Trumpet Solo

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20120217-160909.jpgThis is a snap of a sketch I started while sitting in the Village Vanguard (New York) the other night while listening to the Mark Turner (ts) quartet play. On trumpet was Avishai Cohen, who was really excellent. This quick sketch, very incomplete, was assembled from several glimpses of him when he’d return to this pose, or more or less… Anyway, it was a fun exercise (I’d started another larger sketch of the whole band, but decided it went off balance after a while and so did not complete it).

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Entangled

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Gosh, I got a bit swamped there over the last week. Several things took me away from sitting down and doing a blog post, including teaching my class (more on that shortly), working on a film project (more on that longly) and doing my taxes (late this year – bah!) and the usual raft of committee meetings and so forth. But one of them was locking myself away for two days with my computer and a web connection and writing a paper from start to finish with Tameem Albash. We’d more or less completed the bulk of the project over two months ago, with some very interesting results that we’d talk about from time to time to try to understand what was going on, but I held things up, being distracted by several other things (some of which you know about from this blog). We decided two weeks ago that we’d just finish the thing once and for all, and then somehow ten days went by with me not getting to it. Then I decided to close the door and just do it. So from lunchtime on Friday through lunchtime on Sunday I became a recluse (kind of) and I wrote, in turn with Tameem, as we emailed and IMed back and forth, until we had a nice paper entitled “Holographic Studies of Entanglement Entropy in Superconductors”.

It is a project I’ve been hoping to do for a long time, but not all the pieces were on the market until late last year. The entanglement entropy has been a quantity of interest among physicists in various fields for years, especially in the condensed matter and quantum information community, and is regarded Click to continue reading this post →

Incomplete Subtractions

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Well, it has been well over two months since I popped into the studio I sometimes visit to to a “drop in and draw” session. (I’ve spoken about the value of such practice here before.) Although I’ve been drawing a bit here and there on the bus and subway to keep practicing, and also doing some work on some pages of The Project (actually, some pretty detailed finish work on a few pages I’m quite happy with), I was not sure whether I’d have the right chops to do a good job at the session, and expected that if I went I’d have a frustrating -but of course valuable- evening of knocking off some rust and oiling the wheels again. So I went along yesterday.

Strangely, it felt like it was going to be a good session as I approached, and as I settled down and began to try to capture the 2 minute poses, and then the 5 minute poses, I felt like I was flowing along pretty well. It helped that the model on duty is Click to continue reading this post →

Double Equivalence

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Wow. So I’ve been wondering how far behind I might be in my lectures for the General Relativity class. I seemed to spend a bit more time than I remember teaching a recap of how to think about rotations, using it as an operational and mathematical brace upon which to build my review/revisit of Special Relativity. I was definitely convinced that I was a bit behind after two lectures on introducing how to study a little geometry using intrinsic quantities rather than by reference to embedding it inside another geometry (e.g., learning to think about a two-sphere in its own right instead of as the surface of a ball – this prepares you for thinking about a three-sphere, for which the ball would be hard to visualize, or draw), and so forth. All solidly useful material for the students (in this and so many other physics pursuits to come), so I do not regret spending time on it, but I did wonder about where I was in the journey…

Anyway, I got to the statement of the Equivalence Principle yesterday, the foundation of the whole of General Relativity. I was feeling quite pleased that we’re starting on this now, putting to use all the hard work we’ve been doing conceptually so far… and thought I’d do a quick post here on the blog to celebrate that we’ve got there. I thought I’d entitle the post “Equivalence”.

I started typing and then thought I’d see if I’d written anything about it here before. Click to continue reading this post →

Pen Faces

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Well, it has been a while since I’ve posted any sketches, but that does not mean that I’ve not been doing any. I’ve had a visitor and have not been on my usual routine, and so I’ve got a bit out of practice for not doing so many, but I still snatch the opportunity to sketch when I can. Here are a few faces and fragments of faces I grabbed on the bus and subway in recent weeks. (Click for a larger view.) I just used a ballpoint pen, and a sideways glance or few…

I’m trying to decide whether I prefer catching faces on the subway or on the bus… Maybe the bus, depending upon whether I get the right seat that allows me to look without appearing to be looking too closely.

Also, in both cases it is better if the surroundings are reasonably populated. A sparsely filled bus makes me easier to spot when I’m stealing glances.

-cvj

Gold and Neutrinos!

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Here are two of the top prize winners in the competition (see earlier posts for the others, and for the full list).

The 2nd Prize and 3rd Prize winners are below! Consider watching them in full HD.

(Sadly, the 1st Prize winner, Time, (by Kevin Le and Edward Saavedra) uses copyrighted music and they are waiting to sort out permission before it can be shown publicly by the USC Science Films competition, so I can’t show it on the sciencefilmsusc YouTube channel (where all the winners are hosted) until then…)

Enjoy!

-cvj

Reports on the Night

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Well, it seemed to go well. I rambled too long and unstructuredly in my off-the-cuff speech (and long thank-you list) at the beginning, but nobody seemed to mind so much since the films were the main focus, and people loved the program. I only got two shots of the activities worth sharing since I was occupied with being host and so forth… but there were so many reporters there, and so I expect there’ll be more showing up all over the place. There were about 140 people in attendance, I was told, which is nice to hear.

People seemed to really love the whole idea of the competition and showcase, and really to understand what I am trying to do with this whole program, so that’s heartening. I hope this also translates into lots of interest next year, with even more filmmakers joining in and making films (and faculty being supportive and helping out as matchmakers and so forth).(This is all assuming I find a sponsor to fund the thing.)

Oh! I opened envelopes Oscar-style and gave out the awards. Here are the results:

1st place (and $2500): Time (Kevin Le, Edward Saavedra)

2nd place (and $1500): It’s All in You (Maria Raykova, Andy Su, Jabril Mack, Mara Guevarra, Kayla Carlisle – a freshman team!)

3rd place (and $500): Superluminal Neutrinos in 5 Minutes (Josh Heineman, Nate Fulmer, Michael Powell)

Honourable Mention (and $500): Dance with Newton’s Laws (Linda Jules, Anna Zaferiou)

Honourable Mention (and $500): Yaddda, Yadda, Yada (Kimberly Laux, Simon Wilches Castro, Scott MacDonald, Anna Drubich, Laura Cechanowicz)

(Filmmaker’s roles and the synopses can be found here.)

Then there was a surprise extra prize from Richard Weinberg (Professor in the Division of Animation and Digital Arts). He came up and gave a limited edition print Click to continue reading this post →

CelebritySC is on the Story!

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So I learned about a blog called CelebritySC recently, when they got in touch to ask me about the science film competition, and whether they could attend the showcase and cover it as press. (They also asked me some background about it, and posted an interview here.)

They’ve been doing update posts on the whole thing in the days leading up to the event, and I just saw that they’re even making guesses about which films will win prizes! From Anya Lehr’s piece, I’d guess she’s been chatting with the filmmakers to Click to continue reading this post →

Crunch Time

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I’m on the bus on the way to campus, it is pouring with rain, the heat is too high on aboard the bus, and I am late. And a bit tired. I was up until 1:00am crunching numbers. The main stage of the judging for the science film competition ended last night and I went into the system to do the data analysis. I’d designed a spreadsheet on which each of the ten judges give a score for each film in eight different categories which I tried to make roughly orthogonal. I set it up so that they could go to an online form (having viewed the films on a private channel on YouTube) and enter the scores, an action which in turn populates the spreadsheet for me. (Google docs rocks!) They could also enter optional comments about each film that could be useful for any discussion that needs to be had. So what I was doing was slicing the database of scores to see if I could get a ranking of the films to take into a face to face meeting with some of my fellow local judges today. Then I wanted to find ways of laying it all out in a way that was easy to read for everyone and in the end this morning I printed out a giant version of the entire spreadsheet on several sheets of 11×17 and glued them together to make a big colour coded foldout for us all to sit around.

The films? I’m delighted with the turnout as it shows the kind of variety of film I’d hoped would be produced. There are eight films, with films that are illustrated explainers on the one hand (with with animation or live action or sometimes both), through drama and narrative, to reflective overviews of a topic on the other, sometimes venturing into art inspired by science ideas.

(Above is a graphic made by Laurie Moore in Dornsife communications from stills of the films.)

This variety makes for a hard task in coming up with the prize winners, since Click to continue reading this post →

Evolution of a Poor Joke

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On Wednesday I made a snap decision on my feet in class and went with it. I’d done this several years ago at the same point… Let me explain.

At some point in teaching Relativity I come to do some thought experiments that follow through the consequences of Einstein’s postulates about the speed of light being constant for all observers and that all inertial observers are equivalent… You rapidly discover things like time dilation and length contraction this way. The length contraction discussion usually involves someone riding an object of a given length (from their perspective) at velocity v, and how someone on the ground watching them go by sees the length as shorter… This is Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction…
Well the point is that you need to do some careful accounting and so it is good to label the measurements made by each person carefully, and the times on their clocks, and so on and so forth. Back in the middle 90s I used to teach this at Kentucky using a rocket, with observer [tex] O[/tex] riding on the rocket, with observer [tex] O^\prime[/tex] on the ground. Times measured by each were denoted [tex]t[/tex] and [tex]t^\prime[/tex], of course.

Then one day in 2001 when teaching it in Durham (I’d moved to England) I realized that it would be worthwhile updating it a bit, so in view of the buzz about the books and the film of that year, I changed it to a broom, with Harry riding on it during a game of Quidditch, with Hermione looking on. This made also for nice notation, with times measured by each being [tex]t_{\rm Ha}[/tex] and [tex]t_{\rm He}[/tex]. This state of affairs persisted in my notes for some years.

Then yesterday just before starting that thought experiment I decided that it was a bit tired, and the last of the films was last year, and this crop of students probably think of the whole Harry thing as all so last decade anyway.

So I thought for a while, stopping mid-sentece. The students looked at me as though I was nuts (understandably) and I tried to decide what to change it to. Back to a Click to continue reading this post →

At the Breakfast Bar

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This weekend I stayed over at the house of some dear friends, spending a bit of time out of town. I was up early this morning, and while I waited for everyone to get into full gear, I had a bit of time on my own to do a sketch of what was sitting in front of me after I finished my coffee and toast. (Click for larger view.)

I got my sketchpad and pencil first, and then decided that it was a while since I’d done anything directly on the iPad, and not since I’d got the new iFaraday stylus I got Click to continue reading this post →

Sweet, Quick Treat

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One of my favourite things to do when I have a bunch of left over sweet potato in the morning is turn it into sweet potato biscuits. A nice recipe can be found in one of my favorite standby cookbooks (was a favourite since it came out in 1995), The Welcome Table, by Jessica B. Harris. There are versions online that you can find I imagine, and in other recipe books. Without going over the recipe in the book verbatim, which sometimes seems a bit unfair to me, I’ll say that it involves just a bit of butter (with Click to continue reading this post →

Tense Moments

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I’ve tried not to be worrying about it, but nevertheless there was a bit of concern today as I logged into the account and looked to see if any films had arrived. I did this a few times between other things like teaching and working on issues to do with another film project, and each time there was nothing. I was confident that there were some films on their way, since various students from the teams who entered the film competition had emailed me about various clarification issues (duration, what does midnight mean exactly, etc.) and so I know that not all of the 19 teams who submitted their application to enter the competition in October were going to be no-shows… but how many would “not all” end up being? This is the issue you get when you set something up, advertise as much as you can, and then sit back and hope that people come. You never know until they do. The same thing happened with the pre-registration phase. I’d been running around doing as much as I could to build awareness since the end of August, but until the very end I did not know if I would get a single entrant. In the end 19 teams (around 90 students) got involved!

So here I am again. There’s no turning back… the splendid theatre is booked for the showcase, the judges have been selected, the upload space is sitting waiting, the Click to continue reading this post →