Annual Meeting of the American Astronomical Society: 2010

liveblogging the AAS...

It is freezing in DC, but at the Marriott hotel across from the National Zoo the action is hot and heavy as 3000+ astronomers swarm to the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

This is for the 7 astronomers who phoned it in, literally in one case, you know who you are.
Or, in case you got stuck in the exhibit hall lobby at 9:17 this morning and never found your way out of the basement again. Hope the WiFi signal is holding up down there.

There is a flurry of new results, though through some freudian mishap I just typed "flurry on few results" instead. I am working my way through the backlog and upcoming announcements, on a very slow internet connection.

I think the AAS is outgrowing this venue also, the one thing astronomers may not be denied is bandwidth and coffee and we are low and late on both.

Oh, and the exhibit hall will be closed early on thursday (1 pm) in case you hadn't noticed, so lets not get caught out like in Seattle back in '08...
Security is impressive, though I remain bemused as to why the exhibit hall guard keeps checking my name on the badge: I don't think he'd know if it was a fake (there are other laser printers out there), nor do I understand who would want to crash the AAS poster exhibit...

Anyway, here goes.

by some strange cosmic coincidence this was playing on 100.3 FM as I swung from the I-270 onto the beltway yesterday. Seemed apropos.

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Wasn't Seattle 2007? Security was crazy at that meeting too. They wouldn't let me in early to put up my poster. Fortunately, I missed the Thursday carnage that year.

The DC meetings are so huge now. A decade ago you could assume that you'd be able to run into anyone who was at the meeting, but that's not the case now. I had been to every DC meeting since 1990, but $$ constraints kept me from going this time, so I'm watching sessions on Ustream. Not bad, but not the same as being there.

By T. English (not verified) on 06 Jan 2010 #permalink