The Camellia tree is blooming again, and I’m so delighted! Click for a larger view.
This afternoon marked a somewhat late return to the back garden in earnest, preparing beds for a new cycle of plants, cutting back overgrown bushes of various sorts, checking the integrity of the drip system, clearing lots Click to continue reading this post
Struggling for a post title, I went for a slight critique of the work I did on the character you’ve seen earlier*. She’s been grabbed from a panel showing her looking for a seat in a cafe where a conversation (about a physics issue) is to continue.
It is a large panel showing the layout of the cafe with all the people sitting and reading and talking and so forth, and she’s one of several small figures in it, so it is probably not that big a deal that she has somewhat heroic proportions here as compared to her more ordinary proportions in other panels.
Heroic here refers to the various choices of proportions you can give to figures, usually based on how many heads tall they are. You might have heard of people talking about how many heads tall a figure should be.
Well, there really is no “should be”, and different practitioners use different Click to continue reading this post
I’m guessing that a lot of you (especially those doing graduate work in Biology Labs) will just love this video*, because you can relate to it. It’s about that frustrating feeling that (for one reason or another, or several) you’re stuck doing the endless project from hell… We’ve all been there. Oh, and it is done in the style of a Lady Gaga video I am told (not having ever seen or heard a Lady Gaga video, as far as I am aware, I can’t attest to this). Video after the fold:
Not long ago, I noticed that the cleaning robot was ill. It would start its cleaning cycle, run very fast for some seconds, and then make one of its warning noises and stop. This was a few days before my guests were due to arrive for the holidays, and I’d planned a big session of extra attentive house preparation, involving me putting up curtain rails for some new drapes in the living room, installing various shiny fittings in a spare bathroom, and a few other things like that, while the plucky little robot would run around all the floors and give them a good clean. So I had a dilemma – spend time trying to get it well, or use that time to do the floors myself? A bit of googling revealed that the warning noise was signalling something about a sensor possibly going bad. Did I want to spend the time heading to Fry’s electronics to see they had the sensors? Then digging around inside replacing them, with all the soldering, etc., that would entail? Fun, but time-consuming. After a day or two, I decided to do an investigative poke around the interior of the patient, just in case it might just be a matter of clearing or re-seating the sensor array…You never know.
The innards are delightfully put together! The iRobot people deserve some congratulations for good design. It took little time to take the thing apart, and it is very modular inside, with various components popping out quite nicely. It had a lot of dust in several places, notably. I got out my can of compressed air to blow dust out from various tight corners, and put it all back together after a short while. I got it started again and it seemed to run normally, until I noticed that it was missing a key Click to continue reading this post
So it was an odd day yesterday. On the one hand, after getting up at 6:00am without prompting, deciding to start the work day, then procrastinating for a chunk of time – including admiring Venus (have you seen it/her recently? beautiful!) – it turned out to be a reasonably productive day. I tried to devote it entirely to The Project, since I’ve been quite busy with Professoring the last couple of weeks and so had not done much. The plan was to ink a page that had been sitting there waiting to be inked for a while, and to continue re-inking one of the pages I did over the Summer. Well, I succeeded in the former, and have punted some of the latter to today. I hope. I pleased with the finished inking which includes a little drawing of the wonderful Planck satellite, which will be mentioned as part of a conversation. (By the way, Planck’s preliminary findings were in the news recently. Worth a look.) I even got some of the colour work started on that successful page toward the end of the day, but lost what I did on that due to a strange computer problem (sometimes the Adobe software decides that there’s just too much going on and declares it does not have enough memory to proceed… then you’re stuck not being able to render, or even save….). I only lost an hour’s work of fairly straightforward painting – I am in the habit of saving relatively regularly.
So what’s the “odd” bit in the title? Well, all through the day I was bothered by something, and it is even more bothersome this morning. My right eyeball hurts. A lot. And I don’t know why. And in a universe that I am quite sure loves playing ironic Click to continue reading this post
So you’ve probably heard the news, but just in case I thought I’d mention it here. The Kepler observatory, up there in orbit keeping an eye on things for us, has found a bumper crop of planets orbiting a sun-like star a mere 2000 or so light years away. It is amazing what you can see if you look closely. Every now and again the star’s brightness dips ever so slightly, and that tells you something has passed in front of it – another planet. Or in this case, once you’ve analyzed the pattern of dips, as the team of astronomers did, six planets!
These are not earths, although the headlines all over the news sure try to grab you in Click to continue reading this post
Another succulent in the garden is flowering. I love these flowers, which stretch way up from the plant itself, right in front of the drawing desk at my study/studio Click to continue reading this post
Last Friday, I went to the luncheon of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and as usual there was a fascinating short talk to accompany lunch and coffee. (As I mentioned before, the membership of this group is a rather wonderful mixture of people mostly from USC, UCLA, and the city of Los Angeles in general, mostly prominent writers, artists, and other people from the humanities, film, theatre, and… they let one or two dabbler-type scientists like yours truly on the list, bless them.)
The talk was by Bram Dijkstra, and was entitled “The Nude in American Art”. As with most of the talks here (and in many similar venues), it seems to be associated with a book the speaker has out recently, and this one is a sumptuous-looking tome called “Naked: The Nude in America”. It was a nice talk, although he did not get very much into the modern America part because he spent time on the European connections and background and then ran out of time (they try to keep the luncheon talks short and to the point, leaving you wanting more, and leaving time for questions, which is indeed a good thing). However, one of the things that kept coming up was the whole business of an early prudishness or puritanicalism (still persisting in some places today) that meant that the naked physical form should somehow be hidden away. You get examples even today of art galleries’ major donors creating problems for an exhibit that contains nudes, etc., etc. He discussed various changing (and not changing) attitudes to this issue on both sides of the Atlantic through the years, which I found interesting. Aspects of this were not just tied to things like religion, but also the changing status of women in the various societies, to various degrees, since a lot of nudes feature the female form.
This is all very interesting to me in view of The Project for, I hope, obvious reasons. I found myself wondering (and indeed asked a question at the end about it) about Click to continue reading this post
A closeup snap of the core of one of my favourite succulents from my garden. It is Click to continue reading this post
A student asked a question in the string theory class today to which my answer was a suggestion of how to think about the issue raised in order to go about answering the question themselves. There’d be a few minutes of diagram drawing, and all would (hopefully) be clear. I thought that might not be an unreasonable thing to ask of a student, particularly in a graduate class, where they are ultimately trying to develop skills to do research. Well, it all went a bit pear-shaped as the student seemed to get quite strongly annoyed by this suggestion. I’ve still no idea why.
Anyway, on the bus home I thought I’d do some idle doodling, and ended up doing the exercise I’d suggested… and sure enough what I suggested doing works nicely and does (I think) make it clear.
I’m sure it was all a misunderstanding… Probably my fault.
Over late night dinner just now, since I can’t put down this lovely brush pen I’ve been drawing with recently, I scribbled the figures out from the notebook for you to look over my shoulder, as it were, and see what we’re up to in the class. Don’t worry so much about what it all means. It is sometimes nice to just look at the shapes*. (Actually, one of the students brought his mother to visit the class today. She sat through the whole hour and fifty minutes of the lecture. That was nice. I hope she enjoyed it all!)
I find these diagrams and the computations they represent rather pretty.
Wednesday will be the big climactic lecture of a sequence I’ve been leading them Click to continue reading this post
So, a huge number of decisions went into getting the work to where I wanted it to be, and I’ve shown you samples in various previous posts, some collected here. But where does it all begin? It starts with the idea or concept that I am thinking about, and conversations which will form the dialogue for the piece in question. I start fleshing it out more, perhaps with a setting beginning to form in my mind. Maybe pencil drawings begin to take shape, and I start laying out pages, capturing the beats of the conversation, and the visuals that might get used. Characters (the people who will be in dialogue) begin to assert themselves by this point as well.
Incidentally, this is a place where sometimes the iPad comes into its own, and it is a great tool at several stages of all this. This project is one of the reasons I got the iPad, although I could not tell you at the time I got it back in the early Summer since I was not revealing what I was working on then. (Much of the other stuff I happily discovered about the iPad that I blogged about a while back (here, here, and here) are actually nice bonuses. I got it primarily to help me with development aspects on this project that had little to do with those other features.) I draw rough layouts on the iPad sometimes, and I can store all my rough ideas and print them out, modify them, call them up for later viewing, and so forth. I can carry work in progress with me, reference photos from location scouting, etc. It is also good for practice sketching, and sometimes, using it, I’ve grabbed some nice quick drawings of people in a meeting or in a bar or on a bus. Drawing from life is an important skill to keep up. The iPad is not used in final production on the graphic novel though. I work at a level of detail and complexity that the iPad would not be able to Click to continue reading this post
I just saw on the USC news site that DJ Strouse, one of our excellent current physics majors, has been selected as one of 14 students in the USA to get a Churchill Scholarship this year! He is the first USC student to get one, actually. DJ is one of those students who reminds you why teaching is such a delight. He engages with the material in class and beyond, exploring it extensively on his own, and Click to continue reading this post
The hankering I had for some marmalade on fresh bread on Sunday last was satisfied a bit later by simply making some. It was a lot of fun. I always like making bread as it Click to continue reading this post
This always catches people off guard (myself included), so I thought I’d post a little reminder. The deadline for applications to the Summer workshops at the Aspen Center for Physics is January 31st. That’s coming up soon, so to physicists interested in doing a research stay, start thinking about the dates you want to attend, finding funds for support, planning for things like childcare or summer programs for children if you have any, and so on and so forth. There’s a wide variety of excellent Click to continue reading this post
After working for most of the day on various things (finishing penciling, then inking, and partly painting a panel for one of the pages of The Project, writing a letter of recommendation, answering various emails, etc.,) I decided to go out and enjoy the wonderful day that we were having here in LA for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I opted to head to Leimert Park and check out one of the primary (post-parade) celebrations going on in the city. That part of town is regarded by many as a cultural center for the African American community in LA, and a lot of great celebrations and other gatherings are held there from time to time (there’s also good music to be found there sometimes). As I walked along in observer mode, I noticed a group of drummers. Every now and again they’d get a groove going and people would gather around and some would start moving to the sounds, some swaying in place, some dancing outright. Young and old, male and female, black and white, etc. It was good to watch. I caught a snippet for you and it is linked below. Click to continue reading this post
