Miscellanea
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Good Cause #2: Revenge of the Mekons
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The Mekons are the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. They started in the 70s as a punk band from Leeds but by the mid-1980s had picked up fiddles and mandolins to go with their loud guitars, and learned to love Hank Williams and Gram Parsons as much as they’ve sadly learned to hate the…
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Good Cause #1: Imperial Students Power the Developing World
I try not to ask too much of my readers, but this post and the next are about a couple of worthwhile causes I’ve come across of late. The first project is the BBC World Challenge competition, supporting “social entrepreneurs”, grassroots projects making an impact in the developing world. One of the twelve finalists, e.quinox,…
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Run for the trees
Last year, I ran for cats and dogs. This year, it’s a different half-marathon, Run to the Beat on September 26 (“London’s Music Half-Marathon”), with a less conveniently located course in East London, and I’ve shifted Kingdoms in my charitable support: I will run for “Trees for Cities“, “an independent charity working to improve the…
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Counterculture RIPs
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Two crucial figures from outside the mainstream of American culture have died. Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010) has been hanging around, writing about and stirring up trouble in New York’s Greenwich Village since the 1950s as a writer, poet, occasional political activist and rock ‘n’ roller. First in the late 60s and early 70s and occasionally thereafter,…
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Pop Culture Notes
I’ve just finished marking this year’s Cosmology exams — I’m quite pleased with the outcome. But that’s meant that I’ve rewarded myself with some happily lowbrow (meant as a descriptive, not normative, term) entertainment: I finally got around to the finale of Lost. Watching it, I was disappointed with the purgatorial explanation for this season’s…
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Monsters from the Id
I’ve volunteered at the last minute to appear on a panel following a screening of Monsters from the Id, a documentary about 50s Sci-Fi movies and, apparently, their influence on science itself. The filmmaker is Homer Hickam, an engineer and novelist, author of Rocket Boys, the “novelized” memoir of his rocket-obsessed post-Sputnik childhood in the West…
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99 Years
Let me publicly wish a very Happy Birthday and much love to my wonderful grandmother, Dora Jaffe, born 99 years ago today in Shepetovka, then Russia, now Ukraine, on the eve of the First World War. Moving to New York City just after the war, she has outlasted the century, mothering my father and his…
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My Namesake, R.I.P.
I was saddened, and, I admit, a little freaked out, to learn that a namesake, one of the several other Andrew Jaffes out there, has died. This Andrew Jaffe was a journalist who covered the advertising business: he was an executive and editor at AdWeek magazine, from where he also ran the Clio advertising awards.…
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Andrew Lange, Huan Tran
The cosmology community has had a terrible few months. I am saddened to report the passing of Andrew Lange, a physicist from CalTech and one of the world’s preeminent experimental cosmologists. Among many other accomplishments, Andrew was one of the leaders of the Boomerang experiment, which made the first large-scale map of the Cosmic Microwave…
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Bayes and Blake at Bunhill
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One of my holiday treks this year was across town to visit Bunhill Fields, final resting place of two of my favorite Londoners: William Blake and Thomas Bayes. Blake is of course one of the most famous poets in the English language, but most people know him only from short poems like The Tiger [sic]…
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