The two meetings of last week turned out to be very informative indeed. Whilst my poster didn’t attract the attention I had hoped it would, the whole Dansync meeting was a very good way of meeting many people, even though many of them spoke Danish. One of the most interesting posters was a poster contribution by Emil Makovicky entitled: “The blue tomb of Maragha, a site of the first quasicrystal, revisited”. This man investigated the quasicrystallinity of the pattern on the sides of the tomb-tower Gunbad-e-Qabud in detail, realising that in the 12th century, many aspects of quasicrystallinity were known (c.f. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/315/5815/1106). It is nice to see that sometimes, art can be an inspiration to scientific research.
Whereas the Dansync meeting was mainly filled with more individual, topical research, the symposium in honour of Jens Als-Nielsen’s birthday the following day was replete with talks on the future of “light” (read: X-Ray) sources, and overviews of results of many X-Ray physics related project groups. Thus, this proved to be a great wealth of background information more in line with my own topic, and was thus very enjoyable. It also helped that the talks were held at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, with comfortable leather chairs, some nice bookshelves and a heavy “gentlenman’s club”-like atmosphere. That said, in my opinion, the first meeting was the most useful for making new contacts.
One final remark: It is frustrating to see that some presenters interpret the “you are now out of time, finish ASAP”-bell as a “half-time, plenty of time”-bell. I think it is unfair towards the (usually younger) presenters who did prepare their presentations just so that it would fit into the designated time.
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