Excuses Excuses!

OK, I know I've been slacking on the blogging front recently, and thought I'd explain myself by way getting back into the swing of writing. As you know if you've been reading Cosmic Variance, I recently spent three weeks in Australia as a Sir Thomas Lyle fellow at the University of Melbourne. A week ago I left there and took a lengthy (about 30 hour) trip back home, which left me exhausted, as you might expect. I had a tremendous time in Melbourne (as described here, and here), but am also very glad to be back home. Nevertheless, there were piles upon piles of research, teaching, and administrative/service tasks waiting for me upon my return, and these have entirely consumed the last week. Despite these pressures, I left all of them behind on Monday and attended our semesterly Cornell-Syracuse Joint One Day Theory meeting, this time held at Cornell. We had another impressive meeting, with mostly great talks. I was delighted that the students and postocs with whom I've been working did excellent jobs, and found the day even more useful because my Cornell collaborators and I were able to sneak some work on our paper in during one of the breaks. Today I was back at Syracuse, but tomorrow afternoon I head out to California to chair and deliver an invited presentation in a session titled "How many dimensions does the universe have?" at a National Academy of Science Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium, at the National Academies Beckman Center in Irvine. This should be a really fun time (although a lot of work), discussing science with wonderful people in very different disciplines from across the U.S.. My co-presenters are my good friends Jonathan Feng (from U.C. Irvine) and Gary Shiu (from U. Wisconsin, Madison), so not only will I get to hear their (usually terrific) presentations, but I'll also get to hang out with the two of them, which I haven't got to do for a while. Saturday night the meeting will be over, and I'll take advantage of being close to L.A. to meet up with Sean for dinner. So, as you can see, it's been a pretty busy time for me. Coupled with sitting on three departmental committees (chairing two of them), and teaching my class, it's been a pretty crazy time. We're all busy, so I shouldn't make too many excuses, but after this trip I won't be flying for over two months (something of a recent record for me), and I hope to be able to return to regular blogging.