March meeting names, etc.

I was skimming the March meeting schedule during a particularly dull talk this afternoon, looking for amusing session and talk titles. (For obvious reasons this is a much more remunerative game at the MLA.) I am probably the wrong person to be doing this, being somewhat inured to the weirdness of many terms. For this reason the biophysics titles are a lot more amusing (to me) than the condensed matter ones. (Another piece of evidence: Alan recently pointed out that I had given a talk titled "Solidity and frustration in multimode cavities." This seemed a sensible and even drab title at the time...)

My favorite session title/concept was "Migrations of Physicists" -- it had talks by Russian, Chinese, etc. physicists etc. but I think the talks were meant to be anecdotes rather than studies. I couldn't attend as there was an actual physics session (well, 40-ish) at the same time.

Some others:

Sessions
Drowning in carbon: the imperative of nuclear power
Semiconductor growths [this one probably a typo]
Thermoelectric materials: skutterudites, novel and nanostructured materials
Gapless spin liquids
Macromolecular crowding effects in the cytoplasm
Functional gels
The corporate feel: atomic force microscopy in industry

Speakers with interesting names (a very partial list): Behtash Behin-Aein, Bonna Newman, Reza Farhadifar, Nigel Scrutton, Spiros Skourtis, Nicholas Economou, Thorsten Ritz, Stefan Blugel, Adilson Motter, Eric Pop, Yves Acremann, Christian Pfleiderer, Yoshinori Onose, Weida Wu, Laurent Bellaiche (the last five were all in the same session).

(Google Analytics is going to love this post.)

In other news we got the following excellent email from the Illini-Alert emergency system this morning (the entire thing was just a technical error, something to do w/ testing the alert system...):

subject Active Shooter/Threat

Active shooter at BUILDING NAME/INTERSECTION. Escape area if safe to do so or shield/secure your location.