I'm back from DAMOP, having spent a lazy day in Knoxville yesterday, waiting around to go to the airport. That was a much-needed respite from the non-stop conferencing of the previous few days, but I would've preferred to be home, rather than in Knoxville. Air travel continues to suck, particularly the waiting-around-airports phase.
The meeting itself was pretty good. Nothing really revelatory on the science front, though there were some very nice talks about different things that have been going on for a while. This is pretty typical-- every few years, you get a meeting where lots of exciting stuff has just happened, and really new results are presented, but mostly you get incremental progress on existing projects. This was an incremental progress year, for the most part, but there's still amazing stuff going on.
One of the nice things about hanging out with physicists is that they mostly don't care much about appearances. Thus, despite having lost almost fifty pounds since the last time I saw most of these people, the number of "My God, you've lost a lot of weight!" comments was fairly limited (and included one "Oh my God, are you OK?"). It was great to see a bunch of people I haven't seen in a while, including both of my former bosses, neither of whom I had seen in four or five years. I also met a few more people who read this blog, and another couple who had heard of it.
I may have some comments on specific science-related developments, and I'll definitely say some things about science policy as relating to the depressing after-dinner talk. But for now, I'm going to relax a bit, and enjoy being back home. There'll be time enough for blogging tomorrow.
(I took one look at the number of posts piled up in my Bloglines subscription, and hit "Mark All Read." So if there's any must-read blog stuff I missed this week other than Nathan passing his defense, drop me a comment.)
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