{"id":140953,"date":"2010-01-05T09:54:38","date_gmt":"2010-01-05T14:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=3682"},"modified":"2010-01-05T09:54:38","modified_gmt":"2010-01-05T14:54:38","slug":"refocusing-cosmic-variance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/140953","title":{"rendered":"Refocusing | Cosmic Variance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, I&#8217;ve spent quite a bit of time away from the blog recently, feeling rather overwhelmed as a number of responsibilities accumulated over the last hectic year finally caught up with me. But, for now at least, things seem to be in check and I&#8217;m hoping to get a little more writing done. <\/p>\n<p>The last few months of the year were quite a ride. For example,<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I started teaching again (after a sabbatical at Cornell, and then a one semester leave to help me settle in at Penn), and very much enjoyed introducing the complexities (no pun intended) of contour integration, asymptotic methods, Sturm-Liouville theory, etc. to a whole new batch of beginning graduate students at a whole new institution. <\/li>\n<li>The first (albeit limited) renovations were completed as part of the <em><a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/www.physics.upenn.edu\/particlecosmo\/\">Center for Particle Cosmology<\/a><\/em>, and helping oversee these, as well as planning for much larger future renovations took up a huge part of the Fall semester. In the end though, this should be well worth it, with a new and highly-functional space for us to work and collaborate in.<\/li>\n<li>I started doing significant service again; organizing departmental colloquia and sitting on our graduate admissions committee. Plus some new editorial work<\/li>\n<li>I went to Australia, to speak at the <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/www.ph.unimelb.edu.au\/~theory\/cospa2009\/Home.html\">COSPA-09 meeting<\/a> in Melbourne (if you look carefully you&#8217;ll see both Sean and me in the group picture on the main page.) This was my third visit to Melbourne, and once again I was struck by what a liveable and lovely city it is. The conference was great fun, and I saw a number of talks that gave me something to think about back in Philly.<\/li>\n<li>I finished <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/www.slac.stanford.edu\/spires\/find\/hep\/www?rawcmd=find+a+trodden+and+date+after+2008+and+date+before+2010\">some papers<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>We ran an intense and, I thought, successful <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/www.physics.upenn.edu\/particlecosmo\/workshop2009.html\">workshop &#8211; <em>New Horizons in Particle Cosmology<\/em><\/a> &#8211; to inaugurate the <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/www.physics.upenn.edu\/particlecosmo\/\">Center for Particle Cosmology<\/a>. This involved some of the biggest names in our field, and included a very well-attended <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/www.physics.upenn.edu\/particlecosmo\/events\/publiclecture.html\">public lecture by Paul Steinhardt<\/a>. My colleague <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/www.physics.upenn.edu\/people\/j.khoury.html\">Justin Khoury<\/a> deserves considerable praise for taking on most of the organizational work of the conference and lecture.\n<\/ul>\n<p>Right now I&#8217;m gearing up for next week&#8217;s beginning of my graduate <em>General Relativity<\/em> class, which is my absolute favorite subject to teach. I&#8217;m also preparing for quite a bit more travel this year, although not for a few weeks at least. But most importantly, of course, I&#8217;m hard at work on a number of projects that I hope will come to fruition in the pretty near future.<\/p>\n<p>So this post is just intended to get back into the swing of things. I&#8217;ll leave you with an interesting new link. <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/\">NPR<\/a> is entering the science blogging field with a good-looking <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/blogs\/13.7\/\">new blog<\/a> featuring, among others, science writer and friend-of-the-blog, K.C. Cole, and former <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2009\/03\/23\/guest-post-marcelo-gleiser-on-how-do-we-know\/\">guest contributor<\/a>, physicist Marcelo Gleiser. Their blog is called <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/blogs\/13.7\/\">13.7<\/a> (for reasons you might try guessing before checking on) and I hope you&#8217;ll check them out &#8211; we wish them all the best. <\/p>\n<p><a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/_0hKx6WbLUB8gLyMwJqm0X7ELEg\/0\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/_0hKx6WbLUB8gLyMwJqm0X7ELEg\/0\/di\" border=\"0\" ismap><\/a><br \/>\n<a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/_0hKx6WbLUB8gLyMwJqm0X7ELEg\/1\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/_0hKx6WbLUB8gLyMwJqm0X7ELEg\/1\/di\" border=\"0\" ismap><\/a><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/CosmicVarianceBlog\/~4\/Gp03j2y7Yr8\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/DiscoverMag\/~4\/MCCgCuxG0SQ\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, I&#8217;ve spent quite a bit of time away from the blog recently, feeling rather overwhelmed as a number of responsibilities accumulated over the last hectic year finally caught up with me. But, for now at least, things seem to be in check and I&#8217;m hoping to get a little more writing done. The last [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140953\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}