No, not the new Black Panther trailer, not the new trailer for The Last Jedi (although those are awesome)… No, this is a trailer for the book. You get to look inside for the first time: I may make a second trailer soon. The book appears mid-November. More at http://thedialoguesbook.com
Adding sound to a…book trailer!! To appear soon. So you’ll get to look inside the new book!
-cvj
#thedialoguesbook #sketching #drawing #sketches #graphicnovels Click to continue reading this post
Over on Instagram – follow me there @asymptotia for lots of activity – I showed a couple of montages of sketches I did on the flight out to New Orleans and on the return portion. It is a bit of practice I like to do, which I have not done in a long time. It is part of the practice I did a lot when I was gearing up to do final drawing on the book:
It’s time for a visit to the kitchen. This time the result was a spontaneous coconut tart, made from childhood memories… (and a bit of pastry). Here are two composite photos and their captions (from my instagram account) to tell the story:
Today’s Nobel Prize in physics has an interesting wrinkle to it. I summarised it in the extract above from a certain forthcoming book*. Click for a larger view. Congratulations to the winners Rainer Weiss, Barry C Barish and Kip S Thorne! There are some excellent descriptions (either for layperson level … Click to continue reading this post
Just for a while there it felt good and simple to be sitting at the drawing desk again, pencil on paper… but the moment passed all too quickly and I had to get back to a million things. (Was taking some photos of myself at work for a news piece…) … Click to continue reading this post
This is from just after I gave the opening welcome address at the first Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities ( #LAIH ) luncheon of the new season. After talking amongst ourselves we had a great talk by Jeff Manaugh @bldgblog entitled “A Burglar’s Guide to Los Angeles”. Based on … Click to continue reading this post
Wow, I’ve really got something good for Throwback Thursday! A large white envelope arrived in my mailbox*, addressed to me in handwriting. My first thought was that it was yet another sheaf of papers with someone’s very earnest “Theory of Everything”, helpfully sent along for me to discover that indeed the science world has “got it totally wrong”: the universe is in fact made of (fill in the blank – let’s say parmesan cheese?) which interacts via (hungry angels tethered together by fondue strands?) and so on and so forth, and all I have to do is “work out the math for me because it is not my strong point” and it’ll all work out… “you’re welcome”.
But no, it was not. I don’t open things like this without caution, for various reasons, and often I throw them away, but there was something strangely familiar about the writing and so I took it away to (maybe) open later.
Then it struck me. It was my handwriting! Huh? How could that be? Was I […] Click to continue reading this post
Our Cassini tribute, posted on Instagram. (p.s. I started an instagram account. Not a lot to see yet, but I’d be delighted if you went over there and followed the heck out of it….) Our #cassini tribute. A post shared by Clifford Johnson (@asymptotia) on Sep 16, 2017 at 11:02am … Click to continue reading this post
Dear colleagues far and wide. I’m delighted to share the news that we are having a job search in Astrophysics! Please note the link’s contents, and share it to those who might be interested. Thanks! https://usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-angeles/assistant-professor-of-physics-and-astronomy/1209/5668638 -cvj
It’s that time of year again. For me, County Fairs have a charmingly old-fashioned quality to them, and I love to visit what might be considered some of the more boring aspects – the various crafts on display (shelves of pots of jam, pies and cakes, and so forth, knitted and crocheted items, and so forth), and the old games (hitting things with hammers, etc.) And of course sampling a tiny bit of the the terrible (but tasty) foods you get to eat!
I have a story (told within another story) in my forthcoming book that takes place at a fair (that illustrates an interesting scientific idea – but not one you’d guess at all, I’ll bet), and two years ago I went location scouting at the LA County Fair to get reference material for some of the various drawings I did for […] Click to continue reading this post
Today marks the day when, after a long closure, the lovely tiny railway called Angel’s Flight in downtown Los Angeles re-opens. There is a news piece here for example. It was a common feature of what some called the “Asymptotia Tour”, meaning that back in the day, readers of this blog who visited LA and happened to meet me might well be shown this hidden gem of the city. Well, all those years ago (before it closed) I ended up capturing it (or a version of it) on the page as part of the setting for one of my dialogues in my forthcoming book, The Dialogues: Conversations about the Nature of the Universe (MIT Press, 2017). The images above show some fragments of two pages in the book, featuring the railway.
In Spring 2010, I took a sabbatical semester and decided to spend most of it in hiding (in some cities in Europe), telling nobody what […] Click to continue reading this post
I wonder if others get notifications from Amazon about my book as often as I do… anyway, please note that it is due to appear (depending upon who you believe) in 6-8 weeks or so, so please consider beating the rush and pre-ordering… also note that the discount for doing so is shrinking a bit as compared to earlier, so move fast! Amazon link here, but your favourite store (local or online) will likely have it at that price too!
The fig trees in the garden are in full production mode. (As was my wife on the pancake side of things*.) Made for a delicious combination for family breakfast! There’s something magical about eating figs fresh from the tree that are still warm from the sun.
By the way, there are some major changes coming up for the garden which should allow me to expand some of the variety of things I grow there. I’ll fill you in on this later…
-cvj
*Thanks aef! Click to continue reading this post
It’s an exciting day today! Please don’t lock your kids away, which seems to be an alarmingly common option (from looking at the news – many schools seem to be opting to do that; I wish they’d use they use some of those locked classrooms as camera obscura). Instead, use this as an opportunity to learn and teach about the wonderful solar system we live in.
Actually, to enjoy the experience, you never have to even look in the direction of the sun if you don’t want to (or if you don’t have the appropriate eclipse glasses)… you can see crescents everywhere during the partial eclipse if you look out for them. You can make a safe viewing device in a minute or two if you take the time.
Here’s an NPR video that summarises the various viewing options: […] Click to continue reading this post
