A few people I quickly captured while relaxing in the sun at the farmer’s market this Sunday. (For larger views, click the images.)
It has become quite cool in recent days, and so it was nice to have a patch of warm sunlight to sit in for a while, as I watched people go by.
I was late for the market that day, and so I’d missed the people whose tamales I usually get, but found a tasty pupusa instead. Click to continue reading this post
Well, it’s a time-consuming process (continuing the new work on The Project mentioned in a recent post), especially when you put in more detail than really needed on what is supposed to be a rough layout. Sigh… Anyway, I’m several pages along in layouts for a story I wrote a while back, and I’m flipping ahead from time to time and wondering how long this beast is going to end up being! In any case, it’s a fun topic (or topics) being explored in this one. I’m wondering if I should try to find a way of splitting it into two stories or perhaps Click to continue reading this post
So here’s an interesting sequence of events. On Tuesday in the QFT class I finished the lecture on Renormalization Group Flow, and the idea of a “beta function”, unpacking the results we’d accumulated from QED and quartic scalar field theory to use as illustration. The key result, for those of you about to scroll away (or the few of you who have not, but are hovering over the scroll bar), is as follows. Never mind what a beta function is right now. The issue at hand concerns whether it is positive or negative for a force of interaction being studied. A positive beta function tells you that the strength of the interaction between constituent things (particles, etc) gets weaker as you work at lower energies… This is an important result in understanding how Nature behaves in a variety of situations… one way of seeing variety is to look at different energy scales, and sometimes what seems familiar takes on different character. The converse is true… that positive beta function tells you that the interaction gets stronger at higher energies… Energy is also rather like the inverse of distance scale too, so high energy is akin to shorter distance scales (higher resolution), and low energy like longer distance scales (grainier resolution). In other words, looking at stuff in really tiny detail means using higher energy… and the nature of that stuff can change when you look at that sort of resolution since the way things interact changes… For electromagnetism, for example, we see that it gets stronger the closer we look, digging more deeply into the structure of the atom, say, probing the charged constituents of the nucleus once we’ve understood electrons. The result is that you see the electromagnetic interaction changes, ultimately turning into something else… (it merges with one of the nuclear forces, in fact…but that’s a story for another day)
So anyway one of the things I ended the class with was the idea that if you had a negative beta Click to continue reading this post
Today is supposed to be a return to page layout on The Project. I’m rusty as all hell, not having done that for a while. I’ve been procrastinating a bit, and various errands have intervened, and more will – but I want to get down to it. This is the stage where I try to get all the beats of the conversation and other action all mapped out, before more detailed design of the settings, and before doing tighter (i.e., more detailed) pencils.
To knock the rust off, I decided early this morning to play with simplified mannequin figures. These little guys are great because they are very expressive, while being composed of only a few lines.
It worked…After a little while we were all loosened up and Click to continue reading this post
Wow, Friday already! It has been a busy week, but with some good stuff here and there, I’d say. “Good Busy”, as I sometimes say. I’d like to dig into some work this early morning before the day gets into my head (although I’ve already been emailing with the East Coast) and so I’ll be brief.
One of the things I’ve been doing is experimenting with Pencasts, for PBS. What are those? Well, after I agreed to do one, the main instrument needed arrived in the post. An Echo smartpen, by Livescribe. It is a pen that records (when you write on the right paper) every penstroke you make digitally and you can play back that page elsewhere…It also has a microphone built in, and so what you can do is play back the writings/scribblings/drawings, along with the sounds that were playing at the time you were drawing. You can play them back right from the pen’s little speaker, or upload the whole thing to your computer or to the web and have the whole thing playback there. It is an excellent and powerful tool. The people who make this are heavily advertising it to students as a tool for studying, which I don’t have a problem with, but a lot of the sense of the marketing (and discussions I’ve seen on the web) seem to hint that it is somehow a magical substitute for actually learning how to take notes, since you are recording the lecturer’s voice… That I do have a problem with. Making good notes is an important skill and the act of paraphrasing and distilling what is being said is vital to learning… it is arguably the most important stage now, given that students seem to have less and less time to re-work and supplement the lecture’s material in their own non-class time… These pens should supplement that process, not substitute it… Like all tools, they need to be used properly for best results.
But anyway… Where was I? Yes, so the pen arrived, and I experimented with it a bit Click to continue reading this post
For some reason yesterday morning, I got the urge to taste a good old-fashioned meat pie. Perhaps it is the Winter feeling that has come over everything with the switch to chillier weather, rain, and the delightful seasonal hint of vegetative decay in the air… I was in a strong maker-mood and so this urge built into the desire to make the thing for real with my own hands. I had leeks and beef in mind, but it is not time for leeks yet in the Hollywood Farmer’s market, so I picked up some red potatoes, two types of mushrooms (shitakes and white buttons), two red peppers, some yellow onions and some garlic (forgot to get some green onions), and returned home (after stopping at Trader Joe’s for some good tenderloin beef).
I made some flaky pastry (half butter half shortening this time… figure it would be Click to continue reading this post
Some more Feynman diagrams from quantum electrodynamics (QED), with squiggly lines representing photons and straight lines representing electrons or positrons (their anti-particle), depending upon which way you read the arrows. The process represents an entirely quantum process, with no classical counterpart, of light scattering off light. You can read the diagrams any way you like, running time in your chosen direction, and you’ll get a sensible story. For example two photons approach Click to continue reading this post
Well, it is a week full of premieres, it seems, all with a little personal flavour for me, but possibly of wider interest. I’m talking about two TV shows and a movie.
The movie is going to be out in theatres at the end of the week, and it is called “Being Elmo”, co-directed by Phillip Shane and co-written by Phillip Shane and Justin Weinstein, two friends of mine who are flying into LA for the premiere. It is about Kevin Clash, the guy who operates the Elmo muppet. In short, it is a film that people seem to be really enjoying (it won the special jury prize at Sundance, and was a finalist for the Humanitas prize), and I can’t wait to see it! I worked with Phil on a two hour Einstein special that aired on the History Channel a while back (see Equation Wrangler), and so I know his working style a bit, and the results are great – so I think this’ll be really good!
The new Nova mini-series based on Brian Greene’s second book “The Fabric of the Cosmos” begins this week. They do a very good job, working closely with Brian to produce a show of rather high quality. I hope they do a good job (as you can see from the picture, they’ve got Brian to reveal his superpowers on screen – we’re not supposed to do that Brian!). It should be interesting to see, I think. I can’t recall if I mentioned, but I filmed some contributions for it last year, and some of that will be in the first episode (and I think the fourth). (You may recall that they extracted some of my interview Click to continue reading this post
The mask I wore to two Halloween parties last night. (Click for larger view.) I got the raw mask at a costume shop and then built some interior support into it to have it sit over my glasses without pressing on them uncomfortably… Then I inked and painted some symbols on it. The idea? People often get scared when I mention science or Click to continue reading this post
Hurrah for excellent late(r) night live Jazz in LA! I’d been needing some live Jazz, so this came along at just the right time. My dear friend Patrice Quinn was singing at The World Stage in Leimert Park last night, with Jacques Lesure on guitar and Don Littleton on percussion. I went with a friend to see the second set, starting at 10:00pm. She was wonderful! I’d previously only heard Patrice sing privately (a Click to continue reading this post
I’m having a blast teaching the introductory quantum field theory class, as you may have gathered from several previous posts. It has been taking a lot of time, but I’ve been doing detailed computations with the students (and hence taking up a lot of preparation time) to make sure they really get how to compute in a quantum field theory (such as Quantum Electrodynamics (QED)) and see how it connects to the real world. Having spent time on the electron anomalous magnetic 
moment computation (I told you about that spectacular feature of QED earlier) we went back to basics to discuss in more detail the nature of the physics that is to be extracted from what are called one-loop diagrams – diagrams of the sort I drew before that have a closed loop in them.
This is where I get to try to clear up a huge conceptual issue that still afflicts most people’s popular-level knowledge of quantum field theory due to poor writing – the nonsense often spouted about there being “hidden infinities” and so on and so forth. Covering the poorly-named “renormalization” procedure and treating it in a more physical way to see that the whole “infinity” business is dreck can be fun, since it allows for an emphasis on a lot of the key issues I care about in the science that we do, such as the idea of effective field theory, the importance of separation of scales in your physics, and most importantly the reminder: Let’s not confuse the tools we use to describe Nature with Nature itself.
I like to use that phrase, and it comes back again and again, whether it is to do with Click to continue reading this post
It has been a very busy week, and I’ve been trying to find time to relax somewhere in all the hubbub. I’ve not been fully successful in it all, but I’ve been trying to do a bit of drawing practice where I can as part of the relaxation, but then sometimes I get carried away with my experimentation and turn a simple sketch into a more elaborate thing. It is good practice for The Project, but is it relaxing? I am not sure. It sure is more productive than watching a random TV show, I suppose…
I dropped in at a studio to do a bit of drawing of a model some nights back after a long time away. These “drop in and draw” sessions are good ways of helping me do a hard self-reset on certain aspects of technique, and wake up certain types of seeing, as I’ve mentioned here before. They are an excellent complement to the drawings I do on the bus, subway, in cafes, Click to continue reading this post
Here’s a montage (by Alex Lozupone) of some of the clashes between some of the Occupy Wall Street participants and the police. It is food for thought, for sure. It is set to an evocative song (“Love, That’s America”) by Melvin Van Peebles from long ago that really catches the mood**.
**Thanks Shelley! Say hi to MVP for me!
Always great when someone closes their eyes for a bit on the bus right in front of me. Gives me a chance to look really closely while drawing and finish up some of the details.
This guy’s old-school hair was my favourite thing of all. HB Pencil on the bus, and then this morning I inked it with india ink. The inking was fun as I bought some new nibs, and remembered what a really nice flow can be like. I splashed a bit of digital paint onto it at the end, by way of variety.
The SCSS over at UCLA was great yesterday. Four excellent talks, and great conversation and discussion the whole day. I also got a Click to continue reading this post
The next Southern California Strings Seminar is on Friday 21st October! The website is here. It is going to be held over at UCLA this time, and I expect it’ll be fun and informative, as these regional meetings have proven to be. This time it is a one-day event again. You may recall that the last one, on May 6th, was over at USC. See here. There’s a random picture from it above left.
Apologies to anyone who was hoping to hear about this sooner. Click to continue reading this post
