Press Conference Experience

June 3rd, 2008

I overslept and almost missed it yesterday!   The traveling, stress, and lack of sufficient sleep caught up to me.   I made it over okay, with a couple of minutes to spare.   I wanted to make some adjustments to the slides and practice the talk again just before the actual event, but didn’t have time.

The actual experience was a little anti-climactic.   It had the look and feel of a panel at a science fiction convention, although we had clearer rules and slides to display as we talked.    The room was large, especially given that there were maybe 25 people in the room total, so it appeared a little empty.   I was happy to see Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, sitting off to one side — he’s great at conveying astronomy to the public.   There was a webcast of the slides and the audio went out to a conference call, so that the actual audience was likely much, much larger.   I talked with one reporter on the phone afterward, however, and she said that the audio quality was far from optimal.   There was a question and answer session following the presentations, and all of us received a number of queries.   It made me realize I hadn’t done as good of a job as I’d wished.   The easiest, most obvious thing I needed to do was to skip the nuance, and focus on what was the single main result: how key aspects of galaxy evolution do indeed seem to be driven by mergers and interactions, at least in the most massive systems.   The business about how we see post-starburst quasars in every stage from interaction to full-bore post-merger is an imporant but secondary result, and confusing to emphasize too much.

The presentation that seemed to get the most attention was Marc’s Seigar’s talk about how the tightness of spiral arms can be used as a way to estimate a galaxy’s central black hole mass.   That observation is much easier to make than others in high-redshift spiral galaxies than others.   Phil Plait has a nice post about it.

So I’ve seen our work online in a few places so far: Bad Astronomy, National Geographic, Kazinform, Softpedia, and my own University of Wyoming.   If you see it mentioned elsewhere, let me know!

Overall, I’d give myself a B or B-.   An A for effort for sure, but there wasn’t enough time to do a superlative job given how I was overcommitted this month.   I was exhausted yesterday, went to bed early and slept for 11 hours.   And while I’d just gotten over another cold, I seem to have come down with one this morning again.   When I was younger, no problem.   Now, any time I’m traveling, stressed, sleep-deprived, I seem to get the sniffles. I’m looking forward to getting home to Laramie to relax and get healthy.

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