Science on the Beach
May. 2nd, 2009 09:05 pmOkay, folks. I'm in Virginia, in a decent room in a very nice hotel on the beach. Seriously, if I go out on the balcony, I can see the beach. Sadly tourists here for the weekend, plus astronomers means that the internet is holding up like a buffet under Lina, Gourry and Pocata.
The drive out was all right. I read, I slept, I had interesting conversations about the role of colonization in bringing Europe to prominence, and comparing Indian and Mesoamerican history (that was mostly Matt and Manish).
Unfortunately, I slept like crap last night. Dunno why -- maybe just a change in setting. it meant that I was dozing through all the talks*, and eventually had to bug off midway through 'Disks' (boo -- I missed two talks on the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud) and ended up missing the poster session for a nap.
I also met some people who I barely remember now and found out about some papers on asteroids that might be interesting reading. I had a tuna sandwich for lunch that ended up getting eaten on the way back.
*'Cept rings. Rings are awesome. I might have been doodling a bit during Manish's talk, since I heard him practice. Sadly, the only talk by a non Cornell person was by Mark Showalter, who taught me that one should never put the conclusion in the title when you have to turn in the title in advance**.
** Mark talked about 'weird stuff in the F Ring', but then had to take back one of his major conclusions after doing some last minute analysis -- as in, I was sitting next to him in the first session, and he was changing slides around.
I might do a summary of Matt and Phil's talk. It's interesting and contentious and I think is fair game now that it's been spoken about in a meeting.
(A couple of weeks back, Piled Higher and Deeper ran a strip about grad students calling their professors by their first names. I think I called my advisor by his last name for a bit, but he's been 'Phil' for a while now. Except when context means that I could mean Phil the grad student in our program. (Heck, my undergrad advisor insisted that any student call him by first name if they were doing research with him, and most of the astronomy faculty doesn't seem to mind being on a first name basis with grad students.))
Now, to practice my presentation!
The drive out was all right. I read, I slept, I had interesting conversations about the role of colonization in bringing Europe to prominence, and comparing Indian and Mesoamerican history (that was mostly Matt and Manish).
Unfortunately, I slept like crap last night. Dunno why -- maybe just a change in setting. it meant that I was dozing through all the talks*, and eventually had to bug off midway through 'Disks' (boo -- I missed two talks on the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud) and ended up missing the poster session for a nap.
I also met some people who I barely remember now and found out about some papers on asteroids that might be interesting reading. I had a tuna sandwich for lunch that ended up getting eaten on the way back.
*'Cept rings. Rings are awesome. I might have been doodling a bit during Manish's talk, since I heard him practice. Sadly, the only talk by a non Cornell person was by Mark Showalter, who taught me that one should never put the conclusion in the title when you have to turn in the title in advance**.
** Mark talked about 'weird stuff in the F Ring', but then had to take back one of his major conclusions after doing some last minute analysis -- as in, I was sitting next to him in the first session, and he was changing slides around.
I might do a summary of Matt and Phil's talk. It's interesting and contentious and I think is fair game now that it's been spoken about in a meeting.
(A couple of weeks back, Piled Higher and Deeper ran a strip about grad students calling their professors by their first names. I think I called my advisor by his last name for a bit, but he's been 'Phil' for a while now. Except when context means that I could mean Phil the grad student in our program. (Heck, my undergrad advisor insisted that any student call him by first name if they were doing research with him, and most of the astronomy faculty doesn't seem to mind being on a first name basis with grad students.))
Now, to practice my presentation!