Quantum Diarists in costume
On Halloween, some Quantum Diarists chose to temporarily trade their grounded lives as physicists for more magical existences. Anuj Purwar went to a Halloween party as a terrifying ringwraith, and his wife went as a lovely ladybug. Sarah Phillips dressed as a "woodland faery"--wings and all. Caolionn O'Connell, on the other hand, seems to have lacked "the proper Halloween spirit," at least according to her "Stepford wife" sister.

Debbie Harris shared Halloween with her children, including shopping for their costumes and carving pumpkins. "Sonia is learning sign language in the Fermilab Children's Center, and she showed me that the sign for jack-o-lantern looks like someone scooping the guts out of the pumpkin. Unfortunately she's more interested in making the sign for jack-o-lantern than actually helping with the gut removal," she writes.

Talking about physics
"Every now and then a single plot takes over 90% of the general experimental talks," Gordon Watts writes. He predicts that the next "it" plot at all the talks will be one that describes the status of the race for the Higgs. It will be updated continuously for the next four years, he writes, giving it a long life. "In short, this guy has legs!"

Peter Steinberg gives a talk to a closed session of his "most senior and eminent peers," and gets back--to his satisfaction--a friendly but rather insulting e-mail. "How do I measure quality of a talk?" he writes. "By the quality of insults I get while giving it! And, even better, by the sophistication of the insult delivery."

Caolionn O'Connell is pleasantly surprised at a lecture by physicist Sean Carroll on Dark Energy. "So after Sean's talk, I feel a little bit more at ease with a physics topic that is well outside my research, which, when you think about it, is exactly what a colloquium is supposed to do," she writes. "Why does it seem like so few speakers got that memo?"