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R.I.P. John Peel
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BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel passed away today. Even in the USA, John Peel was a broadcasting legend. We didn’t quite understand who he was, but the “Peel Sessions” that appeared for every obscure British (and American) band gave many of us our first taste of The Fall, of Siousxie and The Banshees, of…
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Leaves on the Line
Yesterday, the trees were still covered in foliage. After the overnight gales, the acer in our courtyard was stripped bare of its gorgeous bright red leaves. I should have been suspicious. At the rail station, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the 0857 to London Paddington delayed about 20 minutes. The usual autumn excuse…
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Podcasting and iPodder
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Since setting this one up, I’ve spent too much time the last few weeks reading weblogs. But the “meme of the moment” (a phrase courtesy of Dave Slusher) is “podcasting” — weblogs you can listen to. More specifically, podcasting refers to the confluence of a few technologies: first, of course, machines like the Mac, or…
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Robert Smithson
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In LA for a week, we went to see the Robert Smithson exhibition at MOCA. Smithson is best known for his Spiral Jetty, a fantastic Earthwork on the Great Salt Lake in Utah, underwater for much of the time since its creation in the early 70s (just before Smithson’s early death in 1973 at 35),…
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Black Holes Part III
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After a few weeks of waiting, I finally got to hear Stephen Hawking live and in person talking about his ideas for solving the so-called “Black Hole Information Paradox” (which I talked about in one earlier post and on another about my trip to BBC World. Hawking came to Imperial College for a meeting celebrating…
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Proms
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Jo and I went to the BBC Proms last night, and saw a new commision from John Casken, Symphony ‘Broken Consort’; Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major; and Stravinski’s Firebird Suite, all performed by the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. The BBC Phil was OK, hard to judge with the slightly murky sound from…
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Fame & Fortune (Black Holes, part II)
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I just spent about three minutes talking to the BBC World 6 o’clock news anchor (Nik Gowing) about Black Holes, quantum mechanics, and information. (And allowed the BBC’s budget to shuttle me from Imperial College to White City and finally to Paddington.) He was perhaps less interested in the science than in Hawking’s bet with…
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Black Holes
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At about 4pm, the phone rang — it was the BBC! Apparently, an editor there had read in New Scientist that Stephen Hawking had solved the “Black Hole Information Paradox.” So — despite the fact that he won’t be presenting the results until the GR17 meeting in Dublin next week — I’m off to the…
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Gabriel Orozco
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Joanne and I went to see the new show of works by Gabriel Orozco at the Serpentine Gallery. He’s most famous for a human skull, inked over with a pattern of criss-crossing diamonds. It’s beautiful, it’s about mortality, geometry, and it’s about imposing our will upon the world (and vice versa). Orozco is a painter,…
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In the beginning
I’m not sure why anybody would care, but here’s my blog for all to see.
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