June 25-July 2, 2006: Correlator Meeting, Groningen, Netherlands

Dan and I presented our work at the JIVE Correlator Conference in Groningen. This was immediately following my prelims (which I passed with flying colors), and the deployment of my eight antenna correlator in Green Bank. Thus, in addition to presenting our hardware and my correlator architecture, I was actually able to show a movie of the radio sky which I made using Python and two day's data from our first observing run. Towards the end of the meeting, everyone was schlepped over to the Zernikecomplex building on the Rijksuniversiteit campus where we saw the IBM Bluegene computer which is being used as the LOFAR array correlator, and is one of (if not the) largest supercomputers on the planet. Besides the meeting (which was great and relevant, but also the most specialized and nerdy of any I've gone to yet), I spent some time around Groningen biking (as all Dutch do) and running to various locales outside the main city. Dan and I biked to the Stadtpark, and later I went for a run along some of the canals and locks in the industrial border of the city. We also visited the Groninger Museum which contained several interesting (but forgettable) modern art exhibits. After Groningen, Dan and I spent two days in Amsterdam, where we strolled through the surprisingly tame, legal red-light district, and visited all the major sites. We ate at the university mensa, and walked by the Rijksmuseum, and along the various canals. We visited the warehouse where Anne Frank wrote her diary as she hid from the Nazis, and at the end of it there was a great discussion about freedom of speech and civil liberties, and some interesting parallels were drawn between the Third Reich and the Patriot Act in the United States. We next went to the Vertzetsmuseum which described the Dutch resistence to the German occupation. Finally, we also went to another modern art museum which had a cool movie of a cyclic Rube Goldberg machine which seemed to symbolize the chemical reactions of life and industry, and was titled "Der Lauf der Dinge" (The Way of Things). The World Cup was going on in Germany while I was in the Netherlands, and the Dutch had just lost out when I arrived in Holland, so there was a subdued atmosphere for a while. However, the bars were still packed with people watching the games, and goals and near misses could be heard echoing down the streets anywhere you walked in the evening.