Monthly Archive for July, 2010

This is hard and boring work. Sorry you had to wait so long. Somewhere I read “Problem 7 Kelvin’s Dropper” and someone thought that it’s a good idea to throw the signed grading sheets in the waste basket. About halve of the USB flash drive’s (the same that you got with your bag) stopped working. Bad, bad quality – and it’s too late today to get new flash drives…
There are power outlets without power. Air conditioners that don’t work. Beamers not willing to work with certain laptops (yes, we’ve checked everyone yesterday) and most of the laptops we got from Sony had some problem (we tried to fix this yesterday, but you know computers…)
My hopes are up, that everything will work more smoothly tomorrow.

Brigitte and Georg are working very hard on the Juror Schedules for the next days. Now that is a really hard problem, probably almost as challenging as the problems you’ve been working on 🙂

Please contact us if you think that there is something wrong with the results. We’re only human after all 🙂

Right now Florian Schreck (who substitudes for Rudolf Grimm as our opening speaker) is talking about ultra cold stuff. Finally gives me some time to blog 🙂
The ceremony went well so far, the Festsaal at the ÖAW is just beautiful and Thomas and Kathi were almost as cool as Schreck’s atoms. The sound guy next to me however was so sunk into his cell phone that we almost screwed up the European anthem.

I really have to send my sister a photo of ~300 physicists standing up to the IYPT2010 logo she designed and listening to the Austrian anthem 🙂

I’ll make sure to get some photos and upload them to gallery.iypt.at later!

It looks like there are no politicians who are going to talk. Sadly Heinz Fischer is abroad. But to be perfectly blunt: I think that most of the young physicists in here enjoy Florian Schreck’s talk about lasers, atoms and the Doppler effect much more than any politician’s speech.

update: Wow, how cool is that – now that the “report” is over, the audience takes the role of the opponent and asks questions about the accuracy of his experiments and points out some errors. 😀

update 2: Alan Allinson has just opened the 23rd IYPT. I’ve updated the website in the very same second he said “opened” 🙂

update 3: The drawing of lots:

1 Croatia
2 United Kingdom
3 Korea
4 Switzerland
5 Russia
6 Nigeria
7 Australia
8 France
9 Poland
10 Germany
11 Iran
12 Kenya
13 Georgia
14 New Zealand
15 Sweden
16 Austria
17 Slovakia
18 Belarus
19 China
20 Czech Republic
21 Singapore
22 Bulgaria
23 Chinese Taipeh

The tournament officially starts when Alan Allinson opens it this Saturday. But for me the start is leaving home (though I must admit Graz is not too far away from here) and going into that deep IYPT mode, were everything else slowly fades away. Teams from all around the world, preparations, “fights”, sleep deprivation – it’s a very special blend of topics, feelings and impressions.

It’s been a very long day, with some hectic preparations, lot’s of fighting with some technical equipment and carrying around of so much stuff: bags, pens, shirts, notepads – those are heavy in these large numbers.
Though I have been working all day, I really have to take a bow to our volunteers from china who have assembled all the bags for the participants – right after flying here! From last year I really know how exhausting the trip from China to Austria is.

I’m pretty tired now, but I’ve promised to myself to write a few words every day and upload some pictures…
So stay tuned for more posts, photos and eventually results of the fights!