Greetings from Richland, Washington

We (Adrian [professor], Stefanos [fellow grad student], and I) arrived here in the Pasco/Kennewick/Richland "Tri-Cities area" yesterday after something like fourteen hours of travel, hopping from Rochester to Chicago to Salt Lake City, and then finally to Pasco on a little Canadair Regionaljet. When I left Pasco last time, it was on the wings of an incoming blizzard; now it's hot and dry and the newspaper headline is, "Dust storm blackens Eastern Washington." Driving out through the sagebrush, it's good to be out West again. Our hotel room has an excellent view of the river. Yesterday afternoon when we arrived, Stefanos and I maintained illusions of going out to check on the hopping cafe scene (etc) of the Kennewick area, but what was originally declared a "short nap" at 5pm turned into the night's sleep, exhausted from the ridiculous travel that had commenced at 3:30am in Rochester.

Our location on Google Maps.

help with LIGO

If you would like to help with the LIGO project, you can run the "Einstein@home" project, which will put your personal computer to work processing data from LIGO. It's like Seti@home except it looks for gravitational waves from pulsars—and the data processing from this distributed processing really is valuable. To get started, download BOINC (a generic distributed-computing platform), and then sign up for Einstein@home.