Random Party Snippet

Got a bit of work done on The Project yesterday. Some pencilling, inking and coloring – all on one busy page. I don’t want to show you the whole thing, so here is a corner of one large panel (click for larger view).

There’s a party going on…

It is an interesting process, designing backgrounds… So here I’m thinking of what everyone is wearing, how to place them in the field of view, what colours they are wearing and so forth so as not to distract from the principals, how the wait staff might be dressed, what drinks they might be carrying, and so on and on.
[…] Click to continue reading this post

Obliging

On the Gold line from Pasadena to downtown on Saturday I was looking to relax a bit after a long morning of work over a meeting I had with some colleagues. I got out my pencil and notepad and was happy to find that just over the way at the perfect distance (not to close, not too far) was a fellow who was looking out of the window and obligingly keeping his head more or less in the same orientation, or bringing it back to a similar position if he looked away from time to time. So I got some good looks and built the drawing on the right, over 20 minutes or so. As a bonus, […] Click to continue reading this post

Has the Fat Lady Sung?

The OPERA experiment has reported that they may have found the source of the timing discrepancy that produced the result that neutrinos moved apparently faster than light. It seems that there was a faulty connection that affected the timing measurements. Here’s a physics world article on the matter, along with a link to a CERN press release. (Note that there are some doubts related more directly to the GPS timing signals they used, which on their own would make for even faster neutrinos, but clearly there’s cause to really doubt their strong claim from back in the Fall and take a step back.)

You’ll recall the huge press storm about it last Fall, accompanied by all the usual hysteria about the establishment (this time, Einstein) being overturned. I blogged about it here, with the noncommittal title “No, Uh-uh, Nope, Nuh-uh”. They’ll be doing more experiments later in the year, as will a number of other groups, in order to solidify the results one way or another. It’s clear that most people have decided the whole business is over, and will turn away from it to other things. Some will be pleased, some annoyed, some confused, and so forth.

My hope is (as I discussed in the article I wrote back then) that this gets as much […] Click to continue reading this post

Trumpet Solo

20120217-160909.jpgThis is a snap of a sketch I started while sitting in the Village Vanguard (New York) the other night while listening to the Mark Turner (ts) quartet play. On trumpet was Avishai Cohen, who was really excellent. This quick sketch, very incomplete, was assembled from several glimpses of him when he’d return to this pose, or more or less… Anyway, it was a fun exercise (I’d started another larger sketch of the whole band, but decided it went off balance after a while and so did not complete it). […] Click to continue reading this post

Entangled

Gosh, I got a bit swamped there over the last week. Several things took me away from sitting down and doing a blog post, including teaching my class (more on that shortly), working on a film project (more on that longly) and doing my taxes (late this year – bah!) and the usual raft of committee meetings and so forth. But one of them was locking myself away for two days with my computer and a web connection and writing a paper from start to finish with Tameem Albash. We’d more or less completed the bulk of the project over two months ago, with some very interesting results that we’d talk about from time to time to try to understand what was going on, but I held things up, being distracted by several other things (some of which you know about from this blog). We decided two weeks ago that we’d just finish the thing once and for all, and then somehow ten days went by with me not getting to it. Then I decided to close the door and just do it. So from lunchtime on Friday through lunchtime on Sunday I became a recluse (kind of) and I wrote, in turn with Tameem, as we emailed and IMed back and forth, until we had a nice paper entitled “Holographic Studies of Entanglement Entropy in Superconductors”.

It is a project I’ve been hoping to do for a long time, but not all the pieces were on the market until late last year. The entanglement entropy has been a quantity of interest among physicists in various fields for years, especially in the condensed matter and quantum information community, and is regarded […] Click to continue reading this post

Incomplete Subtractions

Well, it has been well over two months since I popped into the studio I sometimes visit to to a “drop in and draw” session. (I’ve spoken about the value of such practice here before.) Although I’ve been drawing a bit here and there on the bus and subway to keep practicing, and also doing some work on some pages of The Project (actually, some pretty detailed finish work on a few pages I’m quite happy with), I was not sure whether I’d have the right chops to do a good job at the session, and expected that if I went I’d have a frustrating -but of course valuable- evening of knocking off some rust and oiling the wheels again. So I went along yesterday.

Strangely, it felt like it was going to be a good session as I approached, and as I settled down and began to try to capture the 2 minute poses, and then the 5 minute poses, I felt like I was flowing along pretty well. It helped that the model on duty is […] Click to continue reading this post

Double Equivalence

Wow. So I’ve been wondering how far behind I might be in my lectures for the General Relativity class. I seemed to spend a bit more time than I remember teaching a recap of how to think about rotations, using it as an operational and mathematical brace upon which to build my review/revisit of Special Relativity. I was definitely convinced that I was a bit behind after two lectures on introducing how to study a little geometry using intrinsic quantities rather than by reference to embedding it inside another geometry (e.g., learning to think about a two-sphere in its own right instead of as the surface of a ball – this prepares you for thinking about a three-sphere, for which the ball would be hard to visualize, or draw), and so forth. All solidly useful material for the students (in this and so many other physics pursuits to come), so I do not regret spending time on it, but I did wonder about where I was in the journey…

Anyway, I got to the statement of the Equivalence Principle yesterday, the foundation of the whole of General Relativity. I was feeling quite pleased that we’re starting on this now, putting to use all the hard work we’ve been doing conceptually so far… and thought I’d do a quick post here on the blog to celebrate that we’ve got there. I thought I’d entitle the post “Equivalence”.

I started typing and then thought I’d see if I’d written anything about it here before. […] Click to continue reading this post

Pen Faces

Well, it has been a while since I’ve posted any sketches, but that does not mean that I’ve not been doing any. I’ve had a visitor and have not been on my usual routine, and so I’ve got a bit out of practice for not doing so many, but I still snatch the opportunity to sketch when I can. Here are a few faces and fragments of faces I grabbed on the bus and subway in recent weeks. (Click for a larger view.) I just used a ballpoint pen, and a sideways glance or few…

I’m trying to decide whether […] Click to continue reading this post