Business trip

My boss requested that I go to a conference last week. Usually, I don't look forward to them -- listening to 7 hours of scientific talks in day is not super fun -- but this one had a little more promise. So Jill decided to come also. Banff, Canada, there we went. Perhaps the biggest difference between Banff and ABQ is the amount of water. There's a lot up there -- due in large part to warm temps that lead to melting glaciers. The pic below is the Bow River near the famous Banff Springs Hotel. The conference was located at the Banff Park Hotel, a less costly option.

One perk of conferences is meeting people from all over the world. Below there are 2 Brazilians and a Japanese guy. Fun group!
We flew in to Calgary and spent the first night there before going to Banff. We stayed at the Ramada Inn in downtown, seventh floor. Pretty fun.

The conference adventure was a trip to the Columbia Icefield. Several glaciers grow from the icefield, and we got to walk onto the Athabasca Glacier. This is quite a bit more difficult to do than it would seem. It involved a bus ride down a road with a 30% grade (I'd love to try this on a bike). The driver told us to not cross the blue cones because one might find oneself falling into a crevace. Brrrrrrr.

There are streams of water that flow along the top of the glacier. We scooped some into our water bottles. It was pretty good, exceedingly cold, but I doubt it could sell for more than any other bottled water.

Here's a bad pic of the bus we rode onto the glacier. It's a little hard to get the lighting right with all that ice.

I did attend the conference every day, skipping only a few hours on Wed and Thurs. My talk, about imbedding sharp interfaces between two fluids in the lattice Boltzmann method, went okay. Ask me about it any time.