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Things Learned...
1) MiniBoone says that LSND is totally wrong. Details are still forthcoming.
2) Nobody has found any evidence of supersymmetry, technicolor, multiple Higgs, extra-large dimensions, warped dimensions, or any other BSSM phenomena, meaning that, all-in-all we're still waiting.
3) There is still no interesting physics in the CKM triangle.
4) Anybody and everybody with an APS membership can present their research at this conference. However, cranks and other pseudoscience wonks are now confined to the Poster Sessions.
5) This place has the lowest concentration of women on Earth.
The last point is somewhat striking, considering all the effort that has gone into recruiting female physicists over the past twenty years. It's also present in my home institution, but the relative size of the undergraduate population lessens the impact. It really strikes you when you go into a large lecture and can count members of the female gender on the fingers of one hand. I always feel bad for them, as if guilty by association with their lack of companions, but that never helps. Fortunately, our own field has a strong female contingent, and there were several presentations in my section that I looked forward to from them (and were well worth the wait).
On the other hand, why aren't women attracted to a field where they get buried in unnecessary work as an undergraduate, then treated like a slave as a graduate student, working twelve hour days in the lab where they are underpaid, underappreciated, and their work gets no lasting praise, whereupon they then take their highly valuable technical skills and drudge through two different post-docs, all in the hopes of finding an underpaid job in a tenure-track position, whereupon they will spend the next five years, their social life, and their health in a vain attempt to get tenure, at which point they will be too old and bitter to do anything but complain and unleash the full fury of a ruined, shattered life upon helpless undergrads?
Obviously, it's because women are crazy. Who wouldn't want a job like that?
(I sometimes have to restrain myself when, inevitably, someone asks the question "Why aren't there more women in physics?" from giving the obvious answer: "Because most women are smart". And I'm in physics.)
2) Nobody has found any evidence of supersymmetry, technicolor, multiple Higgs, extra-large dimensions, warped dimensions, or any other BSSM phenomena, meaning that, all-in-all we're still waiting.
3) There is still no interesting physics in the CKM triangle.
4) Anybody and everybody with an APS membership can present their research at this conference. However, cranks and other pseudoscience wonks are now confined to the Poster Sessions.
5) This place has the lowest concentration of women on Earth.
The last point is somewhat striking, considering all the effort that has gone into recruiting female physicists over the past twenty years. It's also present in my home institution, but the relative size of the undergraduate population lessens the impact. It really strikes you when you go into a large lecture and can count members of the female gender on the fingers of one hand. I always feel bad for them, as if guilty by association with their lack of companions, but that never helps. Fortunately, our own field has a strong female contingent, and there were several presentations in my section that I looked forward to from them (and were well worth the wait).
On the other hand, why aren't women attracted to a field where they get buried in unnecessary work as an undergraduate, then treated like a slave as a graduate student, working twelve hour days in the lab where they are underpaid, underappreciated, and their work gets no lasting praise, whereupon they then take their highly valuable technical skills and drudge through two different post-docs, all in the hopes of finding an underpaid job in a tenure-track position, whereupon they will spend the next five years, their social life, and their health in a vain attempt to get tenure, at which point they will be too old and bitter to do anything but complain and unleash the full fury of a ruined, shattered life upon helpless undergrads?
Obviously, it's because women are crazy. Who wouldn't want a job like that?
(I sometimes have to restrain myself when, inevitably, someone asks the question "Why aren't there more women in physics?" from giving the obvious answer: "Because most women are smart". And I'm in physics.)