Blogs / Cosmic Variance

I’ve been a little slack about posting recently because I’ve been traveling quite a lot.

Two weeks ago I left to go to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to deliver the Physics Department colloquium on “Connecting the Dark Side and Fundamental Physics“. Traveling there was a bit of a nightmare because I got stuck overnight in O’Hare and had to take a ridiculously early flight into Madison the next morning. On top of the regularly tiring aspects of traveling, this led to me being quite exhausted. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my time in Madison greatly, seeing old friends like Dan Chung, Gary Shiu, Peter Timbie and Hooman Davoudiasl.

Dan and Gary aren’t just friends, they’re also collaborators, the three of us having written a paper a couple of years back on the hurdles involved in constructing an inflationary model with a significantly running (changing with scale) spectral index. Peter I’ve known since he was a Professor at Brown and I was a graduate student, and Hooman I’ve known for a couple of years through our common interest in extra dimensional models.

Then, last Thursday evening I left to head to Storrs, Connecticut to give the departmental colloquium at the University of Connecticut. Since Sara happened to be on vacation, she decided at the last minute to join me and that we would continue on to New York City on Saturday and spend a day there. Unfortunately, the day before I came down with a pretty bad cold and started to lose my voice. By Friday it was pretty bad and after spending the day meeting with the U. Conn. faculty, graduate students and physics majors, all of whom were fascinating and asked me lots and lots of questions, my voice was essentially gone. I used what was left of it to belt out my colloquium, which seemed to work out, and then it had truly vanished altogether.

For the rest of the evening, through a lovely dinner and delightful drinks back at Gerald Dunne and his wife Elise’s house I was essentially unable to talk, occasionally whispering or rasping out something half-intelligible.

This all led to a Saturday in the City with me essentially silent. We arrived later than anticipated due to a car accident on the highway, and so didn’t manage to see the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History as we had hoped. But we did get some fun clothes shopping done and ate a great dinner. Sara enjoyed the day all the more because I couldn’t really speak, which I got the impression she could get used to.

Tomorrow I am supposed to leave again to give a High Energy Physics/Astrophysics seminar at The Ohio State University, but whether I actually go will depend on my voice. It is a little improved this evening, but I teach tomorrow afternoon so we’ll see how that goes. If I still sound awful I may not be able to give a talk on Wednesday, which would really piss me off, since there are many people I’m looking forward to chatting with at OSU. Well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed and see how it works out.

I’ve actually never lost my voice before, as far as I can remember. It is intensely frustrating (for me that is), although I’ve been getting lots of compliments on the new Brando-like husky tones that emerge when I really do have to speak.