Thursday Notes

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Continuing the week, here’s Thursday:

  • 6:45am Look out the window toward the sun. Another lovely day seems to be starting, at least with regards the weather. Next hour and a half is spent on similar things to the last three days. Go back and look at the earlier posts (listed at bottom). Except cinnamon-raisin bagel with cream cheese and cherry jam instead of oatmeal, in case you were wondering.
  • 8:15am Not quite ready (shower time warp –see earlier– and other things delayed me), but have 9:00am meeting and should have left by now. Should *just* be able to make it if I’m lucky with the bus, but send quick email to tell the person I’m meeting with I might be ten minutes late.
  • 8:32am I made the bus after all. Saw that other faculty member who rides to the bus stop as I passed her on my way and waved. She made a sort of “Nih!” noise of either recognition or surprise or both. I even took a gamble on the bus and jumped off bike, got newspaper from vending machine (thereby missing a cycle of the lights) and got back into the traffic. Always good to have a bit of derring-do in the morning.

    I really only get the LA Times on Thursdays, with any regularity. Mostly because I like the Weekend section, which has listings of events coming up, and some interesting feature article or two about some LA thing or person or other. They’ve been interesting to me more often than not, on balance. Not always hugely interesting, but enough for a good 25 minutes read on the bus. The Home section can be good too. So I get it just in case there’s something good. Indeed, it pays off, and there are some good things. I’ll point two of them out in some later blog posts, I hope.

  • 9:00am Meet with a bright and enthusiastic student who wants to do a Click to continue reading this post →

Notes from Stealth Mode

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Continuing, here’s a short notebook on Wednesday.

  • 6:45am A tad annoying that I woke up at this time. I deliberately did not set the alarm so that I could have a bit of a lie-in. Of course, my system woke me up at the usual time anyway. Similar morning ritual to last two times (yes, oatmeal again since I’ve run out of cinnamon-raisin bagels), but no shirt-ironing was involved. I’ve decided to be in stealth mode for most of the day, which means stay entirely away from the campus and work at home.
  • 8:15am Decide to first tinker a bit with the Tuesday diary post. Turns into a bit more of an epic than I intended. Tinker with it and catch up on email for an hour or so.
  • 9:30am Start reading one of the papers I planned to read today. It’s an excellent one from the early 90s by Greg Moore. I’d never appreciated it back Click to continue reading this post →

A Fair Cop

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RibenaSoon time to sign up to help judge the California State Science Fair. I hope I can make it. Just to reassure you that not every entry is another trebuchet (just the physics, mechanics, etc., section and you’ll know what I mean), here’s a story about two schoolgirls from New Zealand, Jenny Suo and Anna Devathasan, who decided to test the claims of GlaxoSmithKline that their product – cartoned ready-to-drink Ribena – has high Vitamin C content. They set out to show that cheaper drinks were less healthy than Ribena, and found to their surprise that there were only trace amounts of Vitamin C at best.

I’m a bit shocked by this since I love Ribena, and grew up with it for years. I seem to remember that some of the largest writing on the packaging is about the huge amount of Vitamin C that you’re going to get. Admittedly, it’s not the vitamin C aspect that attracted me to it, of course -I just love the taste! But all the same, it’s a bit disappointing….

From an article by Mike Steere*:
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Not all Noteworthy

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Continuing, this was the Tuesday:

  • 6:45am… Get up and look outside. Huh. Super clear and sunny. Unexpected, after yesterday. Cup of tea. Check email (delete 30 spams). Look at blog. Slow steady getting ready ritual while listening to NPR: Oatmeal again today, coffee for bike bag and journey in, sandwich for lunch…ironing a shirt…
  • 7:50am Have five-minute shower.
  • 8:05am Get out of shower. Aarrrrrgh! This is one the great mysteries we must solve concerning time, space, life, the universe. There’s nothing in Einstein’s GR about this: Why, when you go into a shower and spend five minutes – in your frame of reference – has 15 or 20 minutes passed by in the outside world?!
  • 8:17am Having gone from leisurely pace to frantic (since I have a 9:00am meeting) I leave home muttering something like “show me the meaning of haste” to the B as I point it toward the bus stop. (As usual, I make a mental note to not turn the haste into a misstep, so I go along my cycle route with purpose, but not abandon. I should make the bus that leaves about 8:27 or so.
  • 8:32am I did. On the bus I plan a future lecture for the string theory course about the role of various dualities in understanding strings. This is from both an historical and physical perspective. The history is interesting, but I’m also keen to present various physics perspectives to give a clear platform to help the younglings see further than what has been seen before. Yes. I said younglings. I know, it was deliberate, because it just sounds so silly.
  • 9:00am Technically this is on the the office hours for the E&M course, but nobody every shows up since (a) It is not the day when, or day before a Click to continue reading this post →

Married to the Physics?

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Well, it starts out:

When physicists marry physicists, the beginning may be a ‘big bang,’ but issues of life, love, and family gravitate toward the universal.

reider hahn wedding cakeOk. Stop there. That’s way too many physics puns and double entendre in one sentence. It’s a nice article by Mike Perricone in Symmetry magazine about physics couples. Physicists who marry physicists.

Physics, families, careers, children… it’s all in there. Have a read.

Best of all, perhaps, there’s this wedding cake to the left, which is just – Wow! (Click for larger view. More in the article itself.) I wonder what my mum will think of this? She makes cakes – wonderful ones, and can decorate them with flowers and leaves made of sugar. But I’m pretty sure that she has not tried equations of any sort.

-cvj

(Thanks Sara T!)

Notes From the Day

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The other day (some weeks ago now) I started a sort of “day in the life” post, to give you more of an idea of what a typical day was like at work (and maybe also a bit at play). Somehow I never finished it, and then I looked at it a while later and could not remember the rest of the day, and so just deleted it.

I’ve decided to do something different. There really is no typical day. So I will try to do a series of days instead. Of course, I’m not going to have tine to sit and do a long, detailed entry about these days, and so instead I’ll just do a sort of sketchy notebook, with some time stamps. From time to time during the day I’ll stop in and add to it, and then post the whole thing at the end of the day before going to sleep. I won’t include all details (I’ll spare you bathroom breaks, personal grooming, and things of that nature, you’ll be pleased to know), but will try to give you some impressions of how the day goes. If people are interested (and people did ask for such a “day in the life post” before), I might try to do them more frequently. But for now, I’ll try and do one for each day of this week. Average over them to get the typical day.

So here goes.

Well, this work week really started on Sunday night.

  • 11:15 – 11:48 pm (Sun): Thinking about structure of E&M course. When to set the next midterm (we agreed that the previously announced date was too soon). Also thought about what homeworks to set for the last part of electromagnetic waves in dispersive media, and though wave guides. Sent email to whole class about this.
  • 12:30am (Monday) After reading a random entry or two at the ever-brilliant Girls Are Pretty blog (e.g. here), I fall asleep listening to podcast of the BBC’s wonderful Broadcasting House (radio 4). I still miss the excellent Eddie Mair, but this new guy seems pretty good.
  • 7:15am (Monday) (Later rising today since it is Monday and I don’t have any early appointments and I try to get a good night’s sleep when I can.) Over cup of tea, read email. Delete about 30 spam messages that have arrived overnight. I note the kind letter from Dean X at institution Y acknowledging receipt of the long detailed letter in support of a promotion for candidate Z, and thanking me. Good that he/she did that. Took a good chunk of Friday and Sunday afternoon to write that epic.
  • 7:45am Not in a rush to go in yet, I have a longer breakfast – cooked some Click to continue reading this post →

Jasmine Tower

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jasmine towerNo, not the name of a new Jazz singer as far as I know. Instead, it is the single most powerful source of a sweet scent in the garden. What has been happening is that the Jasmine has steadily crept up one of the palm trees, and is engulfing it in hundreds of tiny flowers. (Click for larger view.)

The scent from this is huge. For better or worse, the web does not allow communication of scents, and so I can do no more than offer this rather odd picture (the tree is quite tall, and so it is an odd one to take, and hard to get the right sense of the situation while letting you still see the plant), and leave the rest to your imagination.

The only downside to this wonderful scent is the fact that it is close to the group of Click to continue reading this post →

Questions and Answers about Theories of Everything

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joke hollywood star of brian greene Sometimes the journalists and editors get it right. In fact, they get it right a lot of the time, but you hear more about the complaints (sometimes from me, sometimes elsewhere) about them getting it wrong, when it comes to things like science coverage especially. What am I talking about? I’m talking about the set of questions and answers that are in a new article on MSNBC that a number of people pointed out to me yesterday and today. It starts out as an article about Brian Greene’s science outreach efforts (books, and tv and movie appearances, including a new one), with some discussion of how this is regarded by his colleagues, the value it has had in raising public awareness of physics (and fundamental science in general, I would argue), and so forth. All that is interesting, but not nearly as interesting to me right now as the later parts of the article which is simply a question and answer session. (Picture above right is from a fun joke I carried out last year that you can read here – be sure to read the comments too.)

Alan Boyle, the science editor, asks Brian a series of very thoughtful questions, and Brian gives some very thoughtful answers. The topics include research in string theory (of course), hopes and possibilities for experimental and observational results (such as from the LHC and Planck) that can inform and ultimately test the ideas coming from string theory and open up new vistas in fundamental physics, research on issues such as the landscape, the idea of multiple universes, research on better developing our understanding of string theory (to the point where we can, it is hoped, extract firm predictions from it), and many other things. (I wrote an introduction to aspects of the landscape issue here – see also the comments – and talked a bit about a Tom Siegfried article on the discussion amongst researchers here.)

It is nice to see an honest, non-inflammatory and non-hyped conversation about the issues, and read Brian’s personal take on some of these matters. The bottom line is, Click to continue reading this post →

RoboCup

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So on Wednesday night while cooking dinner I was listening with half an ear to Talk of the Nation, on NPR, and at some point found that I was listening to a discussion about robots. They were talking to Lee Gutkind about his new book about robots, and about the future, and robots as tools, and interfacing with robots and so forth. All very interesting, all bruno robot made somewhat more engaging by the very deliberate way the interviewee spoke, taking great care with every sentence he uttered. This feat rather kept my attention more than the material, which I’ll hasten to add was not uninteresting -and certainly a topic I spent a lot of my youth dreaming about especially given all the Asimov books I used to devour- but my focus was elsewhere I suppose. You can listen to the program here, and it is all certainly worth thinking about, it is a very serious and important topic, and robots (although mostly not in the form we see in our dramas on tv and in the cinema) may well dominate our society the way computers have become so central to us right now… so go right ahead and listen to what he has to say.

What finally grabbed me, this time, was not the serious “issue” material. It was this: Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Vulgarization

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The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 25th March. The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’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. There’s a new website showing past and upcoming events here. You can also have a look at some of the descriptions I did of some events in some earlier posts (such as here and here), and the description of some of the recent special ones on Point of View and Uncertainty that I organized with K. C. as USC campus events (here, here (with video) and here).

Here is a description from the poster for the upcoming programme:
Click to continue reading this post →

E8

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E8 and the Gosset polytope 421

No, not another flower from my garden. This is a two dimensional projection (originally hand drawn in the 1960s by Peter McMullen, of a polytope that lives in eight dimensions, known as the Gossett polytope 421. Click here to be taken over to the American Institute for Mathematics (AIM) site for more information about it. (This image was computer generated by John Stembridge, and you can get higher resolution there for use on your T-shirts and so forth.)

What does this all pertain to? A new result from a team of mathematicians. They’ve done what some are calling the mathematician’s equivalent of mapping the genome of a Lie group, the one called E8. Groups pertain to symmetries. Symmetries are Click to continue reading this post →

Trying To Tell Me Something?

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The other day I was making one of my (half-) joking “kids today” mini-speeches to one of my (very patient) graduate students, Tameem, as part of an IM chat we were having about graduate teaching matters. He then said that he remembered something he wanted to share with me, and IM-ed me this*:

boondocks bannerboondocks grandad

…which I’ll readily admit is both funny and very familiar!

-cvj

(*You can click to make it a bit larger)