The year is officially over in more than half the world as I write these words. As every year comes to an end, it’s time to celebrate and to put to practice many traditions. Among these traditions, there are two that I wanted to share with you.
The first one is the UW-Madison Holiday Physics Colloquium. Every Friday throughout the year, a guest speaker will give a colloquium on his or her field of research, but the very last Friday before the end of classes is usually reserved to the 3rd year grad students.
The students will put together an incredible collection of skits and spoof videos, combined with live performances. The usual topics are: Grad school is terribly hard, TAing stinks, I can’t find a good topic for my thesis, and so on. The faculty always participates in such videos and performances and we all have a good laugh. Pizza is available for the entire department, as well as plenty of beer (this is Wisconsin after all!)
Here’s a video I found on youtube of a past Holiday Colloquium. They are very good, but they even get better if you know the professors and students involved.
The second tradition was unknown to me: it’s a real Race Around the World! and it doesn’t even take 80 days, but a couple of hours. Apparently, every year this race is held in the South Pole Station in Antarctica. The participants have spent some time building all kinds of weird and funny-looking vehicles and crazy costumes to be in the 4 km-long race around the South Pole marker. It is certainly a well deserved celebration moment after all the hard work they’ve put working there while being away from their families.
There were a couple of serious runners that were going against the clock, too.
Here are some pictures that I took from an appendix to the latest IceCube weekly report. Enjoy! and Happy new year!
