Category Archives: work

Less Work, More Play

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madrid_eating_2Well, the weekend is here and so I have wrapped up most of the official part of my visit to Madrid. Lest you think that I spent most of my time eating (not that there’s anything wrong with that), let me mention that I ended up, from Monday to Thursday giving about eight hours of detailed exposition at the board and fielding questions (the lectures and seminar), umpteen (an official number, I’ll have you know) hours of preparation of the notes needed to do this in a successful and clear way, and several more chunks of time in private physics conversations of various sorts. Quite fulfilling, tiring, but worthwhile for all concerned. (I even heard that various people liked the lectures and the seminar, so that’s a real bonus!) It has been a good week.

Thursday night saw me wandering the city streets in the drizzle for several hours. It all started out with a quick walk near my hotel to see if I could stumble on a restaurant, but eventually turned into a longer walk and then an epic quest, as happens to me so often in such situations. I start applying a list of criteria for what I […] Click to continue reading this post →

Peer Review Reactions

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hitler_peer_reviewAh yes. I’ll admit it: Except for the moustache and a few other details, the scene is eerily familiar… 😉 (The embed for the video is below.)

Does anyone know who originally started this brilliant series? For those who don’t know it is a 4 minute clip from the 2004 film Der Undergang that several people have periodically re-subtitled with words that have Hitler reacting to an event of some sort. (Warning: Many of them are full of language some might find a bit strong, so watch out!!)

Here it is*: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Working and Playing Hard

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tapas_madrid_1Well, I’m simply exhausted. I gave my second two-hour lecture today and drained my energy resources quite a bit. This is after an early(ish) start to the morning (7:30am) and with going late to bed last night (1:30am). A good lunch afterward helped restore things to a balance a bit, but I need to rest some more.

I’ve been modifying my lectures during the process of giving them, making adjustments for time and the kind of questions I get. This means that I end up kicking some parts to later lectures, and then trying to spend some of the afternoon writing new material, as well as on the train back to my hotel, and in the evenings.

Well, briefly in the evenings so far. That is because last night was set aside for a tour of some of the tapas you can find in the old part of Madrid. I had the presence of mind to go back to my hotel and get a short nap first, and then met my gracious […] Click to continue reading this post →

Here, There, and Everywhere

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british_library_1Well, it has been quite the week so far. I’ve been mostly in England. First I spent Tuesday getting over the main effects of jetlag and a short but strong cold (both more or less gone now), and then Wednesday I went to King’s College London to give a seminar to the three groups in the Triangle series of seminars – King’s, Imperial, Queen Mary are the three places the participating research groups in theoretical high energy physics come from. It was excellent to see so many old friends and colleagues, meet some new ones, and chat physics at the pub and over dinner later on. The seminar seemed to be well received, although I know I was far from my best, given jetlag and cold. The next two days saw me saying hi to family and friends at coffee and dinner in the evenings and visiting at Queen Mary and Imperial for the day, and hiding in the British Library for most of Friday, writing.

What am I writing? Four lectures on D-branes and string theory and M-theory, with a focus on some of the fun and instructive applications (and potential applications) of […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Universe: Cool Cars, Hot Sand, and Fast Balls

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flows in death valleyYou may recall my mentioning a desert trip to shoot something for TV, some time back. One done at precisely the wrong time of year. And to Death Valley, one of the hottest places on earth, to boot. Well, I meant to mention that the episode of the History Channel’s The Universe that the shoot was for aired a week or two ago and it was really excellent. It was entitled “Liquid Universe” and it was a rather beautiful and thoroughly pleasant episode exploring the role of liquids in our universe, a matter not often raised in questions of astronomy except when it comes to matters of water from time to time. This was not about water per se, but rather the whole matter of material that flows and the role it plays in diverse areas of the solar system and perhaps the universe at large. I was using sand to demonstrate how sometimes there are surprising places where you can find fluid/liquid behaviour, and mentioned some of the new phases of matter found in the context, for example, of quarks and gluons at RHIC. (I’ve spoken about that here a number of times in the context of some of my research. See the archives.)

It was an excellent episode and another example of how one can take a topic under the “The Universe” heading and showcase lots of exciting science quite accessibly […] Click to continue reading this post →

Gloomy Sunday

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vancouver_boatsDespite the title, which is also the title of an utterly depressing but wonderful song that I love, which starts out: “Sunday is gloomy/my hours are slumberless/dearest the shadows/I live with are numberless/…” and wallows in further and darker gloom for the rest of the song until near the end, I mean gloomy here in a neutral way.

It applies not to my mood but to the skies over Vancouver on the Saturday and Sunday set aside for wandering and exploring. I actually found a lot of it quite refreshing (recall that we’ve not had much rain in LA all year) and managed to see several beautiful scenes made all the more lovely for the shades of grey provided by the rain and clouds. The scene with the boats above left is an example. Overall I had a great time exploring, and was shown some nice parts of the city by my hosts, Moshe Rozali and his family (thanks guys!).

The trip was a success, in that I had a lot of great conversations with various people about physics research matters, and also in terms of the main point of the trip which […] Click to continue reading this post →

Time Bandit

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dining_at_vijs_3Well, that was not altogether terrible, I gather, but I was so tired and a little bit out of sorts* when I started giving the talk that I was running very slowly. So by time I got to the end (even though I hit my right pace later on) I was some 15 minutes over. Ugh. People seemed to like it, but I definitely need to whittle out a few of the more superfluous slides (which I’d always intended to) and strike the intended pace I wanted to hit earlier than 3/4 of the way through the talk. My reward (besides some nice remarks at the end of the talk that sort of made my day) was a visit to another excellent restaurant for dinner, with some good company. The extraordinarily good Vij’s. The hour’s wait for the food was perfectly fine given the nibbles they bring you while you wait, and the food itself once you get it. Here’s a shot or two of some of the excellent food just after its arrival, and the empty dishes and satisfied hosts just after polishing it all off: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Remote Office

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I’m in remote office mode again. I’ve to give two colloquia while visiting two physics departments in Vancouver area over the next two days. (Subject matter will be essentially the same as the one I gave a month ago.) So tonight, I’m eating dinner at the splendid restaurant Banana Leaf not far from my hotel while reviewing the slides of my presentations on my pda (my iTouch dining_at_banana_leaf– I dump lots of files I want to read on it using an application called filemagnet. Very useful. See here. In this case I’m looking at the pdf output from the keynote presentation software I use. ) I’m making a few notes on changes I’ll make when I get back to my hotel. I’m also reviewing a few other documents that were sent to me for response, and tying off various loose ends here and there before the evening ends.

I sometimes worry that it might be considered rude that I’m apparently doing a bit of work and so not fully paying attention to the food, but I’m not too worried, really. Once the actual food arrives I’ve been quite appreciative of it, giving it my full […] Click to continue reading this post →

Looking Forward…

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new_books…to lots of happy reading soon! My new crop of shopping (click for larger view) includes three Octavia Butler novels, two Murakami novels (I think I’ve talked about both authors here before) and a science book by Garfinkle and Garfinkle (I’ve spoken about this excellent book here before) that is a gift for a friend. I actually tend to cluster authors from time to time, meaning that I read something of theirs and then consume several more of their pieces of work immediately after. I did that with Murakami a while back and it is time to come back to him and read some more. Then it’ll be a Butler cluster.

Now… just need to read them. I can’t wait…. but I must finish the astonishingly good […] Click to continue reading this post →

Blue Skies…

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I always like an excuse to look for blue skies, and to have others look too, even in the worst of times. I had a great reason to do it today.

Early this morning before sunrise I settled down to write my ten o’clock lecture for my Electricity and Magnetism class. On Tuesday I had ended with a computation that is the essence of the reason the sky is blue, which is a nice enough thing to talk about, but today I wanted to go more in depth on the whole thing, and show that you can in a few steps show that the blueness has a particular pattern to it. I wrote out the final equations in a few steps and looked at them for a moment or two and realized that with the sun rising at that very moment, it was the perfect situation to have! So I went outside to enjoy the beautiful Autumn day and the beauty there is in seeing an equation writ large in the sky – and it really was all there.

It is particularly at times like this that one remembers why it is that it is hard not to just love Physics! (I hope you’ll forgive my unashamed love of what I do.)

Here is the sky I saw, looking toward sunrise, and directly in the opposite direction:

sunrise_scattering_1 sunrise_scattering_2

Oh, you’re wondering what I am talking about..? Why is the sky blue? What pattern in the sky? Thanks for asking! There are two things I’m looking at. First, light from the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Sketches while Zonked

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Once again I find myself in the position of having far more to tell you about than I have either time or energy for – and so much of it is really good!!

I was supposed to tell you about the first of the Nobel Prize lunches that I helped put on last Thursday… Never got to blogging it, and now the second one finished an hour ago. The whole business was quite a success, I am happy to say. I’ll maybe come back to say some more… But I’m zonked right now with tiredness. Super-long day that started early, and I sort of started off tired to begin with. I’m sitting on the bus letting it drag me toward home… From the bus stop I will wheel the bike home because it has an inexplicable medium-slow puncture, and I’m too tired to ride anyway.

What other things have I not told you about?

Well, on Friday I went along to another wonderful event. The Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities had Josh Kuhn give a talk in their fortnightly luncheon at the USC campus. It was about Mexican music in Los Angeles. It was a wonderful and […] Click to continue reading this post →

A. S. Byatt

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Following hot on the heels of Margaret Atwood coming to town last week (over at UCLA), we have A. S. Byatt over at USC today! Very exciting. It is actually partly one of our College Commons events as well, and last week as a College Commons event (with a Darwin tinge) we had a viewing of the film of her book Angels and Insects, which I thought was really excellent!

Her lecture is entitled: “The Novel as Natural History”, (and will resonate with some of the themes I talked about in my report on the CC event about Collections) and I expect it is going to be quite wonderful. Details here, and the blurb goes:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Saturday Shopping in Bed

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buying_in_bedYes. Really. I got up early as usual and decided after to go back to bed with a cup of tea. Then I made a cup of coffee and retired again. I’ve decided to be a bit decadent this morning and try to take it slow and spend some quality time with my laptop doing some long overdue things such as replying to a number of emails, and….. shopping!

No, I’m not buying lots of shiny toys. It’s plane tickets and train tickets. For work travel. Three separate trips. Lots of planning, poking about on the calendar, hunting for good slots for flights, anticipating delays and building in appropriate lag times, coordinating various errands and meetings here and there… Basically, looking into the future and squeezing parts of it into some sort of shape. A scaffolding, as it were, for draping the details onto later.

One annoyance and one delight:

(1) Why do airlines insist on assuming that people prefer aisle seats over window […] Click to continue reading this post →

Audience View

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colloquium_audienceA shot of the gathering audience for my colloquium two weeks ago. (Click for larger view. I mentioned the circumstance behind it here.) It was a lot of fun, I must say. I spent a good deal of time preparing the slides in the day and a half leading up to it, and it was worth it. The audience seemed very attentive (or perhaps they are collectively very good at faking) and I got some great questions along the way, and at the end. My hope was to do a short and sweet colloquium […] Click to continue reading this post →