I had a nice/brief stay in Toronto last weekend at the Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference 2008. I was trying to kill 2 birds with 1 stone and catch Madlib DJing at wrongbar too, but he cancelled. However, it turned out for the best because I met many fellow nerds. I even unknowingly stumbled upon another physics blogger! Keep up the good work Jasper, consider yourself blogrolled.

I'm not 100% sure why I went to CUPC because I presented research I did at University of Notre Dame last summer in Computational Chemistry. But some good old fashioned American chemistry never hurt anyone.

Highlights of the weekend include my museum/pub crawl attempt with some Manitobian physics students. I tried to explain that Einstein's, despite the name, was a pretty weak bar but I feel like failed to impress them with my Toronto-skillz as I led them on a lackluster College St. journey. Where is your cheap drinks + live music when you need it?

The next day I presented my talk "The Counterintuitive Intermolecular Interactions of Hydroxyl Radical In Silico" which was probably a counterintuitive title since it had nothing to do with Silicon. Poster presentations were at the same time as my talk, so I tried to do a little PR and told as many people as I could when my talk would be, and how mind-blowing it would be. Where is your publicist when you need him?

I missed most of the events but had the pleasure of hearing how John Polanyi (pictured above courtesy of Alan Robinson) uses a web of deception to get funding for his fundamental science research (and he's surely not the only one). Where is your funding when you need it?

I also managed to award "Best Sneakers at CUPC" to Evan Rand from University of Guelph who presented the poster "GEANT4 Simulations of the GRIFFIN Spectrometer". He was wearing some nice brown AF1's which I should have got a picture of.

The "Best Illustration" award went to Todd Sierens from University of Manitoba who presented "Electron Scattering: One-Loop Contributions to Parity Violation in QED".  The picture on his poster was of a skiing Feynman Diagram in a santa hat.

Where is your camera when you need it!?