Category Archives: personal

Brian Eno on Singing

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Like singing? Think you can’t? No use for it?

Have a listen to Brian Eno on the issue. He was on NPR’s This I Believe this morning talking about singing. Extract:

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness and a better sense of humor. […]

[…] a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue. […]

More here. Take a moment out and sing out loud for a while!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Tiring, but Good

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mount hood oregonTo the left is Mount Hood, in Oregon. I often see it when I fly on my way up North. I often see it when I fly on my way up North. I love seeing it as it emerges from the clouds rather pleasantly, looking a bit like a cloud itself for a moment, perhaps oddly shaped, but then becoming something rather different entirely.

I was in Vancouver for a few days last week, and chatted with a few friends and colleagues (such as Moshe Rozali, Mark Van Raamsdonk, and Joanna Karczmarek) at the Physics department at UBC, and gave a seminar. I talked about ongoing work on ideas I’m still struggling to beat into shape (mentioned a lot in earlier posts about my retreat at Aspen this Summer). This was a deliberate choice. Sometimes it is very useful to force oneself to do a pedagogical seminar on work in progress. This is not so much because someone in the audience might toss up an idea that you did not consider (this can happen, sometimes as a result of a good question – but it is less likely when the audience has no expertise in the area under discussion, as was the case here) but mostly because of the very act of preparing the seminar itself. It forces you to take the wider view, consider the big picture, and try to motivate why you are doing what you’re doing, or why you picked on path over another along the way. I find this process can be quite valuable as an internal pruning and self-checking exercise.

So it was that I spent three hours at LAX writing the first 2/3 of the talk. This is not […] Click to continue reading this post →

Hollywood Halloween

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hollywood halloweenHollywood Halloween. How about that…. two perfectly matched words side by side like that, and in context. Well… last night’s West Hollywood Halloween Carnaval confirmed my faith in Los Angeles (in the broader sense) as a city where people can indeed come together in vast numbers in if there’s enough will to do so. And boy do I mean vast. I’ve never seen this many people in good spirits in such […] Click to continue reading this post →

They’re Back!

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Wow! Almost to the day (see last year’s post), they have returned, perhaps stronger than ever! I had two big waves of them this year, one about ten days to a fortnight ago, and another new one starting a couple of days ago. Here’s one:

flowers from my san pedro cactus 2008

Flower from my San Pedro cactus (trichocereus pachanoi). (Click for larger view.)

I love these flowers dearly for many reasons. First and foremost, they are beautiful, but there’s an additional enhancement of my love brought about by their short-lived nature. They’ll appear all of a sudden, somewhat unexpectedly, and last just one day […] Click to continue reading this post →

Monsters, Etc

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Well, it was quite a fascinating and fun Sunday afternoon, all in the spirit of art and community. And the story has a twist or two before the end.

Where do I start? Well, it was the second LA area Monster Drawing Rally (organized on LA by the Outpost for Contemporary Art), held over in Altadena. A friend of mine, artist and playwright Nancy Keystone, told me about it. Over four hours, many artists (Nancy included) would draw, in hour-long shifts, and then the results would be sold at $75 each. There’d be people looking on, general fun, food, beer, wine, and so forth. Of course I’d go! (As a bonus, there was even belly-dancing at one point. Go figure.)

It was rather excellent. There were artists of all sorts, doing a wide variety of things under the banner “drawing”, and lots of people to chat with and things to chat about. Nancy drew faces in brushed ink on pages of the phone book, which I thought was a lovely idea (unfortunately, I missed getting a shot of her in action), and there were people cutting up bits of paper and gluing, blowing things, measuring and calculating things. More on that latter later. (Click for larger views.)

scenes from the monster drawing rally 2008 scenes from the monster drawing rally 2008

It was another great community event, and I recognized faces of friends and strangers from other things I go to around the city, such as the farmer’s market, Categorically Not! events like this recent one, and the wonderful Urban Homestead Speakeasy organized by Christine Louise Berry that I reported on not long ago. My friends Marc Kamionkowski (Caltech) and Robert Caldwell (Dartmouth) (cosmologists/astrophysicists) showed up at some point, and it was great to see them and catch up a bit.

Every hour the artists changed over, finishing their work and another set of artists seat themselves and get to work. So it was quite a dynamic event. As the 5:00pm session […] Click to continue reading this post →

Saturday Calm

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october rosesWell, another super-busy week has gone by. Work has been crazy, life has been crazy, and so forth. It is so good to be able to sit here for a while on a sunny Saturday morning and reflect. I thought I’d take you with me on some of the reflections.

The Nobel prizes seemed to come up so much faster this year, and go by even more quickly. I’ve not had as much time to contemplate them as I’d have liked. It was certainly really good to see that the physics one was a celebration of some of the key ideas in my field (see here), of course, but I’d have liked to have had more chatter about all of them, as I usually try to do. It is good to learn more about other things – get out of one’s comfort zone. Two years ago while I was departmental colloquium organizer, I set aside one date to be a colloquium where the three science prizes were highlighted – “Who, What, Why?” There’s always going to be local faculty who can […] Click to continue reading this post →

Disentanglement

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nice cold beerTime for a cold beer. It’s only 5:30pm, I know, but there are extenuating circumstances. The first is that there’s a sudden heatwave. It is above ninety degrees outside. Will be doing this pattern for the whole week. Huh. The second is that I just cycled my bike really hard in that heat, coming back from an afternoon sitting in the Casbah writing a progress report on the year’s research. Happily there’s a lot to include, but it is still quite the task pulling it together, especially when it is so hot. For me, when it is very warm, concentration problems circle around trying to not falling asleep.

The third reason is that I’m clearly going a bit nuts, with several, uh, senior moments descending on me recently. I need to take a nice break and unwind before typing in all these scribbled note. Here are three of the senior moments, so you know what I mean: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Late Night Drinking

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In the early hours of Sunday morning, before sunrise, I could hear a dripping noise – or rather lots of dripping noises – from outside. It was familiar, as I’ve been hearing it from time to time over the last four or five weeks. It is one of the very lovely features of the the climate here at this time of year. After a hot sunny daytime, late at night (or early in the morning) a mist or fog rolls in all the way from the ocean twelve or more miles away. It is the result of marine layer, a term that is often -although not really accurately- used for the fog itself.

foggy los angeles

The fog condenses on everything, and while not being actual rain (we haven’t had any in the main part of the Los Angeles basin in a long while), results in a great deal of moisture on the ground and the trees and bushes, keeping lots of vegetation green through this otherwise dry period of the year. That’s the dripping I could hear. This is presumably how this wonderful natural desert sustained a variety of flora and fauna long before the city, with its […] Click to continue reading this post →

Laugh While Seeing

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vista theater on sunset boulevardYes, that’s indeed why it is called Sunset Boulevard. Beautiful, isn’t it? And I wonder whether this is why the Vista Theatre is called the Vista. I saw this lovely warm evening light as I came around the corner on Tuesday, on my way to meet a friend to see a movie I’ve been waiting for for some time now – Burn After Reading. It’s a Coen Brothers movie, and for me, it is an event when one of theirs comes out.

As has been the case a number of times in the past, when people hear I am interested in seeing a Coen film, they tell me things like “oh, the reviews weren’t good”, or “it hasn’t been doing so well”, or “the reviews are mixed”. My response is to thank them but politely ignore them. Especially for films I’ve made up my mind to see, I ignore all reviews.

In fact, as a rule, I read film reviews only after seeing the film, and then mostly […] Click to continue reading this post →

Will Explain Physics For Food…?

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It’s been super-busy here in my universe, coupled with turmoil of various sorts. This has kept me away from doing some of the sorts of posts I’ve wanted to do. I hope to tell you a bit about what I’ve been up to when I get a chance. I managed to squeeze in some time for a movie last night, and I’ll do a post on that shortly, since I thought it was wonderful. In the meantime, I thought that while I do a quick breakfast before diving into the day, I’d mention the following.

Alternative Title: A Physics Blind Date

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email out of the blue from a lawyer from out of town. He explained a bit about the type of law work he does, and then went on to say that this was nothing to do with what he was emailing me about. He was emailing me about physics. Turns out that in their spare time, he and his law partner spend time discussing and arguing about physics concepts such as General and Special Relativity, and Cosmology. They’d got to a point where they were confused about various details. The popular level books that they were reading did not really do it for them in terms of getting them past certain concepts and they thought that they’d just contact a physicist and ask.

Hence the email. He wondered if I’d be able to take some time to answer questions. He was terribly apologetic for bothering me, and knew that I might decline since I’m probably very busy.

Well, my response you can guess. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Thoughts During Break Time

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Ah. I see that it’s been three days since my last confession. Gosh.

Well, it’s been a quiet weekend here in, er, my part of the universe. Good time for reflection and rest. I had a couple of posts I was going to do but in the end decided to break the pattern and change up my Saturday and Sunday, and the “change up” did not include the blog. So sorry about that.

I’m taking a break between an interesting meeting (that I will tell you about) and my office hour. The sun’s shining outside and it is not oppressively hot, surprisingly, so I’ll keep this short and poke my head out there again before my Physics 151 visitors arrive.

Some of the things on my mind: […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Farewell To Arms

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cut off arms from shirts

When I look at this, it sort of scares me a touch. Just a touch. There’s a memory of the arms – flesh and blood ones – inside them, and there goes a shiver down my spine. But it’s all fine, really. There’s nothing sinister going on, and no horrible subtext lurking at all. What I was doing with my Labour Day holiday was all perfectly innocent. Nobody’s arms – not mine or anyone else’s – were or will be hurt! (I’m rather pleased with the title of the post, I have to say.)

What was I doing?
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Glory

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morning glory The battle is in full swing, and it is a rather glorious one indeed. What battle? Well, I deployed some ground troops of legendary tenacity to do battle with some ground cover of relentless ivy. I don’t like the ivy much. Since it keeps coming back, and since there is no end to its inventiveness at returning and spreading, I decided to try a different tactic that I knew would have certain other benefits. Deploy the Morning Glory.

I remember my first true appreciation of the powers of morning glories. I was an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky living in a nice cabin with a nice bit of back garden, not far from campus, in Lexington. I’d spend my Summers in New York back in those days. One late spring I planted some morning glory seeds, and watched the little plants that resulted struggle through the dirt and face the sky. Then I was away for the Summer, on my usual (for the time) retreat to the excellent Morningside Heights neighbourhood, the whole of Manhattan my office.

Upon returning to Lexington, finding everything still in the clutches of the humidity that reigns supreme at that time of year, ready to begin teaching in the new […] Click to continue reading this post →

Big?

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On campus yesterday, I ran into a colleague I had not seen in a long time. She was with her daughter. She introduced us, saying, among other things, that Professor Johnson is “Big in Cosmology”.

I’ll admit that I giggled like a naughty schoolgirl for a longish, unprofessorial moment. It was sort of hard to explain, and would have derailed the conversation, so I did not try. Why was I giggling? Well, it is just that the field of cosmology (which, for the record, […] Click to continue reading this post →