More awesome results pending...

Here I am giving my conference talk earlier today. It's over, and it went okay. I covered what I needed to, but it was a little choppier than I would have liked, plus I finished short of the time allotted. The latter isn't the end of the world, but it's better to use your 10 minutes efficiently, so that you can communicate all the cool things that you do to people who (nominally) care about the research that you are doing. You might argue that no one cares, and I might agree. However, while that may largely be true, it's hard to deny that an atomic physics conference represents the best chance of finding anyone who cares about the stuff I work on.

Oh, the title of this post refers to the fact that our best results are always "just around the corner". ;)

"Leave everything behind!"

My first (and hopefully) last emergency evacuation of an airplane occurred yesterday. The above picture is of the plane after we had exited in haste. Because I already had my bag in my hands, I didn't listen to the flight attendant's instructions to, "leave everything behind". As a result, I had my camera and decided to commemorate the moment.

Fortunately, no one was hurt, the engine merely overheated (no fire!), and we were on our way on a different plane within 3 hours. I got to the conference I'm currently at in plenty of time to worry about my presentation.