Life on board ESS

This week ESS had to cancel the third Steering Committee Meeting in Bilbao, Spain, due to the ash cloud over Europe. I think it was a wise decision by the ESS management.

Staff at ESS were of course a bit disappointed seeing all their work and preparations for this meeting litterally going up in smoke. But luckily we stand quite prepared with a load of black humour for situations like this. Something which have actually helped us to cope every now and then in critical situations that sometimes occur in a complex project like the ESS.

There are of course many people who have got into serious trouble due to the ash cloud. Not the least people in Iceland who are already suffering from the financial collapse. I think about you and wish you all the best in your struggle to fix the Icelandic economy. A positive effect in all this could be though that Iceland have probably never got as much international publicity and PR before. So in the long run, an exotic volcano might help tourism and make it easier to open new doors to do business in the future.

For those who like to cheer things up a bit in all this mess, there is a lot of humour on the volcanic subject flourishing around the web:

United Kingdom: "Dear Iceland, we asked for cash, not ash!".

Iceland: "Sorry for the flight delays, Europe. We were aiming for London, but it's hard to be accurate when firing a volcano".

Or this one:

"The last wish of the Icelandic economy was to have its ashes scattered over Europe...".

Locally, here in my mailbox, the news just reached me that our friend, ProfESSor John Larese who gave a speech at the ESS / Lund University seminar series last week, is still in Sweden unable to get home because of the ash cloud. Live and direct from Uppsala (apparently there's a second university town in Sweden after Lund?) John sent me a short reflection on his current situation. He seems to be contemplating over geology stuff, perhaps trying to find some secret code to send as a morse signal to his science colleagues back home across the Atlantic:

"Im sitting in my hotel room in Uppsala, Sweden reflecting on the past few days and how premonitory my lecture at Lund University was. I opened my lecture about Spallation Neutron Souces and Nanomaterials with the Great Smokey Mountains as a backdrop on my title page but little did I think that this Chemistry profESSor from TennESSee, the VOLunteer University was going to fall victim to the Nano silica ash originating from the Smokey Icelandic VOLcano eruption. While some confusion still exists it appears that I still have a few days to ponder if the VOLcano will stop SPALLing out any more Nanosilica ash and this citizen of the VOLunteer state can return home. In the future I'll stick to VOLunteering to scatter neutrons closer to TennESSee and not dodging VOLcanic ash!"

Dear John, I hope you make it back to the US and Tennessee soon and don't suffer too much from “jet lash”. Otherwise you could always settle down in Lund and build a spectrometer or two. We will need them to analyse the huge (but so remarkably invisible) particle clouds that keeps the Europeans from levitating nowadays.

By the way, Johnny cASH was born in Kingsland, ArkanSAS - But he actually died in nASHville TennESSee.. ashESS to ashESS.. I think I need to cough..

End of story.

Oh, one more: "Waiter, there's volcanic ash in my soup. I know, it's a no-fly zone".

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Here we all are in Knoxville, 28 brave souls from Scandinavia - 7 from the ESSS Secretariat - who have run the gauntlet of swine flu and the possible end of civilisation as we know it, to attend the International Conference on Neutron Scattering in Tennessee.

With our specially designed shirts (thanks Karl !) we are quite a visible presence here, demonstrating the very solid scientific strength which Scandinavia has in neutron scattering. When we get a delegate list we can see whether in fact we are the largest delegation. Neither has the weather been kind to the organisers, with tornado warnings on Sunday, but we were thoughtfully supplied with umbrellas in our delegate pack, a nice practical touch - just like the delegates to the Bilbao meeting a few weeks ago were. There was lots of reminiscing about the warm sunny weather which we had left behind us in Lund but we have been warmly welcomed here.

Last night the whole Scandinavian team all went out to dinner together at Calhouns waterfront restaurant, an inspired choice of Sofie, Therèse and Johan, since the heavens opened up especially for us and it was quite dramatic over the Tennessee river. Waterfront was therefore the word. We had a really lovely evening with the friendliest waiter and waitress you could imagine. Such enthusiasm and involvement with the (admittedly good-looking!) Scandianvians.

Interestingly, a senior local fellow had earlier asked me how things were doing at ILL. I told him that they had said goodbye to that old guy who used to be there about three years ago and had replaced him with a (somewhat !) younger version (news can travel slowly sometimes...) and that now I was in Sweden. "Oh", he replied with a glazed look in his eye, "the weather must be really bad there."  As he said this I glanced out of the window - there was a torrential rainstorm outside, with cars being washed down the street in front of my eyes (no, no... I made that last bit up!). But it is really interesting how we as humankind comfort ourselves with preconceived ideas. I resisted saying (as I admit I sometimes do) that the Polar bears have migrated north for the summer now and the streets of Lund are safe for a few weeks. Let us hope that the imminent decision on the siting of ESS will be made objectively, setting aside preconceived ideas which all of us carry around with us. I feel confident that that is in fact happening.

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