Category Archives: work

Bed Post

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I’ve a big meeting in the morning at 9:00am and have not the slightest bit of sleepiness in me at all, and it is 11:30pm. This may have something to do with me making a pot of coffee at about 9:00pm after deciding that it was way too early to go to sleep and I should do some work. I’ve done some, and now im in bed. Let’s see if a little blogging off the cuff about some internal stuff helps…

Well, sort of internal. Pretty sure you would not want full-on internal stuff. Even I don’t know what’s in there all the way down…

….hmmm, and now it is 13 minutes after midnight. The intervening time was spent prepping a draft of what I expect will be the next post, involving generating a video and uploading it to YouTube and so forth. Do have a look.

One of the more interesting things from today was getting excited about a paper I was asked to referee. It turned out that I really liked it a lot. I’d somehow missed it in the regular scheme of things, and so this time around I get to say that refereeing was really useful for me. I cannot tell you which paper it s, unfortunatley. It was actually about something that I’d planned to try to do myself, before I got distracted by another set of projects and never returned to the issue… So it was nice, a bit of the way through, to suddenly realize what was going on and sit up and take note. I’ve a few minor comments to the authors to encourage a bit of clarity in the presentation, but other than that my report will be “nicely done, chaps”. It has all served the purpose of reminding me to get back to some of those projects I had in mind three years ago. (Three years already! Geez…)

Was chatting with a bunch of different sorts of physicists today. It was enjoyable.[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Heads Up

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The last day or two I’ve paused from various things due to various other things intervening and competing for time. For work toward the project in the in-betweens, I’ve decided to do a bit of study (really, re-study and move things forward a bit) of head construction… mostly working on two key things: (1) Variety of types and (2) more solidity and, er, sculptedness…. This will help with improved production and character design and so forth later on, for The Project.

All while still keeping speed at a good clip. At the right is a quick study I did toward the end of the day today. It is rough, and I am focusing on overall structure, so forgive the crudity. I’d been working entirely with pencil earlier in the day, so this was a change of medium, and a change of pace, that is often useful for getting nice flow. The medium? I used the app Brushes on the iPad. So there’s the one thin stroke of black, using a stylus. I’d done a rough framework of blue underneath first, for layout and bulk.

Just for fun, I’ve included something else you might find interesting. I have […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales from the Industry XXXVII – Firestarter

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Well, Wednesday was unexpectedly exhausting, but quite a day. I intended to do a step by step report as I went along, but in the end we were too busy for me to do that, so instead I’ll give you a summary from memory. My instructions were to meet at 5:00am (yes, I know, 5:00am!) in the Temecula area with the film crew and a senior representative from the fire department. This meant leaving the night before and staying in a hotel nearby, so that I only had to get up at 4:30am instead of the two hours or more I’d have needed to otherwise. The meet went well (even with the slight confusion over two strip malls on opposite sides of the street both with a Starbucks, the meeting point…) and we set off in two vehicles into the brush.

Our goal was a particular area where we were going to take part in a key operation of the forestry and fire department (and related services the names of which I’ve forgotten) – a controlled or “prescribed” burn. The burn will act as a rather excellent analogue of a much larger issue of scientific interest, the main subject of the episode. I’ll let you actually watch the episode to learn more, so that I don’t spill the beans.

I say take part since we were not only going to film it (in 3D), but I would be – in my role as a sort of host of this segment – interviewing the Battalion Chief (Julie Hutchinson) about the burn, and then helping burn some of it myself! It’s certainly not every day one gets to help burn 100 acres – safely and legally!

It was a huge amount of fun, right from the morning briefing (6:00am), the borrowing of odd bits of safety equipment from various members of the crew so that our crew, and yours truly, were safely kitted out, to being instructed on camera by one of the fire chiefs how to use the drip torch (there’s one on the left) to set little pools of fire in the brush the required distance apart to get the required burn rate…

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Reaching Out…

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So I’ve been involved in two or three shoots so far (I forget which) for the new series. It has been good, overall, since I’ve been pleased to help out with explanations of various physics ideas here and there where I can. I’ll be winding down on all this soon since (a) I must get back to working on other things, and (b) I will be going away from the area for a chunk of time, so there’s a bit of juggling going on, I think, to find some space and time to include some more contributions from me for various episodes. I think I’ll end up being in three of them, if I recall correctly, and have had to turn down shoots on various others for a variety of reasons. Most of the reasons are to do with scheduling, but at least one was simply because I figured I’d be the wrong (or at least, very certainly not the most right) guy for the job. There’s a move […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales from the Industry XXXVI – 3D at the Fun Fair

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Thursday’s shooting day was tiring, but fun overall. It started in the (highly unusual) June rain that we had in the first area we shot in – Griffith Park. We were at those famous (man made) caves that you may well have seen in one or other movie Western, or TV series like the classic old Batman show, where they played the role of the batcave. Don’t ask me why we were there. I think it was just a nice backdrop for the physics I was talking about to camera, between rain showers and screaming bouts from some, er, Angry Birds*. Crows, I think they were. It was cold, and I was a bit low-spirited and off my game as a result. I did not even remember to take a picture for you…

Then we headed South -and warmer- to Knott’s Berry Farm. Now, I’d vaguely heard of such a place, but I will admit that I had no idea that it was so close to Los Angeles. We were there to shoot lots of moving, interacting bodies, as a series of analogies for some other physics issues…and this is the perfect place for that, with all the various fun rides there are within easy reach. It was fun to enter the park through the service entrance, and then emerge through a secret door in the middle of the special universe they’ve created for the customers! We wandered off to find the various things we […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales from the Industry XXXV -Tinkering with the Universe

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One very good piece of good news from last month was the announcement that one of the TV series I have done a lot of work for over the last five or so years (gosh, has it been that long?) has been renewed for another season. I’m being deliberately vague here and not naming it since I do not know if it has been officially announced yet. (On the other hand, nobody has told me that it is a secret…) (You can see many of my posts on this sort of thing here.)

It’s great that the parent channel has again continued to invest in science programming, and people seem to like the show a great deal. As I’ve said here in the past, I am very encouraged by the very wide range of types of people who stop me on the street (or bus, subway, bar, cafe, plane – yes, I’ve had show-related encounters in all of these places… people who like science shows are everywhere!) to tell me they like the show, ask questions, or just say thanks for my on-screen explanations and demonstrations. It’s a diverse range of people in terms of careers, race, gender, age, and so forth, which I am very pleased to note, and I do very much hope that TV executives take note of this when making decisions about future programming for their outlets.

It is great to get the chance to contribute a little bit again, even though it takes a bit of time away from other projects (particularly right now, The Project). As far as I know, so far I’ll be in two or three episodes, although there may be more (that’s all […] Click to continue reading this post →

Sew What

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This morning, before starting what turned out to be a long day of work, I did some sewing. I realized the day before last that the umbrella that protects me from the sun’s rays a lot of the time was filthy with dust and mildew. Realizing that this was connected to it never having been washed in its seven or so years in my possession, I set about removing it from the frame (a task that involved 16 screws, interestingly) and popped it into the washing machine. It emerged with a lot of the mildew greenery still attached and so I soaked it for a while in diluted bleach* and then rewashed… It emerged rather splendidly clean, but then I noticed that all those years in the sun and other elements had rather taken a toll on a lot of the stitching in various places (perhaps the vigourous cleaning contributed a bit too?), and so before putting […] Click to continue reading this post →

Learning Goals

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Two things:

(1) If I did not already have a long set of deal-making reasons why the iPad is a marvellous tool for work and more – see some of the things I said in a post or few last Summer (here, here, here) – there’s a new reason. The New Yorker on the iPad is wonderful. It is so beautifully laid out and feels like the magazine, and then, rather than just reproducing the magazine, it goes beyond it. It has been around for some time now, but previously you had to pay for the iPad app for it even if you were a print subscriber, which seemed utterly ridiculous to me. They changed this at some point, and now, you just enter your subscription details and you can get the latest issue, and every issue going back several decades. More things to read on the bus, without any extra weight to carry around. Hurrah! (Will this cure my New Yorker Problem? My inability to throw old print issues away? Make me get rid of all the issues I’ve received since I was a postdoc in the early 90s? Er… I doubt it…)

(2) There’s an excellent article, in the June 6th New Yorker, by Louis Menand entitled […] Click to continue reading this post →

Stick with the round balls, for now

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So, apparently, electrons are round. Very very round. So when drawing those terribly wrong but evocative pictures of atoms as a lump in the middle (the nucleus) with a collection of round balls in orbit around them (the electrons), go ahead and make them nice and round. Very round. How “very” are we talking about here? According to this report on the recent experimental measurements in the Guardian:

Were the electron scaled up to the size of the solar system, any deviation from its roundness would be smaller than the width of a human hair […]

So you’d have to be using a pretty impressively sharpened pencil to draw it that accurately round. But give it a try.

Ok, what’s the story here? Well, oddly, this seemed to be on a lot of news sources yesterday, and I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe because it mostly seemed to be pitched as a “back to the drawing board for the theorists” story (two major sources I heard had it spun this way), which editors seem to like running with. And the roundness? What’s that about? Well, what they’re taking about is the result of a long careful set of measurements done by Hudson et. al. at Imperial College (my […] Click to continue reading this post →

Momentus Mingus

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So at the end of last week, it was that time. I’d been doing temporary countermeasures over the past month or two to put it off, but it was inevitable. I tried to run Illustrator, the program with which I do my painting for The Project, and while opening, it stopped and complained – I’d run out of hard drive space. Somehow, since what feels like only yesterday, I have filled (well, with 4GB spare) 320 GB of had drive space with…. Well… Who knows what? Lots of little bits of everything, I expect. So after a bit of research, I decided to go wild and get a 750GB 7200 rpm drive from Seagate – new on the market this year, apparently. Usually I wait for new things like this to have their creases ironed out, but it seems that they’re really just gluing two smaller drives together, and their 500GB version of the same thing seems to be thought of as reliable, so I decided what the hey. And this whole series of drives is called the Momentus, so surely that’ll be a good thing too.

This meant a fast trip to the always-fun Fry’s Electronics, in Burbank, about which you’ve maybe read a post from me before. Fast because it closes at 9:00pm and I was leaving the house at 8:30pm, but wanted to get it so I could begin the cloning process (see later) overnight, so as to get back to work on the computer the next day.

The trip was great, as I expected, made even better by the fact that the things I wanted were actually on the shelves – said hard drive (a steal at $99), an enclosure for it to make it USB accessible ($9.99) while I clone my existing drive to it, and some tools ($13.99), since Apple, fresh in their new role as Evil Empire, keep changing the screws on the inside of their electronics to odd sizes and shapes to discourage DIY work, trying to force you to take it into their amusingly called Genius Bar… Happily, people have been making screwdrivers to undo the five round pointed head screws on such models and selling them in kits. I found one. Hurrah! (Turns out that I did not need the one for the pentascrew… it was introduced on a different model than mine. The smaller Phillips head driver was good to have though, and as […] Click to continue reading this post →

Chatter

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The characters in the story (“The Arena”) that I’m currently working on for the graphic novel are firmly mid-conversation here… (See more on The Project here.) Been away from it for some weeks now. Need to re-engage and push this one to the end. For those interested in the process, here’s a series of illustrative clips of: (4) rough pencils and layout (done on a bus ride back from Westside one day), (3) tight pencils (done that second morning of the retreat between breakfast and lunch), (2) inks, (1) inks, flat colours and letters (bubbles present, but letters hidden):

(1)

(2) […] Click to continue reading this post →

Telling the story of the Revolution

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The good people at Revolution Books made me quite at home when I arrived, and the talk (see previous post for background) was fun. There were about 20 people there in the end, all very engaged and asking many excellent questions*. So I spilled over the allotted time as a result, but in a good way, since people really wanted more, it seemed. I managed to explain all the key parts of Special Relativity that I wanted to, unpacking in a way that seemed to work, and even went on to explain the Equivalence Principle and set up the key aspects of General Relativity.

The prep for the talk was a blast… I’d just written out some thoughts on several sheets of large drawing paper – the big stuff I like to do large life […] Click to continue reading this post →

Revolution!

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Ah. Should have mentioned this before. Tomorrow I’ll be talking at Revolution Books. No, I won’t be stirring up political buzz or anything like that, rallying the troops, singing the songs and so forth. Sorry to disappoint. I’ll be there doing what I usually do – trying to put a bit of science out there among the rest of the culture where it belongs. I ran into Keith James of Revolution Books in the market one day some time ago and he recognized me from a tv show explaining science – and I was hanging out with a writer friend whose work he was a fan of, and so it was a two-birds-one-stone thing for him, stopping us to say hi. He raised the idea of me coming and explaining Einstein’s Relativity at the bookstore, and I readily agreed. It has been a long time in the making -largely due to me- but we finally settled on a date, and it is tomorrow. I also suggested that I put them in touch with a friend at the Griffith Observatory so that after my […] Click to continue reading this post →

Done. Sort Of.

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Last night I graded the exam for my advanced string theory course, computed the final grades, and will enter them into the System today. Hurrah! It was a fun class to teach, maybe even to learn (you’ll have to ask them). The final exam took me most of Sunday to write and LaTeX carefully, checking for typos since there were a few “show this” type questions where I gave a complicated expression that they had to derive. In […] Click to continue reading this post →