Journey Notes

From 29th November to 5th December I was at the 18th congress of the Australian Institute of Physics in Adelaide, and this was the first time I got to see the city after Thomas, Claudia and myself had only driven through in late 2002, on the way to the airport, and then I had to get on a plane back to Sydney. This time, I had planned this as something like an early summer escape (seeing as it can’t seem to stop raining for long in Sydney), but I had also prepared an article for the conference proceedings and a talk for the program – along the lines of this.

Turns out it was a pretty busy conference – 8:30 in the morning till 7:30 in the evening almost every day! This is the sort of conference that gets your head spinning after four or five days. I’m still not complaining, because the poster sessions were a lot of fun (and they took place on three out of the five days, and came with food and drink), the plenary talks in the mornings were mostly interesting, and it was relatively easy to switch between the seven parallel sessions, because everything was in one building.  To take advantage of this, though, you had to use the elevator rather than the stairs, which is still a little unlike me.

The only thing that didn’t work out very well was the computer support for the presentations – does anybody actually like Office 2007? Does anybody know how to use it?  Certainly, my Powerpoint presentation (made with OpenOffice 3 and Powerpoint 97, mostly at home) didn’t run very well on the test computer that was set up at the speakers’ preparation centre. So I fixed the movies, and the animations (took the entire lunch break) – then it’s Wednesday, the time for my talk arrives, and what do I find in the lecture theatre?  Office 2003 and Windows 2000.  Almost needless to say, the movie did not run on the first attempt, but at least everything else worked okay. After the talk it occurred to me that when the lecture theatre has two screens, one should use the mouse, not a laser pointer, to point.

On Thursday, I had to chair a session, which was a challenge, because initially I wasn’t too familiar with the subjects of the presentations.  I had tried to read up a bit on the techniques and work of the group that provided four out of the five talks in “my” session, so that at least I would be able to ask a question or two to jumpstart a discussion after talks – but that turned out to be quite unnecessary as the discussions started themselves rather nicely; in fact I had to cut some of them short. As a reward for my extra preparation work though, I now know a little better what a frequency comb is, and I find that quite useful and exciting.  It’s inconceivable that this would have been discovered without someone puttering for hours and hours in the lab, because this is really quite an improbable instrument! Unfortunately, a Nobel Prize has already been given for that.  And in the frequency-comb labs, these inner sancta of 15-significant-digit accuracy, it’s still common practice to start the pulse laser by tapping a mirror with a screwdriver!

But enough of the talk already! I wanted to show you some pictures from my wanderings in the sparse spare time I had, and let’s do that in a separate album. The parks, campus and river parts that I saw of Adelaide, are rather pretty – but six years ago we also saw some bleak suburbs. There are statues everywhere, and war memorials, and churches. The city has a good, pleasant vibe to it – but then the grass is always greener (or yellower, in the case of Adelaide) on the other side of your flight.