back in the states

I've been away in Canada for almost 3 weeks, attending Summer School on Particle Physics, Cosmology, and Strings at the Perimeter Institute. Got back last night around midnight.

I've been trying to catch up on lj today... skimming through weeks worth of posts, and marking ones I want to come back to. I still haven't looked at anything within the past week yet (if there was anything important, let me know), and then I have to go back and look at the flagged posts from the two weeks before. But I'm getting there! I'm leaving for Burning Man 2007 in 5 days, so for the next 5 days I'm going to be scrambling to plan, buy, and pack everything for that. After which I'll get behind on lj yet again. Hopefully, packing will be quicker this year than the last two years, as I have much more of an idea of what I need to bring.

I got to see a bit of Toronto and Niagra Falls during the weekends before and after school. The school itself was pretty intense (I had trouble sitting through several long lectures per day, and then getting myself to work on homework problems each evening), but I learned a whole lot. Nima's lectures on SUSY stand out in my mind as phenomenal... inspirational, insightful, and informative all at the same time. He's a really bright physicist, and an incredible speaker (even moreso than I'd realized before). I just hope he's not being overly optimistic about the prospects of seeing SUSY at LHC. I asked him at the end what he thought the odds were, and he toned it down a bit being diplomatic. But I still get a strong sense from the way he talks that he leans towards the "surely we're gonna see it" persuasion. So far, every physicist whom I've asked to give odds on seeing SUSY at LHC has said 50% in one way or another (including myself, before I had asked anyone this question in particular). (Although Michael Dine seems a bit more pessimistic as his answer was "ask someone else, if you don't want to get depressed"). Nima sort of said 50%, as he said something like "half the time I get paranoid that we should have already seen it if it was there... and the other half I think we've just got cabin fever (having been locked in a cabin with no experimental data for too long), and really should pay no attention to this paranoia." But on the other hand, I got the feeling by the way he said it that the first "half" of the time is actually a lot less than the second "half". Overall, I find myself also leaning more towards the "we've got nothing to worry about, we'll see it" camp now. As I've thought before after listening to his talks, I hope I'm not just being swayed by his charisma instead of listening to the arguments objectively.

I was going to include pictures in this post, but livejournal's scrapbook feature has suddenly gone down and it says it won't be back up for another 30 minutes or so. So'll I'll just make that another post.

pictures from Canada

The architecture and aesthetics of the Perimeter Institute are unparalleled. I've included some pictures of both the outside and the inside of the building. There were blackboards and couches everywhere inside. There is even a giant blackboard on the wall (or should I say is the wall) in the Black Hole Bistro (the dining hall at the top floor of Perimeter) as you can see in one of the pictures. Even the thing that looks like a "smokestack" from the outside turns out to be 4 blackboards you can write on when viewed from inside (which you can see clearly in another picture).

I've included some pictures I took of the falls, one of which I couldn't help but photoshop just a little bit. And there's a picture of Castle Loma in Toronto, one of the only actual castles in North America (which apparently was used as a secret lab to develop anti-submarine radar at one point!). Sean and I also went to the Royal Ontario Museum and the Ontario Art Gallery, the first of which has some really unique looking architecture (almost as cool as Perimeter) but I'll have to get those pictures from Sean, as I forgot to bring my camera with me that day. T was very generous with lots of stuff, including letting us stay for a couple nights at her place before we could get into our dorm in Waterloo. She came with me to the Falls, and took me to a play called The Circle at the Shaw festival, and we had a spectacular evening in Niagra on the Lake.



( click for more pics of Perimeter Institute, Niagra Falls, etc. )

Two resolutions I made while in Canada: 1.) eat more Indian food, and 2.) go see more plays