(Since it is bowl season…)
It has been rather pleasant here in Los Angeles over the last week or two, since there has been a mixture of rain, cloud, and sunshine that has been very good for all concerned: climate, mood, garden, etc.
Perhaps you’ll have noticed that I’ve been quiet with regards writing here over the holiday period. This is not because I’ve fallen off the planet or anything! I’ve been […] Click to continue reading this post
A shot (click for slightly larger view) from a lovely afternoon walking on the beach recently…
Happy Holidays, one and all!
Sometimes I find the most elaborate ways of procrastinating when faced with a tedious task (this time, gathering all my grade data for my class together and doing the analysis to produce a final letter grade):
It is good when the distraction produces good and useful results, of course, and a […] Click to continue reading this post
They’re sitting the final exam for my graduate electromagnetism class right now, having started at the ungodly hour of 8:00am. I’m sitting outside in the bright, lukewarm Winter sun with a cup of coffee, two cheesy biscuits I baked at 6:30am for no reason other than feeling in a baking mood (see right), my phone in case there’s a reason for the TA on duty to contact me, and my iPod, which I am of course using to write to you.
It has been an odd few days. Not so much because of the pair of them that had me wandering around a huge studio lot, being wardrobe-checked and make-up checked, shot from all angles with a live cheering studio audience in attendance (for your viewing pleasure on a new prime-time series on Fox to begin airing next month – more on this later, perhaps), but because early on Saturday I woke up with a severe vertigo attack. 
Very odd indeed and although I managed to get it under control and it had worn off over the days, every now and again it gets close to being triggered again. I don’t know the source for sure – I think it was correlated with a reaction to some of the food I had on set, maybe combined somehow with the severe ear blockage I had about a month ago after catching a (short-lived) cold on a long transatlantic flight? – but I have to say (and this is the point of my digression here) that it is a remarkably odd experience for me to feel slightly off balance for such an extended period. I’m used to being on the tips of my toes ready to skitter along the line at the edge of a low wall if the mood takes me while walking along. But I can’t imagine doing that now. I feel like I’ve lost my powers… it’s often amazing to me how little it takes to make a person feel very mortal, even fragile, again. It will no doubt pass.
I’ve been gentle on this final exam. I still find it disturbing that kids today (yes, I said “kids today” – perhaps my lack of equilibrium has put me in crotchety-old-man mode), even the very smart ones, typically do badly on any advanced exam that […] Click to continue reading this post
When I’ve got a decent amount of jetlag, coming West, I find it not so much of a drawback as a way of seeing how to arrange one’s days differently. Sometimes the results are tasty. I had to leave a birthday party early last night due to the need to sleep, but this meant that at 6:00am today I suddenly felt in the mood to make a walnut […] Click to continue reading this post
Yes, I sometimes find myself asking the question “Is it just me or…?” from time to time. Something to do with the issue of differing views of the world and so forth… This time it is about this bag.
To me, there’s a huge Pi on it, first and foremost. Just Pi. You know, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. When I first saw it I had not seen the octopus written below, and so was feeling pleased to see a commercial logo on a shopping bag that simply had Pi on it. It fit with my oft-expressed desire to see more science and science related things out there in the general culture. This stretched to plays on numbers, mathematics, and so forth.
So then I wondered what the Pi stood for, or what clever pun they were going to work into the mix to connect it to their product. Then I saw that they simply meant it to be octopus eyes. (On a severely deformed octopus – I always thought that they had eight legs…). Given that the blob has the wrong number of legs and all, I can’t properly make it work for me as an octopus. How about you?
Bit disappointing that Pi is not involved. Perhaps it could have worked if the store was using the plural form of the animal’s name.
I’ve been saying legs. Perhaps I should say “appendages”. This all puts me in mind of […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, I’m back.
It is early in the morning, at home. At 5:30 am, with my first cup of tea in hand as I breathe in deeply and simply listen, the rest of the City of Angels seems asleep still. It is covered with a fluffy blanket of grey clouds, and it looks strangely snug under it.
It has been quite the trip, as you may have gathered from the past several posts. I managed to get a great deal done in that last day or two, as I was planning when I last reported in. This included more food, jazz, some flamenco in two unexpected but fascinating settings, the excellent collection at Reina Sophia (focused mostly on Picasso), and more.
I’ll try to tell you some of it in the next few days.
But now I must focus on being back. I spent a long day travelling back from MAD to LAX yesterday and need to recover and get on with business immediately. There is a final big lecture for my Electromagnetism class to write and deliver, for example. All […] Click to continue reading this post
I spent an astonishing stretch of time in the Prado on Saturday, in an operation that experience and aesthetics have taught me to pace properly. I pick a particular artist or cluster of artists and focus on them for an hour or ninety minutes (visiting the parts of the museum that are relevant to them, not focusing on anything else, more or less), then I find the cafe, get a cup of coffee and a tasty, and relax for a bit, glowing from the experience. Then I plan the next pieces of the museum I will visit next and begin my focus on that part. The temptation with a museum the size and complexity of the Prado, with the remarkable depth it has in its collections, is just to show up and try and see everything in whatever order you find them. This results in confusion, superficiality, and major headache and backache, at least for me. I’m happy to go in and see a subset of what is there really properly and in context rather than just “see stuff”.
So of course I mostly focused on Spanish painters – several of the masters before the 20th Century – and later, other masters who perhaps were creating work in a Spanish context of some kind, and later, particular masters who happen to have examples of some of their great work housed in the Prado, whether there be a Spanish context or not, of which there are several such examples.
The collection is amazing. About 1/3 of my time was spent on Goya, in fact. (I wisely […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, the weekend is here and so I have wrapped up most of the official part of my visit to Madrid. Lest you think that I spent most of my time eating (not that there’s anything wrong with that), let me mention that I ended up, from Monday to Thursday giving about eight hours of detailed exposition at the board and fielding questions (the lectures and seminar), umpteen (an official number, I’ll have you know) hours of preparation of the notes needed to do this in a successful and clear way, and several more chunks of time in private physics conversations of various sorts. Quite fulfilling, tiring, but worthwhile for all concerned. (I even heard that various people liked the lectures and the seminar, so that’s a real bonus!) It has been a good week.
Thursday night saw me wandering the city streets in the drizzle for several hours. It all started out with a quick walk near my hotel to see if I could stumble on a restaurant, but eventually turned into a longer walk and then an epic quest, as happens to me so often in such situations. I start applying a list of criteria for what I […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, I’m simply exhausted. I gave my second two-hour lecture today and drained my energy resources quite a bit. This is after an early(ish) start to the morning (7:30am) and with going late to bed last night (1:30am). A good lunch afterward helped restore things to a balance a bit, but I need to rest some more.
I’ve been modifying my lectures during the process of giving them, making adjustments for time and the kind of questions I get. This means that I end up kicking some parts to later lectures, and then trying to spend some of the afternoon writing new material, as well as on the train back to my hotel, and in the evenings.
Well, briefly in the evenings so far. That is because last night was set aside for a tour of some of the tapas you can find in the old part of Madrid. I had the presence of mind to go back to my hotel and get a short nap first, and then met my gracious […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, it has been quite the week so far. I’ve been mostly in England. First I spent Tuesday getting over the main effects of jetlag and a short but strong cold (both more or less gone now), and then Wednesday I went to King’s College London to give a seminar to the three groups in the Triangle series of seminars – King’s, Imperial, Queen Mary are the three places the participating research groups in theoretical high energy physics come from. It was excellent to see so many old friends and colleagues, meet some new ones, and chat physics at the pub and over dinner later on. The seminar seemed to be well received, although I know I was far from my best, given jetlag and cold. The next two days saw me saying hi to family and friends at coffee and dinner in the evenings and visiting at Queen Mary and Imperial for the day, and hiding in the British Library for most of Friday, writing.
What am I writing? Four lectures on D-branes and string theory and M-theory, with a focus on some of the fun and instructive applications (and potential applications) of […] Click to continue reading this post
I had a lot of time to kill in Philadelphia’s International Airport on Sunday (I was changing planes), and I must say that is not a bad airport in which to be in such a situation. I like the city a lot, and so am not surprised that its main airport is to my liking. First of all, who can not like an airport that supplies you with… (you’re expecting free wireless, and they had that, sure, but no, I mean)… with… Rocking Chairs!!!
I saw some excellent art as well. And lots of displays of various types. I’ll share a couple more in a post or two, but look at some of the pieces I snapped pictures of for you. They are done with packing tape! Yes, packing tape. That brown thin stuff you know well… It was part of a series of scenes from noir films, rendered in this way. Very effective indeed, I felt. The series name is “Tape Noir”.
I’ve learned over the years that news about public transportation often does not reach people in Los Angeles who aren’t already inclined to use it (that’s a lot of people) and so I ought not to assume that everyone’s heard about the exciting events of tomorrow. So here’s a quick post to let you know that the new Eastside extension of the Gold Line opens tomorrow! This is very exciting indeed! Spread the word! There’ll be lots of events to celebrate during the course of the day, and you can learn a lot about them at this link. You can ride the whole Gold line free to explore the system.
Those of you who will no doubt continue to insist that public transport in Los Angeles will never have anything to do with you (until there is a personal stop with a single-person train carriage right outside your home and a corresponding one wherever you want to go) can also join in the fun (just for the day, you understand) and come to the farmer’s market, see the bands and the people and so forth, and confirm your familiar position that it “won’t work for you” because it “doesn’t go anywhere”, just like the rest of the entire system supposedly doesn’t.
Soon, I’ll be doing a post on progress that has been made in recent months on the Expo line, by the way. That’ll be another celebration when that opens in late […] Click to continue reading this post
You may recall my mentioning a desert trip to shoot something for TV, some time back. One done at precisely the wrong time of year. And to Death Valley, one of the hottest places on earth, to boot. Well, I meant to mention that the episode of the History Channel’s The Universe that the shoot was for aired a week or two ago and it was really excellent. It was entitled “Liquid Universe” and it was a rather beautiful and thoroughly pleasant episode exploring the role of liquids in our universe, a matter not often raised in questions of astronomy except when it comes to matters of water from time to time. This was not about water per se, but rather the whole matter of material that flows and the role it plays in diverse areas of the solar system and perhaps the universe at large. I was using sand to demonstrate how sometimes there are surprising places where you can find fluid/liquid behaviour, and mentioned some of the new phases of matter found in the context, for example, of quarks and gluons at RHIC. (I’ve spoken about that here a number of times in the context of some of my research. See the archives.)
It was an excellent episode and another example of how one can take a topic under the “The Universe” heading and showcase lots of exciting science quite accessibly […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, that was not altogether terrible, I gather, but I was so tired and a little bit out of sorts* when I started giving the talk that I was running very slowly. So by time I got to the end (even though I hit my right pace later on) I was some 15 minutes over. Ugh. People seemed to like it, but I definitely need to whittle out a few of the more superfluous slides (which I’d always intended to) and strike the intended pace I wanted to hit earlier than 3/4 of the way through the talk. My reward (besides some nice remarks at the end of the talk that sort of made my day) was a visit to another excellent restaurant for dinner, with some good company. The extraordinarily good Vij’s. The hour’s wait for the food was perfectly fine given the nibbles they bring you while you wait, and the food itself once you get it. Here’s a shot or two of some of the excellent food just after its arrival, and the empty dishes and satisfied hosts just after polishing it all off: […] Click to continue reading this post
