diary - May 2011

For my April 2011 diary, go here.

Diary - May 2011

John Baez

May 1, 2011

May 21, 2011

An interesting essay about David Eagleman's studies of human time perception:

Burkhard Bilger, The Possibilian, The New Yorker, April 25, 2011.

"I was working with Larry Mullen, Jr., on one of the U2 albums," Eno told me. . "All That You Don't Leave Behind," or whatever it's called." Mullen was playing drums over a recording of the band and a click track — a computer-generated beat that was meant to keep all the overdubbed parts in synch. In this case, however, Mullen thought that the click track was slightly off: it was a fraction of a beat behind the rest of the band. "I said, 'No, that can't be so, Larry,'" Eno recalled. "We've all worked to that track, so it must be right." But he said, 'Sorry, I just can't play to it.'"
Eno eventually adjusted the click to Mullen's satisfaction, but he was just humoring him. It was only later, after the drummer had left, that Eno checked the original track again and realized that Mullen was right: the click was off by six milliseconds. "The thing is," Eno told me, "when we were adjusting it I once had it two milliseconds to the wrong side of the beat, and he said, 'No, you.ve got to come back a bit'. Which I think is absolutely staggering."

May 16, 2011

Today I set off on a long trip back to the University of California at Riverside, where three of my graduate students are finishing up and giving thesis defense talks this week. Meanwhile Lisa is going to Erlangen for a meeting of a consortium on Fate, Freedom and Prognostication. Her flight took off around 6 pm, and mine around 9, so I decided to go to the airport with her. This was a somewhat bad decision because American Airlines, being short-staffed, didn't open its desk for check-in until shortly before the flight. Since I knew this was just the beginning of a ridiculously tiring flight, which would include a 6-hour layover in Tokyo, I decided to buy a big fat interesting book. I settled on this:

John Keay, China: a History, Harper, 2008, 578 pp.

Detailed but engagingly written, intelligent but not too scholarly, this is just the right thing for me now. I've been in China enough, and talked to Lisa about its history enough, that I can keep track of the the different dynasties and most of its different provinces: I know that Hubei is different from Hebei, and Shanxi is not the same as Shaanxi. I find myself drawn to the Tang and Song dynasties, and want to read more about them. Even the dreadful Ming holds a grisly morbid fascination for me.

May 17, 2011

I arrived in Riverside jet-lagged but unbowed. Because I hadn't carefully read the airplane ticket bought by a secretary at UCR, the long layover in Tokyo involved a train ride from Narita Airport to Haneda Aiport (which I'd never even heard about). This is presumably a trick played by the ever-avaricious American Airlines to save money and pass on costs to me—maybe by avoiding some fees at the larger and more famous airport? Luckily I knew I was in for this by the time I took my trip, so I was prepared. It went smoothly, and actually relieved a bit of the boredom of the layover.

Typically, the American Airlines flight leaving Haneda Airport was delayed by 3 hours. I read Chinese history.

In Riverside I went to my house, picked up my car and drove to the Mission Inn, where I'll stay for this trip. (My student Chris Rogers is renting my house, and I didn't want to bother him.)

May 20, 2011

All my students did well, and got their Ph.D's. We did one thesis defense a day for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. First John Huerta talked about division algebras, supersymmetry and higher gauge theory on Wednesday. Then Chris Rogers talked about higher symplectic geometry. The Christopher Walker talked about A categorification of Hall algebras.

I took them all to dinner at the Mission Inn, along with Alissa Crans, a former student of mine who just got tenure at Loyola Marymount University, and Julie Bergner, who was on two of the thesis committees, and John Huerta's girlfriend. It was fun but I think we were all a bit tired: them from last-minute thesis work, me from jet-lag. So the revelry was low-key, and we quit at 9:30 pm.

And thus ends an era—the era of my work on categorification! Well, not quite: I still have papers to finish with Alex Hoffnung and Christopher Walker. But it marks a transition. It's very nice, actually. I feel freer now.

May 22, 2011

I've been spending a lot of time talking to Jim Dolan, and I also checked out the house yesterday. The yard and garden are fine, I'm relieved to say. Our gardener, Robert Rodriguez, has been doing an excellent job of tending them.

I spent a bit of time this morning surfing the web. If you've enjoyed the music of the guitarist Michael Brook—I'm a fan of Hybrid (with Brian Eno), Cobalt Blue and Night Song (with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan), you should try his extensive collection of free music online. He wrote:

When initially constructed, the focus of this site was primarily as a way to interact and communicate with fans of my recorded music and concerts.
Ironically almost as soon as the site was redesigned in 2008, it became somewhat painfully apparent that trying to sell and promote recorded music wasn't really a viable business for me. Fortunately, I had already started a transition into film scoring and that is now the main thing that I do.

So, now he's giving away music for free and making money through film scores!

Next I'll go visit my friends Chris Lee and Meenakshi Roy in Los Angeles for a couple of days...

May 26, 2011

I had some great conversations with Chris and his postdoc Marc Harper, a tiny portion of which I later recorded on my blog. I survived the flight from Los Angeles back to Singapore, which was just as convoluted and tiresome as the flight there: another train trip, luckily no flight delays, but somehow depressing to leave on the 24th and arrive on the 26th. Luckily I had my history of China to keep me company. I'm now up to the Yuan dynasty.

I arrived in Singapore at 6 am; Lisa showed up around noon.

May 29, 2011

A somewhat lazy day. After a nice swim, I fixed up the webpage listing the papers and theses of all my students, which was a good way to remove material about them from my main webpage and convince myself that yes, John, Chris and Christopher really were done. I updated my vita, and some more stuff like that. Then I created a bunch of webpages based on my blog entries about information geometry. While listening to music, all this is a bit like knitting or cleaning out the closets. I seemed to need a low-energy day like this.

Here's a great photo of zodiacal light versus the Milky Way, taken in Tenerife by Daniel Lopez:

For my June 2011 diary, go here.

For Hillman, "soul" is about multiplicity and ambiguity, and about being polytheistic; it belongs to the night-world of dreams where the lines across the phenomenal field are not so clearly drawn. Soul pathologizes: "it gets us into trouble," as Moore writes, "it interferes with the smooth running of life, it obstructs attempts to understand, and it seems to make relationships impossible." While spirit seeks unity and harmony, soul is in the vales, the depths. - Brent Dean Robbins