Category Archives: Los Angeles

Big Draw LA

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Big_draw_la_11th_october_2014_1_smallThe Big Draw LA event downtown today (in Grand Park) was a lot of fun! There were all sort of stations of activity, and lots of people were jointing in with drawing in various media, including making masks (so drawings and cut-outs) and making drawings on the concrete plaza area using strips of tape, which I thought was rather clever. (I forgot to photograph any of those, but look on twitter – and I presume instagram – under #thebigdrawla for things people have been posting.) One of the most interesting things was the construction made of drawings that people did on pieces of slate that lock together to make a larger structure. Have a look in the pictures below (click thumbnails for larger views). There were several, but maybe still not enough adults involved, in my opinion (at least when I went by). Perhaps this was due to a “I can’t draw and it is too late for me, but there is hope for the children” line of reasoning? Bad reasoning – everyone can draw! Join in, all ages. There are events all around the city (see links below).

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The pursuit that had the highest proportion of adults was the costumed figure […] Click to continue reading this post →

Expo Line Chain Lady

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expo_line_chain_lady_8th_oct_2014So I looked up from my notes and saw this striking person in a remarkable, and presumably deliberately forthright, amount of chain-based jewellery. She had a heavy looking gold chain that started from one ear and stretch over to the other, with the slack resting on her chest. She had wrist shackles of some sort that were in turn connected via chains to rings on her fingers. It was amazing. I was frozen, mesmerised. I was mostly thinking about all the ways one could accidentally snag those things on something as you walk by and…

Then I was thinking I ought to get a record of this to show… But it is rude to anonymously take a picture of someone… Then I remembered. I could draw her, that’s what I do – what was I thinking? So I got […] Click to continue reading this post →

CicLAvia Tomorrow!

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imageThere is a CicLAvia tomorrow*! I’m out of town right now (see next post) but I hope to make it back in time to enable me to go along at least for a little while. It looks like a fun route (see snap of map to left; click to enlarge), although it will be quite hot, so if you go, take it easy. The website is here, and you can find more information (like the 9-4 time) and so forth.

Enjoy!

-cvj

*Search the blog on that term clicking here to learn more. Click to continue reading this post →

STEM Keynote

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keynote_at_stem_divide_cvjAs I mentioned, a couple of Saturdays ago I gave the keynote address at a one-day conference designed to introduce STEM Careers to underrepresented students from various neighboring schools. The event* was co-sponsored by the Level Playing Field Institute, but sadly the details of it seem to have vanished from their site now that the event has passed, which is unfortunate. It was good to see a room full of enthusiastic students wanting to learn more about such careers (STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and I tried to give some thoughts about some of the reasons that there’s such poor representation by people of color (the group I was asked to focus on, although I mentioned that many of my remarks also extended to women to some extent) in such fields, and what can be done about it. Much of my focus, as you can guess from the issues I bring up here from time to time, was on battling the Culture: The perception people have of who “belongs” and who does not, and how that perception makes people act, consciously or otherwise, the images we as a society present and perpetuate in our media and in our conversations and conventions throughout everyday life, and so on. I used my own experience as an example at various points, which may or may not have been helpful – I don’t know.

My experience, in part and in brief, is this: I went a long way into being excited […] Click to continue reading this post →

Baby Mothra!!!

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So I discovered a terrifying (but also kind of fascinating and beautiful at the same time) new element to the garden this morning. We’re having a heat wave here, and so this morning before leaving for work I thought I’d give the tomato plants a spot of moisture. I passed one of the tomato clusters and noticed that one of the (still green) tomatoes had a large bite taken out of it. I assumed it was an experimental bite from a squirrel (my nemesis – or one of them), and muttered dark things under my breath and then prepared to move away the strange coiled leaf that seemed to be on top of it. Then I noticed.

It wasn’t a leaf.

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It was a HUGE caterpillar! Enormous! Giant and green with spots and even a red horn at one end! There’s a moment when you’re unexpectedly close to a creature like that where your skin crawls for a bit. Well, mine did for a while […] Click to continue reading this post →

Screen Junkies Chat: Guardians of the Galaxy

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Screen Shot 2014-09-11 at 3.13.03 PMYou may recall that back in June I had a chat with Hal Rudnick over at Screen Junkies about science and time travel in various movies (including the recent “X-Men: Days of Future Past”). It was a lot of fun, and people seemed to like it a lot. Well, some good news: On Tuesday we recorded (along with my Biophysicist colleague Moh El-Naggar) another chat for Screen Junkies, this time talking a bit about the fun movie “Guardians of the Galaxy”! Again, a lot of fun was had… I wish you could hear all of the science (and more) that we went into, but rest assured that they* did a great job of capturing some of it in this eight-minute episode. Have a look. (Embed below the more-click):
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

But How…?

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I get questions from time to time about where the drawings on the site come from, or how they are done. notebook_and_tools The drawing I had in one of last week’s posts is a good example of one that can raise questions, partly because you don’t get a sense of scale after I’ve done a scan and cropped off the notebook edges and so forth. Also, people are not expecting much in the way of colour from drawing on location. Anyway, the answer is, yes I drew it, and yes it was drawn on location. I was just sitting on a balcony, chose which part of the view I wanted to represent on the page, and went for it. I wanted to spread across two pages of my notebook and make something of a tall sketch. See above right (click for larger view.) A quick light pencil rough helped me place things, and then a black […] Click to continue reading this post →

Coral Forest

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crochet_forest_7Given that you read here at this blog, you may well like to keep your boundaries between art and science nicely blurred, in which case you might like to learn more about the coral reef forests made of crochet spearheaded by Margaret and Christine Wertheim. The pieces mix crochet (a hand-craft I know and love well from my childhood – I got to explore my love for symmetry, patterns, and problem-solving by making doilies) with mathematics – hyperbolic geometry in particular – as well as biology (mimicking and celebrating the forms of corals – and drawing attention to their destruction in the wild). You can read much more about the projects here. I’ve mentioned the work here before on the blog, but the other day I went along to see a new set […] Click to continue reading this post →

Making and Baking….

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Back in LA, I had an amusing day the other day going from this* in the TV studio…
photo_laser_mirage_shoot_small involving a laser and liquid nitrogen (so, around -320 F, if you must use those units), to this in the kitchen:
tasty_things_1 involving butter, flour, water and shortening… (and once in the oven, around +350 F) which ultimately resulted in this: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Aspen Art Museum Opening

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I just got back from the Aspen Art Museum‘s new building. They’ve been having a members-only series of nights before the big opening to the public in a few days, and an invitation was sent along to Aspen Center for Physics people to come along, and so (of course) I did. It was a nice thing to do at the end of a day of working on revising drafts of two papers, before settling down to a nice dinner of squash, green beans, tomatoes, and lemon-pepper pasta that I made, all from the Saturday Farmers’ Market. But I digress.

Let me say right at the outset that the building is fantastic. There will no doubt be arguments back and forth about the suitability of the building for the town, and so forth (and there have been), but as a space for both art and community (and to my mind, those should go together in a city’s main art space) it is simply […] Click to continue reading this post →

In Motion…

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subway_sketch_5th_august_2014_smallBack in Aspen. I went back to LA for a long weekend, and my travel back to Aspen today gave me a lot of good thinking time. Also, I got a few very quick drawings done, such as the one on the right of a cooperative fellow (looking at his phone) on the subway on my way to Union station to take the LAX Flyaway bus.

I’ve been thinking about two projects, one physics and the other about physics, going back and forth between the one and the other, trying to not let them interfere with each other. The “about physics” one is of course the graphic physics book project. In itself it is in two parts. I’m adding more pages from time to time – drawing, inking, and painting/colouring when I can – and I’m also having the odd conversation with potential publishers from time to time, and sending off proposal packages to appropriate places that accept them… trying to explain the nature of the project to those who are willing to listen to something new and exciting. As I’ve said before, “new and exciting” are not words that most publishers want to […] Click to continue reading this post →