Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

新年快樂

Happy New Year of the Rat to all of the visitors landing here from Google, searching for “Gung hei fat choi”!

“Ezra Pound — From Fascist to Fabulous” -Fine Books & Collections magazine

Too busy for much blogging for the next few weeks. In the meantime:

First, my grad students: Goodbye to one just finishing, hello to my new one, congratulations to the one who just transferred to official PhD-student status, and, finally, to the one staying on as a postdoc! I’m excited that I’m able to still work with all of them on various projects, all concentrating on understanding the state of the Universe at its very earliest moments.

Second, to the undergrads: I hope that my teaching is going better than last year.

Third, the new record from my homestate boy, Bruce Springsteen, is better than you might expect from a still-left-wing pro-Union old-fashioned rock’n’roller. And “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” sounds like it could have been written and performed by Stephen Merritt and his Magnetic Fields (this is intended as a huge compliment!).

Next time, an update on the odd combination of Philip Glass’s versions of Leonard Cohen’s poems. And maybe that 16-solar-mass Black Hole (technical paper here). Conversely, I am unlikely to usefully comment on race relations as seen through the eyes James Watson or Sasha Frere-Jones. But the rest of the blogosphere has those well in hand.

Saturday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Jews are meant to fast (among other prohibitions), and spend the day in Temple, communally asking forgiveness for our sins.

I’m a secular, atheist Jew. So why do I feel guilty for all of my meals yesterday? It’s not Pascal’s Wager; it’s not a lurking agnosticism. It is, I suppose, the weight of a few millenia of culture, some of it useless, irrational baggage but much of it a beautiful tradition of ritual and morality, connecting me to other Jews, and to “all the strangers who live in our midst”, as the prayers of forgiveness have it.

Most of us male academics acknowledge that it’s hard being a female in the male-dominated world of physics, with our own academic sort of testosterone and structural prejudices. Imagine what it’s like as a superhero:

[Via Bedazzled, which also points to a campy Batgirl trailer (not to mention an unrelated weird clip of Astrud Gilberto singing “The Girl from Ipanema”).]

I would like to think that the passing of one Scooter — Phil Rizzuto, Yankees Shortstop and broadcaster — was of greater cultural significance than the pardonning of the other one (since they didn’t manage to indict the likely mastermind behind the plot before he could resign. Probably not.

In honor of the Summer solstice (and Gaia herself) we Londoners are being encouraged to shut off our lights for an hour at 9pm tonight. Even Picadilly Circus will be dark, for the first time since World War II.

Even if it’s just a PR campaign, take advantage: go outside and look at the stars.

I was travelling through Schiphol airport in Amsterdam today (more later on the various reasons why) when I was delighted to see the Sunday New York Times on sale at the airport news-stand… until they tried to charge me €14.50 (about $20 or £10). It’s still the best paper in the world (especially on Sunday), but the 400% markup seems a bit steep (not to mention encouraging the waste of transporting these newspapers thousands of miles across the world).

I spent over an hour this afternoon in full green consumerist frenzy, celebrating the opening (i.e., shopping at) the new London branch of the Whole Foods supermarket chain. Three floors of good food, eco-friendly (more or less; see below), tasty, not at all cheap, luckily located en route from work to home. And noticeably more Americans in one place than I’ve ever encountered here in the UK!

And yet. Whole Foods may pay their staff well, but they’re an anti-union shop. They are organic and sustainable, but it’s unlikely to be good news for local small butchers and groceries. Plenty of the items on their shelves certainly amassed quite a few carbon miles getting to central London. But those heirloom tomatoes — British! — tasted really winderful in the frittata I cooked once I made it home…

A beautiful but frightening picture of the fire burning near the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles. Evidence that we were probably never meant to live in that part of the world? (Photo courtesy Monica Almeida/New York Times)