Loose ends: July

My first adventure outside Chicago (outside the city proper: not out of reach of the Metra) in July was to visit William: I helped him and Truc tear down wallpaper, then we enjoyed dinner at White Fence Farm.

Then it was time for a longer trip: to Boulder for a summer school.

The academics were quite good: overall, I found the lecture quality considerably above the average I observed at MIT. There were ten lecture series I found particularly informative:

Tom Lubensky (Penn), on elasticity
Efi Efrati (Weizmann), on chirality
Alex Levine (UCLA), on fibres
Narayanan Menon (Massachusetts), on wrinkling
Eric Dufresne (Yale), on surface tension
William Irvine (Chicago), on hydrodynamics
Sid Nagel (Chicago), on glasses
Pierre Le Doussal (ENS), on disorder
Lisa Manning (Syracuse), on cell dynamics
John Toner (Oregon), on flocking

There were others that I didn't find as useful for various reasons, but ten is pretty good for one trip!

I also did numerous hiking trips: Sentinel Pass, Royal Arch, Gem Lake, Green Mountain and Bear Peak. And then, when Tom visited for a weekend, 80% of the skyline traverse. We walked for approximately 26 km, reaching the top of four mountains and climbing something like 1500 m (and dropping the same, as we began and ended at my dorm).

Here's a series of us before and after, and at the top of each of the four mountains we climbed that day. And no, we didn't go swimming: my hair was just that sweaty under my hat.

That evening we joined some of the other students at one of the local students' apartments, particularly enjoying his pool, hot tub and barbecue.

The following day we took it easy, and tubed down Boulder Creek. The first bit had some rapids, so we did it four times, then floated back to campus on a much smoother (and shallow) part.

We had dinner at a local brewpub, where I had half of my biennial beer (I'm saving the other half for New Orleans or Austin). They offered free sample during our "15" (actually 5) minute wait for a table, and I tried what the bartender recommended, which was an IPA. I have assumed I would dislike IPAs more than most beers, because they're even more beerlike, but I actually quite liked it: I would describe the taste as floral. I foolishly decided to try the other IPA for my half pint, and it wasn't as good, but I still drank it with no difficulty and enjoyed the first three quarters. Maybe beer is growing on me!

The weekend with Tom was certainly the most fun of the trip. There were other highlights: having dinner with Noelle's cousin and grandmother, enjoying a cello concert, playing volleyball, watching Big Hero 6 and Labyrinth in our dorm lounge... but there's something special about family.

It was also nice just to meet and spend some time with fellow physics PhD students and postdocs. Being at the same stage makes it easy to talk, and most of us were meeting each other for the first time, so we were on equal footing there as well. A contrast from conferences, where I don't always feel at home among all the faculty.