Today is Cal Day, when UC Berkeley welcomes the public to visit the campus and see exhibits across many different departments. It is also a day for incoming students to visit and get answers to their questions about different majors, housing, student clubs, and so on.
When I left my cottage to walk over to the campus, I noticed the orange tree hanging over my front yard was ready to be picked (click on the photo and look on the ground):
The first place I visited on campus was the dinosaur exhibit in the Valley Life Science Building. This is the same building where I teach my class, but I had not been inside this part of it before.
Nearby, outside, were several biological exhibits on reptiles, insects, plants, and creatures from the sea. The specimens were from the university's paleontology museum and are ordinarily available just to researchers. Only on Cal Day can the public see these (excluding the few large dinosaur exhibits above, which are always visible).
Here is a close-up view of just one of the insects in the above photo (the cup gives a sense of scale):
The plants in the sample below were taken from the Phillipines in 1927 (click on the photo and read the cards near the bottom):
Here some very small crabs (about the size of a fingernail):
And some more substantial sea critters in a kiddy pool:
On Sproul Plaza were dancing and musical performances by students:
Nearby were many student clubs. Korean drum players:
Berkeley Democrats and their super-hero:
Click on the next photo to see a Muslim club and Jewish club near each other! (But they are not next to each other. The Marketing club provides a buffer zone.)
There is a Rubik's Cube club, which teaches people how to solve the cube or, if they already know that, how to solve it faster:
One of the guys in the Rubik's cube club said they needed to get more girls to join to show it is a friendly club. I wonder why that could possibly be a problem.
Students can get 1 credit for attending the Rubik's cube club course through DeCal, which is a venue for all student-run courses (over 100 DeCal courses every semester, including a course on wheelchair basketball).
At one end of Sproul Plaza there was a visitor from the Middle Ages:
Outside the math department, George Bergman assumed the role he has had for many years: sitting behind a desk and inviting anyone to ask him a question about math.
When Bergman first did this he thought people would turn this into "Stump the Mathematician" by asking him to multiply 5-digit numbers in his head, but for the most part he gets asked sincere questions (e.g., why can't you divide by 0). When Bergman saw me, he asked me a question: can the integers be made into a Hausdorff topological group such that the two sequences of powers of 2 and powers of 3 both tend to 0? (Note that the question is asking for both sequences to go to 0 in the same group topology.) I have no idea. Bergman said this question is equivalent to some unsolved problem in group theory.
From the math department (top of Evans Hall) and the astronomy department (top of Campbell Hall), there were great views of the campus:
Looking down at the long line of people waiting for a bus to go up into the Berkeley Hills for Cal Day events at the Botanical Garden, Lawrence Hall of Science, and Space Science Lab:
Construction on the football stadium:
The astronomy department has some offices on a top floor courtyard:
I was very surprised to see a UConn Husky mascot on the right door (click on the above photo). Presumably this is related to the successful men's basketball team this year.
A view of clouds rolling into San Francisco:
At 4 PM, events at Cal Day were drawing to a close. For example, staff from the math department came downstairs to Ask the Mathematician to bring his furniture and sign inside until next year:
There were still things happening at the Space Sciences Lab and I took a bus up there to investigate.
Outside the lab was a bowl of apple sauce being cooked by reflecting rays from the sun:
During the cooking, the temperature reached up to 350 degrees (F). The apple tasted great (not too hot)!
Inside one of the SSL buildings was a demonstration of an infrared detector, which is used in the WISE project. A small camera was set up near a TV screen and it gave false-color images of objects standing in front of the camera based on the heat that was detected:
The photos above are my face (1st photo) and my hands (2nd photo, with a cellphone camera in the right hand being held out of view). The reason that the central parts of my hand are purple while the fingertips and palm are orange is that I was holding an ice cube in that hand before I took the picture.
Outside the SSL I took a guided tour of their satellite-tracking antenna dish:
This was built in 1999 and can be seen up close by the public only once a year, on Cal Day.
The dish receives data from several orbiting satellites for research projects at Berkeley (it is too busy to allow outside groups time to use it). A few times during the tour I saw the dish rapidly rotate to communicate with a new satellite. You can tell the dish has moved between the above photos since the shadow cast on it from the sun has changed a lot in a few minutes. The scientists have to keep the trees nearby at a limited height to give the dish a full range of access to signals coming from space (to about 5 degrees above the horizon).
Because of the frequent moisture in the Bay area, lichen grows on the dish, which you can see on some of the panels in the next photo (click on it):
About once a year the dish is cleaned.
The next photo is a chart on the fence which provides a basic description of the downlink and uplink mechanism for the dish.
Note in particular the effect of the parabolic cross-sectional construction: parallel incoming beams reflect to a single point, and outgoing signals from that point emerge from the dish in a parallel direction. This special feature of parabolic reflectors is a nice exercise for a calculus class. I had mentioned parabolic antennas when I was teaching derivatives a few months ago, but I didn't know about this example right on campus.
People who work at MSRI (which I wrote about before) have offices that face either SF Bay or the trees in the Berkeley hills. The views of SF Bay are more interesting, so prominent visitors to MSRI usually get offices which face that direction. But visitors with offices that face the other way still get an interesting sight: they get a clear view of the SSL radar dish every day, not just on Cal Day. Here is how it looks from one office.
When I left my cottage to walk over to the campus, I noticed the orange tree hanging over my front yard was ready to be picked (click on the photo and look on the ground):
The first place I visited on campus was the dinosaur exhibit in the Valley Life Science Building. This is the same building where I teach my class, but I had not been inside this part of it before.
Nearby, outside, were several biological exhibits on reptiles, insects, plants, and creatures from the sea. The specimens were from the university's paleontology museum and are ordinarily available just to researchers. Only on Cal Day can the public see these (excluding the few large dinosaur exhibits above, which are always visible).
Here is a close-up view of just one of the insects in the above photo (the cup gives a sense of scale):
The plants in the sample below were taken from the Phillipines in 1927 (click on the photo and read the cards near the bottom):
Here some very small crabs (about the size of a fingernail):
And some more substantial sea critters in a kiddy pool:
On Sproul Plaza were dancing and musical performances by students:
Nearby were many student clubs. Korean drum players:
Berkeley Democrats and their super-hero:
Click on the next photo to see a Muslim club and Jewish club near each other! (But they are not next to each other. The Marketing club provides a buffer zone.)
There is a Rubik's Cube club, which teaches people how to solve the cube or, if they already know that, how to solve it faster:
One of the guys in the Rubik's cube club said they needed to get more girls to join to show it is a friendly club. I wonder why that could possibly be a problem.
Students can get 1 credit for attending the Rubik's cube club course through DeCal, which is a venue for all student-run courses (over 100 DeCal courses every semester, including a course on wheelchair basketball).
At one end of Sproul Plaza there was a visitor from the Middle Ages:
Outside the math department, George Bergman assumed the role he has had for many years: sitting behind a desk and inviting anyone to ask him a question about math.
When Bergman first did this he thought people would turn this into "Stump the Mathematician" by asking him to multiply 5-digit numbers in his head, but for the most part he gets asked sincere questions (e.g., why can't you divide by 0). When Bergman saw me, he asked me a question: can the integers be made into a Hausdorff topological group such that the two sequences of powers of 2 and powers of 3 both tend to 0? (Note that the question is asking for both sequences to go to 0 in the same group topology.) I have no idea. Bergman said this question is equivalent to some unsolved problem in group theory.
From the math department (top of Evans Hall) and the astronomy department (top of Campbell Hall), there were great views of the campus:
Looking down at the long line of people waiting for a bus to go up into the Berkeley Hills for Cal Day events at the Botanical Garden, Lawrence Hall of Science, and Space Science Lab:
Construction on the football stadium:
The astronomy department has some offices on a top floor courtyard:
I was very surprised to see a UConn Husky mascot on the right door (click on the above photo). Presumably this is related to the successful men's basketball team this year.
A view of clouds rolling into San Francisco:
At 4 PM, events at Cal Day were drawing to a close. For example, staff from the math department came downstairs to Ask the Mathematician to bring his furniture and sign inside until next year:
There were still things happening at the Space Sciences Lab and I took a bus up there to investigate.
Outside the lab was a bowl of apple sauce being cooked by reflecting rays from the sun:
During the cooking, the temperature reached up to 350 degrees (F). The apple tasted great (not too hot)!
Inside one of the SSL buildings was a demonstration of an infrared detector, which is used in the WISE project. A small camera was set up near a TV screen and it gave false-color images of objects standing in front of the camera based on the heat that was detected:
The photos above are my face (1st photo) and my hands (2nd photo, with a cellphone camera in the right hand being held out of view). The reason that the central parts of my hand are purple while the fingertips and palm are orange is that I was holding an ice cube in that hand before I took the picture.
Outside the SSL I took a guided tour of their satellite-tracking antenna dish:
This was built in 1999 and can be seen up close by the public only once a year, on Cal Day.
The dish receives data from several orbiting satellites for research projects at Berkeley (it is too busy to allow outside groups time to use it). A few times during the tour I saw the dish rapidly rotate to communicate with a new satellite. You can tell the dish has moved between the above photos since the shadow cast on it from the sun has changed a lot in a few minutes. The scientists have to keep the trees nearby at a limited height to give the dish a full range of access to signals coming from space (to about 5 degrees above the horizon).
Because of the frequent moisture in the Bay area, lichen grows on the dish, which you can see on some of the panels in the next photo (click on it):
About once a year the dish is cleaned.
The next photo is a chart on the fence which provides a basic description of the downlink and uplink mechanism for the dish.
Note in particular the effect of the parabolic cross-sectional construction: parallel incoming beams reflect to a single point, and outgoing signals from that point emerge from the dish in a parallel direction. This special feature of parabolic reflectors is a nice exercise for a calculus class. I had mentioned parabolic antennas when I was teaching derivatives a few months ago, but I didn't know about this example right on campus.
People who work at MSRI (which I wrote about before) have offices that face either SF Bay or the trees in the Berkeley hills. The views of SF Bay are more interesting, so prominent visitors to MSRI usually get offices which face that direction. But visitors with offices that face the other way still get an interesting sight: they get a clear view of the SSL radar dish every day, not just on Cal Day. Here is how it looks from one office.
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