Category Archives: work

Revisiting Old Haunts

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Since you asked, here’s an update on The Project. I was a bit quiet on it the last two weeks with the end of semester duties taking up lots of time (setting finals, grading them, extra homeworks and so forth – see several recent posts). Just before that however, I did a bit of a push to finish some pages that I wanted to include in my presentation to the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities (I mentioned that to you before – see here. It went very well by the way, with lots of enthusiasm from lots of those who were kind enough to attend.)

Over the four or five days I’ve started on a new aspect of the project that has led me in an interesting direction – revisiting some of the original pages I did, two years ago. I decided then that the best thing to do to learn what I needed to learn about production of a graphic novel is just to… produce one. So I set upon a prototype, learning lots of techniques along the way, making lots of twists and turns in developing the methods that worked best for me, and so forth. I’ve refined the route I take from pencil to final product over the time (I’ve described it to you a number of times here on the blog), and in addition, my basic drawing skills have moved along a lot too… Anyway, looking back, I see that the first few pages especially are quite dreadful, a combination of bad drawing and also the struggle with digital inking techniques that I decided to abandon in favour of old school nib pens and ink. (It is actually satisfying to see just how far I’ve come in a short time… fixing various things took a relatively short time compared to how long I’d have agonized over them back then…)

So since I want to show this prototype to people, I’ve decided to re-draw and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Heaven’s Parameters

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Oh… I forgot to get around to letting you know the result of designing the universe required in a previous post. The result is that it is a radiation (“light”) filled universe with positive cosmological constant [tex]\Lambda[/tex](and so space wants to expand due to negative pressure – much like ours seems to be doing). The radiation density wants the thing to collapse. There’s a balance between the two, and it turns out that it is when the two densities (radiation, and vacuum energy) are equal. This is only possible when there is positive curvature for the universe (so, not like ours), as you can see from the Friedman equation if you were that way inclined. So the universe is a 3-sphere, and if you work it out, the radius of this 3-sphere turns out to be [tex]a=\left(\frac{3}{2\Lambda}\right)^{1/2}[/tex]. The temperature of the radiation is then computed using the usual Stefan-Boltzmann relation.

The equality of densities turns out to result from the fact that the effective potential of the equation is at a maximum, and so this universe turns out to be unstable… It is a radiation-filled version of Einstein’s matter-filled static universe, which is also unstable. It is larger than Einstein’s by a factor of [tex]\sqrt{3/2}[/tex].

Einstein was said to have arrived at his static universe on the grounds of what he thought was observationally clear – the universe was unchanging (on large scales). […]
The equality of densities turns out to result from the fact that the effective potential of the equation is at a maximum, and so this universe turns out to be unstable… It is a radiation-filled version of Einstein’s matter-filled static universe, which is also unstable. It is larger than Einstein’s by a factor of [tex]\sqrt{3/2}[/tex].

Einstein was said to have arrived at his static universe on the grounds of what he thought was observationally clear – the universe was unchanging (on large scales). Hubble […] Click to continue reading this post →

Project Heaven

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This is an extra homework that some students of the General Relativity class did to make up for one that did not count earlier in the semester. While writing it, I realized that this universe is in fact, Heaven! You know, we become beings of light, and live forever, etc…

I thought it would be fun to share its final form:

“You work in the design section of the company that manufactures universes. (This is […] Click to continue reading this post →

Fractal in Progress…

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So last week we had a visit from Kelly Stelle (he’s part of the high energy theory group at Imperial College) who gave us an excellent talk about aspects of supergravity. His work connects to the fascinating ongoing story about finiteness, and the new techniques being used to do the multiloop computations (see a recent Scientific American cover story about some of that – it is misleadingly packaged by the magazine, as usual (preview here) , but the article itself, focusing on the computational issues, is nice).

After his talk, I gave him a tour of the campus, and as we passed through the Doheny Library to view the lovely interior, we stopped by the ongoing construction of the Mosely Snowflake Sponge fractal that I told you about here.

They’re making a lot of progress.

We spent a few minutes folding some business cards to contribute some component cubes to the construction, and I took a snap (see photo on left) of Kelly at work. We made two or three cubes each…

Here’s a shot of one of the completed modules […] Click to continue reading this post →

Now Arriving…!

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The new line rocks! I went down there with my Brompton on the earlier side of things, this morning. I took the Red Line and changed seamlessly to the Expo Line at Metro/7th, and it was an excellent ride. I really do think (as I said in the previous post) that this is part of a major transformation for the city. This is a transformation with regards things like energy usage, congestion, community, air quality and all those wonderful things public transport helps with.

Of course, at the outset there is something truly right, to my mind, about being able to easily connect from downtown to Exposition Park and the Science and Natural History Museums, the African American Museum, and of course USC – All major Los Angeles institutions clustered together and now connected back to the newly beating heart of it all. From USC, I can now easily connect to the music center, LA Live, MOCA, any number of my favourite restaurants, bars, cafes, and other places I love downtown, and then float on home on the Red Line, or off to Pasadena or Boyle Heights on the Gold Line. This is so exciting to see come to pass. I’ve been dreaming of trains running along Exposition Boulevard between USC and the Museums and the Rose Garden for many years now, and it is now a reality. Stepping off the train today at the Expo Park/USC stop was just magical.

I recorded some footage of my travels on it today for you and edited it all together into a ten minute film. You can see it in the embed below. Consider it an invitation to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Making it Real

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I’m supposed to be writing a talk, but it’s too early to start on it. I’ve been woken up early (5:00am) and kept awake by ideas swirling around in my head, and a mockingbird’s singing – it is nesting in a tree near the house, and I think I may be doomed to listen to it every night until the Fall…

Tuesday of last week saw me hiding and working on The Project. This time, it involved a bit of stalking. Last year I wrote a story which mostly takes place in a family home, between a brother and sister. I had a very particular shape for the house in my mind. They move from room to room, and spend a bit of time on a patio at the front. This time, I decided to build the entire house and populate it with all that I needed so that I can use it as reference to design the backgrounds for the story. Some weeks before I’d started looking a bit more closely at some houses I’d seen in the area as models. It is almost like the house which existed in my head was out there somewhere in the city, and I just had to find it. Somehow it was intended to be a typical smaller Los Angeles single family home, and if I looked for it, there it would be. I saw a number of houses on my walks that looked suitable enough, and was going to choose one of them and make modifications… and then one day I found it.

I’d been walking past it every day for several weeks, and had not really been in the right mode of thought when doing so, and so had not looked at it in the right way. Also, I’d been distracted by a rather larger and grander (too grand) house almost across the street from it. As soon as I thought about what I’d designed last year, and so rejected the house across the street, I realized that this one was the house I’d been looking for all along. So I took a couple of hurried surreptitious reference photos (while walking past pretending to be fiddling with my phone), and went home and laid out some of the dimensions I’d guessed for it.

I worked up some made up floor plans (based on my story’s needs and my memory of the interior of houses like this that I remember, and then I decided to build it […] Click to continue reading this post →

Graphic

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This was a fun assignment. I’m giving a talk (“Graphic Adventures in Science Outreach”) on Friday to my colleagues and friends at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and they asked me to send a graphic to them to use for the poster. So I spent a bit of time digging into my database of drawings for The Project and threw something together pretty quickly. I rather like it. (You will maybe recognize that drawing from an earlier post – I added in an earlier stage, and then a drawing of a hand I’d done for something else…) By the way, it is not an event open to the general public and is by invitation only, so just showing up won’t get you in.

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

LA Times Festival of Books 2012

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Don’t forget the big event of the Spring! The LA Times Book Festival is the weekend of the 21st and 22nd April, and we’ll be hosting it on the USC campus. The website is here for more information, and start booking your tickets (free) for the various panels you plan to visit.

I’m also looking forward to the Book Awards on the night of the 20th. It’s always fun and interesting, with a great reception at the end. I’ve no idea if I’ll get tickets to all that this year (but I hope so, since three friends of mine are presenting [update: see here to purchase some]), but in any case it’ll be interesting to hear the results of the awards in the various categories again this year. The list of nominees is here. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Inquiries

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9:30am, my office. Phone rings. I get it on the first ring.

Hello?

Oh. Is that… Professor… Johnson?

Yes.

Oh! I was not expecting to… Well I’m watching this program, and had some questions…

I see.

Well, when you say…

Well, who am I talking to?

Oh, I’m [name].

Hi.

Hi… So, when you say millions of years, even billions of years in these programs… do you mean earth years? or, um, do you mean space years?

Oh, that’s a good question. I mean the regular years. Earth years, if you like.

Oh. So these things are really that old.

Oh, yes. They are.

I have one more question.

Of course, please go ahead.

Michio Kaku says that the universe is full of many things and all you have to do is ask for something and you’ll get it. How do you go about doing that?

Uh… Well… I’m not sure I understand what that means…

Well, you know we come from supernovae…. and… we’re from space… and there are maybe lots of gods out there that we can ask for things…Kaku says we can just ask the universe. How does one do that?

Well… I am not sure what he had in mind. It might be…. might be best to ask him…. But maybe what he meant is that the universe is a very big place, with lots of things going on, and maybe he meant that there are all sorts of things you could find out there because it is so big and diverse… But perhaps he did not have in mind that a particular person could go out and get any of those things… but you might want to ask him. I can’t say for sure.

Oh, ok.

But I can tell you what I think. I think that while the universe is a big and exciting diverse place, it is still the case that a given individual only has limited access to all those things in it. It is a big place, and so you mostly only have access to what you can get to locally. Travelling around it takes a long time…

Oh, I see. Well, thank you.

And… thank you, by the way, for watching the program. I am glad you enjoyed it.

Yes, I love these programs.

I’m glad to hear that. I hope you continue watching and do tell your friends about them too. All the best.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

I enjoyed that chat. I love it when people are inspired to step away from their […] Click to continue reading this post →

Picasso and Einstein

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Tuesday evening was fun. My dear friend Amy French, who was hired to direct a production of Steve Martin’s play “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” had been been rehearsing her cast for a few weeks. She invited two people to come along as guests one evening to talk about Picasso and Einstein – their work discussed in the play (Cubism and Special Relativity), and the impact of their work on the world. Megan Mastroianni from the Art History department (see her in the center of the photo above – you can click it for a larger view) came along to talk about the Picasso aspect, and I talked about Einstein. It was a lot of fun, and verity informative for all concerned.

The cast were all assembled, and Einstein and Picasso were even in costume, as we […] Click to continue reading this post →

Conferring

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(Well, it’s not really the correct use of the term in the title, but I’m going to stick with it.) It has been a busy last several days, and so I’ve been quiet here. The last couple of days I’ve been at a conference in Pasadena. I’ve been enjoying the conference. There has been a host of interesting talks, and interesting people to talk to, including old friends I’m getting to catch up with a bit. It has been quite tiring though. I evidently don’t have the stamina I used to have for a schedule of eight talks in a day. Perhaps I never did.

On Thursday I managed to get an hour of David Gross’ time to sit down with me and […] Click to continue reading this post →