This is a backdated post, intended as a summary of the first day of the Gordon Research Conference on Cardiac Arrhythmias
Travel
Travel was long, though rather uneventful. We arrived at the airport in New Orleans on time, had some trouble with checking in using the United machines, so we had to talk to someone at the counter. Aside from being rude, he also informed us that United is now charging $30/leg of trip to sit in an exit row. Not impressive, United. Anyway, we hopped an A320 to Denver, where we arrived at about 10:00 local time, or a little before. I think it was my first time on the ground in Colorado. It was warmer than I expected in February. After finding a bit to eat and some coffee, we boarded a commuter (CanadAir of some kind) for the 2.5 hour flight to Santa Barbara.
Pictures from the Denver Airport:
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Once we arrived at Santa Barbara Airport (which is extremely small, by the way), we found our rental car and headed to downtown Santa Barbara just as it was beginning to rain. I pointed out a little indian place with a lunch buffet, where we proceeded to stuff ourselves. Then, to kill time until our free parking time was up, we walked up and down State St., where we found some coffee (I had Chai), Natalia and Molly looked at a variety of clothing stores (mostly through the window), and finally headed back to the car.
Pictures from downtown SB:
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At the Conference
Once we made it to the hotel, I met my roommate. You see, they overbooked the conference and basically forced us to take roommates. Being the only guy on the trip, I was lined up for a single, while Molly and Blanca shared a room. I ended up with an interesting guy named David from Duke, who has a poster on mathematically modeling the restitution curve. He happened to know Lisa Fauci of the math department at Tulane, from whom I have recently taken a class in cardiac modeling.
Natalia and Molly were late (for a variety of reasons) to meet me in the lobby before the reception, so I had a seat. A woman who introduced herself as Jeannie (Genie?) from University of Wisconsin, Madison introduced herself and informed me that there was wine, but not really a crowd, downstairs. I went and got a glass of wine and we talked about our respective fields a bit. She’s a research scientist working on the genetics of protein channels, using immunohistochemistry and so on.
Had some good Santa Barbara wine, as did Molly:
and then proceeded to dinner. I was grilled by the guy I was sitting next to (Les Tung) about our implementation of regional ischemia, specifically IK(ATP) and admittedly was not as quick to produce an answer as I ought to have been.
After dinner we headed downstairs to the first session, where we met Ray from UCLA, who is doing some interesting work on computational modeling of Long Q-T syndrome. Talks were on the subject of sudden cardiac death, and general conference introduction.
It occurred to me during that session to write a script for my 2D study that determines which simulations contain reentries and which do not. It’s a neat idea, but I don’t know that I really have time in the overall plan to implement it. I wouldn’t get much out of it at this point, but in retrospect it would have been good. I don’t know that I would have been able to write this when I needed it.
Later, a backdated entry for the 21st.