March Meeting 2019 Boston

I’m currently in Boston for the 2019 March Meeting, which is as exciting, overwhelming, and exhausting as usual!

You may remember last March Meeting, we were in LA, which was naturally nice and warm.  Boston welcomed the March Meeting with one of the first big snow storms of the season — about 8 inches of very wet, heavy snow — right in time for Monday morning.  Fortunately, I flew in on Sunday so had no trouble, but I heard of a local presenter who missed their invited 8 am talk because they couldn’t drive in.  The roads were definitely sloppy, but it was a beautiful snow.

I ended up walking into the convention center (about a mile) which was actually quite nice.  But I wished that I had brought boots.  I was impressed at how quickly the downtown sidewalks were being cleared.  The trouble was really at the intersections with the piles from the snow plows.

Once I arrived at the meeting, there were lots of interesting talks, of course.  I spent the morning in a session on Geophysical Applications of Granular Flows, with a series of really interesting invited talks. I learned a lot more about erosion and incipient flow — when does a fluid flowing over a granular material make those grains also flow?  When do grains that have been picked up and carried in the fluid drop down and settle?  It’s fluid dynamics and turbulence and granular materials all in one complicated problem!

More updates to come — but I need to get to the convention center this morning for our last day at the meeting!