Category Archives: personal

Saturday Scenes

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alonys red
(The striking central red piece above is by the artist called Alonys (as are the ones surrounding). You can see more things of hers at her myspace space.)

Well, it’s been a busy week here, and I had tons of things to tell you in about five or six extra posts (beyond the quick ones I did) that never made an appearance. I had several for last weekend too. I ought to start by catching up from there. Here goes a bit of recollection and reflection:

Saturday was interesting since I ended up cramming three different activities into the evening, after a day of gardening and errands (mostly the latter), if I recall correctly.

gatherd crowdThe evening began (as it did the Saturday before) with a trip to an opening at an art gallery. This time it was downtown, near Gallery Row, (it is called Crewest) and it was featuring the work of some up and coming female artists. Overall, I was not overwhelmed with things I thought were great, but the exhibition was not without some interesting pieces on the walls (see above – some of her 3d sculpture-meets-painting works were fun too) and sometimes interesting people milling around. There was even a DJ, but sadly no wine (I’d been spoiled by the last gallery reception, I suppose.) […] Click to continue reading this post →

End Notes

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Well, it’s Friday, and the end of the week of standard work days, although not of course the end of the working week. I’m sure I do not speak only for myself when I say that this job does not really get switched off at a specific time every day (as you’ve seen), and it certainly is not contained to any specific days of the week. But I do scale things back quite a bit on Saturdays and Sundays and try to focus more on other things in my life (there are exceptional circumstances, of course). So this will be the last in this short series of “day in the life” posts describing my work day. (The last one was here. You can find all the others listed at the bottom.)

  • 8:30am Finally I managed to get a lie-in! Unfortunately this is probably due to poor sleeping due to the fact that I accidentally fell asleep with the radio on (with no sleep function set) and so my entire night was full of the BBC and NPR. Getting ready this morning I realize that every story on NPR is familiar because I probably heard it at 4:00am already. I have poor reception in my bedroom, and so I listen to the radio over the web on a computer. It did not go to sleep, since the radio streaming keeps it active. If I want to fall asleep listening to something, I usually overcome this shortcoming by listening to a podcast, but this time I did not get to starting it before I dozed off. Anyway, tea, cornmeal porridge, coffee. No shirt ironing as I don’t need to be terribly professorial-looking today, much (see below).

    I’ll be in semi-stealth mode again today (like Wednesday), in order to focus on research matters, but only semi. Again, I’ve avoided scheduling any meetings today (except one – see below). Although I do not leave for work, I settle down to dealing with various administrative matters. This starts with emails about next week’s colloquium, a future colloquium, and things of that nature. Also check blog, and add entries and begin to clean up the post about yesterday for later appearance.

  • 10:00am – 12:00pm Basically a mixture of reading some more research papers, some more email exchanges about next week’s colloquium, and reading the research blog in preparation for the meeting with the team later today.
  • 12:15pm. A bit panicked again since I do not have any idea how it got so late! Need to shower, dress, make a sandwich, pack my bag and get to campus by 1:00pm. And it normally takes me 45 minutes if I’m lucky with the buses.
  • 12:30pm. Now leaving home. Decided that the bus is not the way to go in view […]

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Thursday Notes

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Continuing the week, here’s Thursday:

  • 6:45am Look out the window toward the sun. Another lovely day seems to be starting, at least with regards the weather. Next hour and a half is spent on similar things to the last three days. Go back and look at the earlier posts (listed at bottom). Except cinnamon-raisin bagel with cream cheese and cherry jam instead of oatmeal, in case you were wondering.
  • 8:15am Not quite ready (shower time warp –see earlier– and other things delayed me), but have 9:00am meeting and should have left by now. Should *just* be able to make it if I’m lucky with the bus, but send quick email to tell the person I’m meeting with I might be ten minutes late.
  • 8:32am I made the bus after all. Saw that other faculty member who rides to the bus stop as I passed her on my way and waved. She made a sort of “Nih!” noise of either recognition or surprise or both. I even took a gamble on the bus and jumped off bike, got newspaper from vending machine (thereby missing a cycle of the lights) and got back into the traffic. Always good to have a bit of derring-do in the morning.

    I really only get the LA Times on Thursdays, with any regularity. Mostly because I like the Weekend section, which has listings of events coming up, and some interesting feature article or two about some LA thing or person or other. They’ve been interesting to me more often than not, on balance. Not always hugely interesting, but enough for a good 25 minutes read on the bus. The Home section can be good too. So I get it just in case there’s something good. Indeed, it pays off, and there are some good things. I’ll point two of them out in some later blog posts, I hope.

  • 9:00am Meet with a bright and enthusiastic student who wants to do a […]

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Notes from Stealth Mode

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Continuing, here’s a short notebook on Wednesday.

  • 6:45am A tad annoying that I woke up at this time. I deliberately did not set the alarm so that I could have a bit of a lie-in. Of course, my system woke me up at the usual time anyway. Similar morning ritual to last two times (yes, oatmeal again since I’ve run out of cinnamon-raisin bagels), but no shirt-ironing was involved. I’ve decided to be in stealth mode for most of the day, which means stay entirely away from the campus and work at home.
  • 8:15am Decide to first tinker a bit with the Tuesday diary post. Turns into a bit more of an epic than I intended. Tinker with it and catch up on email for an hour or so.
  • 9:30am Start reading one of the papers I planned to read today. It’s an excellent one from the early 90s by Greg Moore. I’d never appreciated it back […]

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Not all Noteworthy

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Continuing, this was the Tuesday:

  • 6:45am… Get up and look outside. Huh. Super clear and sunny. Unexpected, after yesterday. Cup of tea. Check email (delete 30 spams). Look at blog. Slow steady getting ready ritual while listening to NPR: Oatmeal again today, coffee for bike bag and journey in, sandwich for lunch…ironing a shirt…
  • 7:50am Have five-minute shower.
  • 8:05am Get out of shower. Aarrrrrgh! This is one the great mysteries we must solve concerning time, space, life, the universe. There’s nothing in Einstein’s GR about this: Why, when you go into a shower and spend five minutes – in your frame of reference – has 15 or 20 minutes passed by in the outside world?!
  • 8:17am Having gone from leisurely pace to frantic (since I have a 9:00am meeting) I leave home muttering something like “show me the meaning of haste” to the B as I point it toward the bus stop. (As usual, I make a mental note to not turn the haste into a misstep, so I go along my cycle route with purpose, but not abandon. I should make the bus that leaves about 8:27 or so.
  • 8:32am I did. On the bus I plan a future lecture for the string theory course about the role of various dualities in understanding strings. This is from both an historical and physical perspective. The history is interesting, but I’m also keen to present various physics perspectives to give a clear platform to help the younglings see further than what has been seen before. Yes. I said younglings. I know, it was deliberate, because it just sounds so silly.
  • 9:00am Technically this is on the the office hours for the E&M course, but nobody every shows up since (a) It is not the day when, or day before a […]

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Notes From the Day

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The other day (some weeks ago now) I started a sort of “day in the life” post, to give you more of an idea of what a typical day was like at work (and maybe also a bit at play). Somehow I never finished it, and then I looked at it a while later and could not remember the rest of the day, and so just deleted it.

I’ve decided to do something different. There really is no typical day. So I will try to do a series of days instead. Of course, I’m not going to have tine to sit and do a long, detailed entry about these days, and so instead I’ll just do a sort of sketchy notebook, with some time stamps. From time to time during the day I’ll stop in and add to it, and then post the whole thing at the end of the day before going to sleep. I won’t include all details (I’ll spare you bathroom breaks, personal grooming, and things of that nature, you’ll be pleased to know), but will try to give you some impressions of how the day goes. If people are interested (and people did ask for such a “day in the life post” before), I might try to do them more frequently. But for now, I’ll try and do one for each day of this week. Average over them to get the typical day.

So here goes.

Well, this work week really started on Sunday night.

  • 11:15 – 11:48 pm (Sun): Thinking about structure of E&M course. When to set the next midterm (we agreed that the previously announced date was too soon). Also thought about what homeworks to set for the last part of electromagnetic waves in dispersive media, and though wave guides. Sent email to whole class about this.
  • 12:30am (Monday) After reading a random entry or two at the ever-brilliant Girls Are Pretty blog (e.g. here), I fall asleep listening to podcast of the BBC’s wonderful Broadcasting House (radio 4). I still miss the excellent Eddie Mair, but this new guy seems pretty good.
  • 7:15am (Monday) (Later rising today since it is Monday and I don’t have any early appointments and I try to get a good night’s sleep when I can.) Over cup of tea, read email. Delete about 30 spam messages that have arrived overnight. I note the kind letter from Dean X at institution Y acknowledging receipt of the long detailed letter in support of a promotion for candidate Z, and thanking me. Good that he/she did that. Took a good chunk of Friday and Sunday afternoon to write that epic.
  • 7:45am Not in a rush to go in yet, I have a longer breakfast – cooked some […]

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When Worlds Collide, II

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I think I ought to explain, as promised, why I am in New York. The first thing to mention is that I wrote the previous post in this miniseries (it was written on a flight to Dublin, and finally posted when I returned) before I knew about any of what I’m about to tell you, so it is rather funny to me…

casino royale shoot

The week that I returned from Dublin I noticed a phone message from an editor of a magazine asking me to return their call. A couple of days later I learned what it was about. It’s a magazine that largely focuses on buzz about people and projects in the entertainment and fashion industry – Music (R&B, Hip Hop mostly), Movies and TV, etc., as far as I can tell, along with some coverage of parts of the business world. Its readership is mostly younger African American males, I think. As far as I can tell, the intention is not to be about those things in particular, but it is largely reflecting the interests of the readership it is targeted at. It’s a major product, jumping out at you immediately when you are in the magazine store (the striking picture of a woman on the front helps it grab your attention, of course).

Each year, the magazine does a special issue featuring a group of individuals who are doing “major things” in the industries I mentioned above. It is a combination of a focus on new talent that’s about to become more widely known, or just bringing to readers’ attention the existence of some of the people who are making significant impact in what they’re doing.

Somehow – I do not know how – they got my name. It turns out that they spent some time reading some of things I’ve written here at Asymptotia too. Now normally, you’d expect things to stop at that point, but in fact it did not. They decided to broaden things out a bit and include me (if I was willing) in this year’s feature issue.

I thought about it for a day. It is quite an honour to be approached, and I’m also impressed that the magazine’s editors are being creative in this way (it would be easy […] Click to continue reading this post →

Field Testing

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Well, ok, it is working well out in the field. (See here for what I’m talking about.)

Keys started out a little sticky, but are loosening up with use. Good. Ok, here’s a secret: I admit to feeling a little (just a little) smug among the group of people sitting here, ‘cos you see they’re all the same – all five of them, in one tiny cafe – with their normally individual and cool-looking macbooks (it’s one of those ‘hoods), now looking unneccessarily big, heavy and clunky in comparison.

Ok, I’ll stop being annoying. It was just a smug moment, and now it has passed. Here’s the setup in the field: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Sunday at the Shops

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Lots of shopping today. Among the places I went to was Fry’s Electronics. The particular one I went to is always fun since it has an aliens theme. They don’t do the theme in a subtle way…. it is all over the shop…. it starts with the big alien spaceship that has crashed into the front:

fry's electronics

…and all through the shop there are little aliens in the rafters, and on the ground you have members of the military shooting up at them….it is the middle of a big battle you see (the military jeep has been cut in half by a ray gun of some sort – was not able to get pictures without risking my place in the 45 minute-long (!) checkout line….).

I go to Fry’s Electonics for actual electronic components. It is in fact quite good for that […]
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Grin and Bear It

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illustration by Deanna StaffoWell, it is midnight and I am only on page 12 of the notes I am writing to present as a talk in the Southern California String Seminar tomorrow at 9:15am. Don’t try this at home – prepare talks early, ok?

Where is the seminar being held? UCLA! What University am I from? USC! What event happens tomorrow besides my (hopefully not too terrible) talk? The big USC vs UCLA head to head in College Football. If USC wins, they go to the championship game, apparently. Yay.

So the usual articles about the cross town rivalry between the two institutions have shown up this week in print and on National radio and TV. There are two amusing (and interesting) ones that I looked at – one in LA Weekly (about academic performance, faculty recruitment, student acheivement, and much more – illustration above from it, by Deanna Staffo), and one in the LA Times (mostly about nightlife). Have a look. There are dozens of others -just type USC into the LA Times search engine for example. You learn things about both universities as well from those two, so it is not without some point. For example, our young ones clearly go to cooler bars, for a start, as you can see from the pictures in the LA Times article.

(Strange that the articles do not mention the cooperation and general fun had when their high energy physics groups get together to discuss topics in string theory and other physics. Very odd omission indeed.)

I would say a lot more about the articles, but time is not on my side, so I will instead leave you with […] Click to continue reading this post →

Memories, Physics, and Celebration

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It’s a pleasantly foggy morning here on the USC campus. It is 7:00am now (at least at start of writing), and it will all burn off in a few hours, I imagine, to reveal the sunny sky waiting for us. But right now it reminds me of the Cambridge morning of a couple of weeks ago. A foggy Saturday morning in fact. I took that photo of the spider web I used on Halloween with that mist in the background.

That Saturday of celebration of Andrew’s work (The Andrew Chamblin Memorial Conference) at Cambridge was a remarkable experience. I was exhausted through a good deal of it, since I had eight hour jetlag, but I’m so glad I went, and that I could contribute a talk. I met many old friends and colleagues, drawn mostly from the UK and European side of Andrew’s collection of friends, collaborators, and admirers in the field.

andrew chamblin memorial conferenceThere were talks by former collaborators of Andrew’s: Gary Gibbons, myself, Roberto Emparan, Robert Caldwell, Raphael Bousso, and Stephen Hawking (who also guided some of Andrew’s thesis work). Gary, in “Discrete Symmetries and Gravity”, talked about Andrew’s early Oxford and Cambridge work on various discrete symmetries in physics, particularly those of a geometrical origin. He’d played with various ideas in this context, including some applications to problems in […] Click to continue reading this post →