Category Archive for ‘work’ at Asymptotia

« Older Entries

Newer Entries »

Archive for the 'work' Category

In Which I Fail Physics 101…

Published

Clifford

on January 10, 2008

in Los Angeles, craft, science and work

. 7 Comments

… but pass it on a retake!

While quickly building an ad hoc washing line pulley assembly from a bag of hooks, eyes, and pulleys, and a 2×4, I put this together at first (blotted out some background for privacy of myself and neighbours - click for larger view):

Huh. Does not want to hang level. Why? A tenth of a second after the thought, I burst out laughing loudly at my error. Ironic since I love teaching about pulleys in basic physics, and for some reason students are scared of pulleys. (Not as scared as they are of torque (why?), but scared nonetheless. I try to help them overcome those fears.) I made an obvious mistake. (Do you see it?)

Continue reading ‘In Which I Fail Physics 101…’

A Retreat

Published

Clifford

on January 3, 2008

in Los Angeles, architecture, craft, design, personal and work

. 4 Comments

As I get older and busier, I seem to increasingly value quiet spaces. I always loved them, but now they seem more vital to me than ever. So I seek them out constantly. It’s important to note that it is, as they say, all relative. My whole house is a quiet space in a quiet part of a neighbourhood, which is itself in a relatively quiet part of the city. Nevertheless, I’ve been monitoring my working patterns of late and noticed quite a bit of fragmentation, which bothers me a lot. Sure, a lot of it is self-inflicted (email, blogging, and so forth can always be managed better - that’s another issue to discuss), but some of it has to do with finding good spaces to work, depending upon the type of mood and type of work to hand.

I’ve lots of favourites, and many of them are cafes and bars around the city, some places on campus (my office is not high on that list though), the odd bench in a park here and there, and so forth. But those are mostly for working in my “public space” mode. Sometimes I want to work in a different mode, or sometimes I want to just stay Continue reading ‘A Retreat’

’Twas the Night Before Finals…

Published

Clifford

on December 20, 2007

in fun, words and work

. 0 Comments

My always-ignored advice to anyone studying for exams is that the best thing you can do the night before is get a good night’s sleep. Long study periods long before the previous night should have been used to build up your skills and knowledge. Late-night cramming at the expense of being fresh and having your wits about you in the morning is not really going to help much, if at all. (Heh… long study periods….call me old-fashioned.)

On this very matter, Yvette (one of our regular commenters here) has outdone herself once again with her literary skills! Here is part of her seasonal (as in finals season) poem:

The Night Before Finals

By Yvette Cendes

Tâ€™was the night before finals
And all through the dorm
Crazed cramming and panic
Was quite the norm.

The students were restless
And none touched their beds
While theorems and formulas
Danced in their heads.

With textbook in hand Continue reading ‘’Twas the Night Before Finals…’

Finally

Published

Clifford

on December 19, 2007

in Los Angeles, academia and work

. 3 Comments

Well, it’s been a crazy week here in my corner of the universe. I’m still trying to find the time to break off from several things in order to update you on things from last week and the week before. Meanwhile, new things have this way of happening anyway, and sometimes I’d like to mention them too. So it is with teaching matters. Two Fridays ago was the last lecture of my electricity and magnetism class. We’d done magnetization, they’d waded through another couple of class worksheets I prepared for them on the topic, we’d remarked upon similarities and differences with respect to polarization in the electric case, and with a few hints about what phenomena were to come when they do electrodynamics (the second part of the course - we’d strictly been dealing with statics) a feeling of some sadness came over me as I said the last words of the class. I’d liked this group. They got it. I was going to take them out of their comfort zone and get them to work a bit harder and stretch themselves a bit harder, and the benefits (I hope) became apparent to them when they could see further, run faster, and jump higher (with respect to their abilities as physicists, I mean). (See some earlier thoughts on that here, as I prepared to start teaching the class.) They responded well by not whining about the extra effort required, but instead rolling up their sleeves and having a go, with good humour, a good sense of camaraderie, and remaining reasonably engaged and interactive right down to the very last lecture. They got it. I love it when that happens.

Monday of this week was really the end - they had their final exam (see photo above - Continue reading ‘Finally’

My Work Here is Done

Published

Clifford

on November 9, 2007

in personal, science, string theory, travel and work

. 1 Comment

Yep. All done. Sitting in great cafe with a cup of camomile, listening to one of my favourite Mingus albums on the cafe’s overhead speakers, feeling that it all went well. (The latter - Mingus in a great cafe late at night? - is not really the Kentucky I remember.) I seem to have gone three for three. Class, seminar, colloquium. No disasters, besides skimping on the sleep a bit here and there and writing some of the material at the last minute. Good.

So I gave the seminar at noon*, talking about much the same material I did in my Santa Barbara talk I mentioned before here. We then went to lunch at a Korean place nearby that was rather good. I ordered the bi bim bap (as I often do at Korean places) and to my disappointment, it did not come in the super high temperature Continue reading ‘My Work Here is Done’

A Return

Published

Clifford

on November 9, 2007

in cosmology, personal, science, travel and work

. 6 Comments

I’m in Lexington, Kentucky, for a couple of days to give three presentations at the University of Kentucky (or “UK” as everyone refers to it here - I hope that explains the previous post). I should be preparing two of them instead of blogging, but… you know how it is. Here’s how I got here:

On Wednesday afternoon, after a class on magnetostatics, and an attendance of a lunchtime event where four of our faculty (Biology, Geology, Cosmology (our very own Elena Pierpaoli!), Biology) presented their research, I dashed for a plane. Some hours later, at 10:45pm local time, I touched down in Chicago, and 15 minutes later was on the highway in the company (and car) of Nick Halmagyi.

Our mission? To hang out for a few hours in an excellent bar or two of his acquaintance and catch up on what’s been going on with each other, workwise and otherwise. The Charleston was indeed excellent, and (after chortling a bit about the memory of my annoyance at being charged $29 for a serving of a single malt scotch in a bar in Aspen during the Summer) proceeded to order the same here (he the Macallan, me the Talisker). At about 1:00am, the music stops and a guy with a face full of character sits down at the upright piano, is introduced to a scattering of applause, and proceeds to play some Chopin. Everybody shuts up and turns to listen. Appropriately, the piano sounds like all upright pianos in all bars all around the world sound (the tuning is just a bit wobbly), and the guy is good - really good. He stops playing the piece, and there’s some more scattered applause; someone (jokingly?) offers his a dollar as he walks away which he waves away enthusiastically; the music comes back up, and everybody turns back to their conversations. Nick and I continue to chat about various aspects of life, and order a couple more whiskeys.

At 1:25am or so we wander over to another bar. Nick seems a bit surprised by my suggestion to do this (’cos I’m supposed to be going to sleep), but I’m just enjoying walking for a bit in the cold, wearing a cozy hat and coat that normally get no use these days, and there’s something nice about a proper bar hop in a neighbourhood with good bars and in the company of someone who appreciates it. This bar has an Continue reading ‘A Return’

All in a Weekend’s Work and Play

Published

Clifford

on November 6, 2007

in Los Angeles, art, design, flowers, gardening and work

. 9 Comments

I’ve been distracted by several things recently, and so (even more than is usually the case) there’s far more to report than there is time to report it. Among the highlights are, as already mentioned in the comments, a Saturday visit to MOCA (Geffen Contemporary) to see the Takashi Murakami exhibition. (Coinciding nicely with me about to embark upon reading “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” by the other very well known Murakami: Haruki Murakami.)

His simplest motif - which he reuses again and again in many pieces - is the smiling flowers in various colours. The 2D version of the 3D flower box is one of my favourites, and here it is in a room that is wallpapered with the motif. There’s a more solemn one with a range of expressions on the flowers’ faces in an entire field of them (”Kawaii - Vacances”) (including one shedding a tear), but I could not find a good web reproduction of it. The below is a rather small version:

murakami: kawaii - vacances

It’s only the second weekend since it opened here in LA and it is hugely popular, with tons of people in the exhibit spaces walking around excitedly and pointing at things. (This being LA, this included a lot of activity in the special Louis Vuitton room, which Continue reading ‘All in a Weekend’s Work and Play’

Coffee Thoughts

Published

Clifford

on October 11, 2007

in Los Angeles, art, science, science education, television and work

. 0 Comments

Well, it’s almost the end of the morning, I’ve just finished one set of tasks and about to move on to another and I thought I’d sit down and chat with a cup of coffee. This morning has largely been about three different outreach-type tasks. I hope to spend the entire afternoon on Physics research. I’m an optimist.

Here’s the shape of this morning:

At 7:00am I checked my email and found that an editor at a magazine was looking for something different from what I initially wrote in response to a question of hers about art and science. I’d spent some of the evening before writing something and sent it along, adding a couple of sentences at the end as a sort of final thought. Of course, she liked the last two sentences and not the rest so much (it was not getting directly at what she wanted me to speak to). So, a bit crestfallen, I tried again. In fact, I had indeed spoken to the issue, but had sort of buried it a bit. So I spent some time scraping away the unnecessary and bending and reshaping the text. Amazing how long that takes when you’ve got a word limit. I sent it along eventually. I’m not sure it is actually as good as what I wrote last night in terms of literature, but it is more to the point of what their feature is about, and so in that sense it is better. From the response I got back, it seems to be more like what they’re looking for now. I’ll tell you more about it when it appears… it’s all about a personal take on the interaction between art and science as far as inspiration goes, with a single piece to illustrate it. It’s the picking of a single piece that was the true difficulty. Took me days to decide. In the end, I had to make some hard choices indeed. I actually enjoyed thinking about the issue though. Sort of re-invigorating. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts about the matter in the comments. I’ll come back to this once the piece appears - if it does.

At 10:00am I called a television production company to talk about a new TV show for Continue reading ‘Coffee Thoughts’

Some of What Matters

Published

Clifford

on October 4, 2007

in Los Angeles, academia, black people in science, environment, gardening, minorities in science, personal, science, science and society, science education, science in the media, women in science and work

. 12 Comments

Below I’ve reproduced the text of the approximately 20 minutes of that which I presented at the What Matters to Me and Why event on Wednesday. I mentioned my preparations for it in a previous post. The event was well attended, in an excellent setting (a hidden campus cafe I’d somehow not known about before, Ground Zero). There were students, faculty, staff, alumni, and several others. I chose to give a structured address to start so as to make sure that I did not go on for too long, as I might in a more off-the-cuff delivery. I very much wanted to leave plenty of time to interact with the audience through their observations and questions. I delivered it partly from memory and partly from reading, and wanted it to have a bit of a feel of being read a story, rather than a formal speech. I don’t know how successful that was, but it was fun for me. I think I might try that approach again some time.

[Update: - Audio of the event here.]

Overall, I think the event worked well, and I had a great time. A number of people (kindly) said at the end that they had a good time, and I hope everyone else did too!

___________________________________________________________________________________
Hello Everyone.

First let me say that it is an honour to be here. I’d like to thank everyone concerned for inviting me to speak in this series. I imagine that everyone starts their piece by saying that they struggled to find a way of saying What Matters to them and Why in a short time. So I won’t dwell on that, except to say that it’s especially hard when, the day before preparing, you realize that it’s not going to be that hour long presentation you were expecting to squeeze your essence into, but 20 minutes!

Some time ago, when people started mentioning that they’d seen that I was a guest in this event, and that they were looking forward to hearing what I will say (!), I’d respond that I too was curious about what I was going to say, and would also try to show up and find out. This was actually true. The other thing that I (half-)joked was Continue reading ‘Some of What Matters’

New Installation

Published

Clifford

on September 25, 2007

in Los Angeles, academia and work

. 3 Comments

Yesterday we saw the official “installation” of Howard Gillman the new Dean of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. I find this term amusing in this context, as it sounds a bit like putting in a new lightbulb, or perhaps a new operating system (the latter is, I guess is closer to the truth). I sort of had to go since it represents the outcome of a lot of work I did last year on the search committee* that advised the Provost and President on their choices, and of course I have an interest in it as an ordinary faculty member of the College and of USC in general - The LAS is truly the core of USC, and we need the new Dean to do a good job of steering it forward in this (happily) continuing period USC’s steady and rapid progress on all fronts. So a good opening speech is seen as a good sign. It was good - much more than good actually - and everybody seemed to have genuinely good things to say afterwards (as we munched on the always excellent food served at these events - the other reason we go to them).

Right: Not the most representative photo (click to enlarge), but you can see him mid-speech, with President Sample seated listening. Assembled is a lot of the faculty, mostly seated. All the other Deans from all the other units were present, as well as various vice-Presidents and so forth. They all precessed into the room, and members of USC Thornton School of Music’s choir sang the USC song, which was… quite a bit more pomp and circumstance than I was expecting. What you can’t see is that the room is about twice as big as the part you can see, there’s lots of faculty standing around in that part, with several tables of very tasty food and wine for all.

For the record, the fact that I thought that it was a good speech has nothing to do with Continue reading ‘New Installation’

I’ve Got Next

Published

Clifford

on September 13, 2007

in Los Angeles, energy, entertainment, environment, gadgets, personal, science, science and society, science education, science in the media, space, technology, television and work

. 4 Comments

Ok. So I want to make this post timely, but it means that it will begin to let a cat out of the bag. We’ll see how much I can save for a later post as I write¹.

So, as I walked to the subway this morning (yes, they have one in LA), I went through my little checklist of things I take on self-assigned assignments of this sort.

Notebook for scribbling: Check
Pen for scribbling: Check
Camera: Check
Phone (now with decent back-up camera): Check
Spare battery for camera: Check
Decent excuse/reason for being spectacularly late: Check
Water: Check
Good footwear for endless walking back and forth: Check

By now you get it. I’m either doing one of my parade reports, or perhaps a street fair/party, museum exhibit, or some random science fair, object or installation or other. Yes, but which? Well, apparently I was going to the future:

The scene: The Los Angeles Convention Center. The event: The NextFest, brought to Continue reading ‘I’ve Got Next’

That Sort of Time

Published

Clifford

on September 11, 2007

in Los Angeles, fun, personal and work

. 1 Comment

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 Continue reading ‘That Sort of Time’

Switching

Published

Clifford

on August 27, 2007

in Los Angeles, academia, personal and work

. 7 Comments

Back in LA, and down at the USC campus. Good to be back! Click below for larger view.

Well, it is the first day of the new academic year’s teaching cycle. I’m here in my office at 7:30am (the power of jet-lag) and somehow have to switch my mind back firmly onto teaching and other matters. It’s always tough to do this, since there are always lots of intensely interesting research issues that continue on my mind from the Summer, and I know that some of those will gradually begin to fade (if I am not careful) as my other duties take up so much of my day to day. My first class (part one of the upper level electromagnetism course) is at 10:00am, and I want to plan out the structure for the whole semester, and write a syllabus to hand out and discuss. As well as the first lecture, of course. I’ve not taught this part of the cycle before, and so I’ll have to be writing new lecture notes.

I want to try some new things this year. In particular, I’ve become increasingly Continue reading ‘Switching’

My Superpowers Revealed

Published

Clifford

on August 9, 2007

in fun, personal, science, television and work

. 6 Comments

Ok, I can’t resist. From an earlier post:

â€¦and of course video footage of me effortlessly squashing a star much larger than our own sun down into a tiny space should help out enormously later on with classroom control, and so forthâ€¦

Since my cover is now blown, here are some stills** (click for larger) from Tuesday’s (unexpected) episode of the History Channel’s “The Universe”*:
Continue reading ‘My Superpowers Revealed’

Last Night in Aspen

Published

Clifford

on August 4, 2007

in film, food and drink, movies and work

. 9 Comments

gin gimlet at little nell's

… for this year, anyway. The evening out ended with a trip to my primary hideout* of this year’s visit, the nature of which you can deduce from the photo. The barkeep at The Little Nell, Michelle, really knows how to make a decent gin gimlet. I asked for it Continue reading ‘Last Night in Aspen’

News From The Front, VI: Simultaneity

Published

Clifford

on July 30, 2007

in black holes, personal, science, string theory and work

. 7 Comments

I stopped the previous post rather abruptly (I had to do another task and then run some errands) without getting to tell you a little twist at the end of the story. Here it is.

Having chipped away at the thoughts that Strominger’s talk stirred in my head for several days last week, scribbling equations to check that all I was thinking was on the right track (and chatting a couple of times with Nick Halmagyi down the hall), I decided that it was all fitting together so nicely that the framework and my extensions of it just had to be true. There was that feeling that it was too nice to be wrong, and it passed all the obvious checks I could think of. There were two independent consistency checks everything had to pass (using my way of formulating things) and they gave exactly the right results as required by the general setup, with no room for maneuver.

When that happens so nicely, usually at that point in thinking about a physics problem, a thought occurs to me. If I’m playing with a good idea and everything is working so well, then there’s at least 200 other people in the field who probably are also playing with it, and 199 of them have way more time than I do to think it through and write it up before I can. One should not really worry about these things in an ideal world, but I’d be lying to you if I said it did not come up as a concern from time to time. I’ve a history of having my thunder stolen out from under me several times in the field (and not always accidentally), so I’m a bit gun shy.

Anyway, I started writing a draft of the paper on Thursday the way I usually do: I write Continue reading ‘News From The Front, VI: Simultaneity’

News From The Front, V: Microscopic Weekend Diversions

Published

Clifford

on July 30, 2007

in black holes, personal, science, string theory and work

. 5 Comments

I’ve been spending the day so far as an administrator, and not a researcher, since I have to present the results of two committees’ deliberations at one of the big annual organizational meetings tomorrow here at the Aspen Center for Physics. So I’ve been gathering and arranging data in a presentable form. Enough. I will take a break and blog a tiny bit before turning to a truly riveting task - reviewing an introductory physics textbook for a publisher… (Sigh…it is not so easy to escape these things, even out of semester time.)

I had big plans to do a hike each day on the weekend, but physics intervened. I should explain a bit more. Earlier last week I eventually got around to following Nick’s suggestion from an earlier post to take a look at Andy Strominger’s Strings 2007 talk entitled “Search for the Holographic Dual of N Heterotic Strings”. It was the usual nice Strominger talk, where he motivates the physics very well, and presents interesting and clear thoughts on the problem in hand. I shall try to say a bit more about what it is about later on, but the general gist of it is that it is to do with understanding certain types of four dimensional black hole in string theory. As you may know, one of the extraordinarily successful results in string theory in the last decade (and slightly more) has been that we can understand one of the most central results of semi-classical quantum gravity -that they have an entropy and behave like thermodynamical objects (the work of Bekenstein and of Hawking from the early 70s)- in precise terms in the full theory of quantum gravity that string theory appears to present us with. This started with the work of Strominger and Vafa in 1996, that showed how to describe a large class of black holes as essentially made of extended objects called D-branes (about which I’ve spoken at length earlier¹).

Just to fill in the gaps roughly: Hawking’s result that black holes can radiate as thermodynamical objects comes from taking Einstein’s theory of General Relativity and combining it with Quantum Mechanics in a partial way. He could not really do much better since there was no proper quantum theory of gravity at the time, but even in Continue reading ‘News From The Front, V: Microscopic Weekend Diversions’

Clearing Out

Published

Clifford

on July 29, 2007

in flowers, hiking and work

. 0 Comments

Some of the results of last Saturday’s wanderings. The wildflowers are in evidence nearly everywhere you look. Hiking through entire fields of them stretching off into the distance is such a pleasure:

The view toward Snowmass lake (you can just see it) that you can get from being on Continue reading ‘Clearing Out’

More Than A Hint Of The Old Days, II

Published

Clifford

on July 26, 2007

in academia, cosmology, dark energy, science and work

. 17 Comments

A strange but satisfying aspect of my time here (I’m at the Aspen Center for Physics, recall) has been the fact that due to some odd serendipity, there’s a ton of people from the “old days”. Which ones? My Princeton years, in the early 90s, as a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study (and later at Princeton University). These are not all people doing what I do, but in a wide range of fields such as high energy physics, astrophysics, condensed matter physics. Several of us were postdocs together. I’ve been chatting with people I’ve not seen for a while, sometimes not since those days, or they are people I met back then, and with whom I have a pool of shared memories from those days. So it has put me in mind of those times somewhat.

A quick example. Soon after I arrived last week, I was walking along, chatting with Petr HoÅ™ava (Berkeley) about various things, and we got on to reminiscing a bit about our time together as postdocs in Princeton. And then minutes later, as though conjured from the very substance of our conversation, who should walk by but one of the Gods/Legends of the field (then and now), Princeton’s Alexander Polyakov. He walked by in exactly the same sort of way he would back then, either coming from or going to a walk along the river or canal, perhaps to give us a lecture. Petr and I looked at each other, and continued our walk and talk.

The great news for me last week was that Polyakov then gave a talk. I’ll admit to being a big fan of his physics. When he gives a talk nearby, I show up, no matter how confused I might end up at the end. There’s going to be good stuff in there - it’s only a matter of time before it sorts itself out in your head. Often years. Decades. Several of us sat in on his graduate class back in Princeton in the early 90s just to try to catch the pearls of wisdom which we’d pick up as he lectured on….. Well, I’ve no idea to this day what the class was really about. He would show up (probably fresh from a walk), with no notes or anything, and just pick up a piece of chalk, stare out the window for a few seconds, and then start writing stuff. Essentially, he was randomly jumping around the subject matter in his widely under-read book “Gauge Fields and Strings”. He was all over the book. It was not always a simple and coherent path through the subject matter, and it seemed that he was largely exploring whatever took his mood in the moment, but I suspect that was largely my ignorant young mind’s impression.

A. M. Polyakov in the middle of giving what for me was an excellent and intriguing seminar at the Aspen Center for Physics. Click for larger view.

Sadly, it is the type of course that these days would score close to zero in most Continue reading ‘More Than A Hint Of The Old Days, II’

All In A Day’s Work

Published

Clifford

on July 19, 2007

in science and work

. 10 Comments

Difficult to say what a typical day is at the Aspen Center for Physics . It probably varies a lot from person to person, since many people are here for different reasons, and with different goals. There’s a lot of sitting and thinking, and walking and thinking. There’s a lot of chatting in corridors, and at blackboards. There’s quite a buzz of productivity during the middle of the day. On some days, there might be a couple of seminars, where someone presents finished work or work in progress. Here’s Robbert Dijkgraaf (University of Amsterdam) leading a discussion of some of his recent work today:

In addition to some seminars, my day was filled up a bit more with some administration. I’m on a couple of committees that helps keep things ticking along Continue reading ‘All In A Day’s Work’

Strings 2007: Share the Memories

Published

Clifford

on July 17, 2007

in science, string theory and work

. 6 Comments

A big chunk of yesterday (recall, I’m visiting at the Aspen Center for Physics) was spent chatting with old friends in the field I have not seen in a while, including going for a walk or two in the local surrounds with colleagues, discussing some of the physics issues of the day.

One of the things that comes up a lot with everyone I spoke to (and met at lunch, and in corridors and so forth) was Strings 2007, the big annual meeting that was held in Madrid last month (blog post here). It comes up in the form of people asking each other things like: “were you at Strings?”, “what did you think of Strings?”, “what were your favourite talks?”, “is there any interesting gossip about…?” (where the latter is not necessarily directly about physics).

So it occurred to me that some of those conversations and responses might be useful to workers in the field. Of course, you can just sit and work your way through the entire collection of online talks, a good thing to do. But it’s interesting to hear from others what talks they liked, and why, just as we do (and maybe have done) over tea and coffee in lounges all over the world after someone returns from a meeting. Often, this is where we hear of some excellent work by the less famous speakers (or even by someone who did not talk at all), etc.

So I’ll kick off. Although I was not there, and have yet to start a serious assault on Continue reading ‘Strings 2007: Share the Memories’

Physics, 101

Published

Clifford

on July 11, 2007

in Los Angeles, personal, science and work

. 4 Comments

It’s been one of those days. I just got back home, at 2:30am, after a very pleasant bit of work in a cafe. I was writing up my thoughts of the day into my notebook (I’m old-fashioned that way) and crafting new ones. Where was I? The 101 Coffee Shop, of course, an LA landmark - with those lovely booths, the counter, the lighting, all classics - over near the Capital Records building (another LA landmark) just where you join the 101 heading up to North Hollywood - hence the name, and hence the title of this post.

It’s been one of those days in a good sense. After a long couple of weeks of muddling and being rather down about a project I’m working on that had run into problems, things suddenly made sense today over the course of a long IM conversation (six hours) with one of my collaborators, Jeff Pennington. Things just started to fall into place during the brainstorming… we’d exchange facts and observations, explain thing to each other….muddle along for a while… ask questions… calculate separately for a bit…. suggest computations to each other…report results…get confused… and then it all broke open quite nicely and every single fact seemed to fit into place by the end. A lot to do still, but it seems rather robust and tantalizing.

After taking a break after the long brainstorm to do a bit of gardening work, this Continue reading ‘Physics, 101′

Festive

Published

Clifford

on July 8, 2007

in Los Angeles, books and work

. 3 Comments

Festival of Books

One of my favourite scenes from the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books earlier this year (I forgot to post these nearer the time). They’d set up giant crosswords at various points on the UCLA campus (where the Festival was held), and people gathered around and tried to solve them. I think this is a lovely idea!
Continue reading ‘Festive’

Consider a Spherical…

Published

Clifford

on July 2, 2007

in personal, science and work

. 10 Comments

So I went out to get a new kettle a few days ago. I’ve now given up on a rather lovely design by the company Chantal that I’ve been using for many years since on two models in succession (or is it three?) the same flaw has revealed itself - the plastic parts of the Hohner whistling lid began to loosen gradually (probably from too much heat up the sides, which may be my fault) and then you eventually end up with a non-fitting non-whistling lid.

I began to assess other kettle designs, and in doing so found myself thinking idly about a number of physics issues. One of the main ones was energy. If I got a smaller kettle (the one I had before had a capacity of 1.8 quarts, and I was considering ones as big as 2 quarts and ones as small as 1.5 quarts), which I was leaning heavily toward, it would probably encourage me to save energy and not boil so much water. On the other hand, maybe that’s really silly, since I might just be putting the same amount of water into the kettle anyway… I’d never fill either up all the way in any case. But if I put the same amount of water into both kettles, would the smaller one end up using less energy anyway as I don’t have to heat up the extra air in the chamber, or does that not matter…? It’s not that simple since the chamber is not sealed. Hot air (and later, steam) is escaping all the time. Well, this is all complicated by the fact that the smaller kettle has less of its base in contact with flame, so I’d have to turn down the flame, and heat it for longer on a lower flame than with the larger kettle… would that make a difference? Perhaps a smaller chamber at lower flame means slower steam escape velocity, and so a quieter whistle. Not good if you’re prone to forgetting that you’ve put the kettle on during an absorbing computation…downright dangerous, in fact!

This was not an entirely serious discussion, you see, but it’s sort of fun sometimes to find these things floating around in one’s head. Physicists (and I imagine, other scientists) have this sort of thing flit through their heads a lot. The key thing -especially as a Theoretical Physicist- is knowing when to engage with one of these problems, and when to ignore them. Is there are clear route to tackling the problem? Is it worth it? Is there something to be learned from solving this problem that might be useful elsewhere? In fact, I was trying to explain this all to a writer friend of mine Continue reading ‘Consider a Spherical…’

Blogging Strings 2007

Published

Clifford

on June 25, 2007

in research, science, string theory and work

. 1 Comment

I’ve just noticed that Jacques Distler will be blogging from Strings 2007 (his first post is here). Excellent! I hope that others will be too. If you learn of anyone else who will be blogging from the conference (either physics content or other aspects of the event), do let me know (either in comments or by email) and I’ll update this post with pointers. If you have anything interesting to share from it*, but don’t blog, consider sending it along too!

-cvj

(*You know, anything from supplementary physics discussion to incriminating photos from those notorious string theory after-parties that plague the conference circuit…)

Strings 2007

Published

Clifford

on June 25, 2007

in research, science, string theory and work

. 7 Comments

The main annual conference in my main field of interest starts today. Strings 2007 is in Madrid, and runs all week. The website is here (while there, have a play with the front page image of the Goya painting - quite entertaining - snapshot right). They promise to update the schedule/speakers page with scans of slides, and video, so you’ll be able to keep track of some of the new developments online. There’s no system for doing this live, or asking questions remotely, so if you want to quiz Ed Witten about his new 83-page monster paper on three dimensional gravity that came out yesterday (just in time for the conference!), or feel the buzz of event-anticipation whenever Witten talks about a huge new sets of results, you’ll still have to show up in person.

Why am I not there? Well, it would be nice, but there are lots of reasons I’m not going Continue reading ‘Strings 2007′

Morning Computations

Published

Clifford

on June 23, 2007

in personal, science and work

. 1 Comment

morning computations …and then you have days when nothing works. At all. This was not like last Saturday. Despite starting out nice and early with a cup of tea in the sunshine and scribbling away while wrinkling one’s brow. Things got worse and worse through the morning, as I realized that many things I so wanted to be right about the next stage of my computation (which perhaps I’ll tell you about one day) were in fact not going to work. Not even close.

By lunchtime I’d given up, and summarized my thoughts on the research blog for my collaborators. Was probably not the most encouraging reading for them to encounter, but I tried to be as constructive in my deconstruction of our idea as I could. I’m hoping that they -or later, I- might find some useful threads to pick up on from my notes and remarks.

It’s not over yet.

Maybe I should have gone for that hike instead of sitting entirely at home on a Continue reading ‘Morning Computations’

Is there a Perfect Pitch?

Published

Clifford

on June 21, 2007

in academia, minorities in science, women in science and work

. 25 Comments

And the immediate followup question is “Should there be?” I’m referring to the story on NPR’s Marketplace the other day about the effects that some women’s voices have on whether they are taken seriously in the workplace. The audio is here, along with a transcript. The article, entitled “Professional women? With little-girl voices?”, is by Ashley Milne-Tyte.

The piece begins with a clip from the recent news, of Monica Goodling (Former Justice Department White House liaison) speaking in her defense during the hearings over the Justice Department firings. She has a noticeably “little-girl”-pitched voice. (I’m sure you remember hearing her during the news or the live broadcasts, and possibly your first instinct was to ask yourself why - in the political feeding frenzy aimed at bringing down Alberto Gonzales from the Attorney General position - the Congressional Democrats were now rounding up and grilling small children. (Or at least that was how it was for me for a split second since I mostly don’t watch television news - I find it too slow and otherwise annoying - and so I heard her on the radio.) It was then announced in the news piece who it was and I thought nothing more of it at the time…)

My own take on this is that it does not matter. You just learn, and move on. Since coming to the USA long ago, I adjusted my expectations about what are considered Continue reading ‘Is there a Perfect Pitch?’

The Two-Body Problem

Published

Clifford

on June 21, 2007

in academia, personal and work

. 11 Comments

Ah, the two-body problem. On NPR’s Marketplace last week, Kai Ryssdal had a piece entitled “Studying ways to help 2-career couples”, covering a “Dual Careers Conference” at Cornell. The audio is here, along with a transcript.

It’s an important issue, (which I’m not going to spend a huge amount of time on here, since I’ve been blogging too much this morning so far), and I’d no idea that there were conferences devoted to it.

From the point of view of academia, there’s one aspect of it which still has not penetrated very far in the minds of many, in my mind. It is one I tried to emphasize when this issue came up during various advisory committees I’ve served on with relevance to matters of hiring, diversity, etc. What’s on my mind is that the two-body problem (as it is jokingly referred to by some) is not always to be thought of as a “problem” from the point of view of potential employers. In fact, if you can work with a potential employee to find employment for their spouse at your or a neighbouring institution, it actually can strengthen your faculty roster in many ways. Aside from the obvious ones, there are the benefits of having happier employees who are committed to setting down roots, rather than an employee who is spending a lot of time travelling to or calling their spouse in another city, wondering every day whether their job is really worth that strain. Retention is a huge issue in managing your faculty. The value of settled employees cannot be overstated if you take the long view for your organization.

Anyway, have a listen to the article (or read the transcript). There’s the usual interview with members of couples who are academics and struggling with the issue, and it’s interesting if you’re not familiar with the matter, or perhaps if you’re in academia, early in your career and wondering about what the job market holds for you. And if you’re currently wondering whether to date other academics or not, don’t be put off (at least not by this issue!). Things are getting better. Employers are getting smarter Continue reading ‘The Two-Body Problem’

Nuts and Bolts

Published

Clifford

on June 17, 2007

in Los Angeles, personal, science, string theory and work

. 16 Comments

notebook working Yes, part of my job is to sit and think about how the universe works. People hear this, and they wonder exactly what that entails. Well, it entails a lot of things - sometimes there’s the grand thoughts and the thought experiments and the like that you hear of from documentaries and books about Einstein and other famous scientists - but more often that not it is grungy nuts and bolts.

Take yesterday for example. After a week of working on various calculations and chipping away at improving my understanding of how to approach a certain problem, I decided to take Saturday and be outdoors a bit more…see what it was like outside. You know…. Have an actual Saturday Saturday. (I did not end up being booked to do that TV shoot, by the way, so I had a nice clear day ahead of me.)

What actually transpired was this:

Continue reading ‘Nuts and Bolts’

New Toy Tool!

Published

Clifford

on June 13, 2007

in Los Angeles, personal and work

. 12 Comments

Trying to calculate all day long. Lunch break. During this moment of procrastination, I thought I’d tell you about the product of yesterday’s procrastination. At some point in the morning I decided that I was not thinking straight about aspects of my computation (like what it all means), and that this could be helped by having a bigger space to work on that I have at home right now.

I don’t know about others, but sometimes in addition to the need to change venues during research thoughts, I also need to change the medium I’m writing on. So at lunch I went shopping and after visiting far too many stores (art supply for one part, office supply for another) to get the right things, look what I got (see left picture)!

Continue reading ‘New ~~Toy~~ Tool!’

TASI@Home

Published

Clifford

on June 4, 2007

in cosmology, science, string theory and work

. 14 Comments

This year’s month-long Theoretical Advanced Study Institute -TASI- looks especially good, from my point of view, with a great combination of topics and lecturers. As usual, it is held in Boulder, Colorado. It’s all about current ideas and experiments and observations in particle physics and cosmology. Three USC students are there and I’ve heard from them that things have been great so far.

raphael bousso at TASI Well, the great news is that the TASI people are making the lectures available online a fairly short time after their delivery. The link is here. So even though not there, you can schedule some time to take these lecture courses if you like. I glanced for a while at Raphael Bousso’s first lecture in the series “Cosmology and the Landscape”, and it was clear and very well presented. (This is not entirely surprising - Raph is always an excellent lecturer.)

Continue reading ‘TASI@Home’

That Ain’t Workin’

Published

Clifford

on June 1, 2007

in fun, humour, string theory and work

. 1 Comment

Remember the Tune “Money for Nothing”, by Dire Straits? It was a big hit in the 80s. (Remember those?) Well, Warren of the new blog A Strange Universe* wrote a rather brilliant physics version of it, to be sung to the same tune. The “stringer” is the object of the ridicule of the song’s character. The original post is here, where he’ll tell you his thoughts on the song. I can’t resist (I hope he forgives me) posting the entire thing here, rather than an extract, which would break up its impact. (Original song’s lyrics are here, by the way, for comparison.)

So here it is:
Continue reading ‘That Ain’t Workin’’

The Meddler, II

Published

Clifford

on May 29, 2007

in Los Angeles, environment and work

. 8 Comments

[Continuing an earlier post...which you'll need to read to understand this one. Link here.]

recycling symbol So, unhappy with the state of affairs, I was on the warpath. I began to consider how to deploy my shiny weapons of war. I considered what to do. I could not believe that this really is the policy of the people overseeing the whole operation of Trojan Hospitality (the organization that oversees the whole of campus catering) - it must have been a unilateral effort on the part of the manager and staff in that particular cafe. Or I least I hoped so. So before calling on even higher powers from, say, the Provost’s office, I thought I’d talk to the head person at Trojan Hospitality. If I got no joy there, then I’d go higher. (Ironically, not long ago I’d politely turned down an approach for me to consider a position in the Provost’s office to become a sort of official campus-wide trouble-shooter on an ad-hoc basis for problems of precisely this sort.)

Another reason why this is all so frustrating to me is the fact that USC recently scored abominably in a recent report/survey grading college campuses according to how much effort they make in the area of sustainability. (Sustainable Endownments Insitute here, USC’s report card explaining its “D” score here.) While the report’s results seemed to me to be likely a bit harsh, I’ve always wondered whether anyone at USC actually cared about this issue enough to take the report seriously. (I’ve my own issues with Trojan Transportation with regards environmental matters -not the least because pedestrians, cyclists, and people who use public transportation seem to be lower on the food chain than people who buy parking permits- but have not got around to making noises about it to date beyond using the suggestion box in their office, and some comments in the campus surveys they sometimes circulate.)

So, here was the letter I wrote on Friday:
Continue reading ‘The Meddler, II’

The Meddler, I

Published

Clifford

on May 29, 2007

in Los Angeles, environment and work

. 13 Comments

I don’t like getting angry. I don’t like losing my temper. In the first place, it makes me feel like I failed, and in the second place, I’m a little too good at being angry. I’m really scary. So I let it happen very little.

On Wednesday of last week, I almost completely lost my temper at work (bad enough), and in front of a guest (even worse, in my opinion), Bee, and in front of two of my students (setting a bad example). I apologized to them all, several times, later. Luckily (maybe because I was not wearing any purple pants?), I did not lose it entirely but my internal temperature was really very high indeed by the end of the incident.

travel coffee mug What was the matter? You’re possibly going to think that this is an insignificant matter, but I don’t agree. We all went for coffee to one the (usually excellent, with usually very good staff) cafes on campus, and as usual I brought along my own coffee cup. I do that a lot, primarily since it means that I do not use any paper cups as a result, and secondarily becaus