After W left for Camp Cherry Valley, I myself departed for the Netherlands to attend the International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC) in the Hague. I had spent much of June and July finishing up my analysis for and my paper on SuperTIGER composition and spectra analysis for Ne to Cu; I had agreed to present the paper orally on behalf of the collaboration. Other team members would present the more prominent and important overview paper, the instrument paper, and the ultra-heavy elements papers, and since they had done far more work than I had, I was happy to take the paper I did, which covered the secondary science objectives.
I also spent June and July working on my pet science of inferred ionic charge states of solar energetic particles. I wrote and submitted the paper, and I presented it as a poster.
I had been pretty worried about the SuperTIGER paper. I was worried about the charge states paper, too, but the SuperTIGER paper was to be presented orally, and since I would represent the team, it was definitely more important.
Luckily, the deadline for paper submission was pushed back twice, I got a couple of breaks in the data analysis that allowed me to have real results for the charge states paper (else I would have withdrawn it), and I got a lot of help from my SuperTIGER colleagues in finishing up the composition and spectra paper. (Unfortunately, I didn’t get actual spectra, but I made progress in doing the analysis, enough to show at the conference.)
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The trip to the Hague started on 7/28 with a flight to Houston, followed by another flight, overnight, to Amsterdam. Ed was on the same itinerary as me, and he got me into the earlier boarding groups as well as into the United Club in Houston. Plus, I had purchased Economy Plus seats for the longer flights (including return).
We arrived in Amsterdam Schiphol Airport on Wednesday morning, where we immediately had problems with the train ticket machines not accepting our credit or debit cards, so we had to go to the ticket desks, where we ran into Christina. We then took the easy train ride to the Hague Central Station, where we caught a taxi to our hotel, the World Hotel Bel Air, near the World Forum where the ICRC would be held. I paid 20 euros extra to get into my room early.
After resting and freshening up a bit, I walked to the World Forum to pick up my registration materials. Although it was a nice, sunny day (albeit windy), I was somewhat taken aback by the architecture of the buildings in the international quarter area where the World Forum is located: All dour and industrial and one-world-government-imposing and Soviet-like, as I imagine it, as if the architects had been looking forward to the triumph of world Communism. I had been looking forward to visiting the land of the Dutch Masters and Van Gogh, and instead, I was visiting the land of oppressive world government and the world court.
Back at the hotel, I ran into Eric, Mihir, Berndt, and other colleagues, and a few of us went out to dinner at a nearby residential neighborhood with shopping and restaurants. When we got there, the architecture was more modern Holland and less world government (world Communism), so I was relieved. It turned out that for the rest of my stay, only the international area had that kind of oppressive feel to it.
And despite the World Forum’s exterior, the interior of the World Forum was a nice, modern conference center (although the main theater had a bit of an echo problem).
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On Thursday, Ed gave his opening highlight talk on Voyager. He’s always a star at these international conferences.
I also put up my charge states poster. Unlike some other meetings and conferences, at this ICRC, the poster sessions each spanned two days, for one hour each afternoon. So, on Thursday, I spent an hour in front of my poster, and after speaking to a random attendee, I spent a lot of time talking to Mihir, and later to Berndt and Yulia. Berndt wondered why the technique worked for some SEP events and not others, and he suggested that Yulia could do some theoretical calculations to show which SEP events had the kind of energy dependence we needed. Mihir wanted a list of charge states for all events for which I had good results.
So that was a good afternoon.
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On Friday, I attended some morning talks, and I can’t remember what they were about. That was to be the case for much of the conference, I’m afraid, whether they were plenary talks or contributed talks.
Then I attended the afternoon poster session and got another visitor — Jim Adams. I forgot what he asked, but I wrote it down on my iPhone’s Notes for further work. I’ll have to find out his new e-mail address, though.
I spent part of the day working on finishing up my oral presentation for SuperTIGER, and I submitted the pdf (rather than the PowerPoint original) to the conference for uploading to the presentation system.
At the end of the day, Thomas gave his SuperTIGER and ACE highlight talk.
That evening, I went with Eric to Sumo Sushi for our traditional sushi meal together. It was an "all-you-can-eat” sushi place, except it both was and wasn’t really all-you-can-eat. The idea was that for each of six rounds, you could order up to five pieces of sushi or other small plates. I had noticed that the box-lunches I had ordered for the ICRC had been heavy on bread, e.g. sandwiches made of thick pieces of bread with small amounts of filling in between. Well, it turns out the sushi was like that, too: Big chunks of rice with small slices of fish on top. I guess the Dutch don’t have no-carb or low-carb diets. We were both so full from the rice that we finished only four rounds of sushi, and then we had a little dessert for the fifth round and skipped the sixth.
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On Friday, I gave my oral presentation for SuperTIGER’s Ne to Cu composition and spectra paper. It was actually the fourth talk in the session, which began with Marty (above) talking about the Fe-60 measurements in ACE/CRIS, followed by Makoto talking about the SuperTIGER instrument and Ryan talking about the SuperTIGER ultra-heavy composition analysis. Those three talks together combined to give good support to the notion that cosmic rays originate in OB associations of stars. My own talk followed Ryan’s and, as I said, covered SuperTIGER’s secondary science objectives of Ne to Cu composition and spectra.
I had gone over my slides with Marty before the session began, and I think I gave a reasonable presentation. I had paced myself to fill my alotted 12 minutes of talking time, and I went over by only a minute. I got a question from — I think — an AMS guy wondering if we’d have the appropriate energy resolution to do microquasar searches. I thought we had enough statistics to answer yes, but I was only able to give a guess about the energy resolution. Unfortunately, the energy resolution changes with energy, and I was going from memory in answering. On the other hand, for the microquasar search, we are using considering Fe signals which have high aerogel Cherenkov signal because of the Z^2 dependence, so resolution should be okay.
That evening, I attended the traditional ICRC Chicago dinner, where I was happy to reassociate with many of my old University of Chicago friends. Dietrich gave the speech recounting the tradition of the Chicago dinner and pointing out new attendees. Scott and Joerg were the organizers. This year, we ate at a restaurant called Waterproef near the beach, and the meal was a very elegant two courses of fish and steak.
At the Rio ICRC, the Chicago dinner was at a Brazilian churrascaria, and I would characterize the meal as lots of tasty meat, but definitely too much to be healthy. At the Beijing ICRC, the Chicago dinner was Peking duck, but again, the volume was much larger than at the Hague.
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Sunday was our day off from the conference, and since I didn’t sign up for a tour, I decided to go to Amsterdam and wing it and try to visit the Rijksmuseum to see paintings by the Dutch Masters. Pam had given me her Museumkaart and said that I should be waved in after the barcode was scanned, but she said the ticket-taker might look at the back of the card and decide I wasn’t a 60-year old person. (The card had only her first initial and last name, so I didn’t have to worry about being the wrong sex.)
I slept late, had breakfast (included with my hotel fee), and then got on a tram to the central station, rode a train to Amsterdam central station, and then took an Amsterdam tram to the Rijksmuseum. I got there after noon, and I ran into Ryan just outside of the men’s room. We entered the museum together, and the ticket-taker did indeed look at the back of Pam’s card, look at me, look back at Pam’s card, and then give me another hard look — but he waved me in anyway.
Ryan had spent a summer at Erice in Italy, so he was Italian-Renaissanced-out, so we skipped a bunch of exhibits (though we did view the van Gogh self-portrait) and went straight to level 2, where the Dutch Masters paintings had a special gallery hallway.
I really loved viewing the Dutch Masters paintings. I loved their mix of subject choices — from Biblical subjects to portraits of named and unnamed figures to their paintings of everyday work and commerce and the outdoors. I loved seeing different treatments of light and shade, how some clouds in the skies of some paintings were sharply defined while other clouds in other paintings were far less sharp. And while Rembrandt was the star, there were wonderful paintings by so many other artists there as well.
I also appreciated that we were allowed to take (non-flash) photos. That’s not often the case in so many museums elsewhere.
Ryan and I toured together for a while, but he also had a 3 PM ticket for the Van Gogh Museum, so we split up around 2 PM. I went to get a cappuccino and rest up a bit, since I hadn’t had lunch, while he continued touring the Rijkmuseum on his own before leaving to go to the other museum. After my snack break and rest, I toured the rest of the Rijkmuseum alone as well.
After the Rijkmuseum, I wandered about the area until about 4:30-5:00 PM or so, at which point I found The Seafood Bar, which is ranked #23 out of 2565 restaurants in Amsterdam. I was lucky I got there when I did, so I was seated immediately, and I wound up having the best fish and chips I’ve ever had — piping hot, as if it had just come from the oil, but not greasy. The batter was crispy and the fish (cod) was flaky without being dry.
After a tram ride back to Amsterdam central, a train ride back to the Hague central, and a tram ride back to my hotel area, I decided to take a walk along the neighborhood restaurant row and maybe buy groceries (drinks for my room). I wound up running into Pam on that street, so I was able to return her Museumkaart.
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On Monday morning, I attended Christina’s review talk on multi-spacecraft measurements of SEP events, but after lunch, I struck out to visit the Hague.
Again, I visited a museum, this time the Mauritshuis. This museum is a lot smaller than the Rijksmuseum, but it packs a lot of Dutch Master/Flemish Renaissance painting into its two floors.
For me, the highlight was a separate exhibit of Rembrandt’s Saul and David. I sat in the room viewing the painting mostly alone, but after a while, I wandered to the rest of the exhibit on this painting and found a very well-done multimedia exhibit discussing how the painting was not definitively known to be by Rembrandt for generations, until modern analysis led to the consensus that it is indeed by Rembrandt.
The rest of the museum housed masterpieces like Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, as well as other self-portraits and other paintings by Rembrandt, and many more.
I left, walked through the Binnenhof, and then spent some time wandering around the shopping areas in Centrum (The Hague city center). I had a nice Argentinean steak dinner at Los Argentinos.
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In July, Joerg had asked me to chair the morning cosmic ray session on Tuesday, and I agreed immediately. I had never chaired a session, and I looked forward to the opportunity. So after some morning talks (which I again forgot), I found out from the staff how to read the timers, and I gave some brief timing instructions to the speakers.
I chaired for two talks by PAMELA, two talks by AMS-02 (given by the same scientist, one after the other), a talk I don’t quite remember (results from a Russian satellite, I think), and a theory talk by a guy at Stanford. All talks were about cosmic ray anisotropies. For the most part, the experimental talks were about what can be done rather than about interesting findings.
In case nobody asked questions for a given talk, I had prepared for the session by reading all six papers and coming up with a couple of prepared questions for each paper. My purpose was to stretch a speaker’s total time to 15 minutes, if needed, so the next speaker wouldn’t start too soon (because conference attendees sometimes jump between sessions, according to the schedule of talks). Luckily, only the AMS scientist needed to stretch some time out, and that’s because she had two talks that sort of followed one upon the other. She did get her share of questions, and I asked a question for which, unfortunately, I didn’t think she quite understood what I was getting at: I asked how long it takes to do an anisotropy map, in terms of accumulating data in real time, but I think she interpreted my question as asking how much computation time it takes to build the map from that accumulated data. No matter: I was just trying to fill time until the next speaker.
One thing about the session was that it was in the main theater, instead of one of the auxiliary theaters. At the beginning of the conference, during his own talk, Ed mentioned that there was a big echo in the main theater that made it hard for people on stage to understand questions asked from the audience. Since I was chairing from onstage, I got that echo first hand, and it made things pretty hard to understand.
After lunch, I visited the Escher Museum, which had been recommended many times by other people at the conference. I must have gotten a little motion sick on the tram ride, and the museum itself was a little stuffy. Combine that with the odd perspectives and visual stimulation in Escher’s prints, and I wound up feeling a bit queasy and maybe experienced some vertigo.
I returned to the area near the hotel and had Thai food for dinner. I also made a solo dinner reservation at a nearby Indonesian restaurant for Wednesday.
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On Wednesday, the last day of the conference, I spent the afternoon near the beach. There was a sculpture museum (Museum Beelden aan Zee), which had a fair number of pretty whimsical sculpture installations, but I think I spent less than two hours there.
Dinner was the previously-mentioned Indonesian dinner at Keraton Damai. I was skipping the conference banquet, as I always do, and I found out that Eric was skipping it, too, so I added him to my reservation. We had a number of tasty satay skewers, plus rice and vegetable dishes.
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On Thursday, I returned to the US. The taxi ride to the Hague Central Station, the train ride to Amsterdam Schiphol airport, and the flight from Amsterdam to Houston were uneventful. Once I got in Houston, though, the line through customs was very slow (though passport control was quick). I ended up missing my short connection to LAX, and I wound up walking huge distances back and forth across Bush International trying to get on flights by standby. I worked up a big sweat, but luckily, I had a tech-shirt packed and ready to go, once I settled down and finally got on a flight to LAX.
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Some final notes:
Some of my colleagues booked their hotel room outside of the conference registration on their own, but I had Debby make my hotel reservation for me. As a result, I had breakfast included in my more-expensive hotel fee. Breakfast itself was fine, althought the fruit seems to have been canned in some sort of syrup that I’m not familiar with.
The hotel had a tiny but barely-used fitness room, so I took the opportunity to walk a couple of kilometers almost daily on the treadmill. I also used the free weights a little.
When I arrived, my room television didn’t work, and I couldn’t figure out why not. It turns out the power cable was accidentally hidden, and housekeeping found it for me. I was glad to have a little TV, even if much of it was Simpsons reruns.
As for the conference itself, I attended talks, but I found many of them unmemorable. I’m not sure what will come of this conference this year. I must have missed something.