Friday, March 12, 2010

How many Ph.D's does it take...

UH Hilo is planning to hire a new physicist to fill the vacant post of Assistant Professor, vacant after the Chair of Physics and Astronomy retired last semester. They narrowed it down to two people, and are bringing them to campus for evaluation. So today I got to sit in on the colloquium given by the first one, an experimental high-energy particle physicist. The talk was pretty routine as talks go, all about searching for cosmic strings in GOODS and COSMOS data, with the unsurprising result that they haven't found any. But there was a humorous episode about halfway through when the laptop the presenter was using to present started hibernating. Apparently he had his presentation on a USB flash drive, because he was able to get it up and running on another computer pretty quickly, but it led to the amusing sight of first one, then two, then three, and finally four of our physics and astronomy professors, including the new Chair coming up to offer assistance and see if they could get it going again (hence the title of this post). I can hardly wait for Tuesday when the second one will be giving his talk (he's an atmospheric physicist, so it will be a bit different).

In other news, I am doing well, though quite busy recently. I've been trying to organize the monthly UAC trip up to the Mauna Kea Visitor's Center, something I haven't done before and which I'm learning about the hard way. I still don't know if I have everything down, but I guess I'll find out tomorrow when I go up.

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