Another fun combination of science and sketching! Photographer Volker Steger decided get his subjects – a selection of Nobel Prize winners – to try to represent their work (what they got the prize for) with a drawing. You can see a discussion of the results (and find links to the prizewinners talking about their work) here*
So over a quick lunch of sardines, tomatoes from the garden, and homemade bread*, I decided to glance and the bbc news website. It had a thing in the corner listing the top five stories, and one of them was How to build your own TARDIS.
Well, naturally I looked, because I was not aware that the required technology was available to do this yet. (I was sure we’d still have to wait until last year, or at least to 1985…. But anyhoo….) Turns out it is in the Technology section, so even more interesting, right?
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I’m switching tasks again. For a few days I was back on the Project (graphic book starring physics, you may recall) and managed to squeeze out some results. An inked panel from a page I was working on yesterday is above. (It is a continuation of some […] Click to continue reading this post
Ok, maybe things are getting a bit out of hand here? Or, time to start selling in the market!
Lots of sauce to make, for storing for the bleak MidWinter, methinks…
Wow. I’ve just returned from a most marvellous evening, and feel compelled to recommend what I saw to those in the area who can get to see it. You’ve possibly heard/read me talk about Nancy Keystone’s wonderful work in collaboration with her Critical Mass Performance Group before (e.g. see here and here). I probably used a lot of superlatives while doing so. Well here I go again. Nancy and the CMPG are doing a remarkably lively, clever, poignant (and downright funny in all the right places) production of their treatment of the Euripedes play Alcestis at the Boston Court Theater in Pasadena. I strongly recommend it for a thought-provoking and very moving evening out. It is a meditation on life and death that is powerfully done, and it is one of the best evenings of theatre I’ve had for a while. It’s one of the classic Greek plays we’re talking about here, but it is not a bunch of people standing around in togas (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) fretting. It is contemporary, on the face of it, timeless in another sense. (Photo is from the Boston Court Theater site.)
It is always impossible to describe Nancy’s work, because it is such a powerfully […] Click to continue reading this post
While on a long weekend break up North not long ago, during a heat wave, I had a bit of time to hand one morning to do a sketch of the scene outside the bedroom window… 
There was a lovely shady garden, with lots of green growing things in the fore and middle […] Click to continue reading this post
TwentyWonder is tonight! Come along if you’re in the area. Some quotes from the site:
A mindblowing cultural mashup. One night only. Only in LA.
Art. Science. Music. Comedy. Food ‘n Drink. Weird Geeky Stuff. …and Roller Derby!
Feel the Love. All proceeds go to the Downs Syndrome Association of Los Angeles.
See you there?
One of the things that came up in conversation in my meeting at the APS on Tuesday was Science Slams. These are a lot of fun, and are growing in popularity and frequency. Maybe you might want to take part in one, or organize one. There’s a lot of great theater to be had, and its fun for wider audience, just as poetry slams when done well can be fun for an audience that might not have chosen to study or listen to poetry. (See earlier posts on the local Dead Poets’ Slam, for example.)
My friend Herbi Dreiner, at the University of Bonn in Germany, (he’s in the photo at the right, used with permission) is one of the most active and experienced people I know of in the area of successfully combining physics, theatre, and (if you like) performance art. If you don’t know about his 
physics show, that has even gone on tour internationally, have a look at an article he wrote about it (with links to video and photos) for the journal The Physics Teacher here (arxiv version here).
Herbi’s been getting involved in physics slams too, and he wrote a very nice piece about his own participation in the Guardian. Have a look here. He went into some nice detail about how (with the help of the audience) he illustrated the issues [..] Click to continue reading this post
You know those cross-country trips that nip from one coast to another for a day and then back? There are people who do that regularly for a living. Honestly, I don’t know how they do it. I left LA on Monday to go to a meeting in DC, and returned on Tuesday night, and while nothing unpleasant happened en route (and the meeting at the DC office of the American Physical Society was good), it is really not something I’d make a habit of. I like to add a bit of time to see the place I’m visiting, and get a bit of a feel of the pulse before flying back. But there wasn’t time. I was in DC for a day and a half last November to visit another organization, and I did manage to get two hours to wander the mall and have sandwich in the cafe of the Smithsonian, but I’d have liked a bit more time back then too. Anyway…
I did, however, get some face time. On take off on the flight back I flipped through Hemispheres (United’s in flight magazine) to see if there were any more large faces 
to sketch. (You’ll recall several earlier posts about my liking to do this for practice […] Click to continue reading this post
So, last July, we had a huge landmark with the discovery of a new particle key to how our universe works – we now know it is a Higgs particle, something we’ve been waiting for a very long time. See many earlier posts about that.
This July, just this weekend, we had another huge landmark – a British tennis player won Wimbledon!! (Ok, I’m only partly serious about listing this alongside the Higgs result…) I am actually doubly excited about this, because in addition to Andy Murray actually winning, my old favourite player Ivan Lendl was coaching him. Lendl, a fantastic player, was a symbol of determination and hard work during his playing career, but never won Wimbledon, so […] Click to continue reading this post
Happy 4th of July, those of you who are celebrating it. I should have brought you Red, White, and Blue, but those are not the colours prevailing in the garden right now. Also, I don’t know of any blue tomato varieties. There’s a bit of a bonanza of tomatoes right now, I am pleased to report. All that time spent composting is paying off again, perhaps. A small part of the harvest is in the photograph above, showing six of the varieties in the garden this year. (Click for a larger view.) I don’t recall all […] Click to continue reading this post
You may recall that last month I hosted the First Fridays portion of the Natural History Museum’s day of celebration, where I introduced and steered the questions for JPL’s Adam Steltzner (lead engineer of the the “7 Minutes of Terror” Mars Curiosity landing). A fun event indeed. Well, this month I’ll be at another First Friday event, but for the other wonderful classic science space in the city, the Griffith Observatory.
They have a First Fridays series too – not to clash intentionally, I’ve recently learned upon inquiring – and it is a goal of mine to connect the relevant parties and find ways of having these events and spaces intersect with each other fruitfully, maybe. Perhaps participating in both of them is a good way to start. The “All Space Considered” event is a series where there’s a panel of scientists […] Click to continue reading this post
In honour of the heat wave, some sunflowers from the garden:
Yes, I found a bit of time to work on a page of the book. Here’s the development of a panel (click for larger view):
Indeed, the original rough sketch (done back during my Spring break retreat) shows that the panel was conceived a little differently. But then I decided to have a page with more fully rendered backgrounds, and so shifted the view in most of the panels […] Click to continue reading this post
Today’s CicLAVia was, in my opinion, almost perfect. It was always my dream for it (long before it actually got off the ground) to be an event that closed all of Wilshire from Downtown to the beach, to allow the city to celebrate car-free-ness on a regular basis. For me, having Wilshire be the route would make it a core location that meant the city was serious about the event, would mean a lot of participation linking East and West, and perhaps most importantly, would give a lot of room, since Wilshire is a really wide street. Perhaps that it is a long way off to have the whole of Wilshire be used, but they came close to the dream by having a Wilshire one today. The route ran from where Wilshire starts (at Grand) all the way out to LACMA at museum square at Wilshire and Fairfax. I rode it with a friend in the middle of the day and it was a lot of fun. See below for some of the things we did. Also, watch the timelapse video I made (embedded later) which has some fun stills embedded in it as well.
You might recall some of the things that I felt the need to mention concerned me after the last CicLAVia. In that post I was most concerned about the narrowness of the route (they only used half of Venice for much of the way) and the fact that the resulting compressed group of people got even more compressed with the numerous traffic stops that there were. It was unpleasant and possibly dangerous. Well, there was not a hint of that here. They had both sides of Wilshire open, and relatively few traffic stops. This meant a lovely free flow of traffic for people of all speeds, ages, and mode of transport. The other main concern I had was that the event did not leave enough time for people to explore the route, leaving a number of people stranded, which is not good for a lot of people who are infrequent riders – they’ve got to get home cycling in traffic that they might not be ready to do yet. Well, today they extended the time by two hours, making it run from 9:00am to 4:00pm. Brilliant. I suspect that helped also with the potential congestion since people participating get spread out over a longer time.
Overall, I must congratulate the organizers for a nearly perfect event. Now if only we can have Wilshire open all the way to the beach for a CicLAVia, I’d be in heaven.
(Actually, just a few weeks ago I did my own all-Wilshire CicLAVia when I was heading to a couple of events at Westwood and Santa Monica. I started out planning to take my bike on the 720 bus but ended up giving up on the whole thing – there was a dreadful 45 minute hole in the schedule that made me horribly late for the first event and too many pushy people fighting to get on when the bus did show up – so I just cycled the whole way. It was a lot of fun, and helped me let off steam…but I’d love to participate in a whole group of LA residents doing it one day…)
So it was great. Having started Downtown and enjoyed the ride West, my companion and I […] Click to continue reading this post
