From Instagram
From Instagram
Monthly Archives: June 2017
Random Machinery
Making up random (ish) bits of machinery can be lots of fun!
(Click for larger view. This is for a short story I was asked to write, to appear next year.)
Cover Fun!
Thanks for all the great compliments that many of you have been sending me about the cover of the book. The final version of the cover is essentially the one you’ve seen before (it is on the MIT Press website here, and you can currently pre-order at amazon and other booksellers the world over – for example here), but the blue is a bit lighter (some people at the publisher were concerned that the figures were a little too subtle and wanted them much brighter, I did not want them to light so that they’d get lost in the lettering…so we compromised). Click the image to see a sightly larger version.
For those of you who want a deeper dive into the background of all this, I thought I’d share the sketches I made back in early April when they asked me to design the cover. (Click for larger view.)
It is always good to explore options, and also to give design options when asked to design something… I was secretly hoping they’d choose my favourite […] Click to continue reading this post
Arundhati Roy Interviews
Listening to interviews with Arundhati Roy always fills me with joy, admiration, hope, and renewed love of the great use of language in speech and writing. (If you are interested, I refer to interviews recently on Front Row, but even better with Phillip Dodd on Free Thinking. BBC Radio 4 … Click to continue reading this post
American Cinématheque Event
Tonight at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica there’s a special screening of the last two episodes of the current season of the National Geographic drama Genius, about the life and work of Albert Einstein. After the screening there’ll be a panel discussion and Q&A with the show runner Ken Biller, the actor T.R. Knight, and me, in my capacity as the science advisor for the series (as I’ve discussed earlier here). The details are here, and admission is apparently free. It will be moderated by Corey Powell. (Image is from National Geographic publicity.)
Also, apparently if you arrive early enough you’ll get a free Einstein mask. So there’s that.
World-Building…
Well, just a small semi-real corner of it… it’s an establishing shot for a new setting in the aforementioned short SF story. I did roughs on the subway on the iPad and now I am laying down the final lines in black at my desktop. I’ll try and show you the final thing that results later.
LIGO Does it Again!
I just got off the phone with an LA Times reporter about this new result (announced today in PRL and by LIGO directly), trying to get across some of the enthusiasm about this shared by a wide community of physicists and astronomers, and the reasons why. Here’s a nice New York Times article about the discovery, by Dennis Overbye. The graphic to the right is from the LIGO press release.
(Incidentally, according to Physics Today it is Kip Thorne’s birthday today. What an excellent birthday present for him!)
