Category Archives: personal

‘Tis the Season

By | | , , , ,
5 Comments

There are a lot of silly, ill-informed things said about Los Angeles, mostly in the form of lazy clichés. Sometimes said by people who are otherwise quite sensible, but the power and groove of a truism is hard to resist, even when it is an untrue one. One of them is that there are “no seasons” here. This is just a silly thing that people say in place of saying that they are used to seasons from a different climate and they have not taken the time to listen and watch for the march of the seasons that is evident here. (I think also that we have it amplified by popular culture that the standard symbols of the Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter cycle involving snow and red and gold leaf colours and bare trees and jack frost nipping at your nose and so forth are “the way things are supposed to be”.) A friend of mine has in her email signature the slogan “I have a life. It is just different from yours”, and so I will retool it here: “We have seasons. They are just different from yours.”

jasmine_in_bloomJust like anywhere else, the seasons wink or call (sometimes even shout) at you through certain combinations of colours, smells, temperatures, and so on. I think people miss a lot of cues in Los Angeles because they don’t get out of their cars and walk the streets very much. Even a few gardens or hedgerows passed along the way can show a lot about the mood of the season the city is in. For me, colours and smells are very big cues in Los Angeles, and there are times when large parts of the city seem to be dominated by a single plant’s smell or colour or sometimes both. For me, it is the Jasmine time of year now. This is when the night-blooming jasmine bushes (cestrum nocturnum, apparently) of the city all seem to work in concert and fill the air with a great scent, and lovely clumps of creamy […] Click to continue reading this post →

Purépecha

By | | , , , , ,
4 Comments

purepecha_woman_28_07_10_smallHere’s a sketch I did either in the airport or on the plane back from Morelia last June. Well, it was certainly finished on the plane, I think. You will recall that I was in Mexico to give some lectures on string theory at a quantum gravity school (see here and here and the related posts links below). As part of the practice and experimentation I was doing at the time (for The Project), I was drawing interesting faces, sometimes from photographs, like for this one. You just hold the photo in one hand (this one on the screen of my camera) and sketch it. I was working on a 8.5inx11in sketchpad with a charcoal pencil, I think. (I was trying to be quick, and I think it was about 15 or 20 minutes work.) The photo was taken a day or two before in the village of Pátzcuaro. I think I’d mentioned my visit there to you in an earlier post, but had showed you no images except some clocks.

Well, a funny/nice thing happened. The guy sitting next to me two seats over spoke […] Click to continue reading this post →

Song for My Father

By | |
25 Comments

dadI always think of my father when I hear “Song for My Father”, by Horace Silver. One of my favourites from the Blue Note classic days. Do enjoy it, if you click (below right) to listen.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It’s not long after 3:00am, and not too long since my brother called me to let me know my father died a couple of hours or so ago. I’m sitting here with a cup of tea, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Robot Realities

By | | , ,
9 Comments

Not long ago, I noticed that the cleaning robot was ill. It would start its cleaning cycle, run very fast for some seconds, and then make one of its warning noises and stop. This was a few days before my guests were due to arrive for the holidays, and I’d planned a big session of extra attentive house preparation, involving me putting up curtain rails for some new drapes in the living room, installing various shiny fittings in a spare bathroom, and a few other things like that, while the plucky little robot would run around all the floors and give them a good clean. So I had a dilemma – spend time trying to get it well, or use that time to do the floors myself? A bit of googling revealed that the warning noise was signalling something about a sensor possibly going bad. Did I want to spend the time heading to Fry’s electronics to see they had the sensors? Then digging around inside replacing them, with all the soldering, etc., that would entail? Fun, but time-consuming. After a day or two, I decided to do an investigative poke around the interior of the patient, just in case it might just be a matter of clearing or re-seating the sensor array…You never know.

robot_in_bits

The innards are delightfully put together! The iRobot people deserve some congratulations for good design. It took little time to take the thing apart, and it is very modular inside, with various components popping out quite nicely. It had a lot of dust in several places, notably. I got out my can of compressed air to blow dust out from various tight corners, and put it all back together after a short while. I got it started again and it seemed to run normally, until I noticed that it was missing a key […] Click to continue reading this post →

Odd Ball

By | | , ,
8 Comments

So it was an odd day yesterday. On the one hand, after getting up at 6:00am without prompting, deciding to start the work day, then procrastinating for a chunk of time – including admiring Venus (have you seen it/her recently? beautiful!) – it turned out to be a reasonably productive day. I tried to devote it entirely to The Project, since I’ve been quite busy with Professoring the last couple of weeks and so had not done much. The plan was to ink a page that had been sitting there waiting to be inked for a while, and to continue re-inking one of the pages I did over the Summer. Well, I succeeded in the former, and have punted some of the latter to today. I hope. I pleased with the finished inking which includes a little drawing of the wonderful Planck satellite, which will be mentioned as part of a conversation. (By the way, Planck’s preliminary findings were in the news recently. Worth a look.) I even got some of the colour work started on that successful page toward the end of the day, but lost what I did on that due to a strange computer problem (sometimes the Adobe software decides that there’s just too much going on and declares it does not have enough memory to proceed… then you’re stuck not being able to render, or even save….). I only lost an hour’s work of fairly straightforward painting – I am in the habit of saving relatively regularly.

So what’s the “odd” bit in the title? Well, all through the day I was bothered by something, and it is even more bothersome this morning. My right eyeball hurts. A lot. And I don’t know why. And in a universe that I am quite sure loves playing ironic […] Click to continue reading this post →

Nude

By | | , , , ,
13 Comments

figure_study_17th_jan_11_smallLast Friday, I went to the luncheon of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and as usual there was a fascinating short talk to accompany lunch and coffee. (As I mentioned before, the membership of this group is a rather wonderful mixture of people mostly from USC, UCLA, and the city of Los Angeles in general, mostly prominent writers, artists, and other people from the humanities, film, theatre, and… they let one or two dabbler-type scientists like yours truly on the list, bless them.)

The talk was by Bram Dijkstra, and was entitled “The Nude in American Art”. As with most of the talks here (and in many similar venues), it seems to be associated with a book the speaker has out recently, and this one is a sumptuous-looking tome called “Naked: The Nude in America”. It was a nice talk, although he did not get very much into the modern America part because he spent time on the European connections and background and then ran out of time (they try to keep the luncheon talks short and to the point, leaving you wanting more, and leaving time for questions, which is indeed a good thing). However, one of the things that kept coming up was the whole business of an early prudishness or puritanicalism (still persisting in some places today) that meant that the naked physical form should somehow be hidden away. You get examples even today of art galleries’ major donors creating problems for an exhibit that contains nudes, etc., etc. He discussed various changing (and not changing) attitudes to this issue on both sides of the Atlantic through the years, which I found interesting. Aspects of this were not just tied to things like religion, but also the changing status of women in the various societies, to various degrees, since a lot of nudes feature the female form.

This is all very interesting to me in view of The Project for, I hope, obvious reasons. I found myself wondering (and indeed asked a question at the end about it) about […] Click to continue reading this post →

Drum Conversations

By | | , , ,
Comments Off on Drum Conversations

little_drummer_girlAfter working for most of the day on various things (finishing penciling, then inking, and partly painting a panel for one of the pages of The Project, writing a letter of recommendation, answering various emails, etc.,) I decided to go out and enjoy the wonderful day that we were having here in LA for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I opted to head to Leimert Park and check out one of the primary (post-parade) celebrations going on in the city. That part of town is regarded by many as a cultural center for the African American community in LA, and a lot of great celebrations and other gatherings are held there from time to time (there’s also good music to be found there sometimes). As I walked along in observer mode, I noticed a group of drummers. Every now and again they’d get a groove going and people would gather around and some would start moving to the sounds, some swaying in place, some dancing outright. Young and old, male and female, black and white, etc. It was good to watch. I caught a snippet for you and it is linked below. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Leaving Home Ain’t Easy

By | | , , , ,
3 Comments

coffee_group_sketchMum’s upstairs packing to leave after her lovely visit of a month and I’m already upset by this. It was such a great time, and I’m so very sad to see her go*. But I can’t keep her all to myself. My sister and brother will no doubt be expecting her back by now, and so I must give her up. 🙂 This blog post is a lame attempt to distract myself from her packing activity, which is a bit sad for me. On the other hand, a rather sweet aspect of it is that I can hear her in the distance singing along to songs from Queen’s A Night At The Opera** and other albums while doing her packing. This makes me smile from ear to ear.

The last few days had lots of activities, including more picnics by the seaside, walks, cooking, shopping, visits to some old favourite haunts (including a surprise Sunday […] Click to continue reading this post →

New Semester Approaching

By | | , , , , , , , , ,
11 Comments

I’m feeling strangely cold, although the heating is on and I’ve got a jumper (“sweater” to readers in the States) on. It has been this way all day, so I suspect it is something to do with my frame of mind. I’m feeling a bit reflective with it too, so I’ll think out loud (as it were) a bit before going to bed early.

Well, it is almost time to start another round of teaching. This semester, starting Monday, it is a graduate course that I’ll be teaching, the second part of a year’s sequence of string theory that we teach from time to time. My focus will be non-perturbative issues, focusing on much of what has been forming the foundation of research in various areas of string theory since the 1990s. Should be fun. Some of the material will come from my book, D-branes, that was published back in 2002. It seems so long ago now. I actually looked in it today, as I was discussing a research issue with a colleague, and could not recall some details. Happily there was a chapter with it all in there. That’s rather nice. The book serves me well as a personal reminder of things I used to have at my fingertips all the time back then, and as a bonus, lots of people around the world still use it as a handbook/guide/intro/etc, I hear.

I joke, of course. The cart and the horse are the other way around.

Speaking of books, I’ll be doing my best to continue working on the current book project, with all the excitement and adventure in developing it. (And the occasional […] Click to continue reading this post →

Knots from a Master

By | | , , , , ,
5 Comments

witten_on_knotsAh. This is just perfect. I actually looked into my Institute For Advanced Study news magazine this time around and noticed a gem I’d like to share. Edward Witten gave a lovely talk entitled Knots and Quantum Theory for a (sort of) general audience, and there is video of it available. Ever wondered why mathematicians study knots? Why do physicists care? What do they bring to the table? Well, this could be a talk for you to take out a bit of time to watch.

Not long ago I wrote a post about Ed, his huge influence on the field of theoretical physics, and some of his role in my own development as a physicist during my time […] Click to continue reading this post →