What happens in Boston stays in Boston

At about 6:30, I'm going to be picked up by Supershuttle and be taken to LAX in preparation for my flight to Boston, where I will be attending the SIAM Annual Meeting, which is being held jointly with its biennial conference on applications of partial differential equations and its conference on financial mathematics. I will be participating in both the Annual Meeting and the PDE conference, and, in fact, the two-session minisymposium I organized is listed jointly between these two conferences. In the first of these sessions (which starts a few hours after my red-eye flight arrives) I will be speaking about BECs in optical lattices and superlattices. (In this talk, I will include a couple slides about BECs in "nonlinear lattices," which my collaborators and I studied in a paper that we submitted for publication two days ago.) I will also give a short talk on Congress in a data mining session.

As usual, a bunch of people I know will be attending the conference---this includes people I only know professionally, as well as people from Caltech and Cornell. I also am planning to meet up with Caltech and Cornell people who are not attending the conference, including one person I haven't seen since 2001. Naturally, there will plenty of people with whom I hope to talk science, so the networking opportunities are quite promising. Because the Annual Meeting is being held jointly with the PDE conference, it includes a lot more interesting people and talks than usual. My return flight is on Friday evening, so it's going to be a pretty hectic few days. The welcoming reception is tonight, so I'm going to have to miss that.

The All-Star Futures game, featuring top prospects from the minors, was today. I occasionally tuned into it between half innings of the Dodger game. The homerun hitting contest is tomorrow, the All-Star game is on Tuesday, and the AAA All-Star game is on Wednesday, so hopefully I'll be able to watch some of this stuff. The fact that the conference is on the east coast will definitely help in this respect. (The SIAM Annual Meeting almost always conflicts with the All-Star game, which really chaps my hide.)

In other baseball news, Eric Gagné just had surgery for his hernias and will not pitch again this year. In fact, it is very likely that he has pitched his last game as a Dodger, because given that he's hardly pitched the last couple years, picking up a $10 million option would not exactly be a smart move.

Also, today's Red Sox-White Sox game is now in the bottom of the 19th inning. It is officially the longest game of the year.

I should write stuff about my Rotisserie League Baseball team soon. I'll do that in an upcoming blog entry. I started the year very slowly but am now in a pennant race. Stay tuned.