Category Archives: work

Uncommon Conversations

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college commons logo smallI almost forgot to mention that tonight marks the launch of the series of events called the College Commons here at USC. Here’s a news story about the programme. This academic year, I’ve been working on the committee working on shaping the ideas that have come up from the faculty (I had promised to tell you more about this), and we’ve announced the short Spring programme, which you can see here.

There is a featured part celebrating 1859:

Where do ideas come from, and how far do they travel? One hundred and fifty years ago, the astonishing year of 1859 saw not only the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, but such pioneering works as John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, and Richard Wagner’s first version of Tristan and Isolde. This year also marked amazing advances in travel and communications, the first battles prefiguring the Civil War and the first trapeze act performed in Paris. Can we imagine the world 150 years from now, and imagine the place our ideas will have in it? Scholars from biology, anthropology, physics, literature, history, and gender studies, as well as poets and artists, will explore these questions together this spring.

I hope there’ll be a lot of participation in the events (I’ll say more on this later). Tonight has a free movie, Master and Commander (so there’s a reason to go, right […] Click to continue reading this post →

Preparation

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Yes, I’ve been a bit quiet of late, I know. I’ve so many things on, both professional and personal that it sometimes keeps me occupied from when I wake up just before sunrise right through to falling asleep a bit after midnight. And yes I know that means I’ve been not getting the traditional full nights of sleep, but if my body insists on getting up at 5:30am, who am I to resist? I thought it was due to jetlag from the trip a couple of weeks ago, but it seems to have taken. I don’t mind too much since watching the light change as the sun rises is a marvellous way to start the day.

clifford johnson preparing slides at the boardAmong the things I’m up to (yesterday and today so far) is a strip-down-and-redesign of a short talk for an exciting symposium that is coming up in a few weeks in Chicago. The American Association for the Advancement of Science is having their big annual shindig there (apparently the biggest science conference in the world) and there will be a number of addresses, plenary talks, and keynote speakers and the like (including Al Gore, by the way), and also several sessions of symposia and other presentations on various topics.

While slightly annoyed at the fact that one major day of the conference is on Valentine’s day (which means I’ll have to be out of town on just the day that maybe, just maybe, on the off-chance, you know – if the universe sneezes or something, somebody might want me to be their Valentine…*), I was looking at that day’s schedule and it caught my eye that there’ll be a session (with several presenters) entitled “The Science of Kissing”, and three hours long, no less:

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Complex

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So where am I and what am I doing? I’m in chilly Cambridge. The one in the UK. It is super cold over here. When we landed in Heathrow at lunchtime yesterday it was below freezing, and the thick cloud of the London sky was right down to the tops of the airport terminals. Everybody seemed to be talking about how cold it was. My wandering in central London for a few hours dragging my suitcase (before heading to Kings Cross and the train to Cambridge) was quite a bit uncomfortable – at least until I realized that a key mission should be to find on Oxford Street a branch of Marks and Spencer’s (now called M&S it seems… interestingly across the street from an H&M, and not so far from where the doomed C&A store used to be…) and buy some long thermal underwear. A bit elderly, perhaps, but very snug and warm against the icy winds and snow flurries, so I don’t care. (Yes, that probably falls under the category of “oversharing”, one of the words of the year 2008….)

icam board of governers meeting

One of the various governance boards I managed to accept to be on last year (despite trying hard to try to say “no” more last year) was that of ICAM, the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter. For the first time in ICAM’s ten year history, its […] Click to continue reading this post →

Thermodynamics and Gravity

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ads_ballI noticed that Robert Helling shared some thoughts about thermodynamics and gravity today on his blog. He is understandably confused about several aspects of the issue, especially when applied to cosmological issues. (What is the entropy of our universe? Does the Second Law really apply? Does equilibrium thermodynamics even apply here?)

I’ve nothing remarkable to add to the discussion at this time except to note that a blanket statement that thermodynamics and gravity don’t seem to go together (which I don’t think he’s strongly saying) is not one I’d make, since we have a major class of working counterexamples.

The context is the gauge/gravity duals I’ve talked about here a lot, starting with AdS/CFT and beyond. There we know that the gravitational systems are essentially able to display the more garden variety thermodynamics by being immersed in the (regulating-box-like) anti-De Sitter type backgrounds. Then we see that black holes […] Click to continue reading this post →

Remembering Uncertainty

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Gosh, look what I found on YouTube, quite by accident. It is video of the first Uncertainty event I did with science writer KC Cole way back in 2006, and was one of the first Visions and Voices events at USC.

It has as features (about 20 minutes each) Jonathan Kirsch on Monotheism (and how it actually isn’t, really), some opening thoughts by moderator KC Cole, her interview […] Click to continue reading this post →

Snowed Under

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Ok. It’s official. This week I am snowed under with things. Every day I write half a blog post, and then something comes up and I do not got back to it and I fall into bed later, exhausted, some time in the wee hours, only to get up early the next day to carry on with things.

So in case you were wondering, I am still here. Just snowed under. I gave my final exam for my Physics 151 course (Fundamentals of Physics: Mechanics and Thermodynamics) on Monday (hurrah!) and I’ve spent a huge chunk of today playing with various excel files of various chunks of data from the course, trying to turns a sea of numbers into final grades for the students. It has been slow work, and I’m nowhere near done yet. It’s complicated because I must incorporate multiple components of assessment, from three different exams, laboratory work, online homework and written homework, to in-class responses using individual RF transmitters, and online quizzes of various sorts. (All a bit much, in my view, but, well that’s another story…) Every single bit has its own spreadsheet with data that must be uniformized and then combined to give the whole picture of each student’s performance.

It has made me a bit dizzy just talking about it.

But it’s not that simple. Oh no. Here’s a small part of the extra stuff: I’ve been trying to get the exterior of my house painted, and of course there have been (quite fantastic) rainstorms delaying everything and so I’ve been dealing with painters for longer than planned – with the Christmas holiday closing fast, and I’ve got my mum visiting me (hurrah!) and so I must be a good host and so forth and not just hide in the study crunching numbers (she arrived a day earlier than I expected – my fault! – so I’m a bit off-balance about that too), and… and…
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Tales From The Industry XXVI – Science and Entertainment Exchange

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Well, I probably am not worthy of the press credentials I was carrying around with me on Wednesday, as several days later I had still not done my “report” on the event. Well, here it is.

science entertainment exchange

I went to a press conference and a symposium that relates directly to the issues I was talking about in my Tuesday post and its comment stream. All the things I was talking about with regards better contact between the science community and the filmmaking community so as to make films (and shows) that better represent science and scientists more accurately through something closer to a collaborative mode were brought up in these meetings and discussions. It was great to see this issue being taken seriously, and a well-meant effort being made. The core of the idea is to set up an office that will coordinate things – acting as a sort of clearing house that will put filmmakers (of all aspects of the process whether screenwriter or director) in touch with willing scientists who can be helpful in various topics. This is the Science and Entertainment Exchange.

A key thing that I have mentioned here many times before is the issue of it being about more than just fact-checking near-completed work. If scientists are involved at […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tiring, but Good

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mount hood oregonTo the left is Mount Hood, in Oregon. I often see it when I fly on my way up North. I often see it when I fly on my way up North. I love seeing it as it emerges from the clouds rather pleasantly, looking a bit like a cloud itself for a moment, perhaps oddly shaped, but then becoming something rather different entirely.

I was in Vancouver for a few days last week, and chatted with a few friends and colleagues (such as Moshe Rozali, Mark Van Raamsdonk, and Joanna Karczmarek) at the Physics department at UBC, and gave a seminar. I talked about ongoing work on ideas I’m still struggling to beat into shape (mentioned a lot in earlier posts about my retreat at Aspen this Summer). This was a deliberate choice. Sometimes it is very useful to force oneself to do a pedagogical seminar on work in progress. This is not so much because someone in the audience might toss up an idea that you did not consider (this can happen, sometimes as a result of a good question – but it is less likely when the audience has no expertise in the area under discussion, as was the case here) but mostly because of the very act of preparing the seminar itself. It forces you to take the wider view, consider the big picture, and try to motivate why you are doing what you’re doing, or why you picked on path over another along the way. I find this process can be quite valuable as an internal pruning and self-checking exercise.

So it was that I spent three hours at LAX writing the first 2/3 of the talk. This is not […] Click to continue reading this post →

Breakfast Babble

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breakfast thingsSome reflections over breakfast – at least breakfast part II. Well, elevenses, really. Today is, I hope, a day to spend mostly on thinking about research issues. There’s a project I’m still unhappy with, in terms of where I’d like it to be, and I want to try to move things on. I had a new idea on the bus yesterday that I’ll be testing out today. Since I’m giving a seminar about this project on Friday, I’d also rather like to get it all uploaded back into the more active buffers of my brain, as it were.

Tuesday is a welcome day, being between my two biggest teaching days of the week, days that usually completely drain me. I try to use it to remind myself that I’ve a ton of other activities besides teaching that I should be getting on with. Research is one of them.

This morning began with something else, however, and I thought I’d update you on […] Click to continue reading this post →

Strings Everywhere?

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Well, at some point this week I ought to get around to preparing for this. I spoke about the Center For Inquiry before, here. Well, the promised talk that I was going to give at some point is on Sunday. If you’re up for some thoughts about the universe on your Sunday morning, do come along. Details at this link. Some of their publicity is reproduced below: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Sci-Fi Science

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I got this cute postcard from the people at Workaholic Productions. (Click for larger view.)sci-fi science poster You may recall a post I did some time ago about some things I was doing in a demo lab here at USC for a pilot for a new TV show. (Or, you may not. That’s what the archive is for – browse several of the Tales From The Industry” series here.) At the time I did not tell you about the show in detail, since I don’t like to reveal details of show ideas and so forth when things are still in development.

Anyway, the show is done. It’s a pilot, and so with your support, they may well get the go ahead to make more. So if you’re inclined, go and have a look. What is it about? Well, the idea is to start off with some standard (pulp) sci-fi scenario (alien invasion in this case) that you might see in a movie or tv show, and then through the course of the show examine aspects of what you see to investigate the science behind it. They have actual scientists (and engineers, since a lot of can be really about technology) come on and discuss things, explain science, do demonstrations, and so on and so forth.

This particular show, the pilot, has a lot of the standard alien invasion combat weaponry on display – shooting of ray guns, casting of lightning-bolt-like bursts of […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Entanglement

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The next Categorically Not! is on Sunday October 19th (tomorrow!). The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). Stirling Johnson at Categorically Not! September 14th 2008It’s a series – started and run by science writer K. C. Cole – of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See also the links at the end of the post for some announcements and descriptions (and even video) of previous events. (Image on left is of bubble master Stirling Johnson, in action during the September 14th 2008 event on Bubbles.)

The theme this month is Entanglement. Here’s the description from K C Cole: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Saturday Calm

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october rosesWell, another super-busy week has gone by. Work has been crazy, life has been crazy, and so forth. It is so good to be able to sit here for a while on a sunny Saturday morning and reflect. I thought I’d take you with me on some of the reflections.

The Nobel prizes seemed to come up so much faster this year, and go by even more quickly. I’ve not had as much time to contemplate them as I’d have liked. It was certainly really good to see that the physics one was a celebration of some of the key ideas in my field (see here), of course, but I’d have liked to have had more chatter about all of them, as I usually try to do. It is good to learn more about other things – get out of one’s comfort zone. Two years ago while I was departmental colloquium organizer, I set aside one date to be a colloquium where the three science prizes were highlighted – “Who, What, Why?” There’s always going to be local faculty who can […] Click to continue reading this post →