While Waiting…
While waiting to pick someone up to give them a ride from A to B, I found I had 15 minutes to kill. I decided to do a quick sketch, so parked and […] Click to continue reading this post
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Category Archives: Los Angeles
Messing About on the LA River
Memorial Day was fun. There was a gathering at a friend’s house down near the LA River. At some point in the afternoon lots of people went down to the river banks to look at the lovely scene there, with people fishing, cycling, and kayaking (and other sort of boats) along some stretches. This is not at all what people expect of the LA River, so it was good (once again) to see a different reality shine through the standard images. Focusing on being good company, I only started […] Click to continue reading this post
Southern California Strings Seminar
The group at UCLA is hosting the next SCSS, and it is on Friday. More details here. The schedule looks good:
9:30-11:00 Sera Cremonini (Texas A&M): “Probing the IR of hyperscaling violating geometries.”
11:15-12:45 Ken Intriligator (UCSD): “Aspects of 3d N=2 Chern-Simons-Matter Theories.”
12:45-2:15: Lunch
2:15-3:45: Daniel Harlow (Princeton): “On the Computational Complexity of Hawking Radiation”
4:00- 5:30: Eric D’Hoker (UCLA): “Supermoduli and supersymmery breaking”
Enjoy!
Going for a Drive
At JPL the other day, I stood next to this gentleman as he prepared to take over the controls of the Curiosity craft (now on the surface of Mars, you might recall) for a bit of driving. I don’t know where it was being taken to or from on that […] Click to continue reading this post
Sketchy Look
On Saturday I decided to have a bit of simple relaxation at home, and sit on the patio with my notepad and some pencils and draw a likeness. I’d not done any practice from images for a while, and frankly my pencil work was very rusty and needed a workout.
So I dug out this month’s issue of a sewing magazine that I subscribe to (what?! well, it’s a long story… let’s move on) that happens to sometimes have interestingly lit and well reproduced photos of faces and sketched for a while.
It was fun (even with the slightly flawed outcome). (Click for a larger view.)
Final
Well, I’ve got to say goodbye to another excellent group of students from my undergraduate electromagnetism class. We had the final today (starting at 8:00am – ack!), and given the lack of rioting, tears, and throwing of rotten fruit during the exam itself, I assume that it was not too bad an exam to sit. Of course, the real measure of what they thought will be how they did in the actual answering of questions, and I’ve not looked to see how that has turned out yet.
Again, I feel a bit sad since it was a good group of students and it was fun to teach them this material. While it is certainly good to move on to other things (I’ve too many projects I want to work on, as usual), I will miss the twice weekly classes with them. Highlights this year include (in no particular order):
(1) The thing I love to do when we are studying dipole radiation – taking the class outside (surprising them somewhat) to look up at the blue sky and connect why it is blue to the computation we just did, including understanding the pattern of the blueness […] Click to continue reading this post
Baby Harvest
The many squash plants in the garden this season all started a rather cluttered rush of fruiting. Some of them stalled in their growth, and overall it seemed a good idea to remove these small ones and some others, generally thinning the plants a bit to allow them to focus their energy resources into fewer squashes. A bonus of this procedure… an early Summer squash banquet!
Earlier this week I made a very tasty bean stew with some beans harvested from last […] Click to continue reading this post
Lines of Thought
So I’ve moved on to curved lines now, in case you’re wondering. 🙂 (See previous posts.) The last several days (the research parts) have been taken up with more computations. A lot of the time has been spent calibrating the programs, and trying to assess and understand and characterize the inevitable errors that show up, by running the programs and checking the resulting plots of data points against expectations shaped by hand calculations. Calculating on the train to and from work, I’ve filled several pages of my small notebook with computations, alongside sketches of some of my surroundings as usual (people mostly). As a result (fingers crossed) I think I’ve now understood all the key aspects of the results I’ve been getting, and have good numerical control of things. To get such control, I’ve had to push the error tolerance and the size of the grid of points I’m computing on to regimes where I’m back again to waiting for the better part of an hour for each data point. (One sets up the problem on the computer by making continuous variables, such as space and time, into discrete ones, forming a grid. The problem is then to use various […] Click to continue reading this post
A Much Shorter Straight Line
How is the line coming along? It is very kind of you to ask (if indeed you were). Well, there it is to the left. (See the previous post for background.) In the end, I abandoned Maple since it was taking way too long to do each point, and just for the simple example. (When I tried to do one sample point of the complicated example it took 24 hours and I stopped it before it was done!) The point is that Maple does not easily […] Click to continue reading this post
A Very Long Straight Line
I’ve been multitasking in an interesting way. Sort of. I’ve reached a certain point with some computations I am doing that I cannot go beyond by analytic means. 
This means that I can’t extract the physics I need by doing algebra and other exact manipulations on paper any more. Progress can continue however by using numerical means, employing a computer to solve the highly non-linear equations and extract the juice. There are several steps involved, and ultimately, I want to determine how a certain physical quantity depends on another physical quantity. (I’m sparing you the trouble of knowing what the details of the physical quantities are, since it does not matter for the thing I am trying to tell you. It relates to quantum field theory, gravity, and string theory, which connects the two.)
I can see that dependence quite clearly if I simply plot a graph of one versus the other, and in this case I need the computer to work out what the points on that graph are. I actually don’t know the answer for the cases I really am interested in, nobody does (that’s why it is research!), and so that’s what I want to find. I want lots of points to get a nice smooth graph, so the computer has to compute a lot of points, and I need to run it for a long time since I want it to compute the points very accurately. So I wrote a program (in Maple) to work on the problem, studying just one […] Click to continue reading this post
Because…
CicLAVia Time Lapse
Here’s a timelapse video of the CicLAVia ride from Sunday 21st April. (I’ve done one for each of the past rides as well, so search on “ciclavia” for them if you wish.) My thoughts about the ride were posted back on the day, and there’s lots of discussion at that post on some of the issues I raised, so go and have a look if you like, and feel free to join in. I did the ride on the Brompton, as usual, and this time I was accompanied by my colleague Krzysztof Pilch, who was riding one as well. We even saw a few others on the way, which was nice.
The video is a bit flawed, not the least because at some point the top of my bag started puffing up a bit and blocking part of the view. Also, I’ve not laid on some funky music like the fancy folk do, so it is quite silent. But there it is as a record of most of the 13-15 mile route from Downtown to Venice beach: […] Click to continue reading this post
CicLAvia and Festival of Books
Well, I’m exhausted, and so am certainly not going to give you a full report on everything right now. I hope to do another post with my usual time-lapse video of the ride some time later (but soon). They are uploading from my camera right now. All I will give you right now is a shot of the crowds at a typical stop along the route. Also, I will say a few words that will probably get me into trouble.
The bottom line is that I remain a huge supporter of cicLAvia, and the idea that it is planting in everyone’s minds – getting out of your cars and cycling. This is especially important for a city like LA. And it is not just for all the environmental reasons, to do with energy use, air quality, and so forth. I can go on about those but I won’t. See earlier posts for that sort of thing. It is also because many people get to properly see their city in these events, which is really important. You can’t see it from a car – and I don’t just mean all the buildings and wonderful hidden gems I sometimes talk about, but I mean the other people who live in the city with you. That’s a big deal, and an important one for when it comes to how we all work and live together. I’m also very excited that the organizers tried this cross-city route, linking East and West, getting West side based people involved in the fun. And overall I enjoyed today a lot… I love the event and will keep coming and keep supporting it.
But.
But. Yeah, I’m going to say something negative, but only in the spirit of support for […] Click to continue reading this post
Parking Heroics
As I said in the previous post, consider using the subway (the Expo line in particular) to come to the LA Times Festival of Books tomorrow. The campus is now very busy and parking is a pain. Look where I had to put my car today*!
Busy Weekend
There’s a busy weekend coming up. Somehow, two of the largest events on the LA calendar have been put on the same weekend – rather unfortunately in my opinion. The LA Times Festival of Books (held on the USC campus) is on Saturday and Sunday, and I’m excited about that (as you know I am every year). 
I recommend exploring the site for the things you might visit (including the book prizes shortlists – awards will be given out tonight, including special ones to Margaret Atwood and to Kevin Starr!), and then go along and have some fun – all in the name of books, reading, and the worlds that are opened up through books and reading. It should be a great day or two out, and the extra great news is that you can take the subway there. The Expo line goes right up to ten feet from the Festival. You step off at the USC/Expo stop, cross from the platform to the sidewalk, and there you are! Books! Food! Music! Etc…
CicLAvia, another event that brings thousands of people together in the city, is on Sunday. It is extra exciting this year since for the first time it has a route that fully fits with where I think the event should be in the life of the city – it runs from […] Click to continue reading this post
