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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
(Funny punch line below the fold)<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
After a while of this, one of the other guys looked out the window and said “Hey, there’s the Sheraton!”<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
I’m off for this year’s meeting<\/a> this afternoon, and the sad thing is, this is<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n (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.)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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… Continue reading True Conference Stories<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meetings","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}