Category Archives: work

Rain, Dear. Games. (1)

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double_rainbow_small So today’s rain-storm-driven activities involved staring out of the windows at various impressive downpours and marveling at the lightning and thunderclaps. This latter formed an interesting coincidence since I was reviewing grant proposals this morning, and one of them was about the science of certain types of high energy phenomena associated with lightning bolts. They were good to see, since Southern California (at least the LA part) has relatively few and relatively lame offerings in the way of thunderstorms. I miss them terribly.

In the early afternoon, we finally decided to go off to a museum. A good indoor activity. However, we got caught in a downpour between parking and museum and decided that, despite the two giant umbrellas we had deployed, our coverage was wanting and we were all too damp to continue. So we returned home. It was a good […] Click to continue reading this post →

Entropy at Play

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entropy_demoWhile out and about this rainy Saturday I thought I’d buy a set of dominoes with which to play with my young visitor. During such play, since he started to count the numbers of dots on them spontaneously, and since as we unpacked them he exclaimed “zero!” excitedly at the one with no dots on (I found this impressive), I figured I’d encourage him to place them in order. This went along fine until he discovered that he was finding numbers he’d found before. I encouraged him to lay them next to each other when they match (this shows what we’d call “degeneracy” in my area), and carry on. Eventually, he found the nice shape in the picture. I decided it was a bit early to explain to a four year old that he’d just illustrated […] Click to continue reading this post →

Week Ending

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No, I’ve not forgotten you. It has been a rather busy and very stressful few days, and I’ve only just arrived at a place I can take a break, sit down, and type a bit to the blog. I do not know how long this break will be before the next thing comes up. I’m going to reflect a bit, with no particular aim in mind, so beware.

After a not too hectic Sunday, which saw me shopping and preparing the house for visitors, ending in a Holiday dinner gathering at the President’s house where I finally met Murray Gell-Mann (more later, I hope), things descended into a crush of colliding events. Monday saw a long job search committee meeting and then the big final exam for my Physics 151 class. Due to delays and various earlier logistical constraints on my part during the booking of the flight, the exam of course coincided with the landing at the airport of my mother, who is going to be visiting from England for a few weeks. So that was quite a hectic time, in the end (saved by some substitution help), as was the grading of the exam the next day, which involves (with my colleague who also teaches on this course) organizing several TAs, getting them to solve the problems first so that they can properly understand how to grade them, writing solutions, and so on and so forth…

Beyond that, Tuesday is all a blur, except for one sharp point that obscured everything else. While driving along from one place to another (yes, I do drive from time to time), there was a small dull thumping sound and suddenly my dashboard went a bit weird, showing symbols I don’t see during normal operations, followed by a loss of power steering…. I focused on getting home, as I’d left my mum home on her own all day (not very hostly of me), wrestling the car around the corners I needed to take – amazing how much we rely on power steering. Then the engine started to overheat, the temperature gauge measuring in the red… Was that a real reading, or […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Project – 3

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(Monday:) Sitting at the airport waiting for a visitor to arrive. Might as well tell you a bit more about The Project. (This is the third in a series of posts unveiling The Project. See here and here for the earlier ones.)

So the sample I ended with in the previous post was, I presume you have realized, a little attempt at irony and humour. While it does take a while to bring about the transformation of technique that I wanted, and while it has taken some time to explore and then make choices about the various techniques I want to use, it would be hilarious if that was the product so far. But this is not a joking matter. The whole process is very slow indeed, even when ticking along nicely, and additionally of course I’ve got this Professor gig I’m doing for most of my waking hours. So…

Anyway, samples of what I am doing are in order. Well, what I’ve worked up so far, in a prototype story, is only really an example of one story. So the whole thing won’t look like what you are about to see, for better or worse. This is because the outcome of trying to decide what visual style to use for the project was that I would use more than one style. Some stories will call for different styles.

Another key element I mentioned earlier is that I am having the dialogues (by the way, the working title is: The Dialogues. Yeah, I’m tricky that way…) take place in real settings, some of them may be familiar to you. So go right ahead and guess away. Here is a skyline from page one of the prototype story, helping to set the scene*…

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This prototype story, called The Arena, has a pair of characters accidentally (er…or maybe not accidentally!?) meeting again and picking up on a conversation. You can see one of them below and to the right, in one of my big scene-setting splash panels […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Project – 2

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A graphic novel. Yes, of course. (Continuing a series of posts revealing The Project. This is the second. Read the first to see how I got here.)

It makes perfect sense. Rather than hide the visual aspects of it all away in background, I’ll have it right up front. Having both images and words in my arsenal at the outset frees me up to do so much of what I want to do, in bringing the reader into the conversations through the characters, the locations, and in being able to go wherever I want either realistically, metaphorically, or representationally, in illustrating ideas and story. In fact, it is so utterly natural, given how we, the scientists, actually work on a day to day basis and talk to each other!

Actually, immediately it occurred to me that it is a graphic novel I needed to do, I wondered why nobody else in my subject areas (physics and so forth) has done it before. Before you jump in and start telling me about all the “science comics” out there, please note -given all I wrote in the last post and above- that this is not just more “science comics”, with some fun pictures employed to show things in various subjects. People usually mention things like the Cartoon Guides, and so forth. Those sorts of things are great, but definitely not what I am talking about. I’m getting at, or trying to get at, something quite different, at least in part. We shall see. It seems it me that there is way more to do with this incredibly powerful genre in science than has been done, and certainly in the corners of physics in which I lurk. I want to try.

It is still surprising to me, but when I say graphic novel, it is not uncommon for it to emerge that people have an odd idea of what I am talking about. Some think that it is cartoons for children. No, it need not be for children, and it need not be cartoons. […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Project – 1

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It is midnight and I really should get to sleep in order to wake up and work some more on editing the final exam for my class so that it can go to the printer by noon. But I’ve got several pokes from people clamouring to find out what The Project actually is, and I promised yesterday I’d start to spill the beans. Thanks for the interest! I think I’d better get at least some of it out there or I’ll have an angry mob by morning! So here goes. I will drag out the draft I sketched yesterday and beat it into shape:

So, as you may have guessed, The Project, which I’ve been mentioning here since a post way back in February, is a writing project, but it is somewhat different from what you might expect. The bottom line is that I hope that at some point into future you will be able to purchase a copy of your own, and that you will find it instructive, exciting, and enjoyable. At least.

Yes, it is a book about science. However… Well, here’s the thing. Over many years, people (friends, colleagues, potential agents and publishers, blog readers, etc) have been asking me when I am going to write my book. You know, the popular-level book that every academic who is interested in the public understanding of their field (as you know I am from reading this blog) is expected will write at some point. To be honest, I have given it some thought over the years, and it has been something I figured I might do at some point. In fact, several different ideas have occurred to me over the years, and I may well implement some of them at some point.

But a major thought began to enter my mind well over ten years ago. In my field, there is a rather narrow range of models for the shape of such books, usually involving about 80% of it being a series of chapters covering all the standard introductory material (some relativity, some quantum mechanics, and so forth) for the lay reader, before culminating in a chapter or two of what the researcher really wants to tell them about: some aspect of their research. This is a fine model, and it is great that people continue to write such books, and I will no doubt use that model one day, but to be honest, I don’t think there is any urgency for me to add to the canon yet another one of those books. Moreover, if you line examples of that type of book up against each other, you see that the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Of Kings, Princes, and Rogues

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harrys_harry_2I’ve been writing the final exam for my physics class all afternoon, and into the evening. After sending a version off to my colleague Doug for his comments, I left my office for the day shortly after 8:00pm, to do something completely different for a while. Where did I go? To a high school somewhere mid-city to watch a rehearsal/workshop for a production of Henry IV (parts 1 and 2).

A dear friend of mine has called upon his colleagues from stage and screen to put […] Click to continue reading this post →

Unveiling The Project

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So it is ten thirty at night* and I’m sitting on the slow bus home after spending an evening in a too-warm office working on various things. I think when I get to my ‘hood I will stop by a certain nice new bar that has opened up, say hi to the proprietors, and find out what nice beer or wine they want to interest me in. Then, after musing on the world there for a while, a slow walk in the direction of home.

Before all that, I think that while I sit here I’ll begin to write a post that will tell you a bit about The Project. I’ve been mentioning it a lot here without saying anything […] Click to continue reading this post →

Waiting, Planning

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20101207-134312.jpgWhile waiting on a phone call and various other things in my errand-run over to the West side in Santa Monica, I find myself sitting in one of my favourite places for coffee or lunch, eating my favourite thing on their menu. It is a branch of Le Pain Quotidien, and it is their ricotta, fig and honey open faced sandwich. Food of the Gods.

I have a few hours of interlude on this away mission, and so I’ve brought a bit of work with me since I don’t know exactly how long things will take. I’ve made some decent progress on The Project in the last few days, and although I need to do a lot more, I’ve been planning another stage of it, sketching out ideas and expanding on them. Some of this process was begun some time back on the iPad, and I’m now adding to the ideas on actual real paper, and pushing one of them to a slightly more refined level. It is a fun process, and certainly nice to be able to call up old scribblings wherever I am, since I now try to have everything on the pad. (see my earlier posts here and here for more on how I use this excellent tool for work, and I’ll be saying a bit more soon in relation to The Project.)

The teaching part of the semester is over. At least, the classroom […] Click to continue reading this post →

ALICE Publishes!

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Jacques Distler pointed out that ALICE has just published their first paper, only a little over a week after the beginning of the heavy ion phase of the LHC at CERN! Moreover, they are way ahead in energy of the previous heavy ion collision experiment (RHIC) and have verified “elliptic flow” (the main sign that the quark-gluon plasma behaves like a strongly coupled fluid, the big experimental surprise of some years back, with properties of a type that can be nicely captured using string theory models). Have a look at Jacques’ post here, and go directly to the paper of ALICE here.

Hurrah!

Please see my post from last week (“Experimental Excitement” was the apt title) about why I’m excited about all this!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Tales from the Industry XXXIII: Sometimes I Say No

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…But then I feel bad about it at times, especially when there are good people involved. I was contacted on Thursday by a producer I know (I’ve worked with her before) about contributing to a TV show on a certain topic. They wanted to shoot this week. I was to talk in very specific terms about one issue, but it would be then fit into a larger topic that the whole episode is about, and the big theme of the whole series. It turned out that I also had worked with the filmmaker (writer-director) for the episode as well, on various things for the series The Universe on the History Channel that, as you know, I contribute to a lot. (See here.)

So all seemed fine. My concerns about the topic and how my contribution might be edited began to fall away, since these are good people… I spoke on the phone about some of the ideas I could bring up, and how I might try to frame things, and maybe we’d talk again about days of the week to set up the shoot, and so forth. But I asked if I could see other examples of episodes from the series, just to make sure that I was ok with it all.

It turned out that they could show me them since they were online. I looked at them […] Click to continue reading this post →

Experimental Excitement!

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alice_frist_run_dataWell, this week is a big week, in some ways. The Large Hadron Collider has gone into a new phase! For a while, the experiment has turned aside from the task of searching for the origin of mass (the Higgs Particle, or whatever it is that mediates the generation of the masses of elementary particles – see earlier posts, and features like this, etc) and is turning to heavy ion collisions. Rather than studying processes in which only a few particles at a time are interacting at super-duper-uber-high energies, the experiment will instead collide together the nuclei of lead atoms, so that you get lots of particles colliding together and creating a messy “soup” of high energy stuff all together. The goal is to understand the constituent nuclear particles (quarks and gluons) working collectively at high temperature (and low to moderate density), instead of focusing on issues concerning individual fundamental particles. Today (starting late yesterday, actually) is an exciting day because it marks the first step on the journey to probe deeper into this physics. The ALICE experiment has started looking at these collisions. See top right for some screen-shots of the mess of particle tracks that are left after the soup flies apart. The trick is to analyze all these tracks from millions of such collisions to work out the properties of the soup.

As you perhaps know from reading this blog, while of course I’m interested in the behaviour of fundamental particles and the origin of mass, and so on and so forth, I’m very interested in this nuclear issue too. Some of the most interesting work that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Passing Star People

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John Williams in RehearsalYou might not know the name Maurice Murphy, but I am certain that you are likely to know – and maybe even be very familiar with – his work. His is the principal trumpet playing the lead themes in very many films with music by John Williams. I have for a long time been very impressed with how so many of those themes trip so easily off the tongue (physical or mental) and seem to fit together so well (just hum the Star Wars theme, and then follow it by the Superman theme, then the Indiana Jones theme, and so on). A lot of this is due to the fact that Williams (like most good composers) is a master at recycling and modifying, creating a cluster of much loved (deservedly) themes that accompany some of our favourite movie-going memories, but I now think that the other reason is that you’re hearing them all played by the same voice! That voice is the playing of Maurice Murphy, the truly wonderful trumpeter who Williams would specifically request to play the lead on recordings of his film music. Murphy died recently, and you can dig a bit more about him and explore what I’ve been telling you further by going to the London Symphony Orchestra’s site devoted to him […] Click to continue reading this post →

Practice

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During idle moments, when nobody is looking, we professors of the Dark Arts are known to practice various techniques. Just for fun, and to stay sharp, you understand. This was during the wait for the USC Presidential inauguration march to begin a couple of weeks ago. (See posts here and here.) As you can see, Nick Warner (right) and I (middle) are engaged in trying different approaches to a remote influence technique as Krzysztof Pilch (left) looks on at the results, somewhat amused. (Click for slightly larger view.)

inauguration_antics

All in good fun.

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Midterm Matters

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The midterm elections are being held across the USA today, and I am sitting on the sofa at home having a late dinner after giving the second midterm to my large physics class, but the title of this post refers to midterm feelings of mine that have to do with being in the middle of the semester. I realized the other day that I’ve been feeling like all of a sudden I was hugely busy with lots of things, feeling rather drained of energy on some days, and generally feeling pulled apart by doing too many things, helping out on too many tasks, and writing reports and letters and so forth. Then I checked the blog from around this time last year and discovered that in fact I was having the same sorts of feelings last year at around the same time. So I think there is maybe something about the Fall semester that means that by the middle of it one is (or at least feels) enmeshed in a near-quagmire. Perhaps. Anyway, part of my response to all that was to be quiet the last few days and take it easy on the running around. So that meant I did not go off to the West Hollywood Halloween Carnaval*, nor did I do a bunch of other things going on over the weekend. Instead, I worked quietly at home on the Project and made some pleasing progress, with only the odd trip out now and again, mostly centered around shopping for groceries, fresh fruit and vegetables from the farmer’s market, and so on. Good Times.

The Project. Yes, I keep mentioning it but not talking about it and again I […] Click to continue reading this post →