Search Results for: cafe

Twirling, Twirling, Twirling…

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Oh, yes, the midterm. Well, apparently the students don’t hate me as a result of it. (Actually I have not seen any of them since before the midterm (I was away during the actual midterm itself), so I’m not entirely sure about that…)

notebook and coffeeI stayed up until 2:00am or so on Wednesday writing and typesetting the thing, and in the end I think I set a relatively straightforward exam. Furthermore, after I finished writing it, I realized that a good chunk of the computation I’d prepared for them had already been done in a previous midterm. I’d completely forgotten. You can see a (bit blurry, sorry – in a cafe trying not too look too conspicuous taking photos) snap of my notebook with the computations that I did in preparation for the midterm in the little photo to the right.

Since Elliot asked (thanks!), I’ll say a bit more about what they had to do. I decided to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Illy Taste Test

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Well, I did a bit of an experiment the other day. I tend to have Illy coffee when I am away – Originally in Italy, when I used to visit the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, in the early ’90s. (Sigh….some very happy days were had on those trips…) At home, I routinely have reasonably good coffee made cafetiere style, using beans from GroundWork. Some months ago, however, I rediscovered one of my favourite stovetop espresso makers and started to use it again, grinding my usual coffee finer and getting quite a good cup. It started out as a treat in the morning, but gradually replaced more and more of my cafetiere cups of coffee. (Contrast here and here for example.) Then, after conversation with a friend of mine I found myself thinking about Illy coffee again and getting misty eyed. I got thinking – is it really as good as I remember it? Maybe it is partly just to do with being on my travels – the novelty, and some nostalgia for my days in Italy. Surely, a freshly ground set of good but non-Illy beans is enough to make as good a cup? I decided not to try this out, since I didn’t want to get hooked on the very expensive stuff when I was perfectly happy with my GroundWork beans.

But. I stumbled on a sampler pack of two 4.4 oz. cans of espresso preparations from Illy while browsing in a shop the other day, and so gave in.

illy coffee preparation illy coffee preparation illy coffee preparation

Drat. Drat. It is so really very very good. And I’ve gone through one tasty can (the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tiring, but Good

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mount hood oregonTo the left is Mount Hood, in Oregon. I often see it when I fly on my way up North. I often see it when I fly on my way up North. I love seeing it as it emerges from the clouds rather pleasantly, looking a bit like a cloud itself for a moment, perhaps oddly shaped, but then becoming something rather different entirely.

I was in Vancouver for a few days last week, and chatted with a few friends and colleagues (such as Moshe Rozali, Mark Van Raamsdonk, and Joanna Karczmarek) at the Physics department at UBC, and gave a seminar. I talked about ongoing work on ideas I’m still struggling to beat into shape (mentioned a lot in earlier posts about my retreat at Aspen this Summer). This was a deliberate choice. Sometimes it is very useful to force oneself to do a pedagogical seminar on work in progress. This is not so much because someone in the audience might toss up an idea that you did not consider (this can happen, sometimes as a result of a good question – but it is less likely when the audience has no expertise in the area under discussion, as was the case here) but mostly because of the very act of preparing the seminar itself. It forces you to take the wider view, consider the big picture, and try to motivate why you are doing what you’re doing, or why you picked on path over another along the way. I find this process can be quite valuable as an internal pruning and self-checking exercise.

So it was that I spent three hours at LAX writing the first 2/3 of the talk. This is not […] Click to continue reading this post →

Hollywood Halloween

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hollywood halloweenHollywood Halloween. How about that…. two perfectly matched words side by side like that, and in context. Well… last night’s West Hollywood Halloween Carnaval confirmed my faith in Los Angeles (in the broader sense) as a city where people can indeed come together in vast numbers in if there’s enough will to do so. And boy do I mean vast. I’ve never seen this many people in good spirits in such […] Click to continue reading this post →

Saturday Calm

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october rosesWell, another super-busy week has gone by. Work has been crazy, life has been crazy, and so forth. It is so good to be able to sit here for a while on a sunny Saturday morning and reflect. I thought I’d take you with me on some of the reflections.

The Nobel prizes seemed to come up so much faster this year, and go by even more quickly. I’ve not had as much time to contemplate them as I’d have liked. It was certainly really good to see that the physics one was a celebration of some of the key ideas in my field (see here), of course, but I’d have liked to have had more chatter about all of them, as I usually try to do. It is good to learn more about other things – get out of one’s comfort zone. Two years ago while I was departmental colloquium organizer, I set aside one date to be a colloquium where the three science prizes were highlighted – “Who, What, Why?” There’s always going to be local faculty who can […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXIV – Equation Wrangler

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I’m sitting in one of my favourite cafes (Groundwork at Cahuenga) after a couple of hours work with some filmmakers. I’ve mentioned them to you before, you may recall. Eric Salat and Philip Shane are making what is gearing up to be a really fantastic documentary. I’m still not sure whether I’m supposed to talk about the content just yet, and so I won’t be to specific. As I mentioned before they are really trying to tell the science story in some depth. They’re illustrating the development of an idea, the wrong turns, the frustrations, the moments of elation, depression, and everything that goes into the process of doing the sort of work we do. And here, “everything” includes the confrontation of the ideas with the elation of seeing the success of a long struggle to understand Nature. I’ve spent some time chatting with Eric and Phil about the physics ideas, as have other scientists, and I have a good sense that they are so keen to tell the story well, and give the science and the scientific process a chance to shine – something that can often get neglected in some of these shows.

What was I doing today? […] Click to continue reading this post →

Will Explain Physics For Food…?

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It’s been super-busy here in my universe, coupled with turmoil of various sorts. This has kept me away from doing some of the sorts of posts I’ve wanted to do. I hope to tell you a bit about what I’ve been up to when I get a chance. I managed to squeeze in some time for a movie last night, and I’ll do a post on that shortly, since I thought it was wonderful. In the meantime, I thought that while I do a quick breakfast before diving into the day, I’d mention the following.

Alternative Title: A Physics Blind Date

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email out of the blue from a lawyer from out of town. He explained a bit about the type of law work he does, and then went on to say that this was nothing to do with what he was emailing me about. He was emailing me about physics. Turns out that in their spare time, he and his law partner spend time discussing and arguing about physics concepts such as General and Special Relativity, and Cosmology. They’d got to a point where they were confused about various details. The popular level books that they were reading did not really do it for them in terms of getting them past certain concepts and they thought that they’d just contact a physicist and ask.

Hence the email. He wondered if I’d be able to take some time to answer questions. He was terribly apologetic for bothering me, and knew that I might decline since I’m probably very busy.

Well, my response you can guess. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXIII – Big Bang Theory

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Thursday is my first day I can take a breath this week. The last few have been crazy and so I’ve not found time to edit that bubble video I promised, but it is coming. I hope I can get to it tomorrow.

Today is still full of stuff here and there, including a referee report, another report, some administrative things for my class, and then another attempt to think through a thorny puzzle on a research project. The class admin should have been done last night since Thursday and Friday are supposed to be free of undergraduate teaching issues, according to my agreement with myself. However, we had a seminar visitor – Rene Meyer – and so after my class ended at 7:00pm, instead of doing the administration I went to get a bus to downtown to meet with him and my student Arnab for dinner, at the excellent Blossom, one of my favourites down there. There was a bit of walking around to show them some of downtown’s lovely hidden treasures in the form of so many elegant buildings that are ignored by most. (Yes, people, there are restaurants and cafes and things open downtown at night. And of course bars. Go see.)

Now on to the other thing:

still from the show big bang theory

As a result of a phone call that came through while I was hosting Rene yesterday, it […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXII – Live LHC Chats

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Just the other day, while coordinating some work being done on my house, I was thinking that it is time I learned Spanish. Most of the people working in the construction industry here in Los Angeles have Spanish as their first language, and besides the usefulness it would give in communicating difficult ideas about a piece of work to be carried out, I really don’t like the feeling that I’m disconnected from them. I’d like to be able at least to, in Spanish, offer a cup of coffee, or a glass of iced water, and have a little small talk – treat them like fellow human beings as opposed to “the help” as is done so much in this city, to my disgust. I interact a lot with the Spanish-speaking parts of the city through my use of public transport, places I go to grab tasty food from time to time, and so on, but there is still a sense that there is an entire alternative Los Angeles out there that I am only barely touching upon by not knowing the language.

Then yesterday this whole Spanish language issue came up again in a big way. There was a phone call to the department from Univision, the Spanish-language TV network. Probably most of you are wondering what that is. You know those several channels that you never watch and when you flick by them, all clustered together, they’re always speaking Spanish and discussing issues or people that you seldom (if ever) have heard of? Yes. This is one of those channels. There’s a huge part of America (and elsewhere) that tune to those channels primarily.

Well, the people at Univision had heard about the excitement about the Large Hadron Collider (see, e.g. last post) and wanted to do a piece on it, and have someone in the studio to talk about it live on their breakfast show. They were looking for a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Altered Saturday Plans

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river in aspenWell, I was supposed to go for an early morning hike to start off the day, but it has not happened. It was just meant to be a short one, since I’m staying in a little cabin out of town not too far from the start of a lovely trail. Then I was to go to the farmer’s market (more on that later) and then after lunch go to pick up my ticket for the chamber music concert I’m to go to this afternoon. (I say “pick up” and not “buy” since I was the lucky winner (well, one of them) of a little ticket lottery at the Aspen Center for Physics for tickets to concerts in the neighbouring Aspen Music Festival. Hurrah!)

Well, the hike did not happen. Why? Well, at about 6:30pm yesterday while scribbling fragments of equations and furrowing my brow while sitting in a cafe in town (a change of venue after a day at the Center(re) sitting in the office, you see), I began to realize that a computation I was stuck on might actually be becoming unstuck! Various parts […] Click to continue reading this post →

Where Many Paths and Errands Meet

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[Typed in a cafe on Tuesday at about 3:45pm. It’s just a rough collection of thoughts about various recent meetings and activities:]

Interesting day so far. One of those “my office is everywhere” days. I’m on the West side, in Santa Monica, where I’ve a number of errands to do. Also I get to work and have some meetings in between. I try very much to corral everything to one part of town so that I am not driving around too much, adding to the general junk that we all pour into the air without thinking. So I brought my bike with me to connect the dots that I intend to go between while in the area (a couple of cafes (coffee and work), the beach/boardwalk (lunch and work), a mechanic (they’re changing brakes on my car and diagnosing a Noise), one of the English shops (for tea supplies), an electronics store (to shop for memory), a grocery store, possibly a bookstore, possibly the public library (to work and ‘cos it’s just really nice)…).

While reading some notes by one of my students on a project we’re working on, and eating lunch down on the boardwalk/beach wall near the chess-players, I reached for my phone to send him a text with a question. As I did this I looked up at the passers-by and one of them was familiar! It was someone who used to be a postdoc in one of the other groups in the department, who used to share an office with the very student whose notes I was reading! Funny when that happens… We chatted for a while about things (such as career stuff concerning the interesting research life that can often found in various commercial settings), and he seemed interested in my […] Click to continue reading this post →

So Have You Been There Yet?

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I’ve mentioned it twice (here and here) in other posts, but I think it is worth a post of its own.

Have you been yet? I’m looking at you, USC-area person. There’s a fantastic new wine-bar in the neighbourhood, a relatively short walk north of campus at Union and Hoover. I’m so pleased to see it, and it is extremely welcome as far as I’m concerned. It is called Bacaro, and I’ve been there a lot already with several different groups of friends and colleagues.

   bacaro interior   bacaro interior

Why? Well, the wine is just great (various Italian wines) and the menu is fantastic too […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tired

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It has been rather a tiring last several days. I’ve been focusing on writing a big report on various internal matters that my committee was charged to study for the whole academic year. The issues are rather large, and the solutions I was trying to present require not just cosmetic tinkering but major changes in the way things are done. So the key thing to get right in writing it is a tone that is critical of what there currently is in place while at the same time painting a picture of what could be in its stead, while also beginning to show how to get there. If you don’t balance all three just right, there’s no chance that anything will change, since either lots of people will just be pissed off that you trashed their system, or threatened the status quo, or they’ll agree but say there’s nothing that can be done, or they’ll say you have not really thought it through. I think I’ve managed to get the balance right.

It was due on Monday. On Sunday night, I had something down, but I did not really like […] Click to continue reading this post →

Center For Inquiry: Chris Mooney on The War

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Well, here’s a turn up for the books. I pass the buildings of the Center for Inquiry (West) in Hollywood quite regularly on my to-ings and fro-ings, and always wondered what it was. About what were they inquiring? My inquiring mind wanted to know, but by time I got back to a computer, I’d forgotten all about intending to Google it. I was sort of expecting that it might be some, er, fringe organization, given the neighbourhood (not 1/4 of a mile away is uncle charles - center for inquirythe mother ship (or one of them) for the Scientologists, and a similar distance in the other direction is the “Scientology Celebrity Centre” too, where John, Tom, Kirstie, and others from the remarkably large movie star Scientology set presumably go and hang out and feel… celebrated).

Well, it turns out that it’s not like that after all, but a place where, as far as I can tell, serious reason-based inquiry into issues surrounding the places where, e.g., science, religion, culture and superstition intersect (such as, you know, real life) is encouraged. I like that poster of theirs I found, for example (image to the right).

They have a number of speaker series, where all sorts of interesting people come to speak, and people come to […] Click to continue reading this post →