So here I am at the boarding gate at LAX, ready for my flight. I’m off to Mexico City. What’s on my mind? :- What will I be doing on the plane? What am I in the mood for? What I really should be doing, perhaps, is preparing the four … Click to continue reading this post
Wednesday was my last day in Santiago, and so after the morning Plenary talks I checked out of my hotel, stored my bag, and, boarding the subway, melted into the city for a few hours. I was not on the lookout for anything in particular, besides a sense (even a little) of the city’s life and flow. I also had in mind to spend a few hours at some galleries/museums (I’d already seen the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art (Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino) on Monday night, and had a tour, as that’s where the conference reception was). I wanted to check out the Museum of Contemporary Art (Museo de Contemporaneo Artes) and Museum of Fine Arts (Museo de Bellas Artes), as well as the Museum of National History (Museo de Histórico Nacional), back in Plaza de Armaz, where I’d done that cafe and Post office sketch on Sunday. I also wanted to wander the streets and squares and just look at the people and buildings and goings on. And then I had to get back to the hotel at 6:45pm to grab my bag and jump into the taxi I’d ordered and head to the airport for my flight back to LA.
Well, I did pretty much all of those things, with no hiccups to speak of. I was a little annoyed that 95% of the Museum of Contemporary Art was taken up by a massive David LaChappelle retrospective – not because there isn’t something in his work one can find to like or at least be amused by (I had a good look around since I was there), but because it seemed ridiculous to have flown almost 1/3 the way around the planet to see an American artist’s work when what I wanted to see was work that was more local – but all turned out ok when in the Museum of Fine Art (the adjoining building in fact) I found a great deal of interesting contemporary (and other) art that was locally sourced. The buildings themselves were interesting to look at too, so that was a bonus.
On a nearby street (Monjitas), I found a great spot for lunch and people-watching, and the woman who I took to be the proprietor of the cafe (who took my order) decided to engage me in conversation for while. Since she had little […] Click to continue reading this post
The picture is evidence that bug-free Skype seminars are possible! Well, I suppose it only captured an instant, and not the full hour’s worth of two separate bug-free talks each with their own Q&A, but that is what happened. The back story is that two of our invited speakers, Lara Anderson and James Gray, had flight delays that prevented them from arriving in Santiago on time and so I spent a bit of time (at the suggestion of my co-organizer Wati Taylor, who also could not make the trip) figuring out how we could save the schedule by having them give Skype seminars. (We already had to make a replacement elsewhere in the schedule since another of our speakers was ill and had to cancel his trip.)
Two Skype talks seemed a long shot back on Sunday when Wati had the idea, but after some local legwork on my part it gradually because more likely, and by lunchtime today I had the local staff fully on board with the idea and we tested it all and it worked!
It helps that you can send the whole of your computer screen as the video feed, and so the slides came out nicely (I’d originally planned a more complicated arrangement where we’d have the […] Click to continue reading this post
I’m in Santiago, Chile, for a short stay. My first thought, in a very similar thought process to the one I had over ten years ago in a similar context, is one of surprise as to how wonderfully far south of the equator I now am! Somehow, just like last time I was in chile (even further south in Valdivia), I only properly looked at the latitude on a map when I was most of the way here (due to being somewhat preoccupied with other things right up to leaving), and it is a bit of a jolt. You will perhaps be happy to know that I will refrain from digressions about the Coriolis force and bathtubs, hurricanes and typhoons, and the like.
I arrived too early to check into my hotel and so after leaving my bag there I went wandering for a while using the subway, finding a place to sit and have lunch and coffee while watching the world go by for a while. It happened to be at Plaza de Armaz. I sketched a piece of what I saw, and that’s what you see in the snap above. I think the main building I sketched is in fact the Central Post Office… And that is a bit of some statuary in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral to the left. I like that the main cathedral and post office are next to each other like that. And yes, […] Click to continue reading this post
Since it has been a busy semester so far, I welcomed the flights to and from Ann Arbor (on Thursday and on Saturday) as opportunities 
to get in a bit of sketching practice. One must keep in shape, especially for work on the graphic book project, when that resumes soon.
I did some partial sketches of live people while waiting for one flight, and on board the flights dug into the in-flight magazine for faces (as I’ve reported doing here in the past, see e.g. here and here), and found two interesting ones to do quick sketches of. This time I did light pencil at first, to allow me to get […] Click to continue reading this post
I promised two things in a previous post. One was the incomplete sketch I did of Crater lake and West Maroon Valley (not far from Aspen) that I started before the downpour began, last weekend. It is on the left (click to enlarge.) The other is a collection of the wild flowers and other pretty things that I picked for you (non-destructively) from my little hike in the West Maroon valley. There’s Columbine, Indian Paintbrush, and so forth, along with […] Click to continue reading this post
I went for a little hike on Sunday. Usually when I’m here visiting at the Aspen Center for Physics I go on several hikes, but this year it looks like I will only do one, and a moderate one at that. I had a bit of a foot injury several weeks ago, so don’t want to put too much stress on it for a while. If you’ve looked at the Aspen Center film (now viewable on YouTube!) you’ll know from some of the interviews that this is a big component of many physicist’s lives while at the Center. I find that it is nice to get my work to a point where I can step back from a calculation and think a bit more broadly about the physics for a while. A hike is great for that, and in all likelihood one comes back from the hike with new ideas and insights (as happened for me on this hike – more later)… maybe even an idea for a new calculation.
So I took the bus up to the Maroon Bells and hiked up to Crater Lake and a bit beyond into the West Maroon Valley, hunting a few wildflowers. I will share some pictures of those later. (I’ve heard that they are great up at Buckskin pass, and I was tempted to push on up to there, but I resisted the temptation.) I brought along several pens, watercolour pencils, and a water brush (for the watercolour pencils) because I’d decided that I would do some sketches at various points… you know, really sit with the landscape and drink it in – in that […] Click to continue reading this post
I just got back from the Aspen Art Museum‘s new building. They’ve been having a members-only series of nights before the big opening to the public in a few days, and an invitation was sent along to Aspen Center for Physics people to come along, and so (of course) I did. It was a nice thing to do at the end of a day of working on revising drafts of two papers, before settling down to a nice dinner of squash, green beans, tomatoes, and lemon-pepper pasta that I made, all from the Saturday Farmers’ Market. But I digress.
Let me say right at the outset that the building is fantastic. There will no doubt be arguments back and forth about the suitability of the building for the town, and so forth (and there have been), but as a space for both art and community (and to my mind, those should go together in a city’s main art space) it is simply […] Click to continue reading this post
Here’s a quick sketch I did while in Princeton last month, at a new café, Café Vienna. (See earlier posts here and here for sketches in an older Princeton Café. I’m using a thicker marker for this one, by contrast, giving a different feel altogether, more akin to this one.) This new café promises to recreate the atmosphere of the Cafés of Vienna and so I kind of had to have coffee there before I left. Why?
Well, two reasons, one obvious and the other less so: […] Click to continue reading this post
I’ve been looking at some of the many changes to Princeton, as I get the chance between sessions at the conference. A significant one for me is that Small World Coffee has really thrived and grown significantly. I can’t over emphasize how big a deal the place was to the lives of many in Princeton when it opened in 1993. Believe it or not, there was no real cafe in Princeton when I arrived the year before. The arrival of small world was a huge deal. It meant not just decent coffee, but a gathering place, a place to hang out, and a little art and performance space. Such places existed before, but on campus, and mostly for the benefit 
of the student population. I was not a student at Princeton, although many of my friends were, so although I went to such places as well it was nice to be in a cafe that was part of the actual community that was the town of Princeton. Several postdocs loved that the place opened, and we went there a lot. Perhaps it helped balance out the ratio of trips up to New York to choosing to stay in town… Ok, just a little bit, but a significant amount. I remember my friend (and fellow IAS postdoc and neighbour at the time), Marc Kamionkowski, playing his saxophone there (sometimes putting on his “Cat in the Hat” hat for a number – he may not forgive me for mentioning this), and I’d go along to support him.
I sat there yesterday and was pleased that the expanded seating at the back meant lots of nice vistas from which I could look at other patrons without being […] Click to continue reading this post
It was the departmental retreat this weekend, and we all went off on a boat to an island! On the voyage back I decided to practice a little sketching, and found myself surrounded by good subjects, because a lot of people were sitting still during the crossing (it was a small boat). Since the boat was rocking […] Click to continue reading this post
I’ve just returned from a rather wonderful two rainy days in Santa Barbara celebrating the work of Joe Polchinski. (See my previous post for more about this, including a few reflections.) It was a combination of high school reunion, group hug (with Joe in the center), and serious reflection about physics, now, back then, and to come. Now the great news is that pretty much everything was recorded on video, and so you can take part in it by settling down in front of your computer (or other device – those of you in the further (but pre-singularity) future can just instruct the appropriate plug-in from [Cyberdine systems ] [Tyrell Corporation] Google to stream directly to the vision centres of your brain) and view the various excellent talks and panel discussions here.
I had the honour of chairing (and contributing to) one of the panel discussions reflecting on D-branes (as I promised last post). The title was “D-Branes: Tools of the Revolution” and it went very well thanks to my three excellent panelists (Greg Moore, Andreas Karch and Samir Mathur) and many members of the gathered audience who contributed to the free-form discussion in the 15 minutes at the end. Have a look at that right along side the really interesting and lively discussion that Steve Shenker chaired at the end of the conference (which sadly I had to miss because I had to get back to LA through the rainstorm for another engagement). The idea there was to speculate a bit about the future of physics and thereby “Planning for Joe’s 90th Birthday“.
Enjoy.
You know those cross-country trips that nip from one coast to another for a day and then back? There are people who do that regularly for a living. Honestly, I don’t know how they do it. I left LA on Monday to go to a meeting in DC, and returned on Tuesday night, and while nothing unpleasant happened en route (and the meeting at the DC office of the American Physical Society was good), it is really not something I’d make a habit of. I like to add a bit of time to see the place I’m visiting, and get a bit of a feel of the pulse before flying back. But there wasn’t time. I was in DC for a day and a half last November to visit another organization, and I did manage to get two hours to wander the mall and have sandwich in the cafe of the Smithsonian, but I’d have liked a bit more time back then too. Anyway…
I did, however, get some face time. On take off on the flight back I flipped through Hemispheres (United’s in flight magazine) to see if there were any more large faces 
to sketch. (You’ll recall several earlier posts about my liking to do this for practice […] Click to continue reading this post
I find myself in a cold climate for a short while, once again serving on a committee that needs my in-person participation. It is snowing outside here in Chicago, and it is nice to look at the snow from the window, and occasionally pop from one building to another.
This allows me to pretend that as a Southern-California-softy I’ve had my annual dose of proper cold weather, with a real opportunity to wear a heavy coat and a thick jumper (sweater to those State-side) for at least one time this year. My hotel room is in a tower, and has a nice view out of the window. I tried to take a shot that captures the spirit of it. Pity I’m not able to enjoy it much, given […] Click to continue reading this post
While I was apparently catching that horrible flu virus early last week during the travelling I was doing, I was killing time with a few sketching games I tend to do while travelling. I was grabbing faces. A moderately careful face grab is to look through whatever magazines I have to hand (such as the in-flight magazine) and see if there are interesting faces… then I might do a quick or longer drawing of one or two that I find. Sometimes they are familiar people, as is perhaps the case with the one I show to the left. This was not intended to be super-careful, and was rather quickly done, but it turned out to be nicer than I expected.
I was simply drawing with a pen and not trying to be very accurate, and just capture expression and structure of the face, but my eye was in and so… (I’d have used pencil if I was planning to go for accuracy…) I liked it enough to finish it up when I got home and throw some watercolour (pencils and then water brush) on to it. (I took a quick snap of the magazine photo before I left to allow me to recall some features for finishing.)
I’ll spare you the other ones I did in that mode. Not for public consumption! […] Click to continue reading this post
