Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 100 of 147)

Henry Greenside on Einstein and Gravity

The Friends of the Chapel Hill Public Library have been sponsoring a series of talks on Einstein. Tucker and I were at the first three, but he had a conflict today and I was there alone. Alone with a completely packed room! Dr. Henry Greenside does a fantastic job of making Einsteinian concepts approachable and understandable to the layman and his listeners obviously appreciate his work.

Greenside a nice set of notes and links to the talks and further readings on his Duke website.

Einstein’s most spectacular achievement as a scientist was his 1915 general theory of relativity, which explained gravity as a geometric bending of spacetime by matter.

Dr. Henry Greenside, Professor of Physics at Duke University, will present a non-technical overview of Einstein’s theory and then explain some of its amazing implications, including the bending of light by gravity, how strong gravitational fields cause time to slow down, the properties of black holes that form when massive stars die, and how space itself can expand and contract. Dr. Greenside will desribe how general relativity is being used by scientists to understand many mysterious astronomical observations — monstrous black holes at the center of each galaxy, an ever-expanding universe, and the mysterious “dark matter” of which the universe consists.

Finally, Dr. Greenside will describe the major crisis with which physics is currently faced: our two greatest physical theories — general relativity and quantum mechanics — conflict with one another. The resolution of this crisis is likely to lead to spectacular and unprecedented insights.

Fred’s Facebook Final Report

Okay, it’s not a final report, but it’s an end of Fall semester analysis. Fred has been reviewing the Facebook usage at UNC in aggregate (not in detail) for the past semester and he has some very interesting findings. Check them all out at his blog. Much insight into UNC students’ political self-identity, ideas and practices of privacy, taste in music, books and film.

At Sam’s Funeral

Sam Garrard was an amazing man. I never knew him even though I had met him a few times and knew his family pretty well. Sam had Parkinson’s in the very late stages when I met him. It was at the Celebration of His Life, his funeral, that I got a glimpse of Sam, a look at how he helped create and sustain his family with their love of nature, of arts, of the outdoors and of ideas.
Sam’s very musical family celebrated his wide interest in music. Sam had started his adult life as a violinist and a music educator. He was someone who would play Bach’s Concerto in D Minor as well as bluegrass and traditional fiddle music.
Later thanks to the draft he became a pilot.
He kept a journal, a moving book from the excerpts, about his life as an Eastern Airlines pilot, about the sky from the cockpit, about the rare priviledge of being able to fly. He wrote movingly about music and how it communicated, how it lifted.
Sam’s service bulletin began with a Rilke poem that ends “am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?” and ended with a lecture quote from Wilber Wright “If you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and wath birds; but if you really wish to learn, you must mount the machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.”
The service was lovingly arranged and deeply thoughtout and sincerely touching. Afterwards I felt that I had begun to know the Sam Garrard that Parkinson’s has taken away.

After the service which was out in the county near the Eno River at Pleasant Green Methodist where many members of Sam’s family are buried, Jane and I saw vultures soaring. They are lovely at a distance. But we began to see them landing in a dead tree. By the time we got close to the tree, there were at least twenty of the raw red heads settled in for the night there.

Podcastercon – aftermath

Podcastercon was a big success! We had about 300 people here and a good many of them over 1/3 from out of state; Brian was right when he wrote that Podcastercon was national (and he was writing early on in the planning).
The conference was indeed self-organizing which meant that I mostly dealt with securing buildings, getting tables and trashcans, talking to caterers and the like while the sessions were well run by the attendees and Brian could keep us all on track.
During the first sessions, I managed to visit both the Podcasting 411 session and the Advanced Podcasting session as well as having some chat time in the halls with folks that I don’t get to see enough, like Ed Cone, and folks I was just getting to know as the day progressed.
For lunch we experienced the Med Deli version of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Brian’s order of good Lebanese finger food from domates to tzatziki to humas to salad and chicken skewers fed us all well.
In the afternoon, I got to parts of the Podcasting as a Teaching and Learning Strategy session lead by the talented teacher Dave Warlick and to Mur Lafferty‘s Women in Podcasting session. Mur had lost her voice which is a terrible thing for a podcaster to lose. I didn’t get into the Copyright Law and Podcasting session lead by Derrick Oien formerly of MP3.com. That room was way to full for me to slip in and hear what was up. But I heard great reports. Derrick certainly knows the consequences of running afoul of copyright laws.
The open sessions were a bit scattered in location and I was running one so they’re harder to mention (or to link to).
Overall, we had a great time. A very attendee directed conference in content and in tone — relaxed, welcoming, open to a variety of ideas and of people with no one feeling like she or he had to be a superstar. I think we stayed true to Brian’s ideals throughout and the result was a great feeling of comradery and shared success.
Dinner afters for some of us — many from out of state — was at the new Bon’s Home Cookin’ where we experienced such Southern food specialties as fried green tomatos, okra (fried or stewed with tomatos), pulled pork, fried chicken, field peas and corn and some very sweet desserts.

NBC 17 news – Windows only!

So there is a link to the edited story on Podcastercon on the NBC 17 News site as “Podcast Convention Set For UNC”. The link takes you to a pop-up window which tells me that I must be running Windows and I must be browsing with Internet Exploiter. Is No News good news? I can’t begin to talk about how annoying this is. In fact, I can’t really give you a link to the story because the javascript/restrictions are so overpowering.

We were brilliant I hear.

Podcastercon is tomorrow and we’re way over the amount of folks we predicted. Should be wild!

Podcastercon on the Air (NBC 17)

Podcastercon organizer Brian Russell and I will be doing an interview with folks from NBC 17 on Thursday morning to be aired later that day or Friday. I hope we’ll be as interesting as the Israeli Owner-Dog Look-a-like contest piece that they ran tonight. A pug and his owner won. (Note: Sally and I and our salukis won a local owner-dog look-a-like contest some years back, but who isn’t glad to be indentified with a saluki!).


Don’t forget that Podcastercon is coming on Saturday!

And, Brian writes, the site is completely wheel chair accessible.

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