APS March Meeting 2018

It's that time of year again:  The running of the physicists annual APS March Meeting, a gathering of thousands of (mostly condensed matter) physicists.  These are (sarcasm mode on) famously rowdy conferences (/sarcasm).  This year the meeting is in Los Angeles.  I came to the 1998 March Meeting in LA, having just accepted a fall '98 postdoctoral fellow position at Bell Labs, and shortly after the LA convention center had been renovated.   At the time, the area around the convention center was really a bit of a pit - very few restaurants, few close hotels, and quite a bit of vacant and/or low-end commercial property.  Fast forward 20 years, and now the area around the meeting looks a lot more like a sanitized Times Square, with big video advertisements and tons of high end flashy stores.

Anyway, I will try again to write up some of what I see until I have to leave on Thursday morning, though this year between DCMP business, department chair constraints, and other deadlines, I might be more concise or abbreviated.  (As I wrote last year, if you're at the meeting and you don't already have a copy, now is the perfect time to swing by the Cambridge University Press exhibit at the trade show and pick up my book :-) ).