The wife of Steven Weinberg

Audrey: 

I will be taking baby

 

to her second conference this summer, this time in Nova Scotia.

Predrag:

What's she talking about?

Once had a lunch with Steven Weinberg and his wife. At the Niels Bohr Institute. Guys like that always went through Niels Bohr Institute, because that's on the way to the Nobel Prize.

He talked without stop in his booming voice. He's very smart (reason I became a theorist, but that's another story), and articulate. It was all about particle physics and (perhaps?) the standard model. He ignored us ignoramuses, and only addressed his wife.

Now, she's a lawyer. They had moved to Texas, as UT Austin hired her as a law professor, a part of a package deal.

She talked back as a good theorist would. She knew all the words, you would not know that she knew no theoretical physics. It's just that she's been listening to his stuff for a long time.

So, I'm expecting The Baby to give a good talk. The ignoramuses will be awed.

I'm accompanying My Baby to Eresfjord, Norway. As the Mediterranean is becoming increasingly unlivable, Norway is inundated with tourists. Norwegians are desperate. They are rich, they do not need all these tourists. 

 As Swift puts it :

"for as to those filthy Yahoos, although there were few greater lovers of mankind at that time than myself, yet I confess I never saw any sensitive being so detestable on all accounts; and the more I came near them the more hateful they grew"

 

A brief history of the Center for Nonlinear Science parties

A bit of local history: Center of Nonlinear Science (CNS) is 25 years old. From the very inception, grad students used to organize spring or fall CNS picnics in the backyard of Sara & Predrag’s home, some of the old photos and videos are here:

https://cns.gatech.edu/CNS/album.html, https://YouTu.be/9a9Fpgui3WI, https://YouTu.be/uIEod4N7fcQ. Sara & Predrag would provide food, wine & live music, grad students would do the rest - invite friends, show up early to set everything up, play with the kids, not dance https://youtu.be/xxfT4q55AhU, clean up the aftermath

(from the 2002 picnic)

and take the remaining food to Howey for later delectation. 

Then came pandemic, things fell apart, followed by the The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia hostile takeover of Georgia Tech. Check the regents out: https://www.usg.edu/regents . Business people with no interest in or experience with higher education, hand picked by the Governor. They are not your friends. Their goal is to complicate your lives, make a buck. Case at hand - I am told that now, after 141 years of GaTech running itself, the Schools are -inter alia- not allowed to run student events off campus, and no events that are not catered by the GaTech catering monopoly.

So that’s how CNS 25th year picnic became “Predrag’s 80th”, with not a sniff of anything Georgistan Technical School to it. We are celebrating 50 years that Predrag has not touched string theory, 100 years of Schrödinger equation, 250 years of Lagrange’s proof that the Solar System is stable (spoiler: it’s not), 500 years of Battle of Mohács. Predrag loves you, and is throwing a party for you.

Now, the personpower situation is this: at 979 Rosedale Rd there is an 80 year old professor, and a famed but mobility impaired computational neuroscientist. That’s it. We had not run this picnic 25 years ago, and sure are not in shape to do it today. Your professors will not save you. Of the ½ that opened the Evite email, ½ cannot figure out what to do with the [View Invitation] link. They might show up. Or not.

It’s our picnic. Marc has agreed to coordinate the grad students brigade. Sara and I will do our part.

Inhuman Resources