…those written in binary and — wait, that’s not right!

Actually, the two kinds of textbooks, at least in physics, are educational books and reference books.

• Educational books are good for learning a subject for the first time. They’re written in a way that makes it easy to read a whole section or chapter without getting overwhelmed. They have clear summaries, walk you through simple examples, and put their topic in context to keep you interested. These books are almost telling a coherent story as much as they are imparting information.

  Examples include David Griffiths’ books on quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, and particle physics, Daniel Schroeder’s thermodynamics book, James Hartle’s book on general relativity, and Barton Zwiebach’s book on string theory.

• Reference books are good for looking up the details of a specific procedure or situation. They’re densely packed with information, but that makes it very hard to read a large section at a time, the way you would read other books. Instead, a reference book is most useful when you need to know one particular fact and can look up just the part of the book that deals with that fact. In these books, the …

Part of moving to a new country is setting up all the “personal infrastructure” you need in order to live. And when you’re starting a new job at the same time, getting paid is pretty close to the top of that list. Which explains how, a couple days ago, I found myself walking into the Bank of China on the CCNU campus to set up a bank account.

No, wait, let me back up.

(TV-style) TWO DAYS EARLIER

I found myself walking into the Bank of China on the CCNU campus to set up a bank account. Since it is the Bank of China, after all, everything is written in Chinese. Everyone there speaks Chinese. I would have been totally lost without my host (actually my boss, but he’s been so much help getting me settled that I think of him as my host) having come along to translate.

Apparently the idea of being busy with a customer doesn’t really exist in China. A bank employee at one of the reception desks, where a Chinese woman was filling out a form, immediately beckoned us over. She and my host talked for a while, and she led us …

Things that don’t exist in China:

• Ubiquitous wireless internet. Not so surprising, really, because Americans do have a rather unhealthy obsession with their wireless, but one would think I’d get wifi in the hotel room. Surprise, nope! Naturally this makes it rather less convenient to put up blog posts.
• Washcloths. Seriously, China, what’s up with that?
• Dryers. Or, they do exist, but for some reason dryers are considered a luxury item and are pretty rare. The Chinese prefer to stick to the traditional method of line-drying. (Hey, it’s environmentally conscious)

• Smog. The weather has been pretty fantastic since I got here. From what I hear, outside of Beijing and maybe Shanghai, that’s actually pretty typical.

• English speakers. Which, again, is not that surprising; China has its own language, so why would they speak English? Nevertheless, you’ll hear in a lot of places that lots of people in China speak English, even to the point that foreigners don’t actually need to learn Chinese! Nope, not in Wuhan.

Things that do exist in China:

• Toilets, by which I mean something that Americans would recognize as a toilet. In hotels and international dorms, at least. Public …

The blog has been pretty quiet the last few months, because I’ve been getting ready to move to Wuhan, China, where I’ll be starting work as a postdoc at Central China Normal University.

It turns out that moving to another country - in fact another continent - takes a lot of preparation. Shocker, huh. Airlines put pretty restrictive limits on both the amount and type of things you can take, so I had to pack light. I’ll basically be living out of a couple of suitcases for the next six weeks. But at the same time, shipping things to China is unreliable, expensive, and impossible until I find out where I’ll be living, so I had to make sure to take everything I needed. It took some planning to figure out how to fit the essentials into those two suitcases. My old habit of making a checklist of what to pack really came in handy!

Then there’s the whole issue of getting permission to enter the country in the first place. Officially, to work in China, I need a work visa. For that I need a work permit from the university. For them to give me the …

Just a quick update from Darmstadt (Germany), where I’m spending the week at the 24th Quark Matter conference. Quark Matter is the largest conference series in nuclear physics (but not that nuclear physics or that other nuclear physics), and has been held about every year and a half since 1980, also in Darmstadt. You may remember my coverage of the last Quark Matter here on the blog; I won’t be posting quite so much this time because I’ve got a lot going on, but you may see a couple updates from me this week.

By the way, the decision of the Quark Matter 2012 organizers to give out (nice) backpacks as swag was, in my professional opinion as a physicist, the best thing in the history of the universe. Probably half of the people attending this conference came with their distinctive QM12 backpacks. The satchels they’re giving out this year aren’t bad, but they don’t quite measure up.

Today was Student Day, the day before the official start of the conference when everyone receiving student support (a waiver of the 500 Euro registration fee) comes to attend a set of lectures summarizing the various …

I know, I know, it’s been far too long — almost three weeks, now — since I went to the APS April meeting in Savannah, without any update on the blog. And I did say I was going to report on interesting results that I saw there. Uh… oops!

The honest truth, though, is that not a whole lot of new stuff gets presented at the April meeting. So don’t worry that I’ve been withholding all the awesome new science I learned; I just didn’t think there was anything particularly urgent to post about.

Future of the April meeting

This is actually kind of a problem for the future of the April meeting itself. It’s a relatively small meeting, with only a few hundred attendees, and that number isn’t getting any bigger. After all, if people know not to expect groundbreaking or exciting new results to be presented at the April meeting, what’s their motivation to come?

The people in charge of the meeting know this, and they’re trying to determine what needs to be done to keep attendance up in the future. If it’s going to continue to be useful, the meeting …