Category Archives: personal

Just Checking on New York

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Readers in New York… Uh… Are you ok? Leave a comment to let me know that you and the city are still there, ok?

cloverfield posterJust got back from seeing Cloverfield. Quite well done, on balance. They do a great job of mocking up what it would be like to be just an ordinary citizen during your standard city-under-attack scenario. Routine falls apart, people are scared, fighter jets scream by low and fast overhead, there’s only fragments of information about what’s happening, and you find yourself wondering why on earth we build these tall buildings anyway… Yes, the filmmakers did a very […] Click to continue reading this post →

Bookcases

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While the wonderful downpour carries on outside (the whole of Southern California is in the grips of a powerful storm), I’ll continue with the discussion of the re-invigoration of the study that I started a short while ago…

study project - plane
(One of my all-time favourite wood-working tools. The good old-fashioned plane. Planing a bit of wood is jolly good therapy too.)

One of the main things I envisioned, and put into my sketches, was lots of space for books. Lots. I wanted big bookcases that fit the room, and so I planned a simple but robust design that stretched them eight feet from the floor to the ceiling. Of course, I wanted to make them myself – Building them myself would be more fun and much […] Click to continue reading this post →

Lecture One

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lecture notes

So it is that time. A new semester is upon me, and a totally new course to deliver. Today was my first day back on campus after the break (at least during a regular working day).

Sunday saw me sitting down (in the newly completed study) thinking about how I was going to structure the course. This usually has me sitting with the textbook, a pen, a hand drawn calendar on a big sheet of paper, and a frown on my face trying to figure out roughly what topics I will cover, how many lectures I will devote to each, how many class worksheets (see earlier post) I might have, when the midterms will be, and so forth.

What I am teaching? Why, only one of my most favourite topics to teach in the entire […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Retreat

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sketches for studyAs I get older and busier, I seem to increasingly value quiet spaces. I always loved them, but now they seem more vital to me than ever. So I seek them out constantly. It’s important to note that it is, as they say, all relative. My whole house is a quiet space in a quiet part of a neighbourhood, which is itself in a relatively quiet part of the city. Nevertheless, I’ve been monitoring my working patterns of late and noticed quite a bit of fragmentation, which bothers me a lot. Sure, a lot of it is self-inflicted (email, blogging, and so forth can always be managed better – that’s another issue to discuss), but some of it has to do with finding good spaces to work, depending upon the type of mood and type of work to hand.

I’ve lots of favourites, and many of them are cafes and bars around the city, some places on campus (my office is not high on that list though), the odd bench in a park here and there, and so forth. But those are mostly for working in my “public space” mode. Sometimes I want to work in a different mode, or sometimes I want to just stay […] Click to continue reading this post →

Anticipation

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mum's coconut bread

Well, for some of you, the title of the post should be “Frustration”, since I’ll get to try these (click for larger view) later when they cool down, and (sadly) I can’t share them with you in that way. But I thought I’d share the common and special memory of the warmth of baking smells… good thing to start the year off with. Especially if you’re somewhere a bit cold.

There’s been a lot of cooking and eating here over the last week and a half. I’ve done […] Click to continue reading this post →

Small Person in the House

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shoesNo, I’ve not been keeping a low profile in the Far East for a month, as I did a couple of years ago. Nor have I been doing the same in the desert. Actually, I was pondering doing one of those, or something else along those lines, when my sister got in touch and said that she was going to visit me, along with our mum, and my sister’s 18 month old son. This news meant that I’ve been somewhat preoccupied with things over the last few weeks, as a lot of my spare time has been devoted to a project that needed to be accelerated (pictures later) so as to not have too much dust and chaos at the beginning of their visit, and since they arrived, well you can imagine…

They arrived, and it has been a great visit so far. All my plans to think hard about […] Click to continue reading this post →

Transcendence

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seed december 2007 coverI noticed last week that the December issue of the magazine Seed has the short piece I mentioned I was working on a while back. I actually completely forgot about it, and just looked at it on the newsstand on the off-chance, and there it was. It is part of a larger cover story by Jonah Lehrer about science and art (which I’ve not yet read), with a number of other scientists giving their take. I was asked to contribute by picking a piece of art, and writing 100 (they said) words about how it connects to my science, Or I could talk about how a piece might have inspired me, or some combination of those sorts of things showing the intersection between science and art. It took me a while to come up with a short answer to this many-faceted and interesting issue. I actually did two completely separate pieces, before later focusing on one and polishing up the words for the magazine. and I’ll put the latter here (below), and later in the week the other will appear (probably over on Correlations). I’ll use the text I have here as I submitted it… I have not checked to see if it is identical to what appeared in the magazine yet. Go along and look at the magazine for the contributions from others. It is very interesting to see what pieces people chose, and why. What would you choose?

Tell us in the comments.

My choice:

Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1485

Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1485 (Click for larger view.)

Leonardo da Vinci’s pencil study stunningly illustrates for me the key parallel […]

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Chess and Shopping

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Yesterday, on (one of) the biggest shopping days of the year, I went… shopping. Insane, I know. Oddly enough, it was not a disaster. After an hour or so the headache that usually develops (when I have to make so many decisions over prices and items of clothing and so forth) began to approach, but that was largely due to the barrage of Christmas Carols. I eventually found a way to see the humour in just how dreadful some of the treatments of various songs can be, and that kept me going a bit longer. The Mel Torme (“the velvet fog”) version of “Chestnuts Roasting on an…” (whatever it’s really called) has sunken to a new unanticipated low by having had a strangely irrelevant and mood-altering backbeat added to it for part of the song. I heard this in the Gap, which meant that I left rather hurriedly without buying anything because I was laughing too much. After three hours of this sort of activity in several stores, I came away with essentially one item. One. Sigh.

Anyway, where was I going with this? Well, nowhere in particular, but I thought I’d share my lunch scene with you. I was at Santa Monica for the shopping you see, and part of my agenda was to make the shopping bearable by having a late lunch down at the beach.

santa monica atheletics

I’d packed a sandwich, brought a book and an apple, and everything. On my way, I stopped at a store I regularly stop at to get the best deal in Santa Monica – the aforementioned simple jam tarts. A dollar apiece. I got two. Dessert, you see. They packed them into the usual pink box, and after getting a cup of coffee next door I wandered down to the pier, past the pier, and walked toward the area where all the chess tables are set up. Chess players were there, including many of the regulars I’ve […] Click to continue reading this post →

Bench

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Surprisingly satisfying sound to it, that word… Bench.

Feeling a bit off the tracks, internally, in one way or another and so I’ve decided to opt out of Thanksgiving this year and spend some time hiding out on my own. Consequently, there’ll be no cooking post, I’m afraid. I’ll have to refer you to last year’s. However, there are other arenas of derring-do besides the kitchen. Today, Asymptotia goes down to the workshop…

I’ll probably be drummed out of the Theorists’ Guild for admitting this, but I can’t go for long without making or doing something constructive with my own hands. The mood to make something hit me hard the other day. Not long ago I began to eye various aspects of my office (at home) and try to understand why I only use it to pick up printouts, find a book on a shelf, and add to the giant piles of paper on every surface. I never sit in it and use it, and I did not know why, annoyingly enough. Well, I think I figured it out, and after making a series of investigations, and a series of detailed measurements, the solution is on order. I will report later. The solution (and some other projects I have in mind) will require some careful woodwork, and I’ve not really got a good working space for that, having mostly done all my woodworking on the ground, patio, steps, and other improvised places.

So today’s project was to fix this. The plan began with a spontaneous purchase (for […] Click to continue reading this post →

My Work Here is Done

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lexington visit Yep. All done. Sitting in great cafe with a cup of camomile, listening to one of my favourite Mingus albums on the cafe’s overhead speakers, feeling that it all went well. (The latter – Mingus in a great cafe late at night? – is not really the Kentucky I remember.) I seem to have gone three for three. Class, seminar, colloquium. No disasters, besides skimping on the sleep a bit here and there and writing some of the material at the last minute. Good.

So I gave the seminar at noon, talking about much the same material I did in my Santa Barbara talk I mentioned before here. We then went to lunch at a Korean place nearby that was rather good. I ordered the bi bim bap (as I often do at Korean places) and to my disappointment, it did not come in the super high temperature near-molten […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Return

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I’m in Lexington, Kentucky, for a couple of days to give three presentations at the University of Kentucky (or “UK” as everyone refers to it here – I hope that explains the previous post). I should be preparing two of them instead of blogging, but… you know how it is. Here’s how I got here:

lexington visit On Wednesday afternoon, after a class on magnetostatics, and an attendance of a lunchtime event where four of our faculty (Biology, Geology, Cosmology (our very own Elena Pierpaoli!), Biology) presented their research, I dashed for a plane. Some hours later, at 10:45pm local time, I touched down in Chicago, and 15 minutes later was on the highway in the company (and car) of Nick Halmagyi.

Our mission? To hang out for a few hours in an excellent bar or two of his acquaintance and catch up on what’s been going on with each other, workwise and otherwise. The Charleston was indeed excellent, and (after chortling a bit about the memory of my annoyance at being charged $29 for a serving of a single malt scotch in a bar in Aspen during the Summer) proceeded to order the same here (he the Macallan, me the Talisker). At about 1:00am, the music stops and a guy with a face full of character sits down at the upright piano, is introduced to a scattering of applause, and proceeds to play some Chopin. Everybody shuts up and turns to listen. Appropriately, the piano sounds like all upright pianos in all bars all around the world sound (the tuning is just a bit wobbly), and the guy is good – really good. He stops playing the piece, and there’s some more scattered applause; someone (jokingly?) offers his a dollar as he walks away which he waves away enthusiastically; the music comes back up, and everybody turns back to their conversations. Nick and I continue to chat about various aspects of life, and order a couple more whiskeys.

At 1:25am or so we wander over to another bar. Nick seems a bit surprised by my suggestion to do this (‘cos I’m supposed to be going to sleep), but I’m just enjoying walking for a bit in the cold, wearing a cozy hat and coat that normally get no use these days, and there’s something nice about a proper bar hop in a neighbourhood with good bars and in the company of someone who appreciates it. This bar has an […] Click to continue reading this post →

Remembering Bob Miller

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The Artist and Science educator Bob Miller died on Sunday. This is very sad news indeed. He and his work may be familiar to many of you from San Francisco’s Exploratorium.

categorically not - really?I met him only once, on the evening of April 23rd 2006 at a Categorically Not! event. From that short time I got a sense of his enthusiasm for explaining many phenomena in optics and other aspects of physics to anyone who would listen. He was a unique and highly original person in every positive sense of those words, and his passing is a great loss. The Cat Not! event during which I saw him in action (see clickable image on right) describing optical illusions and other phenomena was one of the most delightful such evenings that I can recall. After re-reading my report on the event, I thought I’d share it with you as a celebration of his life. It is the previous post, and it has links to some of Bob’s work.

Bob Miller was a dear friend of science writer K. C. Cole, and so (with her permission) I am reproducing here a piece that she wrote about Bob Miller not too long ago. It is a fitting tribute. -cvj
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The physicist Frank Oppenheimer used to say that artists and scientists are the official “noticers” of society—people whose business it is to notice things that other people either never learned to see or have learned to ignore.

I’ve never known anyone with quite the knack for noticing as San Francisco artist Bob Miller, and since I’ve known him, countless things I used to think quite ordinary have been animated by his imagination. Once he asked me: How would you suspend 500,000 pounds of water in the air with no visible means of support? […] Click to continue reading this post →

Some of What Matters

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Below I’ve reproduced the text of the approximately 20 minutes of that which I presented at the What Matters to Me and Why event on Wednesday. I mentioned my preparations for it in a previous post. The event was well attended, in an excellent setting (a hidden campus cafe I’d somehow not known about before, Ground Zero). There were students, faculty, staff, alumni, and several others. I chose to give a structured address to start so as to make sure that I did not go on for too long, as I might in a more off-the-cuff delivery. I very much wanted to leave plenty of time to interact with the audience through their observations and questions. I delivered it partly from memory and partly from reading, and wanted it to have a bit of a feel of being read a story, rather than a formal speech. I don’t know how successful that was, but it was fun for me. I think I might try that approach again some time.

Overall, I think the event worked well, and I had a great time. A number of people (kindly) said at the end that they had a good time, and I hope everyone else did too!

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Hello Everyone.

First let me say that it is an honour to be here. I’d like to thank everyone concerned for inviting me to speak in this series. I imagine that everyone starts their piece by saying that they struggled to find a way of saying What Matters to them and Why in a short time. So I won’t dwell on that, except to say that it’s especially hard when, the day before preparing, you realize that it’s not going to be that hour long presentation you were expecting to squeeze your essence into, but 20 minutes!

Some time ago, when people started mentioning that they’d seen that I was a guest in this event, and that they were looking forward to hearing what I will say (!), I’d respond that I too was curious about what I was going to say, and would also try to show up and find out. This was actually true. The other thing that I (half-)joked was […] Click to continue reading this post →