Category Archives: work

A Snowflake on Campus

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Ever heard of the Mosely Snowflake Sponge? There is one being constructed on campus here at USC right now! (The image on the left is the poster for the event.) The fractal was discovered by engineer Jeannine Mosely, and she did a similar construction (of a different fractal, the Menger Sponge) some years ago out of folded business cards (see here for some great images!), and the same thing is being done here. You can learn more about the project here. Margaret Wertheim, of the Institute for Figuring, is running this project, with the help of Tyson Gaskill. Everyone is invited to join in. You can just show up and fold a few cubes as you pass by. I took a picture and made encouraging remarks on this visit. (My defense is that I’d just given an hour and a half presentation, it was getting late into the night, and I was tired.)

There’s Margaret and Tyson working on constructing it, alongside a colleague of theirs […] Click to continue reading this post →

Documenting

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Speaking of film projects involving science, I’m involved in two new ones I’ve been meaning to tell you about. I’m working on producing a short film about the Aspen Center for Physics, to be used in the upcoming 50th Anniversary celebrations. My partner in crime on this is Bob Melisso, who I’ve worked with before a number of times, and it’s already been interesting, and fun. I think that the final piece ought to be interesting at the very least. I’ve been trying to work in a very particular look and feel for the film that reflects something about the nature of the work that goes on at the center (both its content and how it is done), and so there’ll be lots of chalk, scribbling on boards, reflections on the creative process and how a place like the Aspen Center helps, and so on and so forth.

We’ll be shooting from time to time over the early and middle Spring, and doing the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Random Party Snippet

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Got a bit of work done on The Project yesterday. Some pencilling, inking and coloring – all on one busy page. I don’t want to show you the whole thing, so here is a corner of one large panel (click for larger view).

There’s a party going on…

It is an interesting process, designing backgrounds… So here I’m thinking of what everyone is wearing, how to place them in the field of view, what colours they are wearing and so forth so as not to distract from the principals, how the wait staff might be dressed, what drinks they might be carrying, and so on and on.
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Has the Fat Lady Sung?

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The OPERA experiment has reported that they may have found the source of the timing discrepancy that produced the result that neutrinos moved apparently faster than light. It seems that there was a faulty connection that affected the timing measurements. Here’s a physics world article on the matter, along with a link to a CERN press release. (Note that there are some doubts related more directly to the GPS timing signals they used, which on their own would make for even faster neutrinos, but clearly there’s cause to really doubt their strong claim from back in the Fall and take a step back.)

You’ll recall the huge press storm about it last Fall, accompanied by all the usual hysteria about the establishment (this time, Einstein) being overturned. I blogged about it here, with the noncommittal title “No, Uh-uh, Nope, Nuh-uh”. They’ll be doing more experiments later in the year, as will a number of other groups, in order to solidify the results one way or another. It’s clear that most people have decided the whole business is over, and will turn away from it to other things. Some will be pleased, some annoyed, some confused, and so forth.

My hope is (as I discussed in the article I wrote back then) that this gets as much […] Click to continue reading this post →

Entangled

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Gosh, I got a bit swamped there over the last week. Several things took me away from sitting down and doing a blog post, including teaching my class (more on that shortly), working on a film project (more on that longly) and doing my taxes (late this year – bah!) and the usual raft of committee meetings and so forth. But one of them was locking myself away for two days with my computer and a web connection and writing a paper from start to finish with Tameem Albash. We’d more or less completed the bulk of the project over two months ago, with some very interesting results that we’d talk about from time to time to try to understand what was going on, but I held things up, being distracted by several other things (some of which you know about from this blog). We decided two weeks ago that we’d just finish the thing once and for all, and then somehow ten days went by with me not getting to it. Then I decided to close the door and just do it. So from lunchtime on Friday through lunchtime on Sunday I became a recluse (kind of) and I wrote, in turn with Tameem, as we emailed and IMed back and forth, until we had a nice paper entitled “Holographic Studies of Entanglement Entropy in Superconductors”.

It is a project I’ve been hoping to do for a long time, but not all the pieces were on the market until late last year. The entanglement entropy has been a quantity of interest among physicists in various fields for years, especially in the condensed matter and quantum information community, and is regarded […] Click to continue reading this post →

Incomplete Subtractions

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Well, it has been well over two months since I popped into the studio I sometimes visit to to a “drop in and draw” session. (I’ve spoken about the value of such practice here before.) Although I’ve been drawing a bit here and there on the bus and subway to keep practicing, and also doing some work on some pages of The Project (actually, some pretty detailed finish work on a few pages I’m quite happy with), I was not sure whether I’d have the right chops to do a good job at the session, and expected that if I went I’d have a frustrating -but of course valuable- evening of knocking off some rust and oiling the wheels again. So I went along yesterday.

Strangely, it felt like it was going to be a good session as I approached, and as I settled down and began to try to capture the 2 minute poses, and then the 5 minute poses, I felt like I was flowing along pretty well. It helped that the model on duty is […] Click to continue reading this post →

Double Equivalence

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Wow. So I’ve been wondering how far behind I might be in my lectures for the General Relativity class. I seemed to spend a bit more time than I remember teaching a recap of how to think about rotations, using it as an operational and mathematical brace upon which to build my review/revisit of Special Relativity. I was definitely convinced that I was a bit behind after two lectures on introducing how to study a little geometry using intrinsic quantities rather than by reference to embedding it inside another geometry (e.g., learning to think about a two-sphere in its own right instead of as the surface of a ball – this prepares you for thinking about a three-sphere, for which the ball would be hard to visualize, or draw), and so forth. All solidly useful material for the students (in this and so many other physics pursuits to come), so I do not regret spending time on it, but I did wonder about where I was in the journey…

Anyway, I got to the statement of the Equivalence Principle yesterday, the foundation of the whole of General Relativity. I was feeling quite pleased that we’re starting on this now, putting to use all the hard work we’ve been doing conceptually so far… and thought I’d do a quick post here on the blog to celebrate that we’ve got there. I thought I’d entitle the post “Equivalence”.

I started typing and then thought I’d see if I’d written anything about it here before. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Gold and Neutrinos!

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Here are two of the top prize winners in the competition (see earlier posts for the others, and for the full list). The 2nd Prize and 3rd Prize winners are below! Consider watching them in full HD. (Sadly, the 1st Prize winner, Time, (by Kevin Le and Edward Saavedra) uses … Click to continue reading this post →

Reports on the Night

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Well, it seemed to go well. I rambled too long and unstructuredly in my off-the-cuff speech (and long thank-you list) at the beginning, but nobody seemed to mind so much since the films were the main focus, and people loved the program. I only got two shots of the activities worth sharing since I was occupied with being host and so forth… but there were so many reporters there, and so I expect there’ll be more showing up all over the place. There were about 140 people in attendance, I was told, which is nice to hear.

People seemed to really love the whole idea of the competition and showcase, and really to understand what I am trying to do with this whole program, so that’s heartening. I hope this also translates into lots of interest next year, with even more filmmakers joining in and making films (and faculty being supportive and helping out as matchmakers and so forth).(This is all assuming I find a sponsor to fund the thing.)

Oh! I opened envelopes Oscar-style and gave out the awards. Here are the results:

1st place (and $2500): Time (Kevin Le, Edward Saavedra)

2nd place (and $1500): It’s All in You (Maria Raykova, Andy Su, Jabril Mack, Mara Guevarra, Kayla Carlisle – a freshman team!)

3rd place (and $500): Superluminal Neutrinos in 5 Minutes (Josh Heineman, Nate Fulmer, Michael Powell)

Honourable Mention (and $500): Dance with Newton’s Laws (Linda Jules, Anna Zaferiou)

Honourable Mention (and $500): Yaddda, Yadda, Yada (Kimberly Laux, Simon Wilches Castro, Scott MacDonald, Anna Drubich, Laura Cechanowicz)

(Filmmaker’s roles and the synopses can be found here.)

Then there was a surprise extra prize from Richard Weinberg (Professor in the Division of Animation and Digital Arts). He came up and gave a limited edition print […] Click to continue reading this post →

CelebritySC is on the Story!

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So I learned about a blog called CelebritySC recently, when they got in touch to ask me about the science film competition, and whether they could attend the showcase and cover it as press. (They also asked me some background about it, and posted an interview here.)

They’ve been doing update posts on the whole thing in the days leading up to the event, and I just saw that they’re even making guesses about which films will win prizes! From Anya Lehr’s piece, I’d guess she’s been chatting with the filmmakers to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Crunch Time

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I’m on the bus on the way to campus, it is pouring with rain, the heat is too high on aboard the bus, and I am late. And a bit tired. I was up until 1:00am crunching numbers. The main stage of the judging for the science film competition ended last night and I went into the system to do the data analysis. I’d designed a spreadsheet on which each of the ten judges give a score for each film in eight different categories which I tried to make roughly orthogonal. I set it up so that they could go to an online form (having viewed the films on a private channel on YouTube) and enter the scores, an action which in turn populates the spreadsheet for me. (Google docs rocks!) They could also enter optional comments about each film that could be useful for any discussion that needs to be had. So what I was doing was slicing the database of scores to see if I could get a ranking of the films to take into a face to face meeting with some of my fellow local judges today. Then I wanted to find ways of laying it all out in a way that was easy to read for everyone and in the end this morning I printed out a giant version of the entire spreadsheet on several sheets of 11×17 and glued them together to make a big colour coded foldout for us all to sit around.

The films? I’m delighted with the turnout as it shows the kind of variety of film I’d hoped would be produced. There are eight films, with films that are illustrated explainers on the one hand (with with animation or live action or sometimes both), through drama and narrative, to reflective overviews of a topic on the other, sometimes venturing into art inspired by science ideas.

(Above is a graphic made by Laurie Moore In Dornsife communications from stills of the films.)

This variety makes for a hard task in coming up with the prize winners, since […] Click to continue reading this post →

Evolution of a Poor Joke

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On Wednesday I made a snap decision on my feet in class and went with it. I’d done this several years ago at the same point… Let me explain.

At some point in teaching Relativity I come to do some thought experiments that follow through the consequences of Einstein’s postulates about the speed of light being constant for all observers and that all inertial observers are equivalent… You rapidly discover things like time dilation and length contraction this way. The length contraction discussion usually involves someone riding an object of a given length (from their perspective) at velocity v, and how someone on the ground watching them go by sees the length as shorter… This is Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction…
Well the point is that you need to do some careful accounting and so it is good to label the measurements made by each person carefully, and the times on their clocks, and so on and so forth. Back in the middle 90s I used to teach this at Kentucky using a rocket, with observer [tex] O[/tex] riding on the rocket, with observer [tex] O^\prime[/tex] on the ground. Times measured by each were denoted [tex]t[/tex] and [tex]t^\prime[/tex], of course.

Then one day in 2001 when teaching it in Durham (I’d moved to England) I realized that it would be worthwhile updating it a bit, so in view of the buzz about the books and the film of that year, I changed it to a broom, with Harry riding on it during a game of Quidditch, with Hermione looking on. This made also for nice notation, with times measured by each being [tex]t_{\rm Ha}[/tex] and [tex]t_{\rm He}[/tex]. This state of affairs persisted in my notes for some years.

Then yesterday just before starting that thought experiment I decided that it was a bit tired, and the last of the films was last year, and this crop of students probably think of the whole Harry thing as all so last decade anyway.

So I thought for a while, stopping mid-sentece. The students looked at me as though I was nuts (understandably) and I tried to decide what to change it to. Back to a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Preparing…

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Ah, preparations. In a few days it’ll be time to start teaching a new class. The new semester will begin. This means I need to start getting ready, but of course, in the last few days I’ve finally hit a nice groove on the work I’ve been doing on The Project, and have knocked out – wait for it – a whole page! Yeah, I know, it does not sound like much but this is between a host of other tasks (some of which I will tell you about) and it was a complex page and full of things I wanted to try for the first time, not to mention I had to knock off rather a lot of rust. Now the rust is off, I’d love to get more done, but alas… prep. I’d show you some of the results beyond the first panel I shared a few days ago (now with the colours adjusted a bit – not quite so red, etc), but the page is the first of a visual motif I want to save for later. So I won’t be able to share much of the progress on this story at all.

Anyway, the good news is that it is a class I started some years ago, and so I get to have a lot of fun with a new bunch of enthusiastic juniors and seniors, exploring a topic that never stops giving – General Relativity. (See this post and those linked within for reports on the teaching of the class last time, in 2008.) I don’t expect that there’ll be any filmmakers visiting the class this time (that time it resulted in the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Happy New Year!

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Well everyone, 2011 is drawing to an end, so I’d like to wish everyone a Happy New Year! for 2012. All the very best, and thanks for reading. See you for more next year.

As my New Year’s greeting image, I give you the results of yesterday’s work on The Project. It is the opening panel for the dialogue/story that I started ink work on.

I sat in the sun with ink pens, brush, and ink, and happily brought to life the panel I’d envisioned for some time. I like the results, even though it is not quite […] Click to continue reading this post →