That Sort of Time

Yes, it has been that sort of time. The last several days have been full of far too many things – several of which it would be fun to blog about – but none of which have left me any time for doing the actual blogging part. What sort of things? Well, everything from social gatherings like a couple of parties and salon-type events on the one hand, the usual work-type events on the other (like yesterday’s reception to welcome new USC College faculty – I find those especially important to show up to as a means of re-engaging with a cross section of one’s colleagues, old and new, at the beginning of the year*), and on a third hand (sorry) there’s been a big crunch on the research side of things. The big crunch saw me in my office until about 3:00am after a long night of finishing up two companion papers with three of my students (this included breaking for a walk across campus at about 8:30pm to get some tasty mulitas at the excellent La Taquiza) and submitting them to the arXiv. Sensibly, the students went home by 1:30 or so, leaving me the silly one to tinker some more until the end. It was a really fun couple of projects uncovering some rather rich physics, and I’ll try to tell you about them some time soon.

So anyway, my plan today was to write you a 9/11 post, but not quite about what you might think. A science one, in fact. Now it looks like I’m going to have to do that later, and also come back to describing some of the interesting and fun things that have been going on. Why? Because I have to get of to one of them. Right now I have to jump on my bike and scramble over to a TV studio. I’ll tell you more about that interesting set of projects shortly. More science-meets-tv stuff, with a little twist.

-cvj

*Two excellent scenes of the type I go for: (1) Sitting with friends and colleagues from the English department talking about the idea of vacuum energy and why empty space is not the same as “nothing”, and how this has led physicists to wondering about how probable one’s universe is, whether one should take into account the fact that one is here to ask the question, and the degree of overlap between physics and metaphysics such considerations represent. The new Dean (Howard Gillman) comes along and joins in, and we end up passionately discussing Russian literature, ending with some ideas about how we might start some campus book discussions to get undergraduates exploring literature more.

(2) Talking with three colleagues from the Psychology department, realizing that we’d all been doing (or now people who were doing) projects in various places in Africa over the last few years. Realizing that we’d been facing some similar problems. Realizing that it might be time to band together, find others on the campus like us, and try to organize some of these efforts with one voice.