Search Results for: cafe

Tales from the Industry XXXV -Tinkering with the Universe

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One very good piece of good news from last month was the announcement that one of the TV series I have done a lot of work for over the last five or so years (gosh, has it been that long?) has been renewed for another season. I’m being deliberately vague here and not naming it since I do not know if it has been officially announced yet. (On the other hand, nobody has told me that it is a secret…) (You can see many of my posts on this sort of thing here.)

It’s great that the parent channel has again continued to invest in science programming, and people seem to like the show a great deal. As I’ve said here in the past, I am very encouraged by the very wide range of types of people who stop me on the street (or bus, subway, bar, cafe, plane – yes, I’ve had show-related encounters in all of these places… people who like science shows are everywhere!) to tell me they like the show, ask questions, or just say thanks for my on-screen explanations and demonstrations. It’s a diverse range of people in terms of careers, race, gender, age, and so forth, which I am very pleased to note, and I do very much hope that TV executives take note of this when making decisions about future programming for their outlets.

It is great to get the chance to contribute a little bit again, even though it takes a bit of time away from other projects (particularly right now, The Project). As far as I know, so far I’ll be in two or three episodes, although there may be more (that’s all […] Click to continue reading this post →

Maneuvers in the Dark

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fay_wolf_hotel_cafe_14_4_2011_smallBefore getting up in the wee hours to prepare to jump onto a plane on Friday morning, I was out seeing some live music at the Hotel Cafe in Hollywood. I find that I need to go and get some of that from time to time, and the Hotel Cafe is a favourite of mine for that…

I had my notebook and a nice vantage point for grabbing a quick sketch or two of people at the piano. It was a nice challenge to do a couple of fast sketches – in almost darkness – to see if my hand and eyes were still “in”.

As usual (I’ve discussed this earlier here) my goal on fast sketches is not photo-realism (!) but a […] Click to continue reading this post →

So what was I supposed to do, exactly?

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So today, five minutes before the end of my class, someone came in and sat down. This is fine. My first thought was they they were early for the next class, or perhaps were curious about my class and decided to sit in at the end, or… fine. I finished up the lecture (on supersymmetry and world-volume actions and D-branes, including various tips for how to count and organize supercharges when you’ve got extended supersymmetries…. fun stuff) and left the classroom. I went to the nearby men’s room and washed the chalk off my hands, and so forth, and re-emerged. There were ten or so minutes left before the colloquium of Nobel Prize winner Anthony Leggett was to begin, and I had just enough time to go and get some coffee to help me off the low I was going through (presumably due to tiredness and eight-hour jetlag – I landed back in LA just about 24 hours ago).

Emerging from the men’s room, the same guy who had arrived at my class was standing waiting for me and walked up and said, “I sent you that email, remember?”. I replied “Which one?” He’d not told me his name or anything, so I had nothing to go on here. He seemed very put out that I did not know what he was talking about and said “The one a couple of weeks ago.”

“Who are you?” […] Click to continue reading this post →

Heroic

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character_a_inkedStruggling for a post title, I went for a slight critique of the work I did on the character you’ve seen earlier*. She’s been grabbed from a panel showing her looking for a seat in a cafe where a conversation (about a physics issue) is to continue.

It is a large panel showing the layout of the cafe with all the people sitting and reading and talking and so forth, and she’s one of several small figures in it, so it is probably not that big a deal that she has somewhat heroic proportions here as compared to her more ordinary proportions in other panels.

Heroic here refers to the various choices of proportions you can give to figures, usually based on how many heads tall they are. You might have heard of people talking about how many heads tall a figure should be.

Well, there really is no “should be”, and different practitioners use different […] Click to continue reading this post →

Nude

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figure_study_17th_jan_11_smallLast Friday, I went to the luncheon of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and as usual there was a fascinating short talk to accompany lunch and coffee. (As I mentioned before, the membership of this group is a rather wonderful mixture of people mostly from USC, UCLA, and the city of Los Angeles in general, mostly prominent writers, artists, and other people from the humanities, film, theatre, and… they let one or two dabbler-type scientists like yours truly on the list, bless them.)

The talk was by Bram Dijkstra, and was entitled “The Nude in American Art”. As with most of the talks here (and in many similar venues), it seems to be associated with a book the speaker has out recently, and this one is a sumptuous-looking tome called “Naked: The Nude in America”. It was a nice talk, although he did not get very much into the modern America part because he spent time on the European connections and background and then ran out of time (they try to keep the luncheon talks short and to the point, leaving you wanting more, and leaving time for questions, which is indeed a good thing). However, one of the things that kept coming up was the whole business of an early prudishness or puritanicalism (still persisting in some places today) that meant that the naked physical form should somehow be hidden away. You get examples even today of art galleries’ major donors creating problems for an exhibit that contains nudes, etc., etc. He discussed various changing (and not changing) attitudes to this issue on both sides of the Atlantic through the years, which I found interesting. Aspects of this were not just tied to things like religion, but also the changing status of women in the various societies, to various degrees, since a lot of nudes feature the female form.

This is all very interesting to me in view of The Project for, I hope, obvious reasons. I found myself wondering (and indeed asked a question at the end about it) about […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Project – 4

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So, a huge number of decisions went into getting the work to where I wanted it to be, and I’ve shown you samples in various previous posts, some collected here. But where does it all begin? It starts with the idea or concept that I am thinking about, and conversations which will form the dialogue for the piece in question. I start fleshing it out more, perhaps with a setting beginning to form in my mind. Maybe pencil drawings begin to take shape, and I start laying out pages, capturing the beats of the conversation, and the visuals that might get used. Characters (the people who will be in dialogue) begin to assert themselves by this point as well.

Incidentally, this is a place where sometimes the iPad comes into its own, and it is a great tool at several stages of all this. This project is one of the reasons I got the iPad, although I could not tell you at the time I got it back in the early Summer since I was not revealing what I was working on then. (Much of the other stuff I happily discovered about the iPad that I blogged about a while back (here, here, and here) are actually nice bonuses. I got it primarily to help me with development aspects on this project that had little to do with those other features.) I draw rough layouts on the iPad sometimes, and I can store all my rough ideas and print them out, modify them, call them up for later viewing, and so forth. I can carry work in progress with me, reference photos from location scouting, etc. It is also good for practice sketching, and sometimes, using it, I’ve grabbed some nice quick drawings of people in a meeting or in a bar or on a bus. Drawing from life is an important skill to keep up. The iPad is not used in final production on the graphic novel though. I work at a level of detail and complexity that the iPad would not be able to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Nine Points

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Although the planning of a panel on a page is entirely freehand pencil or pen work, it is indeed the case that sooner or later I start detailed placing of subjects, and I often use perspective to do the layouts. Not just for skyscrapers and so forth, but for down to earth things too. I do it the old-fashioned way, which is repetitive and time-consuming, but I must admit – It is fun! Take some time to look at everything around you – real or represented in drawings, photos, etc – and you’ll likely see perspective cues that help give sense of depth and placing. It is all about geometry, which our universe seems to like a lot, and which we use to navigate in it. Learning a bit of this geometry, and how to build it in projection in two dimensions on the page (and it is much easier than this sentence makes it sound!) allows one to make reasonably convincing recreations of the universe (or simulacra of your choosing) and how we perceive it. Real artists (not hacks like yours truly) use geometry a lot, in one way or another, to interpret, represent, or distill aspects of the world, and so in a sense, they are companions on the same road as those of us in (especially) the physical sciences.

Babble aside, here you can see parts of the interior of a cafe taking shape. I did it using three-point perspective*:

construction_lines

This will be the skeleton upon which I build the flesh of the rest of the piece. It is based on my knowledge of a real cafe that I location-scouted (well, I happen to drink coffee there from time to time), but you’d never get this view without (a) perhaps being able to fly, and (b) removing the ceiling. Trying to be somewhat discreet in this […] Click to continue reading this post →

Leaving Home Ain’t Easy

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coffee_group_sketchMum’s upstairs packing to leave after her lovely visit of a month and I’m already upset by this. It was such a great time, and I’m so very sad to see her go*. But I can’t keep her all to myself. My sister and brother will no doubt be expecting her back by now, and so I must give her up. 🙂 This blog post is a lame attempt to distract myself from her packing activity, which is a bit sad for me. On the other hand, a rather sweet aspect of it is that I can hear her in the distance singing along to songs from Queen’s A Night At The Opera** and other albums while doing her packing. This makes me smile from ear to ear.

The last few days had lots of activities, including more picnics by the seaside, walks, cooking, shopping, visits to some old favourite haunts (including a surprise Sunday […] Click to continue reading this post →

New Semester Approaching

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I’m feeling strangely cold, although the heating is on and I’ve got a jumper (“sweater” to readers in the States) on. It has been this way all day, so I suspect it is something to do with my frame of mind. I’m feeling a bit reflective with it too, so I’ll think out loud (as it were) a bit before going to bed early.

Well, it is almost time to start another round of teaching. This semester, starting Monday, it is a graduate course that I’ll be teaching, the second part of a year’s sequence of string theory that we teach from time to time. My focus will be non-perturbative issues, focusing on much of what has been forming the foundation of research in various areas of string theory since the 1990s. Should be fun. Some of the material will come from my book, D-branes, that was published back in 2002. It seems so long ago now. I actually looked in it today, as I was discussing a research issue with a colleague, and could not recall some details. Happily there was a chapter with it all in there. That’s rather nice. The book serves me well as a personal reminder of things I used to have at my fingertips all the time back then, and as a bonus, lots of people around the world still use it as a handbook/guide/intro/etc, I hear.

I joke, of course. The cart and the horse are the other way around.

Speaking of books, I’ll be doing my best to continue working on the current book project, with all the excitement and adventure in developing it. (And the occasional […] 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*…

arena_extract_1

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 – 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 →

On Bark and Bite

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20101122-005024.jpgWell, it is a bit after midnight, and I’ve a long day tomorrow, but somehow instead of going to sleep, what am I doing? Taking pictures of tree bark and blogging. The things I do for you, Dear Reader 🙂 …

Let me explain. I learned something the other day that sort of clears up a little mystery that has not really been at the front of my mind, to be honest, but just sort of off to the side, if you know what it mean. It has to do with one of my favorite spices, cinnamon. While it has been a bit of time since I’ve done an Asymptotia Goes To The Kitchen sort of post (which reminds me, I did almost do one about six weeks ago, and took photos and everything, but somehow it did not get written), you will surely have noticed that cinnamon is a spice that gets featured a lot in my culinary endeavours. I had, I am sure, noticed that cinnamon seems to vary a bit in its appearance and texture depending upon where I am, by which I mean that the type I recall in the UK is a bit different from what I get in the USA, (well, maybe slightly), and certainly different from the softer, flakier sort I remember from the Caribbean. But I never really tried to make something of this. It is just one of those things you notice but don’t really get bothered by enough to want to dig further.

Well, I accidentally found out that the reason they are different is because […] Click to continue reading this post →

Entangled

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l-2048-1536-bceff628-4f08-4836-9001-d1f10349d0e7.jpegThis rather hot day sees me in more of a reflective mood, which is a rather good thing. I’ve been chipping away at the Project a bit, solving some issues concerning its final form, and looking around me and soaking up the Summer. I did some of that at Intelligentsia cafe before lunch, listening as I worked for a while to four filmmakers at the next table loudly plan a shoot, until I decided to switch to listening to music when it turned out that it was a porn film and they were exchanging ideas about what underwear the teenage star of the scene would be wearing and in what sequence it would come off. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a prude, and certainly am not averse to underwear being removed in the right sequence and in the right circumstances, but it was distracting. And obnoxious. It is the price one pays for having coffee there instead of at Casbah, where the non-shiny people like me sit, mostly, but it is just too hot in the latter for me these days.

This is a very different day from yesterday, which saw me up at 5:30am, and then e-mail bouncing drafts of a paper back and forth with my collaborator Tameem all day until about 10:30pm, when we decided we’d done enough and submitted it to the arXiv. I focused on little else that day and did not leave my lair at all, so today is sort of an antidote to that.

Going on in background is a bit of preparation for the start of classes on Monday, the beginning of the new academic year at USC. I’ve been looking at a draft of a syllabus for the big class I’ll be teaching on introductory physics (for Engineering and Science majors). My class will have 100 students and the parallel one, taught by a colleague following the same syllabus, will be of similar size. So decisions about homework, grading policies, midterm dates, and so forth all need to be finalized by tomorrow […] Click to continue reading this post →