COMEX6: Day 1

We've had a first, and rather full, day at the COMEX6 conference.  From the hotel at 7:45 to get a bus to iThemba Labs, who are organising the conference (though for the rest of the week we will use the hotel conference room, so no busing back and forth).  The labs are about a 30m ride from downtown Cape Town, and are a fairly typical nuclear physics facility with their big buildings housing accelerators, and their own unique set of animals wandering around outside (different from GANIL's many rabbits) .  The conference room is great, with probably the most comfortable lecture room seats I have come across.  Well done iThemba Labs.

As at most conference, they handed out a pad of paper on which we delegates can make notes.  No doubt we don't all use it:  some will not make notes, some will do it on computer or in their own notebooks.  I did make notes, filling up about half the 50-page A5 notebook, as well as start a list of calculations I can make that relate to the talks (that's taken up one of the pages, so far).  So plenty of interesting ideas out there in the conference for me.  I've started some of the calculations going, to try to understand the question posed in the title of one of the talks; "Are the molybdenums fluffy too?"  If course, the answer given in the talk follows the rule that the answer to questions posed in the title of science talks is "no".

The day ended with a tour of the lab, during which I took the pictures posted here.  Then we had the poster session and a dinner, which was mostly a braai (a kind of barbecue) except for us vegetarians, who got vegetable curry.  Yummy.