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, so we decided to share a cab from the airport. We passed the half-hour cab ride chatting about the sort of stuff that geeks do– somebody we knew had recently defended his Ph.D., so we exchanged a bunch of funny thesis defense stories, and talked about the science we were working on, and all tht.
(Funny punch line below the fold)
After a while of this, one of the other guys looked out the window and said “Hey, there’s the Sheraton!”
The cabbie, who had been silent through all this, growled “Yeah, and there’s the convention center, and if you keep going down this street about a block, there’s a strip club that you guys should really go to, because you need to lighten the hell up.”
I’m off for this year’s meeting this afternoon, and the sad thing is, this is how I lighten up. I’m really looking forward to the meeting as a week-long break from thinking about my classes, and getting to hear the current state of AMO research (with which I am woefully out of touch after two terms of heavy teaching load). And I’ll get to see a lot of old friends that I haven’t seen since last year’s meeting, or even longer.
(OK, it’s not all fun– I’m taking a student with me this year, and we’re giving a poster on Wednesday afternoon. But that’s a minor point– the important thing is five days with no classes.)
This blog will not be entirely silent while I’m gone, as I’ll schedule a couple of things to appear during the next few days, but I don’t expect to have the time or inclination to write long blog posts from Knoxville, so you’re mostly on your own. Stay out of the liquor cabinet, and don’t play the stero too loud, and I’ll be back Sunday or Monday.
So, what sort of tip did you give the oh-so-helpful cabbie?
I remember checking into a hotel in Toronto for an Optical Society annual meeting. At the end of the front desk was a group of prostitutes, asking the clerk what group was going to be in that week. Told it was physicists, the leader turned to the rest and said “guess we got the week off girls”…..
As a theorist, I know we have disgusted various restarunts by requesting more placemats to write equations on than more food/beer, while taking up table space.
DAMOP was more incremental this year, Knoxville was pretty pleasant. The poster sessions were crammed into such small spaces though it was really hard to see much.
DAMOP was more incremental this year, Knoxville was pretty pleasant. The poster sessions were crammed into such small spaces though it was really hard to see much.
I talked to a couple of people who were on the Executive Committee, and my impression is that they were somewhat surprised at how many people registered for the conference. I think the poster sessions may have been larger than expected.
Of course, the real problem wasn’t the absolute size of the rooms, but the way they were laid out– they could’ve spaced the poster boards out more, and had less milling-around-aimlessly space over on the side. As it was, it was awfully hard to navigate the rows of posters.