I'm at the FUSION17 conference in Hobart, Tasmania. At the beginning of today's session I tweeted, using the hashtag #fusion17 not realising that it had already been used by a party being organised in Texas this spring break (see attached picture). Oh well.
The conference is one of a series which has been going for 20 years to bring together people working on nuclear reaction mechanisms which lead to fusion. That's a somewhat minor part of what I do, though what I do doesn't really fall within any one specialist conference series, so it's about as on-topic as most conferences I ever go to. The fact that I know quite a few of the people here is probably a sign that I belong sufficiently well enough to attend.
We're about half way through day one, and as usual, the conference talks have filled me with enthusiasm for the research area, and given me lots of ideas of calculations to perform. I was also pleased and somewhat embarrassed to see my name in the talk by Michael Thoennessen in which he listed the names of all attendees at the conference who were co-authors on papers which announced the discovery of new isotopes. I have 4 written next to my name, apparently being a co-discoverer of four isotopes. I can't claim to have been on the experiment(s) leading to these discoveries, but I was involved enough in some of the calculations associated with them to be on the discovery papers.
