On the Road Again

The scientific program at DAMOP runs three and a half days– Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and only in the morning on Saturday. The weather for the first three days was spectacular– glorious, sunny late spring days, with clear blue skies and pleasant breezes. And, of course, I spent the vast majority of that time indoors in […]

Fines Doubled in Work Areas

This year’s DAMOP meeting is in State College PA, which has good and bad points. It’s not exactly a tourist Mecca, but then that means I won’t feel bad spending all day in physics talks. It’s also probably relatively cheap, unlike Calgary last year. But the most important feature of the location is that it’s […]

DAMOP Day 2

I spent a whole bunch of time running around between talks on Thursday, and at one point was grumbling to myself about the way the organizers had scheduled all the good stuff at one time. Only later did I realize that it really wasn’t their fault– it’s all good stuff, and there are only a […]

DAMOP Day 1

A very quick run-down of physics topics at DAMOP, before I go to bed: I skipped the prize session at 8am, so I started my day with Bill Phillips’s talk in the recent developments in optical lattices session. Oddly, his talk really didn’t have much to do with lattices, but it’s always a pleasure to […]

DAMOP Day 0

I made it to Happy Valley without incident, though it is Orange Cone Season in Pennsylvania, and I spent a lot of time dodging construction. Happily, there really wasn’t anything important at the meeting last night. So I skipped out on the welcome reception to have dinner and a few beers with Kevin and RPM […]

Matthew Hughes, Template [Library of Babel]

A little while back, Matthew Hughes offered a free copy of his forthcoming novel Template to online reviewers via his web site. I wasn’t able to read it fast enough to get in on James Nicoll’s review-a-thon, but I finished it a few days ago. Template is set in the same basic world as Majestrum, […]

links for 2008-05-28

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Academe and Parenting “Part of the problem, I think, is the potentially infinite demands of the job. How much time does it take, per week, to prep and grade a typical class?” (tags: academia kid-stuff society culture education) The Traveling Taps Brigade – washingtonpost.com “”[F]aking taps just isn’t good […]

Science-and-Religion Links Dump

I did a few of these a while back, and then, as usual, sort of stopped posting on the subject. There are a limited number of articles on science, religion, and culture wars that actually catch and hold my interest, so it’s hard to populate a regular links dump. Of course, I could always just […]