... although it might show up later on one of those top-selling Mathematicians Gone Wild! videos. I'll keep you posted.
Anyway, I'm flying off to San Antonio tomorrow. If one is going to visit Texas, January is definitely a good month to do it. My previous experiences there (aside from quick trips through airports) were for a conference in Austin (a week before their big music festival) and Dallas (for my interview with SMU, future home of the George W. Bush Presidential Library---that was the straight line; you provide the joke).
There will be some Techers at the meeting, although it isn't anything like the March Meeting, which is O(6) times bigger. I'm speaking in a session that Melvin Leok '00 is organizing, but we have some overlapping research interests and go to several of the same conferences. (This one is a general math conference.) I will see a few compatriots from grad school (no surprise) and a metric ton of fellow Project NExTers. It should be fun---when I'm not working. :) I still have to finish preparing talks and then I'll be able to write up my character's background for Tim's game (not to mention figure out his stats). I am bringing my dice me as inspiration (even though I guess there's nothing left to role). Maybe I can convince people to play Apples to Apples? I never had a chance to try to get a game going at Dynamics Days.
I will attempt to duplicate last year's feat of getting booed during one of my talks. (This is the only time this has ever happened, and what I said wasn't actually that bad.) The faculty members in the audience from schools where I had interviews were duly impressed. I will be speaking about football, congress, and Bose-Einstein condensates, so I'll vote for Congress being the most likely one where this happens. (I'd say football, except that I am anti-USC on general grounds and that should help curry favor. I assume the San Antonio Campus of UT doesn't have a rivalry with Austin. If it does, I am changing my mind on this particular handicap.) Last year, I got booed during my BEC talk, but the circumstances have changed, so that should be safe this year.
Last year at this meeting, I also saw my old Math 5 prof (for the first time since sophomore year), who was a postdoc at Tech when he taught that class. He was probably the best teacher I had at Tech.
Don't forget to remember the Alamo (the event, not the movie).
I am going to have nightmares about the concept of Mathematicians Gone Wild videos.
ReplyDeleteThey should have the March Meeting in Austin again, but this time during SXSW. We could go to physics talks during the day, and concerts at night...
That was the point of that comment. :) I see I succeeded.
ReplyDeleteI missed that March Meeting. That was 03, right? The first one I attended was the one in 04. Wouldn't the room rates at the hotels be higher then? Of course, this is why we have travel funds...
I would definitely be up for that kind of trip, and that would encourage me to actually have my slides ready before the conferences started (which I have now done for the second time in a row, after a quick airport session this morning, after three years of failure in a row).
The promised internet access in my hotel room seems to be nonexistent (I chose my hotel partially based on this promise...), but at least almost nobody is around to create a line at the computers (10 minutes max if anyone is waiting). They have 4 spots for people with laptops in the same room, but there's no wireless.
I've already run into people I know who I didn't know were coming. That's a good thing. I'm still probably going to be stuck going to dinner on my own tonight, but we'll see.
Welcome to Texas. I don't think UT San Antonio actually has a football team, so I'm not sure there's much of a rivalry to worry about. The best place to hang in SA is the river walk. And the Alamo is actually worth a look. It's much smaller than you expect it to be...
ReplyDeleteThere seems to be an exit to the river walk right from the convention center where most of the talks will be. I have indeed heard good things about it, although the cab driver decided to advertise armadillo races in a nearby city instead of avoiding stereotypes. (He indicated some more interesting stuff as well, although the armadillos apparently slide down a shoot first, so this is giving me Sonic the Hedgehog flashbacks---different animal notwithstanding.)
ReplyDeleteArmadillo races cannot be fully appreciated if one is sober. Just so you understand that.
ReplyDeleteDid he happen to mention which city, btw?
Further to my first point above...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sparksagency.com/Dillo%20Promo.pdf
Yeah, I missed the '03 March Meeting as well, although I thought that was the conference you were referring to above (since it's in March and so is SXSW).
ReplyDeleteClearly, once we are Influential Members of the Community, we should organize a series of physics conferences that just happen to take place in interesting cities during interesting events.
OK, that .pdf was disturbing. Amusing, but disturbing. (For the first question, the answer really ought to have been B.)
ReplyDeleteThe taxi driver did indicate which city, but I've already forgotten. That guy also gets points for quote of the day. He's talking about some bar we were passing (there are three of us riding in the cab, including one female) and was mentioning that Wednesday night is 'straight night' (without having previously described the bar at all) but that it's still 40% gay on Wednesdays. Welcome to Texas (or something like that). With the way he phrased it, I had to hold in my laughter until he was out of earshot.
Also, the people I ran into were in the airport in San Antonio. They were actually on the same flight as me. (They teach at Loyola.)
I forgot to add: My conference in Austin was an RL Moore conference in March 2004 (Moore taught at UT Austin for decades and his papers are kept there), which is meant to indoctrinate people into "his" method of teaching, which really means some of his students' and grandstudents' extreme version of "his" method. During that conference, I felt like the organizers were proselytizing the whole time. They were basically like 'this is the only proper way to teach, blah blah' and that method can't by it's very nature be used for applied mathematics because it's axiomatic. I felt completely turned off by the whole thing, although thankfully I knew people there, so I had a group of people with whom to hang out.
ReplyDeleteI think Jing may have gone to the March Meeting in Austin. I agree we need to have our conferences in places while the cool stuff is going on, not the week before.