First talk imminent

So it turns out that I am going to give a talk at UK Cosmo next week. It’s only supposed to be 18 minutes long, which you might imagine wouldn’t be that difficult to put together, but as you can tell from the lack of posts here recently, I’ve been having some problems.

The talk is supposed to be based on our last paper (which will soon appear in JCAP by the way), but with limited time I think I will have to speed through it pretty quickly. As a lot of the paper draws in techniques and results from string theory, I might have to gloss over those to.

The audience is going to be large (at least 50 people), with a mix of postgrads, postdocs and faculty from across the UK. And with a varied mix of theoretical and observational cosmologists, I am finding it difficult to find the right level to pitch the talk at.

To make things a little harder, I have written the talk using Beamer, which is a very impressive presentation class for LaTeX. But I have never used it before, so I am constantly dipping in to the userguide to find out how to do things that in OpenOffice would be simple. That said, I really like being able to incorporate equations into my presentation with no fuss at all, as opposed to the tortuous methods needed in other programs.

With any luck I will be able to overcome these problems before next Tuesday, so here’s hoping the train to Portsmouth gets us there on time!