Meetings

Over at Effect Measure, Revere (or one of the Reveres, anyway, I'm not certain if they're plural or not) has posted another broadside against PowerPoint, calling it "the scourge of modern lecturing." This is something of a sensitive point for me, as I use PowerPoint for my lectures in the introductory classes. I've been using it this way for more than five years, and I like to think I've gotten to be pretty good at it. I fully expect this to be brought up in my tenure review, though, and to have to justify my use of PowerPoint in class. Here's the thing: PowerPoint is a tool, nothing more. It…
Symmetry magazine has an article on travel tips for physicists, from other physicists. There are two scary things about this: 1) The degree to which the picture that emerges from the different tips aligns with unflattering stereotypes of physicists. Some of the items are funny travel stories, but the tips are all about keeping your laptop running, and how to live out of a single back for two weeks, and how to avoid actually talking to anyone during your travels. 2) The fact that I think most of the advice is excellent. God, I'm a dork. They're absolutely right when they say "if you must check…
It's not as sexy as Strings 2006, but it's easier to understand what the talks are about: Nathan Lundblad is blogging from the International Conference on Atomic Physics in Innsbruck, Austria (the bastard). Posts so far: First day introduction. First day talk recaps. (The latter includes the announcement of the [Norman] Ramsey Prize, "to be given to the first credible measurement of a nonzero electron EDM, with the caveat that it be done in his lifetime." For those not in the field, Ramsey is 91, so that's an important caveat...) Now that I've plugged this, Nathan will no doubt crumble under…
For those interested in keeping abreast of the latest stuff on string theory and its discontents, some links: Jonathan Shock is based in Beijing, and blogging about the Strings 2006 meeting. He's got a first-day recap including descriptions of several of the talks, and incident events. Victor Rivelles is also blogging from Beijing, and has recaps of day one and day two. The Paper of Record loves Stephen Hawking, and writes about his visit to China for the conference. Christine Dantas has re-posted her top ten lists (which were taken down in part due to some unpleasant comment behavior). The…
A scientific conference like DAMOP almost always includes a conference banquet (to which people may or may not bring dates), usually the last night of the meeting, where everybody gets together to eat massive quantities of catered food and drink massive amounts of wine supplied by the conference. The quality of these ranges from your standard rubber chicken sort of fare to the multi-course gourmet meal (with a different bottle of wine for each course) provided at a conference I attended in Bordeaux. DAMOP does all right in the food department, though you're not going to get real gourmet fare…
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…
Every year, or nearly every year, I go to the meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society (which revels in the acronym "DAMOP" (pronounced "day-mop"), but at least we're better off than our Canadian brethren, who are just the Division of Atomic and Molecular Physics). A few years back, when I was a post-doc, the meeting was held in London, Ontario. I flew into London on a small plane jammed with physicists, including a couple of theorists I knew from my grad school days. I hadn't seen them in a while, and we were staying in the same hotel…
Eszter at Crooked Timber points to some public speaking tips she wrote. Some of the advice is fairly specific to the academic conference setting, but it's all excellent. In the Crooked Timber post, she emphasizes problems with people going over their allotted time, and mentions in passing session chairs who let them. This reminds me of one of my favorite physics conference anecdotes, reproduced after the cut: At DAMOP a few years back, a certain guy who we'll call B., just to have a convenient name, was giving a talk in a session chaired by C., a guy from NIST (not me). The talk was..., well…