2011 APS March Meeting, first thoughts

A few brief thoughts at the APS March Meeting (more later....) in Dallas:

• First time I've ever been at a convention center with a graveyard adjacent to the building.  Quite a time saver if there are really bad talks, I suppose.
• Frank Wilczek still gives a terrific talk about the connection between superconductivity and high energy physics.  Very droll, too.  He clearly has a strong aesthetic desire for supersymmetry, but just as clearly acknowledges that all of this could go up in smoke, depending on what the LHC finds.
• The APS's attempt at a mobile app (for iPad, iPhone, etc.) is so painfully slow and incomplete (no scheduling ability I can almost understand, but how can you not list the room numbers for the sessions?) that it's better to use wireless internet access to visit the APS meeting website instead.
• Roland Wiesendanger also presents an outstanding talk.  His group's accumulated work on spin-polarized STM is very impressive, and definitely made me feel an intense bout of "imaging envy" (in the sense that my group's work usually does not have beautiful 3d renders of data sets that grace the cover of glossy journals).
• Lots of discussions with people about looming budget concerns, and separately the decline of science journalism.  On some level, these topics are related....