Spent most of the daylight hours downtown today. Well worth it.
Been a while since I’ve been to Grand Central Market. Continue reading ‘Grand’
Archive for the 'personal' Category
It’s a pleasantly foggy morning here on the USC campus. It is 7:00am now (at least at start of writing), and it will all burn off in a few hours, I imagine, to reveal the sunny sky waiting for us. But right now it reminds me of the Cambridge morning of a couple of weeks ago. A foggy Saturday morning in fact. I took that photo of the spider web I used on Halloween with that mist in the background.
That Saturday of celebration of Andrew’s work (The Andrew Chamblin Memorial Conference) at Cambridge was a remarkable experience. (See here for my first post on Andrew, with tributes.) I was exhausted through a good deal of it, since I had eight hour jetlag, but I’m so glad I went, and that I could contribute a talk. I met many old friends and colleagues, drawn mostly from the UK and European side of Andrew’s collection of friends, collaborators, and admirers in the field.
There were talks by former collaborators of Andrew’s: Gary Gibbons, myself, Roberto Emparan, Robert Caldwell, Raphael Bousso, and Stephen Hawking (who also guided some of Andrew’s thesis work). Gary, in “Discrete Symmetries and Gravity”, talked about Andrew’s early Oxford and Cambridge work on various discrete symmetries in physics, particularly those of a geometrical origin. He’d played with various ideas in this context, including some applications to problems in cosmology and other areas of physics. Gary described some of this Continue reading ‘Memories, Physics, and Celebration’
Post or pillar boxes. One in Ireland, one in England. Nothing profound, I just like the contrast, that’s all.
I am back from my hop around “the islands”. Thoroughly confused body clock. Health Continue reading ‘Pillars of Society’
Well, I’m not getting any sleep at all tonight, so might as well blog a bit. I’ve got to wake up in two and a half hours to catch a flight, so might as well give up gracefully, and usefully, by sharing with you:
Two spheres caught my eye around Dublin today, one familiar, one not. Both great.
(Click for larger.) The first is the “Tree of Gold (Crainn an Oir)”, by Eamonn Continue reading ‘Spotted. Round. Dublin.’
Got to sleep at 6:30am after the post-memorial-conference banquet, and its aftermath…
Up again at 9:45am to rush around to get ready to go for a quick walk (how can one not do that when visiting Cambridge?) and then check out of the hotel.
It is always pleasant to go for a walk around here, no matter how short, so I did a quick jaunt around the alleyways near Trinity, and a little beyond.
Had the sudden urge to buy some handkerchiefs, as so many of mine seem to have disappeared off down one of those household wormholes that I know will be discovered one day. But there was just no time… No, I’ve no idea why I’m telling you this either. Must be the jetlag.
-cvj
Nipped across to Cambridge to give a talk at the Andrew Chamblin Memorial Conference. Link here.
Speaker and participant list means that I should have some very interesting conversations, both about physics and other. The conference celebrates the scientific work of Andrew Chamblin, who died earlier this year. (See posts here and here.) It is a sister conference to the one held in Louisville earlier this year. This is a great loss to the field, and this will no doubt emerge in the talks from lots of his former collaborators, and in the private conversations. Andrew was so bright, creative, and enthusiastic about the physics (and so much of everything else) and so he was a wonderful collaborator.
I also hope to go and sit in a couple of the places where he loved to sit, and remember him here in Cambridge, where he was so happy.
I do so miss him.
-cvj
A couple of magazines showed up in the post the other day, unlooked for (as JRR would write). Spent a short (unfortunately) time lying on my bed in the sun flipping through them, and it reminded me of my youth. Do you remember something similar? You’d go out and get that next issue of that magazine you’d been waiting for and you’d just drink it all up in a general way for a while, lying on your stomach, legs kicking in the air: The smell of the pages, the glossy pictures and other juicy tidbits of writing and other stuff to digest more fully later on….
For me, when I was young it was mostly magazines about music, electronics, computers, science, photography… some crochet, macrame, and knitting (yeah, I know - I’ll tell you more later), and of course lots of comics (these latter I did not browse first… I would read Continue reading ‘Happy Flipping Memories’
No. Not Brian, Freddie, and the boys. Some other time. I’m talking about a different Queen, and different hits. Late Friday night I suddenly got in the mood to go to Amoeba to pick up this music:
… and I’ve been listening to it exclusively since.
It is Labor Day here (for once I use the weird spelling, in deference to geography, etc) and, as usual it is incredibly hot. Already at 92 degrees by lunchtime, and I’m in a relatively cool part of the city. Tomorrow will have lots of pictures in the newspaper of amazing scenes of people sunning themselves on the beach, filling up Santa Monica and Venice beaches in a way that is impressive, given how huge those beaches are.
I don’t actually understand this traditional cooperation from the weather. It seems to consistently get super hot just in time for this symbolic “last day of summer”, at least for the last three years I remember. Back in England, the traditional set up is that on a long holiday weekend, by time the holiday Monday comes, it is raining. People are used to this and plan for it. There are exceptions from time to time, but that’s the tradition as I recall it. Has this changed in Blair’s new Britain, I wonder?
Well, here are some shots from other traditional holiday weekend activity…
I should go and cycle by the beaches or something, but it is way too hot to go out right now (although I managed to get a couple of hours of morning hiking in the park to test out my boots’ repair). So I’m going to hibernate for a while. Then I’ll do some physics. Plenty of time for holiday fun once the sun sets.
-cvj
Well, it’s the morning after. I did not wake up with that sort of cringing feeling that you get when the night before had an event you’d rather forget such as that time you said something incredibly stupid at a dinner party, or some other such thing. No, I woke up at 6:00 am feeling fine, even though I went to sleep at 2:00. The evening before was in fact rather enjoyable. Earlier I participated in the “Uncertainty” event, about which I’ll tell you shortly. I was up that late partly because I was trying to recover the data from the hard drive of my ailing powerbook, Mingus. It was a success! I was able to get it to start up from the recovery disc (by holding down the “C” key as I started), so that (after a partially successful attempt to get it to repair the main disc) I could restart it again with my finger on the “T” key. The latter operation meant that when it came on, Mingus would make itself available as an external hard drive to my imac (connected to it by a firewire cable), which is called Ella, by the way. I was then able to go to Ella’s screen and (lo and behold!) see all of my precious data that’s on Mingus. Dragging and dropping copied over 10-15 GB of stuff from Mingus over to Ella’s hard drive. So easy. I love macs. Especially when they have souls of great musicians. I can now try to arrange to send Mingus off to the doctor for surgery, some TLC, and some rest and recuperation. Time for Ella to do the hard work.
I’d better tell you about the event last night. Next post.
-cvj
I don’t know about you but I melt each of the (very few these days) times I receive a real letter, by post, that contains… stuff we used to put in letters. Not the endless formal letters from business, nor the fake personal ones from businesses (like the amazing fancily embossed wedding invitation I got a while back that turned out to be from HBO… it was an ad for the new TV series on polygamy, “Big Love”… did anyone else get that? Must have cost them a huge amount…. I’ve been to a few fancy weddings, and that invitation was in fact comparable in quality to some of those…)
It is all so rare to get real personal mail the old fashioned way these days. So many things done by email. Hundreds of emails. Too many sometimes. Fast. Too fast sometimes. Or is it just me?
I love the look and feel of a nicely addressed (airmail especially) envelope, with firm, flowing writing by an actual human being… I really miss that. I loved getting this one so much, loved the look of the exterior so very much, that it took me a while to actually (carefully) tear it open to get at the contents.
In fact, at the beginning of this Summer in a fit of good intentions, I bought some airmail envelopes and a pad of writing paper, with lots of mutterings about starting to actually write real hand-written letters again. It has not happened yet. Sigh….
-cvj
Lovely yellow folding bike, spotted on campus outside my building. Soooo cuuuuuute!
Two comments:
(1) I wish they’d raise the seat on this bike, give it a bit of self respect so that it does not look like a children’s toy. (Assuming it is not… I am not familiar with this model. [Update: It is a "Zport" folding bike.]) Granted, I guess that it could be a small person riding it…. but most bikes are so often mal-adjusted to suit the rider, so I’m betting the person is taller than it would appear.
(2) Love the yellow. Obnoxious on a Hummer… cute on minis, beetles, and folding bikes.
(3) Ok, three comments. Poor thing, left outside on its own. Sad thing to do to a folder. Very sad. Should always be picked up and taken inside.
On point (1), since people can’t get past the small wheel prejudice….. you can have a properly adjusted seat post, and -on well designed models like the Brompton and others- have enough spread to allow as comfortable ride as on any bike regardless of size…. actually, sometimes more comfortable.
Here they are (the bike and my B) in conversation, in their respective park modes:
My student, Tameem, almost got an injury from laughing at this picture. I’ve no idea why. He said, over IM (which I’ve cut and paste here with permission):
it almost looks like a bike bully trying to get money from the smaller bike….
wow, my head hurts from laughing so hard….
My response was to be “So how’s that calculation coming?” But he might have thought I had a sense of humour failure….. and actually, it is sort of funny.
-cvj
So yesterday continued the stretch of unfortunate events. I decided to hide and work on the paper to make up for the lost time from the day before. Got a good start, and then after a couple of hours, the computer started its weird behaviour. Slow….. applications hanging up for a long time… etc. Then I realized that it was super hot, perhaps more than it ever has been before. Perhaps brought on by it being a really hot day. Then I realized that I can’t recall the last time I have heard the fan on the computer. In fact, I’m not sure I ever have. A check via IM with one of my students confirmed that it is really obvious when the fan is on with this computer. So I formulated a theory that somehow the computer is not able to cool itself down in these extreme conditions. The fan needs repairing, the system is overheating and it is producing problems. I put it to sleep and into the freezer for a little while. A few minutes later, nice and crisp and cool (like a KitKat straight out of the fridge -delicious!) I started it up again. Runs perfectly. Aha!
So I went like this for a couple of cycles… Computer overheats, I cool it down, I get another hour of work or so done. But I’ve begun to worry that I’m about to lose my hard drive. This is a particular horror for me, since I’ve not backed up this computer for a long, long time, because….. The LaCie d2 250gb external hard drive I bought for the purpose mysteriously started to remain in stealth mode, i.e., not allow itself to be recognised by any of my computers.
So I spent several hours in the afternoon trying to figure out how to resurrect the drive Continue reading ‘Mama Never Said There’d Be Two Contiguous Days Like This’
Oh Boy. So it started this morning with me making some plans to do things on the bike, starting with a visit to the Hollywood Farmer’s market to get some supplies (especially some more superstring beans, which are delicious!) and meet a friend. Idea would be then to -after excellent tamales for lunch from my favourite stand, of course- visit a couple other places, such as a bike store in West Hollywood to get some equipment for my friend’s bike, and then maybe over to the Sunset Junction street fair (you might remember my blogging about it last year), to par-tay. Then I’d go home and work.
Bad thing number 1:
- Halfway to the middle of Hollywood on the way to the market: Catastrophic puncture. Flat tyre. Guess what? Puncture repair kit I carry around with me all the time is of course in my other bag, not the one I use for market. Sigh. So after wheeling the bike all the way to the market (I could have folded it up and taken it onto a bus or train, but I was halfway there and already late and did not want to wait for either), fun, shopping, and tamales were had, which was good. Could not do the other bike things, so I then wheeled bike to the subway, folded it and took it on a train to my ‘hood, then wheeled it home at other end, which all took a while. Actually, wheeling with shopping in its bag is a great way to get the shopping home and see what’s going on in the ‘hood, which I like to do from time to time, so not so bad.
As this is only the second problem I’ve had with this bike in almost 18 months of cycling it around the city, I decided (yeah, I know!) to take a commemorative picture of the sad scene:
But by then I’d lost a lot of time and I’m supposed to be working on writing a paper today. So I decided to pass on the Sunset junction activities (I can hear them from my place a bit, and I encouraged some of my students to go, so I can sort of live vicariously -even though I know they won’t go) and work on the paper. I want to give a draft to some of those students for them to get up to speed on the idea, and once the week starts, I don’t expect to get much time to work on this sort of thing before next weekend.
So okay, no par-tay-ing this afternoon. But first I’d better get bike back to functionality for work tomorrow.
Bad thing number 2:
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