While it is indeed quite quiet in the garden at this time of year, that does not mean it is not producing. Here’s a bowl of lovely tart oranges that the tree has produced in large numbers. There’s also, […] Click to continue reading this post
So, after a bit of time away from the process, this weekend saw me make some progress on The Project. I realized that I had too many things fragmented, scattered in several places, both physically and in my mind. This means that when I come to pick up where I left off (and breaks from it – sometimes long ones – are necessary since I have my Physics Professor gig which is first and foremost, you understand…) it can take all the available time to get back into the saddle since I am pulling the fragments back into foreground. So I’ve decided to sharpen up the process a bit and try harder to send clear notes and assignments to myself in the future. For example, as writer, I need to prepare things so that they are in a good final state with clear conventions in a full script, so that when I come to it later as penciller, I’ve got all I need to get stuck in and move things along, sending messages along to future me at the next step, and so on. It means I’ve got to do less of the business of leaving things un-fleshed out because I think I’ll do that bit at a later stage – That later stage might be months down the line, and by then I’d have forgotten the core of the idea that I was going to build in at that point… You get the idea.
So my task for the next several sessions is to turn all the stories I’ve written so far into full scripts, and finish the bits that are unfinished in each one. What do I mean by full script? Well, over the last two years I’ve done a lot of it in notebooks and in […] Click to continue reading this post
This is from the people at Squidspot… Click the link to learn more about it (like why it isn’t actually periodic, and so forth). Click on the image to see it large and get the details.
I noticed that over on Backreaction, Bee talks about a letter she wrote to Time Magazine to respond to a spectacularly uninformed remark by Jeffrey Kluger about women in physics. It was made in one of the “Person of the Year” runner-up articles surrounding a description of Fabiola Gianotti, one of the physicists who presented the Higgs particle discovery announcement at CERN last year. The spectacularly uninformed remark? Here it is:
Physics is a male-dominated field, and the assumption is that a woman has to overcome hurdles and face down biases that men don’t.
But that just isn’t so. Women in physics are familiar with this misconception and acknowledge it mostly with jokes.
I should say that it is nice to see an article about physics in this context (Time, person of the year, etc) since it gets the general public interested, but it is dismaying to see such a hugely important issue brushed over. I don’t think it helps the younger people trying to get into the field, and it certainly is frustrating and unhelpful for people already in the field who are having to deal with all the preconceptions and […] Click to continue reading this post
Another dude you may or may not recognize. This is for those of you who wondered who I’d find next to do a sketch of, and is another of those sketches done in the cramped conditions of my airline seat after browsing through a magazine to find an interesting face. See the previous post on this practice. There’s this series of print commercials for a watch or something similar that has served me well with well-lit faces, and so when I thumbed through this month’s Hemispheres, I was quite pleased.
I did this one with a mechanical HB pencil, and it is quite incomplete… there’s a bit of tinkering I could do with the modelling of the cheeks and around the […] Click to continue reading this post
The showcase and awards ceremony for the Science Film Competition is tomorrow (Wednesday)! It’ll be in the film school, at the Stark Family Theater (SCA 108), at 7:00pm. I’ll be screening films that were entered into the competition, and then at the end of the evening, giving out large prizes! $3000 first prize, $2000 second, and $1000 third. Should be a fun evening, with refreshments after the ceremony!
Come along and bring friends. […] Click to continue reading this post
I *loved* the Inauguration Poem by Richard Blanco, and I loved the way he read it at the ceremony. It was by far my favourite thing of the day, although there were several things I liked about the event (or collection of events). Of course, you’ll have guessed that the phrases about teaching geometry in class, or about windmills generating electricity, or about having equations to solve, were highlights for me, but it was not just those things that delighted. The overall ideas of sharing and community (One sky, our sky; one ground, our ground, etc.) just fit so well with my view of the world, as you know from this blog. I’ve included the text in full below, and at the very bottom, an ABC video of him reading it. I hope you read it too!
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“One Today” – Richard Blanco
One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.
My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day:
pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows
begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper — bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,
on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives — to teach geometry, or ring up groceries as my mother did
for twenty years, so I could write this poem.
All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day: […] Click to continue reading this post
[Update: replaced sketch with the painted version.] I managed to get a sketch done of some of my colleagues present at the meeting I’m part of here in San Antonio, TX. They’re across from the table from me, and as far as I can tell, not aware that I’m sketching. Was a fun experiment with quick layout. I’d have painted it, but I seem to have forgotten […] Click to continue reading this post
At my meeting in San Antonio, I just saw a nice article by Brian Jacobsmeyer on APS’ Physics Central with an interesting take on art mixing with physics. (A subject you know is close to my heart, given The (graphic novel) Project) (The article was the subject of part of the meeting, ao I was paying attention!) It is actually about fluid dynamics and Rayleigh-Taylor mixing, if you want to be specific, and you’ll recognize it in other images in astronomy, and elsewhere. There’s an interesting film associated with it too, which is linked in the article. Here’s an extract to get you started (link at the end): […] Click to continue reading this post
While I was apparently catching that horrible flu virus early last week during the travelling I was doing, I was killing time with a few sketching games I tend to do while travelling. I was grabbing faces. A moderately careful face grab is to look through whatever magazines I have to hand (such as the in-flight magazine) and see if there are interesting faces… then I might do a quick or longer drawing of one or two that I find. Sometimes they are familiar people, as is perhaps the case with the one I show to the left. This was not intended to be super-careful, and was rather quickly done, but it turned out to be nicer than I expected.
I was simply drawing with a pen and not trying to be very accurate, and just capture expression and structure of the face, but my eye was in and so… (I’d have used pencil if I was planning to go for accuracy…) I liked it enough to finish it up when I got home and throw some watercolour (pencils and then water brush) on to it. (I took a quick snap of the magazine photo before I left to allow me to recall some features for finishing.)
I’ll spare you the other ones I did in that mode. Not for public consumption! […] Click to continue reading this post
So that was by far the most ill I’ve been in many years. The flu wore on for five days, with two and a half of them having me mostly in delirium, fighting highs and lows of fevers… quite remarkable. Then I had two extra days of eating very little, so that by time I started eating real food again on Saturday, and going outside, it was as though the world had been made anew to see and taste various things I’d not had in a while…
Ok… I suppose this means maybe next flu season I’ll finally start taking flu shots? We’ll see.
Anyway, I am reasonably sure that I caught that virus while passing through Atlanta airport on my way back from New Orleans. There, so many paths cross as it is a major hub. Spending two hours there gave me ample time to pick something up. Then there’s the plane as well, with four hours to sit in one space in contact with the things a possibly infected traveller before me had contact with. Nice.
I’ve been much better for a few days now, and semester has got going here. I’ve given […] Click to continue reading this post
(Photo: Taken during the break in the back room at Howlin’ Wolf in New Orleans. The Hot 8 were playing late into the night – super loud and energetic in the tiny space – and it was great. A really classic New Orleans sound.)
Having returned from the (excellent) New Orleans trip (lots of food, lots of music), I started to turn my attention to things like the final preparations for the Science Film Competition – the submissions are due Monday and the showcase is on the 23rd – and preparations for the lecture course on Electromagnetism I’ll be giving, starting Monday. But then I got hit by a virus, and yesterday was lost to the violent swings between freezing cold and boiling hot that accompanies an intense shivering fever. […] Click to continue reading this post
I’m in New Orleans for a few days. Exciting, as I’ve never been here before, but it has been on my list of cities to visit for a long time…
I thought I’d share with you the above photo of an important (to me) artifact that I visited in the old US Mint building, which has a number of exhibits. This is the cornet that, as a boy, Louis Armstrong leaned to play trumpet on!
This is sort of a big deal for me. It would be like finding a set of notebooks that the young[…] Click to continue reading this post
Given that I am frequently mystified by the obsession with making lists at the turn of the year, I was pleased to see* the New Yorker’s parody of the same with its list of “100 best lists of all time”.See […] Click to continue reading this post
I was interviewed by an online publication called The Arts and Entertainment Magazine for their 1st January edition. You might find it interesting, since I talk about some of the themes I bring up here a lot, such as trying to improve public understanding of science, and various projects connected to that sort of thing. It is here. Enjoy!
Actually, they’ve started doing a series of spotlights on various scientists, so browse through the website for other interviews, if that interests you.
