AGU Meeting
Gave a talk.
I attended the Fall 2005 AGU meeting in San
Francisco last week. I was scheduled to give an oral presentation on
"Implications of Ionic Charge State Measurements on Particle Acceleration in the
20 January 2005 Solar Particle
Event."
I had spent the week prior to
the meeting attempting to write simple Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the
amount of stripping during acceleration and transport from near the sun
(1.16-2.5 Rs) to the Earth. First, I had to reproduce the Barghouty 2005
proton-impact Fe ionization cross sections as well as calculations of the solar
atmospheric plasma density of Sittler & Guhathakurta 1999. It took me a
while to do this because of having to type up table data from Arnaud &
Raymond 1992 as well as apparent misprints in S&G 1999. Eventually, by
Wednesday 11/30, I finished the simulation program, and I gave Heather the
go-ahead to travel to Colorado.
She had
originally scheduled a trip to Colorado for business from Tuesday through
Thursday, which upset me quite a bit, because she has gotten into the habit of
traveling for business the week before I have to travel. Given that my work
often takes a long time, up until the conferences themselves, and given that I
travel a tiny fraction of the time that she travels, I think I'm entitled to
some consideration on her part. Her travel right before my conferences screws
up my work. Luckily for me, sort of, James got sick, so she had a valid reason
to stay home.
However, I went the extra
mile for her by finishing my simulation program and letting her go while I
stayed home and took care of the kids alone Wednesday night through Thursday
night -- not having run more than a couple of simulations and not having even
started writing my presentation.
I was
still working on running simulations through Saturday, and I only started
writing the presentation on Saturday. I didn't finish the 1st draft until
Sunday evening, after I had arrived in San Francisco, and after discussing it
further with Dick on Sunday night and Monday around noon, I finally finished
some simulations, plots and the final presentation, which I submitted and edited
at Moscone Center.
I gave the talk on
Tuesday morning. It was originally scheduled for 9:25 AM, the last contributed
talk in the session before an invited talk. When I went up to the podium, it
turned out that my Mac Keynote talk had been placed mistakenly on the PC instead
of the Mac. I had a backup on a USB memory stick, which I inserted into the Mac
and started transferring. However, Ed Roelof, the moderator, mistakenly
believed that the virus scan upon USB stick insertion would take a long time, so
he got Steve Kahler to give his invited talk. I finished installing my talk and
snuck down to my seat. Then Ed, noticing my installation was done quickly,
interrupted Steve's talk and got me to give my talk. A bit embarrassing.
Afterward, given the brief snafus, I agreed to waive my question and answer
session so we could get to Steve's
talk.
Overall, my talk went okay, I
think.
On Monday of this week, I looked
at some CPT data from 11/22, and during the data meeting Monday afternoon, I was
able to decide on L1B0a thresholds of 371 for FM1 and 274 for FM2. I e-mailed
these to Branislav.
Today, I hosted a
sack lunch seminar with Ulrich Langner from South Africa, who gave a nice, meaty
talk on his simulations of the effects of termination shock acceleration on
cosmic rays (and ACRs). He needed to talk to Ed (and probably Alan) about
Voyager data.
During the seminar,
Spiros M., an engineer who had contacted me to ask for directions to the talk
(he's on the mailing list), mistook Ed S. for me, which embarrassed me a bit,
and afterward, he revealed to me that he was looking for an engineering job. I
showed him the ACE lab, where he spoke with Branislav a while, and then I
brought him to Caprece to maybe set up an appointment with Ed. I was pretty
uncomfortable the whole time, though, since I'm not a Human Resources person or
in any way associated with hiring.
Posted: Wed - December
14, 2005 at 04:11 PM