Category Archives: personal

Literary Festivities

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ice sculpture with typewritersDon’t forget this weekend’s LA Times Festival of Books! It is always a pleasure to wander the huge festival and see what’s on offer, and simply be part of an enormous gathering of people in LA on the usually lovely weekend days. – Gathering in the name of books! How excellent that is!

Some bad news this year. You’ll recall that I’ve reported (here and here) on the Oscar-like awards ceremony for the book prizes, complete with fancy after-party. (With chocolate fountains, and ice sculptures with embedded typewriters, no less!) Well, they’re not doing it this year. I imagine its the hard financial times. You see… now it’s hitting home to me that there’s a crisis out there – no awards gala, and no chocolate fountains. However will I survive?

Well, the good news is that the awards continue (actually there is a private ceremony at the LA Times building… yes, for all I know if it is the usual affair, and perhaps they just don’t want the riff-raff any more) and the short lists are interesting once again. You can […] Click to continue reading this post →

I See Book People

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The LA Times Festival of Books is coming up this weekend (see my upcoming post). In memory of the fun time I had at the first time I went to the accompanying awards ceremony in 2006, I’m reprinting a post I did over on CV that year, in which I reported on it. (Timestamp: April 30th, 2006 3:45 am.)

book awards LA Times Well, I’m recovering from an excellent hike up Mount Wilson with the USC Neurobiologists earlier today, so while I do that, I’ll tell you about last night. Recall that the LA Times Book Festival is happening this weekend.

I came closer to seeing a realization of one of those topsy-turvy scenarios I often fantasize about, where more “academic” pursuits, or at least those more associated with the life of the mind, are celebrated in full Hollywood fashion. (I envision it in the context of science and scientists….imagine an Oscar-Like awards ceremony for the year’s best science papers, watched by millions on TV in prime time… but this will do for a start.)

Yes, I went to my first LA Awards ceremony, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, and although I joked about Oscar analogies in a previous post, it actually was […] Click to continue reading this post →

Unintended Giggles

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Quick question:

So, has anyone else, while teaching a class, heard a breakout of schoolboy giggles behind them upon sketching the typical shape of the spatial intensity of the synchrotron radiation from a charged particle? You know, this:
[…]

As soon as I drew it and heard the giggles I knew what they were getting at. I had not anticipated it at all. It did not help that I drew it in the more exaggerated fashion that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Making Movies, 2

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still_from_shoot_5_smallReally, I suppose this should be entitled “Making Movies, 1”, but I think that the earlier post “Call Me Cecil…” is morally the post of that title. Several days of insanity later (from worrying more about insurance, to locking in locations, worrying we would not get the HD cameras in time, trying to find a PA for the shoot, negotiating with various parties here and there about various things – in between the usual activities of physics professoring), the first big shoot day came. That was yesterday.

It was a day with record (for the date) heat (90+, in F), which was not helpful, but overall it was fun. On Thursday, in my location scout mode, I was to be found popping over once every hour or so to a particular location on campus and taking a snapshot. Why? I wanted to see where the sun would be at what time, so that we could figure out exactly when we could use the location, and for what shots. The sun […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Little Priest

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sweeney_todd_snapTim Burton’s film Sweeney Todd is utterly brilliant. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it since its release in 2007, but it hasn’t grown old for me at all. The Sondheim songs are so well done, for a start, and Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter are especially wonderful as the leads (along with the excellent Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall, of course). I caught a bit of them again on HBO the other night and delighted all over again at darkly hued songs such as “A Little Priest”. How many other songs about eating people are quite so excellent? (Lyrics here if you can’t catch them all.) Enjoy: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Some Changes, and Connecting with Facebook

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Well, I’ve upgraded my Wordpress installation and since some plugins might be not quite working with the newest version, things are going to look slightly different for a bit. But not hugely so.

Oh, if you are on facebook, you might like to know that I have put Asymptotia on the NetworkedBlogs application so that you can sign up and get a feed directly within facebook. Click through to here if signed in. Please note the difference between me, my facebook page, my blog Asymptotia, and Asymptotia’s space on facebook. All four are different. I’m just sayin’. Don’t forget to keep visiting here, for example.

Strangely, as a result of upgrading a few things, something weird happened that I […] Click to continue reading this post →

Pit Visit

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I promised a report on last week’s College Commons trip to the Page Museum at the Tar Pits, here in Los Angeles. It was an excellent trip. The usual thing I do for blogging these things is, some time later, as time allows, I sit down and do a sort of brain-dump. I tried to do something different this time, and walk on the tour with my Palm Tungsten (yes, really really old technology, I know) and simply write a sort of narrative into it as I went along. Then I combined the uploaded file with the images I took as I went along, and supplemented with some extra sentences here and there. The overall effect should be a sketchier description of the event than I usually do, which may or may not be an improvement given that everybody seems to skim everything these days anyway. (Click on the photos for larger views.) So, here goes:

tar_pits_trip And so it begins. And it begins well – after a name tag is given out, upon check in for the bus, we are given a little brown paper bag of snacks. Hurrah!

3:39 and we’re off! (We run by the excavations for the Expo line and since it is an elevated bus, I get a nice view of what’s going on for quite a way. Wish I’d had the camera out to make a video for you.)

My colleague David Bottjer, a paleontologist, gives a little run down of the history of the region (both social and paleontological) as we go north on La Brea (appropriately – they are the La Brea Tar Pits… Or given that La Brea means The Tar, they are The Tar Tar Pits…)

4:05 We’re here! Somehow, the little bag of goodies is all empty already. Except for […] Click to continue reading this post →

Chess Tic?

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So, lovely idea to use the floor in this way, but what’s wrong with the picture?

chess_set_wrong

I spotted it while going past (downstairs in Doheny library last Tuesday), and could not let it go. In the end I had to go and figure out who was in charge of the exhibition and politely point out that there was a mistake. Apparently, people have been using it to play games and it might be that it is players who leave it improperly set up. My goodness.

Anyway, they said I should feel free to change it back to the right configuration. So I did. Some days later I went by and it was wrong again. I changed it back. Now I am thinking that I simply should not pass by that part of the building anymore to preserve my sanity…

It might seem a little nuts, but this is one of the campus flagship buildings that people visiting USC come through, looking at the building itself, and the exhibits down in the parts where this chess set is. Looks bad if we don’t know how to set up a chess set, doesn’t it? Well, I don’t know, maybe that’s silly… Also, I realized a bit later that maybe I am nuts, because… this has happened before.

I was in a Pottery Barn, maybe about two years ago, browsing through some of the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Finale Thoughts

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Well, some of the best writing on television (irrespective of genre) came to an end recently, and since I raved about it back at its height some time ago (and maybe even encouraged some of you to watch it) I feel I ought to comment a little, now that the series – Battlestar Galactica – has ended. If you’ve not seen the finale (or even several of the episodes leading up to it), please do not read any further if you don’t want to know plot details.
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

One Million!

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millionHmmm. With all of the current bandying about of “Billions” and “Trillions” in the news (at least over here in the USA – referring to dollars, and economic stimulus packages and so forth), every single day, “One Million” sounds decidedly underwhelming doesn’t it? Perhaps I should instead write [tex]10^6[/tex]. Does that help?

Why am I focusing on this number? Well, while I’ve been in hermit mode the last week (uh… yes, that’s where I was and I’ve got the beard to prove it – was resetting my head over Spring break – more later) the sitemeter counter continued ticking away and sometime today passed the One Millionth Visitor To Asymptotia mark! So we have a landmark of sorts. One worth noting. So…

Hurrah!

I’d planned to note carefully that visitor’s data (you can tell roughly what part of the […] Click to continue reading this post →