Swans on Tea

OK, last things first. The UVa campus gets an overall grade of gorgeous, allowing for the construction that was going on. (There was a very New England “you can’t get there from here” theme that pretty much mandated that any travel between buildings required a detour of some sort) The weather was [...]

The conference is over. I’ll post some thoughts later, after I’ve recovered. Fortunately, Chad has already posted a summary of Day One, Day Two and most of the rest. I attended a few of the same sessions, so there’s not too much to add. I haven’t attended a DAMOP since 2000, [...]

The DAMOP conference is coming up, and that reminds me of a conference-related phenomenon related to gathering a group to go off to a meal. This doesn’t manifest itself when the conference provides meals, so it wasn’t an issue last fall; when the meals are being served you can just grab some people [...]

Check out Allyson’s guest post at Cocktail Party Physics for one of the main reasons for my recent observation
I didn’t see any glitches except for one or two instances of technical difficulties, which speaks volumes for the organizers and support staff, because you just know there were issues, and since they didn’t become visible it [...]

I’ve been trying to catch up ever since going to a conference a few weeks ago. Somehow, the work didn’t know to stop piling up while I was away, and I’ve been getting new things to do faster than I can finish the old things. Printers dying, tape drives dying, things inside the [...]

An idea we were joking about at one of the breaks between talks. You go to science camp, but the time is indefinite. You think it might be a week, and you tell everyone you think you have a week left, but it could end up taking a month. And at any [...]

I’ve mentioned I’m at a conference — it’s the 7th Symposium of Frequency Standards and Metrology being held near Monterey. It’s a bunch of scientists getting together every ~7 years to discuss the state-of-the art in frequency standards, clocks, and precision measurements, and float ideas for future experiments. The last one was in [...]

The conference organizers built some free time into the program to let everyone catch their breath and decompress a little. I went hiking and geocaching along the ocean trail and took a bunch of pictures.
Enjoy the Pacific ocean for a minute
You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

You go to the conference banquet and empirically discover that an empty wine bottle will be replaced with a full one. This has both a good and bad implications.