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Saturday, October 22, 2005
Octoberfest (Category Theory Conference @ OttawaU)
First Day
It is bloody freezing in Ottawa. Like 10 degrees colder than Halifax. I've started taking for granted how mild ocean-side temperatures can be. This is the first time I've been around Ottawa, not seeing it with other people who live here. Not that it makes a big difference, but it is a change. I suppose I'm noticing more differences. Ottawa is very clean and proper. The bus ride to the university has a lovely stretch of greenbelt, with a river on one side. Just a transitway cutting through the grass, trees, and bike/walking/jogging lanes. Very nice, it's a feature more cities need.
But one thing that strikes me is that here it is, 8:00am, I'm on a double bus still half an hour away from downtown, and the bus is full of people. I mean crammed full, all room taken, standing or sitting. Where are these people all going? I mean, I get on the busiest bus in Halifax at 10am to go to the market, and it's barely half full. It's one of the big differences between Ontario and Nova Scotia - people here seem to care more about going to work and/or working weekends/long hours. You wouldn't catch a Haligonian dead working on Saturday, unless they were at the market....
Sitting down in the cramped lecture room is quite intimidating. First of all, I don't know anyone for quite a while, and secondly, the collective brain power of the room is almost overwhelming. It doesn't get any better when the plenary speaker starts talking - I have absolutely no freakin' clue what he's talking about. None. This is supposed to be the exemplary "everyone wants to hear what he has to say" guy, no less. Fortunately, after his talk, I talk to Dr. Pare, one of the big people in category theory, whom I know from Dal, and he assures me he had no idea what was going on either. Very reassuring to hear that, let me tell you.
In fact, this trend is to continue for much of the day, as I estimate now that I only got something from about 4 of the 13 talks I attended. Which actually isn't too bad, all things considering. Once the conference is over tomorrow, I will have a ton of things to look up, falling into two categories: (a) interesting things I might want to look into more as possible research topics, and (b) basic definitions which I've never heard of. The majority of the talks certainly gave me plentiful material for category (b)....
It's funny what people consider standard material. Even at this, a category theory conference, which is specialized enough to begin with, there's a wide disparity in what people assume their audience knows. It doesn't help that the talks are only half an hour, of course. However, I have quite quickly learned that there is a reason that talks are not all a good hour length: most speakers suck. I mean that completely seriously. They don't take into account how much time they have, they don't speak clearly, they don't write clearly, you name it. It actually gets kind of amusing.
Other than the conference, the only other thing of interest was the restaurant I went to for dinner, Royal Thai. It was very busy, but our food came incredibly quickly, and was very, very good. I was literally astonished, what with the size of the place and speed with which our food came, how good it was. The "salad" we had was especially interesting, consisting of very thin slices of cold beef and a wide variety of spices such as mint, coriander, and onions. The funny thing was was that even though it was basically just meat, it really felt like a salad. Quite fascinating.
As an aside, I really miss M. I don't know how I made it through last winter.
First Day
It is bloody freezing in Ottawa. Like 10 degrees colder than Halifax. I've started taking for granted how mild ocean-side temperatures can be. This is the first time I've been around Ottawa, not seeing it with other people who live here. Not that it makes a big difference, but it is a change. I suppose I'm noticing more differences. Ottawa is very clean and proper. The bus ride to the university has a lovely stretch of greenbelt, with a river on one side. Just a transitway cutting through the grass, trees, and bike/walking/jogging lanes. Very nice, it's a feature more cities need.
But one thing that strikes me is that here it is, 8:00am, I'm on a double bus still half an hour away from downtown, and the bus is full of people. I mean crammed full, all room taken, standing or sitting. Where are these people all going? I mean, I get on the busiest bus in Halifax at 10am to go to the market, and it's barely half full. It's one of the big differences between Ontario and Nova Scotia - people here seem to care more about going to work and/or working weekends/long hours. You wouldn't catch a Haligonian dead working on Saturday, unless they were at the market....
Sitting down in the cramped lecture room is quite intimidating. First of all, I don't know anyone for quite a while, and secondly, the collective brain power of the room is almost overwhelming. It doesn't get any better when the plenary speaker starts talking - I have absolutely no freakin' clue what he's talking about. None. This is supposed to be the exemplary "everyone wants to hear what he has to say" guy, no less. Fortunately, after his talk, I talk to Dr. Pare, one of the big people in category theory, whom I know from Dal, and he assures me he had no idea what was going on either. Very reassuring to hear that, let me tell you.
In fact, this trend is to continue for much of the day, as I estimate now that I only got something from about 4 of the 13 talks I attended. Which actually isn't too bad, all things considering. Once the conference is over tomorrow, I will have a ton of things to look up, falling into two categories: (a) interesting things I might want to look into more as possible research topics, and (b) basic definitions which I've never heard of. The majority of the talks certainly gave me plentiful material for category (b)....
It's funny what people consider standard material. Even at this, a category theory conference, which is specialized enough to begin with, there's a wide disparity in what people assume their audience knows. It doesn't help that the talks are only half an hour, of course. However, I have quite quickly learned that there is a reason that talks are not all a good hour length: most speakers suck. I mean that completely seriously. They don't take into account how much time they have, they don't speak clearly, they don't write clearly, you name it. It actually gets kind of amusing.
Other than the conference, the only other thing of interest was the restaurant I went to for dinner, Royal Thai. It was very busy, but our food came incredibly quickly, and was very, very good. I was literally astonished, what with the size of the place and speed with which our food came, how good it was. The "salad" we had was especially interesting, consisting of very thin slices of cold beef and a wide variety of spices such as mint, coriander, and onions. The funny thing was was that even though it was basically just meat, it really felt like a salad. Quite fascinating.
As an aside, I really miss M. I don't know how I made it through last winter.
