Conference in Madison

PSERC had there spring meeting this year at University of Wisconsin-Madison and I just got back from  my trip up there.  I'll spare you all the technical details of the conference and instead talk about the general aspects of my time in Madison.

First of all, the campus.  This is a very large campus that is thoroughly integrated into the city.


(All photos you'll be seeing today were taken with my poor quality cell-phone camera.  No justification is provided for such a choice on my part.)

All the buildings you see in this picture are a part of the university.  Almost all of the buildings I saw on campus were at least five stories tall.  I was told the campus had 40,000 students and it stretched literally for miles.  Despite Madison being a relatively small city, walking through campus felt just like walking through downtown in a many times its size.  You might guess that parking was not easily found and you would be right.  This is true not only for cars but also for scooters (called "mopeds") and bicycles.

Many buildings had the moped lots and all had many bike racks.  Madison took bicycles very seriously.  Bike lanes everywhere (some with curbs in the middle of the street physically separating them from auto traffic), demarcation between bicycle and pedestrian lanes on paths, and automated bicycle rental racks strewn throughout campus.

After riding my bicycle as my primary form of transportation for a better part of a decade, I have to say that Madison fully understands and enables bicycle commuting.  Autos, bicycles, and pedestrians; these three all move at distinctly different speeds and to facilite each, they each need their own lanes.  Seeing these three lanes makes me want to move there.

There's always the weather, though.  Humidity was high (> 90%) so even at 75'F I was sweating.  I don't think it would be any more bearable than Wichita's summers even if the highs are ten or fifteen degrees cooler. Winters I would expect to be much colder and snowier than anything I've ever experienced; maybe I don't actually want to live there.

Anyway, back to the campus.  At a big school there is a lot of money very modest percentages of the university budget can produce very impressive results.  We got to tour the newest building on campus and it is was nicer and more impressive than the building where I have my office at Wichita State, also the newest on its campus.

Five or six stories, glass and metal, very fancy looking labs with many millions of dollars of equipment.  It is hard not to feel inferior when surrounded by such impressive equipment.  The advantages of doing research at such a large and well-funded school were clear and made me jealous; I've always had a problem with gadget envy.  It is in times like these that it is good to remind myself that I'm actually very happy with the education and research opportunities I have been granted, both undergrad and graduate.  Expensive toys are nice and they enable some incredible work but there is a lot that can be learned and studies with much more modest means.  I am thankful for the opportunities I've been given.

Lastly, a bit of a rant on the controls in my shower at the hotel.

Two levers one controls the amount of water and the other controls the temperature. The large one rotates about 540 degrees (1.5 revolutions), the other, smaller lever only 45 degrees. To turn the shower on you must rotate the larger one until water begins to flow.  To adjust temperature you then turn the smaller one appropriately.  No wait, that's completely wrong.  To adjust the temperature, you continue to turn the larger handle an arbitrary amount in an arbitrary direction.

After using this fixture for three days I had memorized where the handle should go; the location never made any sense.  And the smaller handle?  It did adjust the amount of water AFTER you had turned on the water with the larger handle.  This is the worst design I have every personally encountered.  (If design decisions like this equally ruffle your feathers, do I have the book for you: The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.  Amazing, fantastic book.)