Category Archives: work

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 →

Inks in Sun

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I’ve been working when I can on the layouts of the first several pages of one of the stories I wrote in the Summer for The Project, and today I finally decided to do some inking on page one, sitting in the lovely sunshine we’ve been having. I am way behind, but struggle on. Lots of different things I’ve been experimenting with […] Click to continue reading this post →

Science Comics and Branded Content

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People often point to certain “science comics” as examples when I explain to them what The Project is about. In turn, I explain that while both things have science in them, and both things use sequential art, they’re not really the same. Not everyone gets it, but that’s ok. (If it helps, ask yourself if you would assume that I was writing a bodice-ripper for Mills and Boon or Harlequin if I said I were writing a novel in which there are elements of love, relationships, romance, etc., in it*.) There’s room for more than the “hey kids! science is awesome!” model, as fine a model as it is.

Since the confusion with that genre is so easily made I confess that I find myself reluctant to discuss it much here, lest I compound the confusion. That might be silly. Anyway, as an exception, I thought I’d point to a little collection of comic covers (and an extract from an interior) that the Washington Post has on its Innovations site as a piece about the movement in the fifties to get kids interested in science, through the big popular culture medium of the time – comics!

I wonder how much it worked, as compared to other efforts at the time. Is it even measurable? (For example, I think that the stuff I do in science outreach helps the cause of strengthening science (and its understanding) in […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Dancers

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Yesterday I went along to a friend’s dance class to sit and watch the proceedings and sketch a few gestures as they flit by…. It was fun!

I wasn’t entirely true to the process that I had set out to follow – a light touch with relatively few swift strokes – since I found that often when that worked, I was tempted to do a bit more finish work than I should, sometimes way too much… but hey, it was fun and I got something out of it, certainly getting some nice gestures here and there.

This is a very different process of drawing from some of the other things I’ve described here before… It is closer to the sort of drawing I do of people on public transport (catching glimpses and building a sense of the person, not a full, careful portrait since you can’t stare), but not entirely since of course you don’t have the luxury of stillness… Instead you try to internalize some of the shapes you see, and try […] Click to continue reading this post →

Scribbling about Quantum Gravity

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So I mentioned that I was doing some more material for the Nova people, via their website. (See here for some earlier material about Multiverses.) They’ve a blog called The Nature of Reality with contributions from many interesting people. Well, now they’re featuring those pencasts I think I told you about in an earlier post.

The pencasts are all about Quantum Gravity, a major research topic in physics. I talk about what it is and why we care about it. I speak and write, scribble and draw and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tune In!

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Later today, there’ll be a joint seminar by physicists from ATLAS and CMS, the two experimental halls at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) looking for evidence of the Higgs boson. This will be the first official announcement of the physics seen (or not seen) by the combined results from both independent searches. Neither search has enough data to announce a discovery of anything (as far as I’ve heard) and the combined results would not constitute one either, but people are hoping for at least some nice hints of something suggestive that support each other. We shall see! this is an exciting time, as you’ve read me say before, and so I recommend looking out for what will be announced. Even a negative result (e.g., “we’ve found nothing yet”) […] Click to continue reading this post →

Goldilocks Final

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So it is the final exam for my quantum field theory class tomorrow, and today I need to write it and typeset it. I’d given them a choice of exam. They seemed to want a take-home exam, but I warned them that a take-home is probably going to be way more challenging. I’d be thinking up newer, harder material that you can’t just google the results for. An in-class exam has a time limit, which seems to freak people out, but on the other hand (assuming the examiner (me) is a reasonable person – and I think I’ve given them every reason to believe that) it is likely to be written to be solvable in the assigned couple of hours. So there is a much stricter limit to the length or depth of what they’re going to be asked to do. If they’ve really been following along in the class and doing the homework, they should be able to get most of the exam done without breaking a sweat in 3/4 of the time allowed… maybe the last 1/4 of it might need a bit of furrowing of the brow, squinting the right way, scribbling hurriedly here and there, but in the spirit of a challenge, not torture. Even if they don’t get every last part solved, a well-designed exam will give them several opportunities to show off what they’ve learned.

I like setting take-home exams too, but I’ve a soft spot for in-class exams, I’ll admit. As you may have guessed, I loved in-class exams when I was a student. Yeah, I’m weird. This does not mean that I always scored super-well on them, but I enjoyed the […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Splash of Colour

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As compensation for the rather incomplete and patchy sketch of the last post, here’s a sketch that’s at least more uniformly incomplete (!) that you might recognize from a while back. The difference here is that this is an early experiment with applying splashes of (mostly flat) colour directly to my pencil sketches digitally, as an alternative approach to half tone, etc. I did this back in May.

In fact, you’ve seen several better examples since (for example here, here (well, not all flats there), and here (also […] Click to continue reading this post →

What Goes Around…

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So you probably heard about the remarkable wind storm in the region that hit last Wednesday night. It was quite the storm indeed. I was out in it almost at its peak, and so was reminded of just how devastating concentrated gusts of wind can be, even for a short while. Strangely, while houses on several neighbouring streets had lost electricity, and even some on my street, I’d managed to not have any extended electricity outage (although I think something did take place in that regard while I was sleeping). Several friends and colleagues had no electricity for days after, so I’ve been wondering what I did to dodge that bullet.

Well, as though not to leave me out, last night I came home to find that it was my turn to have a disruption, although it was rather an odd one… some systems in the house had electricity, and some did not… The few things that did were some lights that came on about 1/4 the brightness they normally would. Various other systems were unable to deal with this sort of meagre supply and either were complaining or just refusing to operate. Strange.

Anyway, it made me glad that I had gone out, since I’d have been all frustrated had I intended to do a lot of work indoors. I’d gone out to sit in a studio and do a bit of drawing from a live model, for practice. It has been a while since I’ve been to a “drop […]

Anyway, it made me glad that I had gone out, since I’d have been all frustrated had I intended to do a lot of work indoors. I’d gone out to sit in a studio and do a bit of drawing from a live model, for practice. It has been a while since I’ve been to a “drop […] Click to continue reading this post →

Almost at an End

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I’ve had a fun time over the last few lectures with some more mature topics, pointing the students to things that they will see more (I hope) in the advanced class next semester. We covered the large N Gross-Neveu model in some detail, giving me the opportunity to give a glimpse of several important topics and techniques… at large N the 2 dimensional model’s solution is exact, and it shows important phenomena such as spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, dynamical mass generation for the fermions and dimensional transmutation. These are all important phenomena shared by (the more difficult to study) quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong nuclear interactions. (See an earlier post about some of these properties and what they are… there’s also a mention of a new general level book that goes into some detail on the physics and the history.)

The other thing I took some time to explore was the diagrammatics of the model, and the interesting patterns that emerge […] Click to continue reading this post →

More Mannequins

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So, this weekend I am determined to get fully pencilled at least one page of this new story for the graphic novel (the one featuring science as the main character… follow the link for more).

(I had a fantasy that by the end of this weekend the page would be inked and painted as well, but I spent a bit of time on teaching myself a new set of techniques instead, which will feed into much of what is to come… so I am behind.) So I’ve designed the interiors, done all the layouts for this page, and am very happy with it. I have done the first pass at the accurate pencil-work, and there it is on the left. Those mannequins from before are back, now fully worked out in perspective for you. Takes a long time, as I’m rusty, but it’ll gather pace now, as I clothe them in flesh, then cloth (and some leather), and also the space they are in. Compare to the rough layout of this same page from a previous post.

The story? Well, not giving away anything in detail, but the two characters you saw conversing in an earlier story had met before. This is the story in which they meet for […] Click to continue reading this post →