A Mexico Meeting

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from_museo_nacional_antropologia_mexico_1Continuing in the “tradition” of sharing a drawing from a visit to a city South of the border, let me introduce you to this character I met (to my delight) on the recent Mexico trip. I did a quick visit to the wonderful Museo Nacional Antropologia, and there he/she was. I neglected to get the information about the figure. Sorry. There was no time to do it in the spot since they were closing, so I took a snap and sketched the figure in pencil in my hotel later, and painted it on the plane (with watercolour pencils and brush) on the way back. (Click for larger view; I’ve another to share… stay tuned.)

-cvj

D-Brane Fun!

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imageTurns out that it still a lot of fun to lecture about string theory and D-branes! (The latter are an important type of extended object, generalizing membranes, that have been very useful in theoretical physics for the last 20 years. — My goodness, it has been 20 years since Joe Polchinski first demonstrated their importance for string duality!) The students at the Latin American String School here in Mexico City seem to be very engaged and enjoying themselves. Although I was having fun I was also not without a presentation error or two brought on by Click to continue reading this post →

Not the Cafe from Hell…

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imageQuite the opposite actually! And a very welcome find across from my hotel soon after arriving here in Mexico City since it provided me with an excellent ham sandwich and good coffee. While I approve of my companions choice of Hendricks gin, I decided not to have any since it was 3:00pm, and also I’d planned a walk to explore.

I’ll try to show you the amazing Day of the Dead find I made shortly after, but now I’d better prep my lectures for today.

Happy Halloween!

-cvj

That Dilemma Again

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So here I am at the boarding gate at LAX, ready for my flight. I’m off to Mexico City. What’s on my mind? :- What will I be doing on the plane? What am I in the mood for? What I really should be doing, perhaps, is preparing the four 90 minute lectures I will be giving at my destination. What I really want to be doing is writing the papers reporting the results of my nice computations I’ve been working on over the last few weeks. You know, the ones I had to break off from to write a midterm. Some of my best papers have been written on planes, so this could be a good opportunity…

Which shall I do?

I’ll let you know the other end. Boarding has begun.

-cvj

Five zeros!

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So I passed a landmark the other day, and actually missed the moment, as it slipped my mind. But two minutes later, on a safe stretch:

one_hundred_thousand_miles

100K and still running like a dream.

(I’ll try to ignore the fact that a few days before I came back to find a “We Buy Junk Cars!” card attached to one of its windows…)

-cvj

It’s Time

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delorean_sketchOk, So I’ve finished prepping my presentation of detailed recipes for how to make time machines. (Sorry, but it does not involve any of the elements depicted in the sketch above.) It is for a special event tonight celebrating the fact that this is the day Marty McFly came forward in time to in Back to the Future II. The question is: Should I really be telling people how to do this? Yikes. 😉

Ok, time to get into my flying car and head off to teach…

-cvj

Gravity on the Horizon!

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joshua_tree_shoot_horizon_2Had to nip over to Joshua Tree National Park yesterday, for my sins.

Why? Well, gravity, of course. I can’t tell you the full details, but I was helping out the folks from the BBC on a documentary program (for the series Horizon, which I loved watching back in the 80s when I was in school!) being made about topics connected to gravity, space travel, mass, energy, and all that good stuff.

You can see me mid-demo in the photo (click for larger view), standing upon a Click to continue reading this post →

That Serial Film Crime…

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hobbit_poster_cropAfter all these years, I still have that little pain inside about what I think is one of the greatest missed opportunities (nay, crimes) in the history of film: that Guillermo del Toro did not get to direct the Hobbit due to all the delays in New Zealand over strikes (if I recall correctly), and so after two years of development he (and all his staff) packed up and moved on with their lives…. leaving Peter Jackson to take over the reins. That pain is right there next to those three jabbing pains inside that still feel a bit raw every time I get a reminder about how the films actually turned out overall. Just seeing a poster can set me off. (There are of course some nice set pieces in them here and there, but memory of them is rapidly erased by the overall wrong tone, silliness, and pandering to the need for pointless action sequences at the expense of common sense.) It’s old news now, but it still really hurts.

And it is nothing to do with the fact that Click to continue reading this post →

Back to Basics

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back_to_basicsHappy to say that I’m back to regular bread-making! The oven had some problems for a while and since I Was distracted by far too many things, I did not have time to get it fixed until recently. It is working again, and now I can make bread once more, and all is well with the world. Here is some of last week Sunday nights’s batch. (Seven other rolls were made, but those are bagged and frozen already…)

Hurrah!

-cvj

Screen Junkies – The Martian, Science, and Problem-Solving!

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screen_junkies_martianAs promised, the Screen Junkies episode we made is out. It is about The Martian! JPL’s Christina Heinlein (a planetary science expert) also took part, and I hope you find it interesting and thought-provoking. Maybe even funny too! As usual, there’s a lot that was said that was inevitably left on the (virtual) cutting-room floor, but a lot of good stuff made the cut. All in all, I’d say that this film (which I enjoyed a lot!) had a refreshing take on science and engineering for a big studio film, on several scores. (Remaining sentences are spoiler-free.) First, rather than hiding the slow machinations involved in problem-solving, it has a lot of it up front! It’s an actual celebration of problem-solving, part of the heart and soul of science and engineering. Second, rather than have the standard nerd stereotype Click to continue reading this post →

Get ready for some “movie science” chatter…

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hal_cvj_christina_bigYes, I’ve been hanging out with my Screen Junkies friends again, and this time I also got to meet JPL’s Christina Heinlein, who you may recall was in the first of the Screen Junkies “Movie Science” episodes last year. While we were both in it, I’d not got to meet her that time since our chats with host Hal Rudnick were recorded at quite different times. This time, however, schedules meant Click to continue reading this post →

Metals are Shiny

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metals_are_shiny

“Metals are shiny.” That’s one of my favourite punchlines to end a class on electromagnetism with, and that’s what I did today. I just love bringing up a bit of everyday physics as a striking consequence of two hours worth of development on the board, and this is a good one for that. I hope the class enjoyed it as much as I did! (Basically, as you can’t see in the snapshot of my notes in the photo, those expressions are results of a computation of the Click to continue reading this post →

Thomas and Fermi

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thomas-fermiThe other day the Thomas-Fermi model (and its enhancements by Dirac and others) wandered across my desk (and one of my virtual blackboards as you can see in the picture) for a while. Putting aside why it showed up (perhaps I will say later on, but I cannot now), it was fun to delve for a while into some of these early attempts in quantum mechanics to try to understand approximation methods for treating fairly complicated quantum systems (like atoms of various sizes). The basic model showed up in 1927, just a year after Schrodinger’s Click to continue reading this post →