Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

Well I am back from Baltimore now. Louise joined me on Thursday and as there were no relevant talks on the last day of the conference we went to the aquarium for the day on Friday. That was really fun and it is a pretty good aquarium. We saw the dolphin show twice as I really like dolphins and went around the Australia exhibit they are currently showing.

We had a really nice meal that evening at the Capitol Brewing Company and I found one of the nicest beers I have ever tasted! It was called Fuel and was made from coffee and chocolate among other things. It was quite strong but very nice, I couldn't find any to buy to bring home though... Saturday we took the train down to Washington DC for the day.

We paid for a day pass on the tour bus and started off at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. I was amazed that is was free entry, but the queues were long and slow. Once in I had to put my bag through a security scanner, I asked the security guard if it was film safe and he didn't listen at all but took my bag off me and pushed it through. I will find out when I get them developed I guess. Continue reading "Back From Baltimore"

I attended the APS March meeting in Baltimore this year. I didn't know anyone there, and was the only member of our research group out there but I got the opportunity to see a lot of interesting talks and posters. I also checked out the job fair, but it didn't have anything of any interest to me there unfortunately.

This was the biggest conference I have ever been to, with about ten or so parallel talk sessions running most of the time. Contributed talks were only 10 minutes long, and invited talks were usually 35 minutes long. There were a very large range of talks, and as it was more general than previous conferences I had attended I was able to attend a few talks totally unrelated to my research but of interest to me.

There were also a massive range of booths at the exhibition from a whole range of companies. It was interesting to see so many manufacturers, publishers and software companies displaying their latest and greatest products all in one place. The whole conference was on a larger scale than anything I have previously seen.

Some of the talks I saw revealed other groups working on some of the aspects I do but in quite different ways. Not all of this work had turned up in my searches of the published literature so I have quite a few papers I would like to look up once I get back to the office. I also talked to an interesting person on one of the booths about ADS which isn't just for astronomers. I have since used it and found it very useful for finding papers published in physics journals, and when combined with CAS it covers pretty much everything in my field.