COMEX6

 I'm in Cape Town for COMEX6: COllective Motion in nuclei under EXtreme conditions.  I've not been to sub-saharan Africa before, and this is about as sub as it gets, I guess.  I have been a sporadic attender of the COMEX conference because part of my work involves studying giant resonances -- excited states of nuclei which are collective, meaning many or all the protons and neutrons in the nucleus are acting together in the excitation.  In particular, my most recent PhD student and I looked at the magnetic spin-dipole excitation, and how often-neglected terms in the nuclear interaction have a strong effect on the structure of these excitations.  We put a paper up on the arXiv about it (https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.07823) last year.  Now, here in Cape Town while immersed in the topic, may be the time I do one final supplementary calculation on the results in that paper to get it finally published in a journal.