March Meeting Madness

AKA: What happens at the March Meeting stays at the March Meeting.


In a few hours, I am going to need to wake up early in the morning to be picked up at 5:45 am by Super Shuttle for my morning flight to the APS March Meeting in Baltimore. This will be my third trip to Maryland in three months. I am supposed to arrive around 4:30 pm, and then I'll get my butt over to the hotel, get my registration stuff, and hopefully find some of my friends and go eat dinner with them.

I am going to be giving a short talk on Congressional networks and I also have a poster entered for the competition for the GSNP (Group on Statistical and Nonlinear Physics) Gallery of Images. I am speaking in a focus session on social networks and, in fact, complex networks is very well represented at this conference. I'm hoping that between the talk and the poster (and the fact that I will be letting these people know that our data is available upon request) that I'll get a bunch of people interested in my stuff.

There will be a number of Techers at the conference---including Gazebo, Jing Xu '98, Robert Chen '98 (a pair of Scurves), Matt Reese '01, Matt Sullivan '00, and some others whose names and faces I recognize but who I never knew very well. I am bringing both 1000 Blank White Cards and Apples to Apples with me, so hopefully some heated gaming will ensue.

Obviously, a number of other people I know will also be there. One of my collaborators was named an APS Fellow this year. I may have actually nominated him, but I can't remember whether or not I did. Some other collaborators will be there, and there are some work-related discussions in the works. Cornell always has a big group of current people and alums at this meeting (they have a large, prominent condensed matter group), and for at least the past several years, there has been a Cornell reception (with good food). The opening reception should have some good food as well.

The exhibitor's hall at this conference also tends to be extensive.

In general, the March Meeting has a lot of stuff to offer, but it's rather huge, and one does tend to find oneself drowning in things.