Giant Thistle

Do you recall the day you sat on the thistle? Would you have thought these things can outgrow you?


That plant is about 2m high. Would make for a nice Christmas tree.

Noebook photos // Notesz képek

© Taskovics Dorka

We asked my very best friend Dorka Taskovics to take some photos of our notebooks for Etsy, because the pictures are very important and we really need a professional photographer. She is professional and she took so nice pictures that I can't stop to watch them. :)
A legújabb fejlesztésként nemrégiben elkészült füzetekhez egy igazi fotós fotóst kértünk fel, Taskovics Dorkát, hogy készítsen nekünk az Etsy-re képeket, mert nagyon sokat számítanak a jó képek. Dorkának ez olyan jól sikerült, hogy én azóta folyamatosan ezeket a képeket nézegetem, teljesen oda vagyok értük. Köszönjük szépen Dorka!

Quantum To Cosmos

Today Perimeter Institute announced the “Quantum to Cosmos: Ideas for the Future” festival that will take place October 15 to 25. And I'm so sorry I can't be here because it sounds tremendously exciting! The most important thing first: there is a website where you can find a lot of information

q2cfestival.com

This afternoon in the Theater of Ideas, after a welcome by our director Neil Turok, John Matlock (Director of Communications) and Richard Epp (Scientific Outreach) briefly outlined the event, followed by several VIPs in suits who said a lot of nice words, including the mayor of Waterloo, two guys who are ministers of something, a women from TVO, and Mike Lazaridis himself.

The Quantum to Cosmos festival will celebrate the 10th anniversary of PI’s inception, and simultaneously contribute to Canada’s National Science & Technology week, and be part of the International Year of Astronomy. As Mike added later, it isn't only PI's 10th anniversary, but also the 10th anniversary of the BlackBerry.

There are more than 50 events planned, including exhibits, cultural performances and film screenings, plus there will be quite an effort be made to allow a larger online community to take part in the festival by providing podcasts, live streaming and live blogging, supported by the media partner TVO. The festival is on Facebook, on Twitter on MySpace and on Friendfeed. A lot of interesting speakers will be here for the event, including Larry Abbott, Sean Carroll and Katherine Freese.

After the announcement we had a reception in the atrium. The guy with the camera has been sneaking around


and I took a couple of photos. Here is Neil waving with his arms


Robin Blume-Kohout and Achim Kempf


And here you can make a little bit of crowd-spotting. In the picture: two of our faculty members, Rob Spekkens and Rob Myers, Jon Henson, Dario Benedetti, the mayor of Waterloo, Simone Speziale, Constantinos Skordis, Samuel Vazquez, Nicolas Menicucci, and, so I belive, Jon Walgate.


(Close-up of the two Robs here). And here is the charme of the Institute, Sarah Croke, who is presently also our Postdoc Representative


I am afraid I will miss them all.

With that, I wish you all a great weekend!

This and That

Some photos from the SUSY 2009 conference are online now, you can find them here. Here is one that caught me at the reception first day. And just in case, I'm the second from the left. Please don't ask me who these people are coz my brain has a black hole where other people store names.



Some more photos that I made, here's Boston



And here's the Curry Student Center at Northeastern University, the building where the parallel sessions took place, as well as some folks in the coffee break and the audience of the public lecture


I'm not on the group photo for no other reason than that I didn't know when it would be made.

Some other things:

• Lee Smolin wrote a piece for PhysicsWorld titled "The Unique Universe". I don't know what to make out of it, so I'll restrain from commenting.


• Martin Fenner asks Why do we go to conferences.


• For quite convoluted reasons I found this article about Perimeter Institute in the Google cache. It's hilarious. I have the uncanny feeling somebody might be quiet unhappy I digged it out, but I can't resist sharing it. Let me quote you some lines
  

  Faced with [Laurent] Freidel’s delirious state of distraction, his wife reportedly pleaded with a colleague: “Can’t you do something? He’s going insane.” [...]
  
  Markopoulou-Kalamara is the only female faculty member at Perimeter. She makes efforts to tone down her exuberant European elegance to match the company she keeps—that is, variously aggressive, cavalier and nerdy male physicists. One of them, her husband Olaf Dreyer, had recently experienced an eureka moment. “He thinks he’s found the solution to quantum gravity,” she says. “He’s flipping out.” [...]
  
  Every physicist at Perimeter has free use of a BlackBerry, though, as Smolin laments, “the phone bill isn’t covered.” [...]
  
  Bilson-Thompson, 33, is a playful scientist who wears a perennial pony-tail and fleece [...] The Perimeter Institute, he says, encourages the same adventuresome pursuit of knowledge with a simple laissez-faire formula: “Take scientists, put them in a box and say, ‘OK you boffins, do your thing.’” [...]
  
  Physicists are forever thinking they’ve “got it,” Markopoulou-Kalamara says. Or they are tormented because they don’t. This is the physicist’s bipolar yo-yo of euphoria and despair. “We need to have a psychiatrist in residence,” she says. “Somebody is always in a state of crisis over something.” [...]
  
  As for Smolin, he said “Hello” when Susskind arrived for his visit at Perimeter in March, but got a tepid response. “It was in a tone that gave me the impression he had no interest in speaking to me,” he says.
  
  Says Susskind, “I spend every day having lots of interesting conversations.” [...]
  

  
  See what fun it is to be a theoretical physicist?