Pretty much spent the whole of my afternoon-evening out with S and J arbitrarily hanging, drinking and eating. Pretty sweet. The town is preparing for its annual art fair which happens over the next few days. So everyone’s all excited and running around all active-like setting up stalls and that sort of thing. It’s colourful, getting crowded, and very lively.
And remember the time I flipped when I serendipitously ran into papers citing stuff I’d co-authored? It was definitely cool to see my name in someone else’s bibliography. Something similar, but a lot cooler, happened to a portion of our group when they were in Austria a while earlier. There was this group from Spain, who’d picked up some of our pre-published stuff from Cornell’s arXiv and done all sorts of cool stuff with the framework we’d set up. Sure, they were apparently working with simplified material models and what not, but long story short, they had some very cool computational things going with our math. Something along the lines of a model which involved a broken bone, and stem cells being introduced. Through the computation, these cells find their way to the general area where the break is, differentiate and deposit material resulting in healing.
All of that within our framework. A problem totally unrelated to anything we’re working on and not tweaked-for at all. It “just worked”. And that makes me all warm and fuzzy on the inside. Of course I don’t know all the details since I wasn’t there myself to grasp all the specifics. But it feels good. I am pretty certain it would have felt even cooler if I’d experienced this in person. And where was I during all of this? You guessed it.. in India.
Not like I’m complaining or anything.