A week of PANIC

The entire last week went by in PANIC or the Particles and Nuclei International Conference. Since it was being organized by people in Los Alamos, most of my time went by in organizational stuff like sitting in the A/V room assisting speakers with their talks so that all their slides come out fine when they are projected. There were often problems in transferring MS Powerpoint slides from Macs to PCs. You would think that after all these years Microsoft would be able to solve this problem! One nice thing about this conference is the way it brings physicists from different areas of experimental nuclear and particle physics together, thus allowing nuclear physicists to see what is being done in particle physics and vice versa. Experimental high energy physics is getting very fragmented. I can barely keep up with results from STAR (one of the experiments within RHIC) let alone appreciate what is being done in other labs like Fermilab or Jlab. I wish there was some sort of a simple short 1 page summary every month describing the latest results from different high energy particle and nuclear experiments. I don't know how this can be implemented easily. Maybe other high energy physicists can weigh on this issue.