Arcane Gazebo provides a picture of a giant blue bear, a few notes on talks about quantum computing, and thoughts on the Kook Session.(*)
Cocktail Party Physics offers thoughts on Irish giants and large-scale pattern formation in geological systems.
Physics World offers three posts: on carbon-trapping windmills, the physics of icicles, and the 20th anniversary of Woodstock.
Know of any other reports from the meeting? Leave a link in the comments.
(* - Background for non-APS types: The American Physical Society meetings accept essentially all contributed abstracts, even the ones from crazy people. As a result, any big APS meeting tends to have ten or so lunatics on the list of speakers, and the people who put the program together tend to collect them all into a single session at an inconvenient time-- usually late afternoon (the session Travis talks about was at 4:30), or on the last day, when people are leaving to catch flights out. Sometimes they're downgraded to poster presentations-- at last year's DAMOP, all the kooks seemed be be assigned to one of the poster sessions, and given display-board locations that didn't actually exist, because none of them showed up...)
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The APS tradition of rounding up the usual suspects and putting them in a loony session is a good precedent, used by some other science conferences as well. Science Fiction worldcons have evolved from the APS structure. Similarly, the crackpot poster session area has been widely adopted.
I've both been in those ghettos, chaired such sessions, and (much more often) presented in normal and plenary sessions.
I'll skip the anecdotes, and jump to some conclusions.
(1) Even distinguished scientists can be in the ghetto, when they stray from the area of proven expertise. I've been to conferences where Physics Nobel laureate Brian Josephson had his paper on language and consciousness rejected, and gave it in the fringe of the poster session. But his Physics talk was in the regular sessions.
(2) This is also a way to deal with formerly coherent scientists who, through age or disease, are "losing it." They still have respect from their productive days, and the con committee feels sorry for them. This is a kind gesture, which sometimes means a lot to those ill or elderly folks and their students and families. This was diswcussed a month or two ago on the Adventures in Science and Ethics scienceblog.
(3) The very tolerent scientists such as Chad and myself are sometimes interested in the flakey sessions, antirelativists, antiDarwinists, and the like, as they are a kind of f2f blogging, a chance to see and critique unusual ideas. And, once in a blue moon, there is a diamond in the mud, a genuinely original and fascinating idea that may percolate into the mainstream.
The paradigm is real, but hedging one's bet by looking at oddities outside the paradigm has a valid social purpose, and rarely changes the border between goofy and germane.