160/366: Nice Crowd

I did bring my good camera with me to Newport News, and took it on the tour of Jefferson Lab yesterday, but despite the existence of DSLR pics, you're getting a cell-phone snap for the photo of the day:

jlab_audience

That's the audience about 10-15 minutes before my talk last night, so it was a good turnout. And they laughed in the right places, and asked some really good questions last night. I also got asked to appear in a selfie with a bunch of students from a local school, so they could prove they were there to get extra credit for their science class...

The talk went well, though we had some technical difficulties. The shiny new video projection system in the auditorium has an audio input jack on the VGA cable for the laptop input, but it's about four inches long, and the headphone jack for my laptop is on the far side of the keyboard from the VGA out. Whoops.

We ended up taping a lapel mike to the desk right under the laptop speaker, which was mostly fine, except for a couple of occasions where we got earsplitting feedback. Technology, man. What can you do? Video will be posted to the JLab web site at some point in the future, after they edit it and get closed captions done (I'm very sorry for whoever has to do that...)

I was also pleasantly surprised that a couple of Williams classmates showed up to the talk (they live in the area), so I went out with them afterwards for a couple of beers, to catch up. All in all, a good day.

Now, I just need to get through most of a day of airports and Regional Jets to get home to Niskayuna.

More like this

I've been remiss in my self-promotional duties, but I'm giving a public lecture tomorrow night in Newport News, VA, as part of the Jefferson Lab Science Series. This will be my traditional "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk, with the sad addition of a slide honoring the late,…
A quick check-in from Tuscaloosa, where we're getting ready to head out for the football tailgating. While I've got a minute, though, here are the slides from my public lecture, via SlideShare: What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics View more presentations from Chad Orzel. These are…
My parents are in the Caribbean at the moment, and threatened to send me cell-phone pictures of white beaches and blue water. They were thwarted in this by the fact that I still have a cheap LG flip phone with no camera. Our calls from home are exclusively made using a landline phone. You can see…
SteelyKid's second-grade teacher sent home a couple of books about kids dealing with the loss of beloved pets-- one of which, The Tenth Good Thing About Barney is surprisingly atheistic. We read them at bedtime the other night, which was a little rough. After we finished, and moved her to her bed (…