My first conference of the year, and the last while at NREL, will be the APS March Meeting in Pittsburgh. The APS is perfect for those with short attention spans, a parade of ten minute talks, splattered over an immense number of parallel sessions. Fortunately, my talk is 8 am on the first morning, so I can relax for the rest of the conference. I have begun filtering through the sessions, building my ‘personal schedule’. Rest assured if you didn’t get sick enough of graphene last year, there are a dozen more sessions to wade through in 2009.

A few sessions stand out so far:
1. Predictive Materials Design for Alternative Energy. Five invited presentations centered around the use of hydrogen for renewable energy, from a modeller’s perspective.
2. Semiconductors: Atomic Structure and Lattices. A nice mix of talks in this session, but I am quite biased since I appear on two abstracts (phase changes in Ge2Sb2Te5 and the ordering properties of quaternary chalcogenides).
3. Focus Session: Dilute Magnetic Oxide Semiconductors. Sessions on DMS are always worth attending, if only for the high probability for some good fights. The last fall MRS was no exception: talk A observes ferromagnetism in a given system, talk B fails to, talk C predicts ferromagnetism should exist at room temperature, talk D predicts paramagnetism. In this context, the opening abstract correctly describes the present situation as ‘anarchy’. The current theoretical hot topic, in particular for d0 ferromagnetism (magnetism with no magnetic dopant present, a  close relative of alchemy) is defect localization. This is of course something chemists have been well aware of for a long time (e.g. see the abundance of literature on CeO2, TiO2, even Li-doped MgO). No doubt physicists will preach this as a revelation to all that will listen.
4. Computational Study of Semiconductor Band Structures. Many aspects of semiconductor theory I’ve been acquiring over the last two years are covered here: band offsets, deformation potentials, alloy theory.
5. Frontiers in Electronic Structure Theory. A session I’m obliged to go to. This year does look quite interesting. Many years ago I was at a workshop for the code CRYSTAL where they promised periodic MP2 very shortly, which is only materializing now in CRYSCOR. Here, Kresse et al. appear to have caught up fast. Maybe this will get released in VASP 6, circa 2020.

Six pieces of software I couldn’t live without this year.

1. Zotero. I sung its praises before, and it is still managing my pdf’s (and cif files) to perfection.
2. Cobian. Between daily backups to my USB key, to weekly backups to my external hardrive, Cobian does it all (Imsafe fulfills the same needs, but on OS X).
3. Vesta. I owe the authors of Vesta a lot. Crystal structure visualization and manipulation has never been so fast or beautiful. Make sure to cite their paper if you use it.
4. Inkscape. Vector drawings for those Nature and PRL schematics, without the need to sell your lab coat to afford Adobe Illustrator.
5. Gimp. Not the leather clad man, but the bitmap manipulator for making your images publication quality, without the need to sell your colleague’s lab coat to afford Adobe Photoshop.
6. Chemsketch. When you need to draw some annoyingly obscure organic molecule or make use of orbital templates, the freeware Chemsketch comes in handy.

Living at the centre of the democratic convention, it’s a hard task to avoid political polarisation. While it’s understandable that issues such as the right to abortion and off-shore drilling are sensitive issues, the continued push of republicans for creationist teaching in schools is bizarre. Going through the Irish primary school system, Catholicism was a fundamental part of the curriculum. While the incentive of financial rewards associated with each additional sacrament did ease your mind, once you start thinking for yourself, you naturally begin to question the fable vs fact aspects (how big was this ark of Noah? Did Lazarus only get raised from the dead because Mary Magdalene was his cousin, i.e. you need to pull strings to get saved?). In that regard, Jehovah's witnesses are particularly astute, and produce some nice literature as an attempt to reconcile the bible’s teachings with scientific fact, e.g. the six days that the world was created were ‘heavenly days’ which correspond to many millennia, and the resulting evolution was directed towards  the pinnacle of us homo sapiens. The sad thing is that on one side you have religious blind beliefs, while on the other you have the well-informed condescending attitude of people like Richard Dawkins, who can produce some wonderful books, but do little to help rectify the minds of people at large. Obama isn’t the final cure, but he’s definitely as step in the right direction: “religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking”.