While Waiting…
While waiting to pick someone up to give them a ride from A to B, I found I had 15 minutes to kill. I decided to do a quick sketch, so parked and […] Click to continue reading this post
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Monthly Archives: May 2013
Messing About on the LA River
Memorial Day was fun. There was a gathering at a friend’s house down near the LA River. At some point in the afternoon lots of people went down to the river banks to look at the lovely scene there, with people fishing, cycling, and kayaking (and other sort of boats) along some stretches. This is not at all what people expect of the LA River, so it was good (once again) to see a different reality shine through the standard images. Focusing on being good company, I only started […] Click to continue reading this post
Southern California Strings Seminar
The group at UCLA is hosting the next SCSS, and it is on Friday. More details here. The schedule looks good:
9:30-11:00 Sera Cremonini (Texas A&M): “Probing the IR of hyperscaling violating geometries.”
11:15-12:45 Ken Intriligator (UCSD): “Aspects of 3d N=2 Chern-Simons-Matter Theories.”
12:45-2:15: Lunch
2:15-3:45: Daniel Harlow (Princeton): “On the Computational Complexity of Hawking Radiation”
4:00- 5:30: Eric D’Hoker (UCLA): “Supermoduli and supersymmery breaking”
Enjoy!
Going for a Drive
At JPL the other day, I stood next to this gentleman as he prepared to take over the controls of the Curiosity craft (now on the surface of Mars, you might recall) for a bit of driving. I don’t know where it was being taken to or from on that […] Click to continue reading this post
Small Short Film
A creative team at IBM made a rather elaborate little stop motion film recently*. “Little” is a key word here. The moveable elements are atoms (well, actually CO molecules), moved with a scanning tunnelling microscope! They are calling the project “Atomic Shorts”, it seems. (Pause…) Yep, on reflection, I think I will stay away from all the obvious juvenile jokes that spring to my mind…
See the film here:
There’s a “making of” film (of course), which you can find below, along with some […] Click to continue reading this post
Sketchy Look
On Saturday I decided to have a bit of simple relaxation at home, and sit on the patio with my notepad and some pencils and draw a likeness. I’d not done any practice from images for a while, and frankly my pencil work was very rusty and needed a workout.
So I dug out this month’s issue of a sewing magazine that I subscribe to (what?! well, it’s a long story… let’s move on) that happens to sometimes have interestingly lit and well reproduced photos of faces and sketched for a while.
It was fun (even with the slightly flawed outcome). (Click for a larger view.)
Something’s not quite right, perhaps?
Yeah. Scary, right? I woke up one morning to this result (see earlier posts here, here, and here) from a night of an intensive computer run. It was not meant to be a straight line, but pretty close to it, so I knew that something was wrong with my code. Took me a good long while to trace the problem, but I did in the end. My signal was being swamped by both […] Click to continue reading this post
Ok, Here Goes
It has been a while since I shared a snippet of the book project with you, so here’s an update:
Yesterday I completed a short burst of activity in which I re-did two pages in a story that were just horrible to behold. This is a panel from one of the pages. I’m pleased […] Click to continue reading this post
Bad Luck for Kepler
Steinn has a nice post about the sudden ending of the Kepler mission, due to a crucial component failure. As he notes:
“Kepler has discovered almost 3,000 planetary candidates, of which about 100 have been confirmed through a variety of techniques, and, statistically, most of the rest are likely to be real planets.
Kepler has not quite found earth like planets in the habitable zone, yet.
It is heartbreakingly close to doing so.”
Sad to see, especially at a time when science is being hurt so badly by continued […] Click to continue reading this post
Final
Well, I’ve got to say goodbye to another excellent group of students from my undergraduate electromagnetism class. We had the final today (starting at 8:00am – ack!), and given the lack of rioting, tears, and throwing of rotten fruit during the exam itself, I assume that it was not too bad an exam to sit. Of course, the real measure of what they thought will be how they did in the actual answering of questions, and I’ve not looked to see how that has turned out yet.
Again, I feel a bit sad since it was a good group of students and it was fun to teach them this material. While it is certainly good to move on to other things (I’ve too many projects I want to work on, as usual), I will miss the twice weekly classes with them. Highlights this year include (in no particular order):
(1) The thing I love to do when we are studying dipole radiation – taking the class outside (surprising them somewhat) to look up at the blue sky and connect why it is blue to the computation we just did, including understanding the pattern of the blueness […] Click to continue reading this post
Happy Mother’s Day
Here’s a rose for Mother’s Day (in the USA). It is from my garden, and I took the photo last week to make a card to send to my Mother and my Sister.
Happy Mother’s Day to all everywhere!
-cvj
(Look under “flowers” category for roses from past Mother’s Days.) Click to continue reading this post
Baby Harvest
The many squash plants in the garden this season all started a rather cluttered rush of fruiting. Some of them stalled in their growth, and overall it seemed a good idea to remove these small ones and some others, generally thinning the plants a bit to allow them to focus their energy resources into fewer squashes. A bonus of this procedure… an early Summer squash banquet!
Earlier this week I made a very tasty bean stew with some beans harvested from last […] Click to continue reading this post
Lines of Thought
So I’ve moved on to curved lines now, in case you’re wondering. 🙂 (See previous posts.) The last several days (the research parts) have been taken up with more computations. A lot of the time has been spent calibrating the programs, and trying to assess and understand and characterize the inevitable errors that show up, by running the programs and checking the resulting plots of data points against expectations shaped by hand calculations. Calculating on the train to and from work, I’ve filled several pages of my small notebook with computations, alongside sketches of some of my surroundings as usual (people mostly). As a result (fingers crossed) I think I’ve now understood all the key aspects of the results I’ve been getting, and have good numerical control of things. To get such control, I’ve had to push the error tolerance and the size of the grid of points I’m computing on to regimes where I’m back again to waiting for the better part of an hour for each data point. (One sets up the problem on the computer by making continuous variables, such as space and time, into discrete ones, forming a grid. The problem is then to use various […] Click to continue reading this post
A Much Shorter Straight Line
How is the line coming along? It is very kind of you to ask (if indeed you were). Well, there it is to the left. (See the previous post for background.) In the end, I abandoned Maple since it was taking way too long to do each point, and just for the simple example. (When I tried to do one sample point of the complicated example it took 24 hours and I stopped it before it was done!) The point is that Maple does not easily […] Click to continue reading this post
