Grand
Spent most of the daylight hours downtown today. Well worth it. Been a while since I’ve been to Grand Central Market.
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Category Archives: personal
Memories, Physics, and Celebration
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 Gravityâ€, 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
Pillars of Society
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Post or pillar boxes. One in Ireland, one in England. Nothing profound, I just like the contrast, that’s all.
I am back from my hop around “the islandsâ€. Thoroughly confused body clock. Health generally needs restoring to some sort of balance. Had weird disagreement with a […] Click to continue reading this post
Spotted. Round. Dublin.
Well, I’m not getting any sleep at all tonight, so might as well blog a bit. I’ve got to wake up in two and a half hours to catch a flight, so might as well give up gracefully, and usefully, by sharing with you:
Two spheres caught my eye around Dublin today, one familiar, one not. Both great. […] Click to continue reading this post
To The River
Got to sleep at 6:30am after the post-memorial-conference banquet, and its aftermath… Up again at 9:45am to rush around to get ready to go for a quick walk (how can one not do that when visiting Cambridge?) and then check out of the hotel. It is always pleasant to go … Click to continue reading this post
Meeting in Memory
Nipped across to Cambridge to give a talk at the Andrew Chamblin Memorial Conference. Link here. Speaker and participant list means that I should have some very interesting conversations, both about physics and other. The conference celebrates the scientific work of Andrew Chamblin, who died earlier this year. (See posts … Click to continue reading this post
Happy Flipping Memories
A couple of magazines showed up in the post the other day, unlooked for (as JRR would write). Spent a short (unfortunately) time lying on my bed in the sun flipping through them, and it reminded me of my boyhood. Do you remember something similar? You’d go out and get that next issue of that magazine you’d been waiting for and you’d just drink it all up in a general way for a while, lying on your stomach, legs kicking in the air: The smell of the pages, the glossy pictures and other juicy tidbits of writing and other stuff to digest more fully later on….
For me, when I was young it was mostly magazines about music, electronics, computers, science… some crochet, macrame, and knitting (yeah, I know – I’ll tell you more later), and of course lots of comics (these latter I did not browse first… I would read […] Click to continue reading this post
Queen’s Greatest Hits
No. Not Brian, Freddie, and the boys. Some other time. I’m talking about a different Queen, and different hits. Late Friday night I suddenly got in the mood to go to Amoeba to pick up this music: […] Click to continue reading this post
Hot Holiday Weekend
It is Labor Day here (for once I use the weird spelling, in deference to geography, etc) and, as usual it is incredibly hot. Already at 92 degrees by lunchtime, and I’m in a relatively cool part of the city. Tomorrow will have lots of pictures in the newspaper of … Click to continue reading this post
Mingus and Ella
Well, it’s the morning after. I did not wake up with that sort of cringing feeling that you get when the night before had an event you’d rather forget such as that time you said something incredibly stupid at a dinner party, or some other such thing. No, I woke … Click to continue reading this post
Longing
I don’t know about you but I melt each of the (very few these days) times I receive a real letter, by post, that contains… stuff we used to put in letters. Not the endless formal letters from business, nor the fake personal ones from businesses (like the amazing fancily … Click to continue reading this post
Cute!
Lovely yellow folding bike, spotted on campus outside my building. Soooo cuuuuuute! Two comments: (1) I wish they’d raise the seat on this bike, give it a bit of self respect so that it does not look like a children’s toy. (Assuming it is not… I am not familiar with … Click to continue reading this post
Mama Never Said There’d Be Two Contiguous Days Like This
So yesterday continued the stretch of unfortunate events. I decided to hide and work on the paper to make up for the lost time from the day before. Got a good start, and then after a couple of hours, the computer started its weird behaviour. Slow….. applications hanging up for … Click to continue reading this post
Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This
Oh Boy. So it started this morning with me making some plans to do things on the bike, starting with a visit to the Hollywood Farmer’s market to get some supplies (especially some more superstring beans, which are delicious!) and meet a friend. Idea would be then to -after excellent … Click to continue reading this post
