The Excursion

Yesterday was a big day.

At 8:30 we left Erice for a visit to some Greek temple ruins. We began in Segesta, an ancient city that was abandoned some 700 years ago, but since Antiquity has been occupied by many cultures (Greeks, Muslims, Normans). The interesting bit about Segesta is that it contains an unfinished Greek temple that has somehow managed to survive over the millenia. There are pictures of this available here. The city also contains an ancient theatre that was once capable of holding 4000 people.

Afterwards, we went to Selinunte, which is a host to a number of temple ruins. The temples themselves were destroyed during an earthquake some time ago. Of the three we visited, one has been raised, one does not contain enough surviving material to be rebuilt, and another (the largest, a temple to Zeus, I believe) needs only the money to be rebuilt. 

It was very hot, so we went swimming in the Mediterranean, where I had the honor of getting a pretty nasty sunburn on my forehead, which makes it pretty difficult to, for example, move my face.

I realize that I haven't spent much time talking about the conference. There are alot of people from the Pierre Auger observatory (Argentina) here, and IceCube. There are two of us from VERITAS and a few Fermi people, so there's an interesting mix of talks. Given that most of my work has been hardware based over the past 14 months, I am not giving a talk. For my project, there just isn't enough known about the science for me to be able to go down that route; I'd have to talk about hardware, and not everyone (experamentalist or not) is interested in instrumentation. After I take some data I'll be able to talk some more about the science of my research.

Pierre Auger (www.auger.com) is an interesting experiment that is bound to make some neat discoveries as soon as they have taken enough data. One of their most recent results is the detection of an anisotropy in the cosmic ray background (ie, there seems to be a source of cosmic rays somewhere but we don't know where). This is big news in the Cosmic Ray society. 

I can't believe that it's already Friday; tomorrow is our last day in Erice, afterwards I head to Paris for the beginning of my vacation. Due to some timing issues, I'm going to have to be up early on Monday, though, I'm heading to Normandy to go on a D-day tour. 

Anyways, I've go to go get some aloe or something to soothe my face. Also, can't wait to see what's for lunch today.