100th Birthday Bash!

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If you’re in town on Sunday 9th June, I strongly recommend coming along to this! The Natural History Museum is having its 100th Birthday celebration with an all day series of events. There’ll be new spaces and exhibits opening, including the new gardens they’ve been building for some time, and so there’s plenty to explore that will be new, and partly outdoors on a (hopefully) lovely day. (See here for an LA Times article on some of the changes.) As the day draws into the evening, there’ll be a real party brewing, with bands, DJs, bars, and so forth (see below). Kicking off the evening part of the proceedings at 6:30pm will be a talk and Q+A with JPL’s Adam Steltzner (of the Mars Curiosity Mission), in a spot hosted by me.

Adam’s a great guy, with lots of interesting things to say and a great sense of Click to continue reading this post →

Maybe one of the best emails yet?

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I get a lot of unusual emails each day. Typically, offerings of alternative theories of the universe with requests/demands to review them (sorry – please send them to a journal), discoveries of remarkable forms of energy saving or propulsion systems (People, I have my own crazy sh*t to work on – don’t ask me to work on yours too), offers of marriage and/or marriage-related things (Ladies (and, yes, some Gents), no thanks, I’m just fine.), and so on and so forth. But yesterday’s email is up there among the recent highlights. It was sent out to an anonymous group, so I have no problem sharing it here (I have removed the name of the sender):

Click to continue reading this post →

Lattice Experiments

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... and out it came, just as I finished hand-whipping some cream for an accompaniment. Hurrah! Apologies in advance to people who clicked over here because from the title they were expecting a post on discrete approaches to quantum field theory such as lattice QCD. This is mostly about lattice cherry pie, which, you’ll perhaps admit, is at least as interesting. Best to use the ones that have a slight sour edge to the taste, in my opinion… not too overly sweet.

Yes, it is time for an Asymptotia visit to the kitchen. Sunday I had a little dinner gathering for five, which called for an afternoon of cooking. I took some pictures, but in the end the set is incomplete since I got distracted with the important business of helping serve everything nice and hot and on time. So the main focus will be the pie (shown at the top so you don’t have to wait – the photo makes it look at lot darker than it actually is. It is not burnt!), since that’s all I have a complete set for. The Click to continue reading this post →

SCSS Report

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scss_may_2013Friday’s Southern California Strings Seminar was a success! Thanks to all who came, who spoke, and the UCLA organizers. I enjoyed all four talks that were put on, and learned a lot from each. (Sera Cremonini is giving her nice talk about duals of hyperscaling violating theories in the photo.)

I was particularly pleased about the talk by Daniel Harlow about the Firewall issue, Click to continue reading this post →

Messing About on the LA River

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memorial_day_la_river_2013_smallMemorial Day was fun. There was a gathering at a friend’s house down near the LA River. At some point in the afternoon lots of people went down to the river banks to look at the lovely scene there, with people fishing, cycling, and kayaking (and other sort of boats) along some stretches. This is not at all what people expect of the LA River, so it was good (once again) to see a different reality shine through the standard images. Focusing on being good company, I only started Click to continue reading this post →

Southern California Strings Seminar

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The group at UCLA is hosting the next SCSS, and it is on Friday. More details here. The schedule looks good:

9:30-11:00 Sera Cremonini (Texas A&M): “Probing the IR of hyperscaling violating geometries.”

11:15-12:45 Ken Intriligator (UCSD): “Aspects of 3d N=2 Chern-Simons-Matter Theories.”

12:45-2:15: Lunch

2:15-3:45: Daniel Harlow (Princeton): “On the Computational Complexity of Hawking Radiation”

4:00- 5:30: Eric D’Hoker (UCLA): “Supermoduli and supersymmery breaking”

Enjoy!

-cvj

Small Short Film

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A creative team at IBM made a rather elaborate little stop motion film recently*. “Little” is a key word here. The moveable elements are atoms (well, actually CO molecules), moved with a scanning tunnelling microscope! They are calling the project “Atomic Shorts”, it seems. (Pause…) Yep, on reflection, I think I will stay away from all the obvious juvenile jokes that spring to my mind…

See the film here:

There’s a “making of” film (of course), which you can find below, along with some Click to continue reading this post →

Sketchy Look

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magazine_sketch_18th_May_2013On Saturday I decided to have a bit of simple relaxation at home, and sit on the patio with my notepad and some pencils and draw a likeness. I’d not done any practice from images for a while, and frankly my pencil work was very rusty and needed a workout.

So I dug out this month’s issue of a sewing magazine that I subscribe to (what?! well, it’s a long story… let’s move on) that happens to sometimes have interestingly lit and well reproduced photos of faces and sketched for a while.

It was fun (even with the slightly flawed outcome). (Click for a larger view.)

-cvj

Something’s not quite right, perhaps?

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thing_vs_thing Yeah. Scary, right? I woke up one morning to this result (see earlier posts here, here, and here) from a night of an intensive computer run. It was not meant to be a straight line, but pretty close to it, so I knew that something was wrong with my code. Took me a good long while to trace the problem, but I did in the end. My signal was being swamped by both Click to continue reading this post →

Bad Luck for Kepler

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Steinn has a nice post about the sudden ending of the Kepler mission, due to a crucial component failure. As he notes:

“Kepler has discovered almost 3,000 planetary candidates, of which about 100 have been confirmed through a variety of techniques, and, statistically, most of the rest are likely to be real planets.

Kepler has not quite found earth like planets in the habitable zone, yet.
It is heartbreakingly close to doing so.”

Sad to see, especially at a time when science is being hurt so badly by continued Click to continue reading this post →

Final

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Well, I’ve got to say goodbye to another excellent group of students from my undergraduate electromagnetism class. We had the final today (starting at 8:00am – ack!), and given the lack of rioting, tears, and throwing of rotten fruit during the exam itself, I assume that it was not too bad an exam to sit. Of course, the real measure of what they thought will be how they did in the actual answering of questions, and I’ve not looked to see how that has turned out yet.

Again, I feel a bit sad since it was a good group of students and it was fun to teach them this material. While it is certainly good to move on to other things (I’ve too many projects I want to work on, as usual), I will miss the twice weekly classes with them. Highlights this year include (in no particular order):

(1) The thing I love to do when we are studying dipole radiation – taking the class outside (surprising them somewhat) to look up at the blue sky and connect why it is blue to the computation we just did, including understanding the pattern of the blueness Click to continue reading this post →