First, befitting Earth Day, there’s a press release on the discovery of an Earth-sized planet (well, at least double the size, but that’s essentially identical by astronomical standards). The orbital period is 3 days, which means it is way too close to its sun to harbor life. But it’s just a matter of time before we find another Earth. The New York Times article has a direct link to the (unpublished, unrefereed) preprint; I guess your average NYTimes reader is expected to be able to follow an original scientific article?

Second, there’s an interesting blog post by Kevin Kelly on how Nature produces “intelligence” (hat-tip to Mike Warren). The article describes how trees can “see” their environment:

Light reflected from nearby vegetation is richer in far-red wavelengths than unreflected light. Plants can use this information to not only see shade, but to anticipate the likelihood of shading by a competitor in the future. “When a change in the balance of red to far-red radiation is perceived,” says Trewavas, “an integrated adaptive response in phenotype structure [of the plant] results. New branches grow away from the putative competitor, stem growth is increased; the rate of branching diminishes, and such branches assume a more vertical direction: leaf area increases in anticipation of reduced incident flux; and the number of layers of leaf cells containing chlorophyll diminishes.”

And here’s what rock ants (with 100,000 neurons) can do:

To assess the potential of a new nesting site, rock ants will measure the dimensions of the room in total darkness and then calculate – and that is the proper word – the volume and desirability of it. For many millions of years, rock ants have used a mathematical trick that was only discovered by humans in 1733. Rock ants can estimate the volume of a space, even an irregular shaped one, by randomly laying a scent trail across the floor of the space, “recording” the length of that line, and then counting the number of times it encounters that scented line during additional diagonal runs across the floor. The calculated area is inversely proportional to the frequency of intersections times length. In other words, the ants discovered an approximate value for Π derived by intersecting diagonals.

The post then goes on to speculate about the minds we’re building into our technology. It gets a little science-fictiony for my taste, but one interesting site it links to is 20 questions. It’s quite entertaining, and can be eerily accurate. But stop playing the game, and go outside and take a long walk. And remember, the trees are watching.

You suck.

CV readers may recall the trauma suffered a few weeks ago due to a roof rat invading my tomato crop. Well, the roof rat (and his friends) were easily dealt with (naturally, they are now all dead rats). But the squirrels turned out to be a rather serious problem. One came and quickly told all his/her friends. Seems they considered my tomatoes to be quite tasty. Not any more….they can find another restaurant!

Ha – foiled them critters! (I must admit it is real fun to watch them try to get into the cages!) And, my tomato yield has drastically improved.

For all you squirrel lovers out there – note that no squirrels were actually harmed in the cage building process.

and it triggered my instinct to kill. I mean, some varmint is eating my food! Can’t get more instinctual than that. Not to mention all the time and investment I have put into nurturing this crop. Not to mention that my very first BIG juicy tomato was just about ripe enough to pick…

After a thorough debate and inspection of the photos, the concensus of the SLAC theory group is squirrels, rats, or birds. Keeping in mind that my tomatoes are in container pots, on my deck, about 30-40 feet off the ground, rabbits were immediately excluded. I have ruled out birds after a detailed investigation of the crime scene this evening. Burton Richter himself (Nobel prize winner and co-discoverer of charm and former director of SLAC) made a point of calling his wife – an expert on such things – in order to determine the origin of the varmit. Mrs. Richter suggested roof rats. Egads!! I certainly hope not – that sounds rather disgusting and I’d rather have squirrels…

Meanwhile, I have put up every defense possible, short of building a cage for the plants. I might do that this weekend, but since the plants are 6 feet tall, it will be a job. I did some web research and devised a fortified multi-strategy defense. I have purchased Shake-Away Critter-Repellent, it is composed mainly of garlic and fox urine so it is organic, and sprinkled it about. I put out boxes of rat poison and traps, as well as one of those ultra-sonic/EM-wave rodent repellent thingies I had in my garage. I also put out 2 bowls of water (several websites said squirrles eat tomatoes for H2O during a drought – which adequately describes summer in California) and a bowl containing the 7 partially eaten tomatoes from the night before, hoping it might be easier for the varmint to finish them off first. I have also left the lights on, on my deck.

Short of building a cage (or sleeping on the deck with a BB gun) it’s the best I can do….we shall see what has transpired in the morning. If my tomatoes are further eaten by the morning, hell will hath no fury….

Update: It is now Friday. Last night around 1 AM I went out to check on the plants. Sure enough a large juicy (but green) tomato was sitting at the base of the pots. Then there was a rustling noise and a reasonably large RAT (Eeuw!) scurried out of the container pots and ran away. I caught the varmint red-handed! I involuntarily jumped back and screamed (wonder what my neighbors think now), but had no weapon on me so just watched the critter scurry away. (Actually, I don’t have weapons save for a baseball bat or two.) So much for the ultra-sound thingie. I unplugged it and turned on a radio instead for the rest of the night. LaRose Richter gets the prize for the correct hypothesis. Today I took action – the rat control people are coming first thing tomorrow morning, the container with my best plants is now sitting in the middle of my kitchen for the night, and I have about 10 zillion traps surrounding the plants left outdoors….

Update^2: 1:30 AM Saturday. No rat like a dead rat. Yep, my tom-cat snapper trap got’em! Gotta have the right tools for the job.

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

Happy Mother’s Day!

-cvj

Here’s the hedge in full bloom:

You know, I was thinking…

If I ever have a daughter, perhaps I will call her Jasmine. With the agreement of the mother, of course.

Yes…. Jasmine.

Such a lovely name. Such a lovely scent.

Such a lovely flower.

-cvj

Splendid.

-cvj

Quite a pleasure. I think I should plant some directly into the soil one day.

-cvj

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

Must start work on several aspects of the garden next weekend to get ready for Spring!

-cvj

String theory (or whatever it will be called when we figure out what it actually is) is a work in progress. It is an attempt to formulate the physics which will help us understand Nature at a level well beyond that at which we understand it now. Among the things we hope that such a theory will tell us about are:

• The quantum physics of spacetime. Nature is at its heart quantum mechanical, yet we don’t yet know what happens when we combine quantum physics with the physics of spacetime (phenomena such as black holes, vacuum energy, the nature of the very early universe, (and possibly more things we just have not realized yet!) depend on us understanding this);
• The connections between gravity and the other forces of Nature (lots to say here too…..much overlap with the other bullet points’s parenthetical remarks);
• The physical origin of several unexplained patterns and mysteries in our current models of particle physics (the matter/anti-matter imbalance, the origin of mass, the weakness of gravity, why three similar families of matter particles?, Why are “force” particles and “matter” particles so different from each other anyway?);
• The structure and evolution of our universe (Dark Energy and Dark Matter, which make up a whole 96% (or so) of our entire universe!…..what the Dickens are they? See several posts here on CV on these constituents of our universe.)….

….and several other questions that I don’t want to go into here, otherwise it stops being of benefit to non-experts…. (I also won’t go into all of the excellent things string theory has been useful for in our potental understanding other things about Nature, such as the nature of the Strong Nuclear force, why you never see a quark all on its own (“confinement”), etc…..)

Ok. So where are we?

Well, string theory is very complicated. It may well be that all we’ve worked out about it so far, over quite a few years, is just a tiny fraction of the whole story.

Maybe when we have the story worked out, we’ll have a big party in celebration of all that we learn about Nature from it. Or, we’ll see that it’s just the wrong story. Nobody knows whether or not this is the case. We need to work it out in order to know. Another perfectly fine possibility is that string theory tells us about *some* of the list of physics issues above, but not all of it.

In an effort to understand if the theory makes contact (or even has a chance to make contact) with Nature, many have attempted to extract physical scenarios, corresponding to our world, from the theory. Many of these scenarios are difficult to extract. They are often called “solutions” of the theory, in a (partial) analogy to finding solutions to a set of equations in an exercise in high school algebra. (Caveat: The analogy is only partial, because it is not clear if we really have all of the equations yet. This bit is important to remember!)

Workers in the field have found that (keep the above caveat in mind) there are apparently very very many solutions, making up a whole “landscape” of possibilities. (See my earlier, more technical post on this.)

So somewhere in that apparently vast landscape of (possible) string theory solutions, one of them might just correspond to Nature.

The big questions (in this context) for our field right now are:

• Is there a dynamical (or other physical) principle we’re missing that will help us find the One Solution? (In other words, maybe all those solutions aren’t solutions.)
• Must we appeal to other means of selecting the correct solution? (This is where arguments about things like the “Anthropic Principle” begin. See that earlier post and its discussion thread, and several others.)
• Will we just end up choosing a “solution” by hand and see if there’s still interesting science to be done, post-pick? (In other words, use observation/experiment to guide you in determining some parts of the solution (“fitting some parameters to the data”) , and then the theory makes predictions about the rest of the physics.) A perfectly sensible possibility that seems to get forgotten in these discussions, despite the fact that it happens all over the rest of science!)
• Or is it totally random, there’s nothing further to be understood, and string theorists are not doing science any more?

All good questions. Nobody knows the answers, but several people have strong opinions in various directions. Meanwhile, research continues. Excellent.

While we wait for the answers, here’s some hope:

Ok. I’ll come clean now:

This was all a ruse to do one of my irregular posts in a series of weekend botanical/gardening pictures. The above is something I saw yesterday. Possibly my favourite photograph from the entire trip “off-planet“. This plant is often called “Desert Gold”. I do think that it resonates rather nicely with the physics issues too though, so I hope it helped form a picture in your mind of what people are up to in the research.

(I find myself wondering: Why do I not have any of these types of flower in my garden? Must look into getting seeds for them.)

-cvj

I was planning to do a bit of work in the garden today, but it will have to wait until this heavy precipitation has abated…..

Sean and Mark are in town apparently. They must be wondering what they did to deserve this on their trips away from the frozen North East or Midwest.

-cvj

A certain wonderful yellow rose bush has been faithfully giving me roses, even long after the others have begun to just look tall and stringy and barren. I’ve got to prune everything back, so I harvested the last of the roses to put into a vase. Several of them are still full and perfect. And the scent is unbelievable, and indescribable!

So it all started with a bunch of clippings, and then minutes later, gave me a nice indoor display for the living room. Notice that I’ve clipped the leaves away from hanging into the water… I’ve also added a tiny amount of bleach to the water…. all this will lengthen the life of the cut flowers. (Apparently the bleach -which is to control bacteria- is not universally agreed upon, but it seems to work for me.)

-cvj

I stepped out into the back garden for the first time in a month and was rewarded with the sight of this fully-laden orange tree. Last Spring, I planted the lemon tree and the lime tree, but I did not plant this fellow, but it’s quite faithfully producing each year with no encouragement from me (I think it will need some feeding though….these seem smaller than they were last year).

So, what shall I do with these? I don’t know what the variety is. It might have been intended by the planter (whoever that was) to be purely decorative, but these oranges made an interesting (fairly standard recipe) marmalade last year. But I suspect that, given their unusual taste, they may be better suited to other recipes.

Thoughts anyone? I got some excellent discussion (thanks all) on the case of the lemons in the other thread, with recipe suggestions (thanks Janet, Amara), including the unexpected appearance of the food professional, Rochelle Foles from whose book one of the earlier recipes came! That’s just the kind of variety I like to see here….. thanks all!

I’d be happy to hear thoughts from everyone again….

-cvj

….except for meyer lemons! Lots and lots of them on the tree I planted earlier this year. They’re going more and more golden coloured every day.

What will I do with all these lemons? Well, among other things, I see lemon-themed baking in my future. Mmmm…..

-cvj

Having convinced myself that it was not going to grab me in its many-fingered purple paw and do something horrible to me, I studied it for a long while, and took a few photographs. Within a day or two, it revealed its full, elegant shape. Since then, I’ve had several appear.

I love the colours.

I don’t know the name of this palm, unfortunately. Do you? It is very common around Southern California. There are so many varieties here (all but one brought here in the last century or so, apparently), and gardeners love them: I’ve three two (correction because the other is a variety of cycad…not a palm at all) different types in a quite small space. You can see typical streets in the city of LA with several varieties along the sides for many blocks, and several more types in the gardens of the houses on that street. My Sunset Western Gardens book gave me several names, but no pictures, and there just way too many to make a guess. Google turned up this wonderful online encylcopedia of palms, which is not organized in a way that allows for a timely identification, but does seem to have a wealth of valuable information in it. Look at the photo gallery to get an idea of just how many types there are worldwide.

-cvj

Went to see it at my favourite movie theatre, the Arclight, which I’ve told you about before (here and here), and it was in the fantastic Cinerama Dome. Another great thing about the Arclight is that they have interesting film-related displays in the lobby contributed by the film-makers. Guess what they have on display now? Two of the model sets from the film!

They are just great. I carefully took some snaps through the glass cases for you. (My secret for success: no flash, hold your breath, squeeze-don’t-press.)

Here’s Wallace and Gromit in the basement. I won’t tell you what’s going on in case you have not seen the film yet (above right has another shot from that same set):

Here’s Gromit, examining his prized vegetables in the greenhouse:

These are particularly bitter-sweet to see up close, since the recent news of the terrible fire which destroyed most of the sets and props from all the previous work of the Aardman Animation studios.

Anyway, tonight was a lovely evening before a terribly busy work week. Setting alarm clock for 5:45am. Sigh….

-cvj

Sitting outside on the patio, working through the world’s supply of coffee and tea (one has to do one’s part) while scribbling is always very nice. There are distractions, of course, and some of them are pleasant. Two recent ones:

(1) This giant beetle (larger than the size of the top joint of your thumb!) which is a beautiful iridescent green (not revealed in the picture – it left before I could get a good angle to photograph its underbelly). In flight it is huge and loud, like the helicopters that fly over a lot in this city’s busy skies. I had to get up and run to shut the windows it was busily trying to enter. It is so (at first) terrifying in flight close up that my first thought was that if it found its way into the house, I would just give it the keys and leave. But once it alighted on a surface and I could look at it and see how beautiful it was, I was hooked. Does anyone know what this wonderful/scary/beautiful creature is called? ((S)he did not stop to chat.) Specifically, I mean – what type of beetle is it?

(Another iridescent green visitor I’d like to capture on “film” is a marvellous tiny hummingbird (of some sort) that keeps coming to visit the stralitsias, the buddleias, and the salvia leucantha (Mexican sage) that are all blooming in the front garden now. But this beauty moves way too fast, and is rather shy.)

(2) The sounds of my mum (visiting for a while from the UK) chuckling away as she reads J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” with evident enjoyment (she has not even noticed me snapping this picture). She’s recently discovered Potter, and so I expect she’ll have several days of fun to come, reading these books. (I’ll have to borrow or buy the later ones for her since I’ve never read further than the first one, which someone bought for me several years ago. – Yes, I know it should be “…Philosopher’s Stone”: don’t get me started on that topic!)

-cvj

I learned from Pharyngula that it was World Naked Gardening Day on Saturday, so I thought I’d give you an update on the garden, as I did do some pottering about out there…..and I know what you want to ask! The good news is that some of the peas are ready! But they’re going to come ready in separated stages, so it looks like I’ll have about four peas a week, annoyingly. Also, I got one early pepper, of quite an unexpected colour, that was ready the day after I did the last garden post, but I neglected to tell you then since I thought you’d heard enough. No more have come, as the pepper plants seem to have decided to focus on growing to twice their size first. They do look healthy.

It’s an all out war between me and the skunk(s) again. And it might go nuclear again. I’d declared a truce for a while, but a few nights ago two of my zucchini plants were dug out at the roots just at the height of their flowering, so I’m mad. Will be re-arming with all the previous weaponry: sticks, stones (for throwing), cayenne pepper, and the nuclear option …ammonia!

Also on the gardening front, after a day’s calculating and writing yesterday, in the evening I decided to go to my favourite movie theatre, the Arclight, (in Hollywood, not too far from home, on Sunset Blvd, near Vine – best sound, seats and screens in town; check it out) and see The Constant Gardener. It was an excellent relatively low-key film, with a powerful and sad message. I do recommend it if you’re looking for ideas about what to see. Excellent performances (Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, among others), and directed by Fernando Meirelles, that excellent director who also directed a wonderful film that I love called City of God. Also, the film served as a reminder to me that unexpectedly crappy things can happen in your life while you’re worrying about the garden…

Today was spent mostly at home sat at the computer, writing. A sure sign that I’m getting old and distracted is the fact that it is much harder to get fully immersed in a writing project. When I was younger, much younger than today, I’d have been constantly working on the research with no other distractions (you know, committee meetings, teaching, etc), so that when I came to write the paper I’d have the whole paper essentially assembled in my head. Then I’d just sit and write it, sometimes all in one sitting, working through the night if neccessary. Not so now. Too many other things to worry about (not counting the blog here at all, by the way), so ideas come out all slow, not fully formed, and in the wrong order, which is not what I’m used to. Also -very importantly- I’m still trying to determine my favourite places to sit and work around the city when I’m in writing mode. Friday afternoon saw me at an excellent cafe I like called The Alcove (it’s in Los Feliz) for a few hours, writing and thinking. I spent yesterday working at home, mostly, but I did go for a pint or two at the Cat and Fiddle (a British pub (!), also in Hollywood, on Sunset Blvd; everybody checks everyone else out a little bit because someone spread a rumour that you’re supposed to spot celebrities there….tiresome, but a good spot) after the movie and do a bit of writing (on a folded-up bit of paper so as not to scare the patrons) on a bench there until about 11:00pm. I like changing venues a lot, getting on with life (seeing it and living it) and calculating and writing as I go. It’s one of my favourite modes of operation.

Today (Sunday) was mostly home, sitting outside from 8:00am writing and thinking, listening to the quiet morning sounds, broken only later by the guys building a deck over at the house across the street, and the sounds of the new neighbour (some minor celebrity, apparently) and his buddies moving into the other house opposite. Then in the late afternoon I decided on the spur of the moment to head to a new venue and scribble there: the beach. So I drove over to Santa Monica, parked the car, got out the bike and cycled into town, walked down the 3rd Street Promenade (checking that the buskers are still absolutely awful – they were (I have a theory about why)) and then cycled on to Santa Monica beach, then Venice beach, and then back to Santa Monica Beach because for some annoying reason there don’t seem to be any public tables at Venice beach.

It was another gorgeous sunset, and after it got too cold to continue writing I did do a bit of cycling around to see what I could see along the promenade. I’m rather pleased with how much I got done in terms of quality thinking, computing and writing, although I do sometimes long for those days when I could get totally immersed, could stay up late both physically (and logistically) and just rattle off a paper like that, all in one go. On the plus side, I’m probably able to achieve way more across a variety of duties, and be useful to a lot more people, now as compared to then. So you win some, you lose some.

Don’t ask me what the point of this ramble was. I don’t know either, so there you have it. Anyway, now I’ve got to go write the lecture for tomorrow’s 9:00am class. And it’s almost midnight. Sigh…

-cvj