some snaps I took in this post, above and below. Click on her name to go to a site with better reproductions….)

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I’m going to miss most of these. Have done already. However, in case you’re in the area and love the genre as much as I do, I thought I’d mention it. UCLA’s Film and Television Archive are doing a wonderful festival/series of Kung-Fu films, several of them quite rare. It looks like such fun.

Their whole schedule is here: Click on the words “Heroic Grace II’ within the schedule for a page telling you all about the series in great detail. An extract , after which I’ll tell you the physics link:

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This is a reminder to mark your calendars for November 20th. Recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. The first one of the new season was a tremendous success, and I described it here, and there was another one since then, part of which I described here.

Well, the next one of the new season is on Sunday. Here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

As Alice learned, it’s not always clear what’s a looking glass, and what’s a window to another world. Mirrors and windows are often interchangeable: we look out into the world, and see ourselves reflected back. We look at a reflection, and believe it’s showing us a world beyond. We internalize the mirror image and project the one inside. Objects, actions and ideas can become so confused with their reflections that it’s impossible to untangle them. What’s phantom and what’s real? Is there even a relevant difference?

November’s Categorically Not! will explore mirroring in religion, neuroscience, and photography. Mirror neurons turn the mind into a looking glass, firing in the brain when we see someone perform, as well as when we perform an action ourselves. This inherent organization of the brain contributed to how we came to develop language and social groups, learn a skill, and empathize with others. UCLA neuroscientists Bruce Dobkin and Marco Iacoboni will bring us up to date on exciting new discoveries. For photographers, reflections can be a nuisance, but poet and artist Janet Sternburg—who is celebrating the publication of her new book Optic Nerve: Photopoems—uses them to create a multi-dimensional cosmos where phantoms are as real as the “real world” beyond. As for God, do we mirror ourselves in his image? Or do we create him in ours? As Pultizer-prize winning author of God: A Biography, Jack Miles, will discuss: “The practice of a religion entails the introjection of a durable set of moods, behaviors, and intuitions not of one’s own devising. Sometimes these derive from a known founder, sometimes not. In any case, their adoption–in which belief constitutes only one element–brings about something like the transfer of personality over time.”

Once again, in view of a previous time, please send pointed critical remarks about the above quoted blurb to KC Cole, and not to me, thanks. However, discussion and exploration of the ideas within it are welcome in the comment section, as usual.

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

Well, after the wonderful and exquisite treasures on the inside of the exhibition (see my earlier post), which I was not allowed to photograph, I was funneled into the gift shop.
A glance told me that I had to linger there and take some photos of the truly spectacular tat (junk) that they are selling there. Some of it is just such great tat, and I wanted to share it with you.

Top of the list is the King Tut wine rack (top left). It is just priceless. I was tempted to get one for our resident wine expert, JoAnne. But luckily, I could not affort it. These things are shockingly expensive.

Then there were these wonderfully awful pens . There were Mummy ones, Anubis ones, and Tut ones (column right). I admit that these would be wonderful for kids. I thought about getting one for myself to use as a sort of “ironic” statement, but couldn’t make up my mind whether anyone but me would get the joke.

There were lots of other things, such as ties of various sorts with designs of spectacularly poor taste, paintings of the artifacts, plastic crowns and head-dresses that you could wear, sceptres and crooks, etc. Maybe some of this stuff was good, and you actually bought it. I don’t mean to offend… I did not look for very long, and may have missed some treasures amongst the other stuff. I’ll spare you the details of the other stuff, and instead show you this collection of…tut-dolls. Wonderfully tacky….to the point of being cute, in fact. (Also good dolls for kids, though…..)

Yeah, I know. I’m some sort of snob, and I’ll get hate mail about this. Sorry. But I should say that I loved the stuff too, because it was so tasteless and to their credit, they made no pretence at it being anything other than it was: Really expensive tat. Tut-tat!

-cvj

Ok, so you’ve noticed that some of us do a bit of tut-tutting on this blog from time to time. I’m certainly guilty of that. Well, I decided to go Tut-Tutting big time last night and go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) special King Tut (yes, Tutankhamun) exhibition last night. The Egyptian government authorized a special exhibition of some of the treasures to go on tour and it has been here for a while. They’ve made it a huge commercial endeavour, tickets run at $25 each, and the advertising for it around the city reached remarkable levels of perpetual visibility earlier this year. It is coming to an end soon. The official website is at this link.

I think that they did an excellent job, overall. The placing and spacing of the artifacts allowed you to walk around them and properly take them in. There were not too many objects in each room, and the signs and labelling were thoughtfully laid out. The fact that it was an evening visit probably helped make it an enjoyable experience…..seeing the layout of barriers at the entrance for the huge lines they much get during the day and on the weekend, I imagine it must be a dreadful experience to come at that time.

A major contributor to making it an excellent couple of hours is Omar Sharif. He did the voice work on the personal audio tour devices. (Since first trying one of these in Taiwan in 1997, while looking at the vast collection of artefacts in the National Palace Museum there, I can no longer imagine seeing exhibits of this sort without an audio guide… it is at least 30% of the exhibit, in my view, when done properly.) Sharif’s voice work was one of the best performance I’ve ever witnessed from him. It starts off a bit corny, but works really well once you get used to it. He’s not just reading a script – he’s really into it- and he’s distintly got laughter in his voice (perhaps chuckling a little here and there!) at things which are amusing or ironic (such as their care about embalming internal organs, while they just pulled the brain out through the nose and toss it away), and reverent in the appropriate places, without being too over-dramatic. And all the time he’s giving you useful information that would be just a mess to try and put on the signs and labels, given the number of people trying to read them.

Anyway, the thing that tried hard (but failed) to spoil it all is near the end where they have a loud display concerning the issue of why the fellow was dead at age 19. It was annoying because it was too loud and spread to the room before, where you should be contemplating the tomb itself (what they think-wrongly- is the climax of the exhibit) in thoughtful near-silence. Instead, you can here in the distance the corny-movie-trailer-voice (definitely not Sharif…I’m sure it is one of the movie trailer people) booming “The Mystery Continues!”, every 60 seconds or so…..

But the artifacts are just wonderful. You get caught up in the workmanship, relationships to other artefacts, history, etc…. Excellent. Well worth the visit.

They don’t let you take cameras in. I have some respect for that…..especially given how intrusive people can be with those things (I still have terrible, terrible memories of the mob in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris in Summer 2004). I’m also a bit weird about whether I ought to be taking snaps of some of this material to be gawped at randomly and out of context. It deserves to be looked at properly, perhaps, maybe out of respect for the culture (all of our Western culture…), and the dead. Maybe not. I don’t know. I have not thought it through.

Anyway, you know me by now. Camera often at the ready for a secret shot of significance to share with you. When I saw this little object, I just had to do it. It is a cosmetics jar from the burial chamber, and I think that I’ve no qualms about sharing a snap of such an object. It was so charming (big cats sticking their tongues out were involved, so how could I resist?), and so exquisite that I spent 15 minutes tracking the museum officials until I got my chance to do one of my no-flash keep-hand-steady shots, (which I made sure disturbed nobody, I stress). Here it is. Enjoy:

Next, Tut-Tutting about Tut Tat!

-cvj

From their website:

Visions of Science is a photographic awards scheme organised by Novartis Pharmaceuticals to encourage ongoing discussion about science.

So, what is a Vision of Science? To the judges of the Awards, a Vision of Science is an attention-grabbing image that gives new insight into the world of science and the workings of nature. It may show something never seen before, it may explain a scientific phenomenon, it may illustrate scientific data or it may simply be an image that shows the beauty of science.

The panel of judges remains a sound mix of scientists, photographers and picture editors.

Visions of Science is organised by Novartis Pharmaceuticals. The Daily Telegraph is the key media partner. The category prize money of £7,000, together with support and advice comes from the Science Photo Library. Special awards this year have been sponsored by the Institute of Physics, the BMJ, Science Learning Centres and Kodak Ltd.

Some of these images are just fantastic (check out the paper clip one in particular). Get over there and take a look – immediately!

[via Gordon Watts, over at Quantum Diaries]

Yes, I proposed marriage three times today.

Hmmm, I see I’ll need to explain.

Well, it all started back in September, at the installation of our new Provost. (Yes, they use that word, like he’s a new light bulb, operating system, or something.) Everybody went along, since the rumour was that he was going to give some hints about what new directions he was going to take the University (still in that solid angle that is steeply up), in the form of maybe announcing some new Initiatives. (You have to capitalize that word around here). You can read his speech (or a transcript of something like it) here I think (don’t know if it is linkable from outside the USC network).

Sure enough, as had been leaked, there was an announcement of a new Nanoscience thing. This means that there will be a focus on attracting new research effort, faculty, and facilities under this heading, (and there is always the worry that you won’t be able to do anything unless it fits under that umbrella, so everybody is paying attention for that reason too). So he spoke about that for a while, and I was standing there thinking whether I could argue that Planck scale physics is really a sort of ultra-Nanoscience…. (recall my ipod Planck joke, by the way, and its explanation).

But then he started talking about another Initiative! The Provost’s Initiative on Arts and Humanities. Basically he wants to further enhance and enrich the life of your everyday USC student with more engagement with the Arts, etc. He reminds us of the list of the University’s core values (which I won’t trouble you with), and then says:

These core values represent USC at its very best. They form its foundation and drive every aspect of President Sample’s creative vision for our future. And so we must pointedly ask: how can the university incorporate the rigorous exploration of these values into each student’s experience at USC, regardless of discipline? I believe we should turn to the arts and humanities. These disciplines fully capture the values of the university and provide students with an outstanding opportunity to examine their own relationship to these values on a truly personal level. The arts and humanities bring these values to life- illuminating their complexities and nuances…

He goes on like this for a while, quoting ancient poets and philosophers left, right and center. (These top guys are truly masters of this sort of speech, by the way, and they really mean what they’re saying and want you to believe it too. You can’t imagine anything like it in a UK university. Everybody’s just too jaded and cynical and would just fall about laughing if their top administrators started in with this stuff.) So I’m lapping it up, since I did not expect quite this level of eloquence and possibly geniune vision. (Since Clinton left office and Bush came along, I’ve forgotten what it can be like to listen to genuinely inspiring speeches from your top officials, I suppose, as opposed to excruciatingly cringe-making ones.) He talks for example about the idea of projects involving USC and art galleries, theatres and other venues around the city, etc…. He talks for a lot longer than he did for the Nanoscience Initiative in fact!

So at the end of the speech, I walk up to some of my faculty colleagues also standing near the back (where the excellent food is still being served hot -one of the main reasons to go to these sorts of events: the catering is above and beyond the call of duty, with on-the-floor chefs cooking the finger food on the spot!) and go “You know, I don’t know whether I should be turning to do Nanoscience, or whether I should write a play.” Two of us then went in unison (I kid you not), “Well, how about writing a play about Nanoscience?!”

I then turned and walked away only to be facing my good friend, Los Angeles Theatre scence playwright and colleague from the School of Theatre, Oliver Mayer. I said the same opening sentence to him and again we completed the joke together. We sat, had more wine (it’s 4:30pm on a weekday, but you don’t install a new Provost everyday…..) and I told him about my standard bugbear about which you’ve heard so many times: Better representation of science, scientists, and the scientific process in the arts and media should be part of the battle of increasing the public’s awareness and appreciation of science and the crucial role it plays in society, etc…… I won’t repeat myself again (see also e.g. here , in comments). He caught on immediately, and spoke of the fact that in all the the characters and scenarios he’s written about, he’s never explored scientists and science, as it is outside his realm of experience. So I then spoke of my general frustrations about this being the case not just for playwrights, but also for actors, filmmakers, journalists, their editors, etc. We spoke about speaking more (you know, “my people will call your people” -except neither of us are important enough to have “people” to call each other-) and we parted.

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Photographer Bobby Neel Adams splices together portraits of the same person at very different ages (as well as other intriguing work).

Well, I’ve just returned from an excellent concert at Frank Gehry’s wonderful Walt Disney Concert Hall (photo at left by Tom Bonner). The Los Angeles Philharmonic (the Hall has been its home since it opened in Fall 2003) had as guest conductor Andras Schiff, who is one of those marvellous people who can direct from the piano while playing remarkably complex material. It was a program of Mendelssohn (String Symphony No. 10 in B minor), Schumann (Introduction and Allegro appasionato, Op. 92), Haydn (Piano Concerto in D major, Hob. XVIII: 11) and closing with Schumann again (Symphony No. 1 in B flat major, Op. 38 -Spring).

Schiff was just fantastic, and the orchestra was really solid, as usual. He played the Haydn with delight and a level of electricity that I’ve not seen for a while brought out of that material, even though its brightness is quite conducive to that sort of treatment.

So much about watching an orchestra while listening to it fascinates me, and I love having seats that get me as close as possible to watch what is going on. Different things fascinate me on different evenings, depending upon my mood. One thing that was particularly interesting in both Schumann pieces, even though separated in time quite a bit, was how the composer splits some of the lines across the instrumentation, starting a lot with french horns but then breaking it across to trumpets and some interesting doubling with flutes and oboe. I’ve not noticed it quite so clearly before in this work. Part of this may have been my mood, and part of it may be the fact that the acoustics in the Disney Hall are so amazing that I’ve (re)discovered aspects of several pieces that I thought were familiar by listening to them in that place. Something about the careful design of the space has produced the remarkable ability to separate out every instrument in the orchestra -even when at full size (which is was not this evening)- and allow you to hear them clearly.

The other thing that catches my attention a lot are the musicians who are not doing something the whole time. This can be interesting for a host of reasons, and not just the obvious, which is your curiosity about what they must be thinking about while waiting, and when are they going to come in. This is often the timpanist, but it is quite easy to work out when they are going to be needed most of the time. But tonight was a special treat for me. They had a triangle guy on the last piece! If you don’t know the piece very well -and I did not- it is not clear when he’s going to come in, and so you can sit and try to anticipate depending upon how the music is developing. The piece’s popular title is “Spring” so there’s clearly going to be some need in several places for bright sparkly springy bits in both quiet and loud places. Challenge to get into the mind of the composer there and see if you can anticipate. The other thing that was notable was that Mr. Triangle had not one but two chairs. He had one in which he sat in a state of readiness for the majority of the piece, but eventually he did stir himself, and pick up his triangle and one of his two tiny metal traingle-beater-sticks (do you “beat” a triangle or “tickle” it? And why do you need two sticks?) he had carefully laid out. He did his thing for a short while and then he sat in the taller chair, as he was to play soon after. I think of that second chair as his chair of preparedness – in the other chair he’s merely in readiness – or is it the other way around? I’ve enlarged the picture of the orchestra that I snapped secretly (no flash or noise of course) to show you the triangle guy, his chairs, and his equipment.

Well, while I was watching and listening to him in action, I began to wonder: Why is a triangle a triangle? Would a square sound as good? Or a pentagon or other polygon? Are triangles equilateral ones or isosceles? I think the latter, but I’m not sure. And was there a reason for his having two ticklers/beaters? (He did swop from one to another at one point, and I listened for a tone difference but was not sure if I heard it.) There’s got to be some interesting physics in the vibrations of such shapes….is the triangle shape just a traditional one or is there some experimental reason behind the preference for that shape?

Well, I’ll go to bed with these important questions on my mind, along with the pressing puzzle of what on earth to wear to tomorrow night’s Hallowe’en party in West Hollywood. Apparently it’s a 70s disco theme. I’ve no clothes for that….can’t I just go as a scary Physicist from the 21st Century, i.e., me? At parties, women (and men) already run screaming when I tell them what I do anyway, at any time of year, so I don’t need a costume.

-cvj