Encouragement

After the IT meeting I stared at the listings for the Online and the rest of the WIMP breakout sessions. I'd been to part of the WIMP talks, and learned quite a bit--but the afternoon sessions seemed to be "limit" sessions, and I was getting a little weary of new limit papers. That's a bad character trait for a scientist, who is supposed to be happy to learn anything, but some of these are exercises; excluding models I don't believe while waiting for the statistics to address more reasonable models.

And Powerpoint is hypnotic. Zzzz. (Here's a conspiracy theory for you: Powerpoint is for sales presentations, designed to hypnotize the audience so the salesman can press his pitch on a helpless group.)

So I went with the Online processing group, with talks about software trigger upgrades and plans. And a talk I didn't expect to be encouraging, but was. IceCube was designed as a neutrino telescope, and one obvious thing to try to do is coordinate with optical or radio or gamma-ray telescopes to look for neutrinos associated with their spectacular events, or for them to scan for where we say there was something exciting happening in the sky. Universität Bonn should have an interesting result released soon. Nice to see we can do it. Now if something lets loose in our galaxy...