(no subject)

[ellarien]

The lights on the skating rink are all green tonight; I have no idea why. We walked close to the big tree on the way to dinner tonight, and I realized that the ornaments are the size of basketballs and the tiny lights are at least the size of my thumb; I've been underestimating the scale of the thing.

Yes, I went out to dinner tonight, the first and only time this trip, in honor of being done with the meeting. (I gave my second talk this afternoon, and it seemed to go okay.) n the way back, we stopped in the lobby of another hotel to admire the magnificent seven-tier sugar-and-gingerbread castle, rotating majestically on a plinth in the lobby with a a counterrotating train running around its base. (No pictures, sorry.) It had a unicorn, battling knights, a wizard, and various other figures around the base or looking out from balconies.

I'm heading back to Tucson in the morning -- more dark and early than bright and early, I think.

Comments

[peoppenheimer]

Thank you for the updates from the conference. Have a safe trip home.

[ellarien]

Thanks!

Interestingly, the meeting organizers seemed to be embracing social media in a big way, but mostly Twitter and Facebook. There's a facebook group for the meeting, and they not only encouraged the use of a specific twitter hashtag but had a monitor in the poster hall showing the tweets with that tag in real time. (I pity the person who had to sit there hitting the refresh button all day!)

[peoppenheimer]

I recently read a couple of interesting essays about the dark sides of backchannels and sidechannels at conferences. I'm sorry that I do not have the references ready to hand; if I find them again I'll pass them along. I take it that in the case of this conference, the effect were either neutral or beneficial?

[ellarien]

It wasn't doing any harm that I could see, but I wasn't monitoring it very closely; I'm not sure it has really caught on in the solar community, which embraced Powerpoint with great enthusiasm about a decade ago but otherwise has been running meetings much the same way for as long as I can remember, just with more online registration.