This and That

Some photos from the SUSY 2009 conference are online now, you can find them here. Here is one that caught me at the reception first day. And just in case, I'm the second from the left. Please don't ask me who these people are coz my brain has a black hole where other people store names.



Some more photos that I made, here's Boston



And here's the Curry Student Center at Northeastern University, the building where the parallel sessions took place, as well as some folks in the coffee break and the audience of the public lecture


I'm not on the group photo for no other reason than that I didn't know when it would be made.

Some other things:

• Lee Smolin wrote a piece for PhysicsWorld titled "The Unique Universe". I don't know what to make out of it, so I'll restrain from commenting.


• Martin Fenner asks Why do we go to conferences.


• For quite convoluted reasons I found this article about Perimeter Institute in the Google cache. It's hilarious. I have the uncanny feeling somebody might be quiet unhappy I digged it out, but I can't resist sharing it. Let me quote you some lines
  

  Faced with [Laurent] Freidel’s delirious state of distraction, his wife reportedly pleaded with a colleague: “Can’t you do something? He’s going insane.” [...]
  
  Markopoulou-Kalamara is the only female faculty member at Perimeter. She makes efforts to tone down her exuberant European elegance to match the company she keeps—that is, variously aggressive, cavalier and nerdy male physicists. One of them, her husband Olaf Dreyer, had recently experienced an eureka moment. “He thinks he’s found the solution to quantum gravity,” she says. “He’s flipping out.” [...]
  
  Every physicist at Perimeter has free use of a BlackBerry, though, as Smolin laments, “the phone bill isn’t covered.” [...]
  
  Bilson-Thompson, 33, is a playful scientist who wears a perennial pony-tail and fleece [...] The Perimeter Institute, he says, encourages the same adventuresome pursuit of knowledge with a simple laissez-faire formula: “Take scientists, put them in a box and say, ‘OK you boffins, do your thing.’” [...]
  
  Physicists are forever thinking they’ve “got it,” Markopoulou-Kalamara says. Or they are tormented because they don’t. This is the physicist’s bipolar yo-yo of euphoria and despair. “We need to have a psychiatrist in residence,” she says. “Somebody is always in a state of crisis over something.” [...]
  
  As for Smolin, he said “Hello” when Susskind arrived for his visit at Perimeter in March, but got a tepid response. “It was in a tone that gave me the impression he had no interest in speaking to me,” he says.
  
  Says Susskind, “I spend every day having lots of interesting conversations.” [...]
  

  
  See what fun it is to be a theoretical physicist?