Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

First, sorry if you tried to access the blog the last couple of days: the power was down in the building over the weekend for some pretty serious periodic maintenance. Some day soon I plan to bite the bullet and transfer over to an independent host and my own domain.

A few highlights, culinary and otherwise, from the California leg of my current multi-city jaunt:

Arinell Pizza in Berkeley, CA. Aside from having the best "New York style" pizza in the Bay Area, Arinell's is also the only pizzeria I've ever eaten at playing Syd Barrett and Black Sabbath on the stereo.

Dim Sum at Ton Kiang, tamarind and ginger ribs at Betelnut (both in San Francisco) and sushi at Drunken Fish in Oakland. The UK is catching up in Asian (Chinese and Japanese) cuisine, but the Bay Area has a true Pacific Rim vibe. Alas, I wasn't able to get to one of my other favorite restaurants, the Japanese noodle house, O Chamé, on Berkeley's gentrified 4th Street.

The Adventure Playground at the Berkeley Marina. Crunchy lefty liberal types (of which Berkeley is famously full) are usually derided as being responsible for the overprotective nanny-state, all in the wake of campaigners (er, no-fun types) like Ralph Nader. Well, the Adventure Playground is an amazing counterexample, a paradise of rescued timber, paint, tools -- and a few old pianos. Kids are free to un-build and re-build any of the dozens of "forts" of varying size and stability, slap paint wherever they want, swing from the ropes, or climb on the forts they've built. Yes, the parents must sign a waiver, but they can even (gasp) leave their kids for a few hours (at about $6 an hour -- cheaper than a babysitter).

Epic Arts in Berkeley. A grassroots arts project space where I saw some very cool music. "Indie Rock" from Joe Rut this time; on a previous trip I saw the always-awesome Loretta Lynch (full disclosure: one of my hosts is a member of the band!).

And we even got some work done (but, as ever, not enough).

Next week, highlights from ... Warwick...

Just back from a few days at the University of Warwick (which is actually in Coventry, a city with a such a bad rep that they didn't want to name the University after it), at the IOP's Physics 2005: a Century After Einstein (a bit more information on what I discussed here).

An unexpected highlight was a discussion and video presentation with London's Rambert Dance company, from whom the IOP have commissioned a dance in recognition of the Einstein Year. All we saw were a few videotaped glimpses of the piece in rehearsal, but as usual with the best collaborations between science and the arts, Einstein's ideas provided context, but the dance doesn't try to be "about" relativity, or the photoelectric effect, or Brownian motion -- art, not a physics lesson. But it looks gorgeous and worth seeing when it opens in May, or tours Britain in the Autumn.

Nobel-prize winner Steve Chu talked about "Biology as a Solution to Physics Problems": the acousto-electro-mechanics of the ear; the mechanisms of DNA transcription (and how to achieve such high rates of fidelity); and power generation once the supply of oil runs out. It was refreshing to hear that Chu, the head of a national lab (LBL), still felt free to acknowledge the existence of climate change and to critique much US foreign policy as driven by a blatant desire to control the oil supply, despite what has been reported about the stifling of dissent amongst scientists (see this post).

In my own field, most of the talks were reviews -- excellent reviews, but largely on familiar subjects. Alas, having arrived late, and with four parallel sessions of talks going on at once, I wasn't able to see a single talk in any of the other streams: Physics in Biology, Light & Matter, and Quantum Physics.

So most of the fun, and quite a bit of the intellectual stimulation, was to be had as part of the social program, especially at a fine dinner when I was lucky enough to be seated at a table half full of scientists, half of journalists from New Scientist, Nature Physics, and the IOP's own Physics World. In fact, all of the journalists had slowly moved from the academic track over to journalism, so we were all more in awe of them (and, yes, their publicity-making power) than they of us. Also, the fact that they were able to keep the bar open until 1am after the conference dinner was an added bonus (England's licensing laws remain a mystery, especially to someone who once specifically chose an apartment because it was around the corner from the -- now sadly departed -- House of Tiki in Chicago, which shut at 5am).

Other highlights: an after dinner talk from Simon Singh featuring a backward-masked "Stairway to Heaven" as proof that yes, even physicists' perception depends on their biases. And I seemed to be the only person who even moderately enjoyed the Einstein lecture by John Stachel.

(However, readers should note this story and take everything that happens at a conference with a grain of salt.)

Yet again, the servers will be off this weekend: from about 6pm BST Friday 15 April through 8am Monday 18 April. Get some fresh air.

Hunter Thompson: Rich Cohen's Gonzo Nights recounts Thompson's sad end, subsumed in the persona he created through drinking, drugs -- and his words.

For Women in Sciences, Slow Progress in Academia:

Women applying for a postdoctoral fellowship had to be 2.5 times as productive to receive the same competence score as the average male applicant.... "I vastly underestimated the problem," Professor Hochster said. "People tend to think that if there's a problem, it's with a few old-fashioned people with old-fashioned ideas. That's not true. Everybody has unconscious gender bias. It shows up in every study."

It's not a question of whether there are differences between the genders -- there certainly are -- but whether there are differences in attitudes that work against the supposedly meritocratic system of doing science.

From David Gates' review of 'The Outlaw Bible of American Literature': The Rebel Establishment complete with great quote and weirdly out of place tech reference (extra points if you get it):

From Waylon Jennings's autobiography, ... the Platonic country-music anecdote, about Hank Williams:

"Faron Young brought Billie Jean, Hank's last wife, to town for the first time. She was young and beautiful, and Hank liked her immediately. He took a loaded gun and pointed it to Faron's temple, cocked it, and said, 'Boy, I love that woman. Now you can either give her to me or I'm going to kill you.'

"Faron sat there and thought it over for a minute. 'Wouldn't that be great? To be killed by Hank Williams!' "

I'm with the levelers on this one. That's not literature? All right then, I'll go to hell.

Maybe in a hundred years, assuming there's anybody left around, people will be amused at their great-grandparents' failure to grasp the self-evident idea that what was called literature was a niche-marketed intellectual property, and that the war between the outlaws and the canonicals was another dispute between Big-Endians and Small-Endians. (Half a dozen people with a taste for the recherché will even get the allusion.) You can already see the borders getting porous.

Google Maps is (are?) up and running in the UK.

Here's where I work, more or less (actually I thought I was in SW7 2AZ, but it can't seem to find that...). It's a slick interface, although it will be much cooler when the Satellite maps are available, like they are in the US.

My great-grandfather moved to the US from Russia in the years before the First World War, in part forced out due to his trade union activities. Although working at a University isn't exactly the equivalent of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, or my great-grandfather's construction sites in New York City, I was pleased to find out about the Association of University Teachers, representing academics at UK universities (along with a related union, NAFTHE, with whom the AUT is likely to amalgamate in the near future -- workers of the UK, unite...).

Last week, at their national conference, the AUT voted to boycott several universities in Israel, despite the opposition of the national executive, and quite a bit of evidence that the vote was railroaded through by a few frankly anti-Israel activists (obsessives?).

Of course, many academics, even culturally and genealogically Jewish ones like me, have huge problems with Israel's political and diplomatic actions (as do many Israelis themselves), and indeed some actions undertaken by the Universities being boycotted. But sanctioning universities -- centers of at least some amount of free-thinking, and some amount of integration between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians -- seems to me not only largely symbolic, but symbolic of exactly the wrong sentiment. Instead, we should be encouraging dissent, supporting education in the Occupied Territories, and championing peace initiatives. Some AUT members have already quit the union over this; I am waiting to see how it turns out.

(Please see also quite a lot of interesting commentary over on Crooked Timber).