It's cold here

Sorry for lack of posts. I gave a colloquium at University of Illinois at Chicago yesterday, and today I'm headed to Montreal to do the same at McGill University (physics/computer science talk on entanglement entropy and black holes, computer science colloquium on technology startups). They videotaped my talk yesterday, which was on dark energy. If the video appears on the web as promised I'll post a link to it. (Note, links above are to slides. The first two are PDFs and the third a big .ppt file. If you look at the three talks you might understand why my head is about to explode :-)

Tom Imbo, the colloquium organizer who introduced me yesterday, was my officemate at Harvard many years ago. As an old friend he knows a little too much about my past. In his intro he mentioned my not so stellar athletic career as a linebacker on the Caltech football team (Caltech dropped football in 1993; I was also on the swim and water polo teams, which seem to have survived) and ultimate fighter. No, I never stepped in the ring for an ultimate fight, but did spend years training in Brazilian Jiujitsu, including some time with professional fighters in Tokyo one summer. I've trained less and less in recent years, and in my last training session a few months ago was schooled by one of our new graduate students***, a wrestler and judoka who competed at Pacific University. I guess I consider myself retired from the mat for now :-/

*** Perhaps I shouldn't feel too bad -- it looks like the guy who crushed me scored a major decision (12-4) over a 197 pounder on the Pacific team in their alumni vs team tournament just recently.