Search Results for: cafe

Prototyping

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iron_man_movie_stillNope, I have not disappeared off the face of the earth. Sorry about the long gap between posts, but I got buried in several things such as contributing to the writing of a grant renewal proposal, settling back into Los Angeles (checking that some of my favorite things that you hear about from time to time on his blog, like the downtown art walk, the cafe at Bottega Louie, various other cafes, the Edison, etc, were all present and accounted for), and…. The Project.

Yes, the Project that I mentioned from time to time and, probably annoyingly, declined each time to tell you what it is. Recall from a post I did back in February that I essentially devoted my sabbatical semester, and the Summer that followed, to developing the Project, researching it, investigating the idea, seeing […] Click to continue reading this post →

New Bounty, and Homeward Bound

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white_figsBack in Los Angeles, things at home started on a rather pleasant note. I went out into the garden and picked four nice ripe figs off one of the trees, still warm from the sunlight. (Hmmmm… My nemesis, Fluffy, must be napping. Or planning something very subtle.) You can see three of them in my hand to the left. A fourth did not survive the wait period while I got my camera out of my luggage.

Sunday in Vienna was as interesting as Saturday, with more outdoor components than indoors since it was a lovely day, weather-wise. I wandered the city streets a lot, and spent a fair amount of time getting a feel for them, occasionally hopping on the subway (U-bahn) or a tram to nip over large distances, or to rest my feet. Other rest stops involved cafes for a beer, or a cup of tea, and a bit of people watching, reading, or other pleasant sitting activity.

Like Saturday, I saw a lot of art on Sunday, focusing again on Austrian artists primarily, and learning about the Secession movement in particular, and several of the characters associated with it. Fascinating.

I’ll do a post or two more on Vienna later on, I hope.

I left the city in the evening, heading for a brief stop in London before setting my sights on Los Angeles on Monday. Found myself in the amusing position of watching […] Click to continue reading this post →

Outshine

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l-640-480-d044a0bd-8d6a-4a37-af29-7487b2205058.jpegI gave my seminar at the workshop yesterday and said goodbye to friends old and new, colleagues, staff, and so on. Today is a hello to tourist mode, with me exploring aspects of Vienna. It is raining today, so it is a good thing that I’d planned to spend a lot of time looking at art indoors.

I’m resting in the cafe at MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst), between bouts of exploration of the exhibits. There’s a modern art and modern science (together, and of course modern means early 20th Century) exhibit on the upper floors. They have the usual chatter […] Click to continue reading this post →

I’m Melting, I’m Melting!

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Ah. Now I feel the Summer. We’ve been having a streak (starting Monday, or that’s when I noticed anyway) of quite hot days here in LA and, as usually happens above a certain temperature, sleepy_me_sketch_smallI’ve begun to be in danger of shutting down. I tend to get perpetually sleepy in such conditions, and wake up quite early in the morning (which is good for avoiding the heat with an early start), and so get to sleep relatively early. During the day I’m going at half speed if I don’t manage my temperature properly. I’m not a big fan of just switching on and blasting the air conditioning the whole day, so you can say it is entirely my choice to have these issues. Instead, I try to manage good airflow at times of day when it is possible, and shield interiors from heating up under the influence of the sun. It works pretty well, but there’s a point in the middle to late afternoon where things […] Click to continue reading this post →

Morelia Cathedral

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Morelia is a beautiful city. One of the things that strikes you is the high concentration of architectural features that are either churches or related to churches (convents, chapels, etc) in the core of the city. The queen of these is the cathedral, which was across the street from my hotel (and gave it its name). Here it is during the day. The photograph was taken quite early in the morning to take advantage of the pleasant light (click for larger view):

morelia_cathedral_day

It has fountains and gardens on both sides of it, and so acts as an all important […] Click to continue reading this post →

Summer Reading: Of Bookstores and Lemon Cake

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There’s something enduringly lovely about local independent bookstores. I love stopping by to visit them, try to give my local ones the first shot at supplying me with a book I’m looking for, but most of all I value them as community centres at the heart of the villages (real and virtual) that exist in our neighbourhoods, even in a vast city like Los Angeles. People gather and linger at them, bonding over the written word for the most part, but sometimes just for the sake of gathering and lingering. In that role they are a lot like public libraries, another favourite of mine. Much of what I said can apply to the large chain bookstores too, but somehow I find them less likely to have that community feel that independent stores have. I’m not sure why (location? focus? less of a personal touch in the organization of the material?), but this is the way it seems to me. (I’m speaking about the USA; the feel of bookstores is different to me in different countries.)

aimee_bender_reading_3Last night, after a quiet evening meal after a long day of working on the Project, I went for a nice long walk, heading to Skylight books in Los Feliz. (That’s the neighbourhood at the base of the hills of Griffith Park, in case you don’t know.) My friend and colleague Aimee Bender was launching her new (long awaited) novel “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake”, and I thought I’d go along to support the launch, hear about the book, and absorb a bit of the buzz. And buzz there was, since in addition to […] Click to continue reading this post →

And So It Goes…

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bottega_louie_2So it has been a quiet week or few in my immediately local world. This is by choice. Recall that I’m on sabbatical, and working on a project. I’m trying to work on it exclusively, but I keep getting interrupted by several other things, especially since I returned from Walkabout.

But I do what I can, saying no to some things, doing some duties where I am needed, and tending somewhat to my private life and friendships of course. But mostly I’ve been hiding and working on the project. Overall, I can report that I’m very pleased with progress in the last month (since I returned to LA) on several aspects of the work. I’m sorry that I have not – and still will not – tell you anything about the project. I’ve already given my reasons, and nothing has changed. Perhaps later.

Most of my work has been in Away mode, which means at offices other than the one assigned to me at work. I am certainly staying away from the department as much as I can, (no disrespect intended, but people find things for you to do if you’re perceived as being around – I am not around!), and the same goes for the campus, making only fleeting visits to the latter, mostly in stealth mode (my obligatory sabbatical beard, among other things, has helped here). Sometimes I appear for a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Slower

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I’d take the slower train a lot.

They’re discussing a newly announced long term plan to build a new rail network in the UK that will slice huge chunks of time out of the long distance travel times between London and points North. There are many reasons why this is good news (and some bad, since there’s going to be impact on parts of the country side – this is not upgrade of existing rail lines), and these include the benefits that will result from people choosing rail over cars, and even planes, the possible further decentralization of the country (although I doubt this – I think the overall change in that regard might well be neutral. It might in fact have the opposite effect), and so on and so forth.

The national discussion that has been taking place has been interesting, of course, but I’m not hearing enough about one aspect: That travelling from point A to point B as fast as technology allows is not always the best option. I don’t think that the UK is a very big place, frankly, and I’ve got to the point where I think that the long journeys that I sometimes do on either corridor (West or East) have improved quite a bit over the years to the extent where they are about as fast as I want them to be. virgin_trainI care more about them leaving and arriving on time than I do them getting there much more quickly. Yes, I know that some people have urgent business in London and need to get there fast from Glasgow or Preston or Newcastle…. but would the extra 45 or even 60 minutes really make that much difference? Well, sure it might for some, and I do not mean to remake the world […] Click to continue reading this post →

Dessert Coffees

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three_coffeesThese are not really my cup of tea (at least not first choice), so to speak, but they are very pretty.

While working at the countertop of a coffee bar at Mercado San Miguel, in Madrid, (drinking my usual café cortado) I watched the fellow at the counter making them for some customers.

It was a rather elaborate process, and quite fascinating to watch. It might seem odd […] Click to continue reading this post →

Hideouts

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library_i_like

One of the things I tend to do when on Walkabout is seek out pleasant public spaces in which to work. Sometimes institutions to which I might have some connection might give me access to a guest office, or something similar, but often I go “off the grid”, where the grid here refers to the network of academic connections and arrangements that produces such (generous and vital) courtesies. So every city I spend time in, I try to work build a personal network of hideouts. Sometimes, these are just favourite cafes of one sort or another (you’ve maybe seen posts on those), but at times it can also be libraries or other spaces at one sort of institution or another. Some of them are quite splendid, or simply pleasant or convenient. Among the examples for me are the Santa Monica public library, the (downtown) Los Angeles public library (yes, even close to home I like to get away from my standard offices), the Butler Library at Columbia University in New York, the New York Public Library […] Click to continue reading this post →

New Voices, Great Name

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13point7_roster I noticed yesterday that there’s a new group blog, at NPR, on science and culture, and – to my pleasant surprise – one of the co-authors is my friend and colleague KC Cole, the well known (and quite marvellous) science writer! I’ve met the physicist Marcelo Gleiser who will be a co-author and he seems like an excellent new voice to hear from. Astrophysicist Adam Frank and Biologists Ursula Goodenough and Stuart Kauffman round out the exciting-looking roster. (I cheekily grabbed a screen shot of the roster photos (left) from their site.) There are a number of lovely pieces up on the site already for you to read.

The blog is called 13.7, a number that might be familiar to you.

No? You might be thinking that it is the new high price for a basic over-priced cup of “gourmet” coffee in some new tediously pretentious cafe in LA (and believe me, I’d not be at all surprised), but I was in fact referring to the 13.7 billion years that is the age of our universe. I think that is the primary meaning they had in mind too. I’m pleased to see these new voices in the blogosphere, and pleased that authors of blogs of this sort can still come up with excellent names! 13.7 is a really rather nice name and, in a slightly inside way, captures the scope, variety, and grandeur of the themes I expect they’ll explore in much the same way that the name Cosmic Variance promised (and delivered) for that group blog back in 2005. I came up with that name a little before we launched the blog (we mulled […] Click to continue reading this post →

So Much To Do…

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madrid_cathedral_1I spent an astonishing stretch of time in the Prado on Saturday, in an operation that experience and aesthetics have taught me to pace properly. I pick a particular artist or cluster of artists and focus on them for an hour or ninety minutes (visiting the parts of the museum that are relevant to them, not focusing on anything else, more or less), then I find the cafe, get a cup of coffee and a tasty, and relax for a bit, glowing from the experience. Then I plan the next pieces of the museum I will visit next and begin my focus on that part. The temptation with a museum the size and complexity of the Prado, with the remarkable depth it has in its collections, is just to show up and try and see everything in whatever order you find them. This results in confusion, superficiality, and major headache and backache, at least for me. I’m happy to go in and see a subset of what is there really properly and in context rather than just “see stuff”.

So of course I mostly focused on Spanish painters – several of the masters before the 20th Century – and later, other masters who perhaps were creating work in a Spanish context of some kind, and later, particular masters who happen to have examples of some of their great work housed in the Prado, whether there be a Spanish context or not, of which there are several such examples.

The collection is amazing. About 1/3 of my time was spent on Goya, in fact. (I wisely […] Click to continue reading this post →

Hanging with the Funny People

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I know what you’re thinking, based on the title, but I’m not talking about me and my colleagues. (Stage cymbal crash.) I mean funny-ha-ha not funny-peculiar.

comedy_festival_aspen

Saturday morning. I’m drinking a double espresso at Victoria’s (the newest of the cafes) and putting my aging ipod to the test after having opened it up and tinkered around inside to diagnose some strange behaviour. I notice out of the extreme corner of my eye that the guy who was sitting at a nearby table, now on his way out, changed his mind and is looking at me and now approaching and saying something. I […] Click to continue reading this post →

Haunting while Working

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Well, there are two Aspen cafes that are probably a bit sick of me. The last couple of days saw me frequenting one or other of them while I worked on a number of things, primarily finishing writing a paper. I’ve focused on little else but finishing it up so that I can get on with other things, such as my various other projects, and also to allow me to pay attention to the interesting talks coming up in the workshop […] Click to continue reading this post →

Ink Time…

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ink_break_aspenAh, time to relax a bit after a somewhat busy last couple of days glued to the notebook and computer. The results? (1) A hasty colloquium to an audience of mixed expertise to try to get across a sense of why some of us are excited about various applications of string theory to a diverse range of physics including ongoing experiments in nuclear physics and condensed matter physics (the person who was going to do it was a bit ill apparently so I stepped in with some hastily prepared slides… a bit messy but hopefully some use)… (2) Two papers with my student Tameem on applications of string theory techniques to superconductivity (one will appear on the ArXiv in about 20 minutes if you are interested [update: it is here.])… (3) Notes for a talk I’ll give on Thursday about said new results… (4) Several discussions with and ideas sent to some documentary film makers about some new TV shows coming up – Season 4 of The Universe! Seems I’ll get involved in some of them (stay tuned)…

So this morning I went to sit and cool down a bit at a cafe I like to visit a lot when in Aspen. Ink Coffee. Ok, I see that I did not yet mention I was in Aspen. Have been for […] Click to continue reading this post →