Berlin remains fun

[fivemack]

I think Berlin is still my favorite city to visit; the new buildings feel as if they've only just been taken out of their boxes and many of the old ones as if they're freshly back from the dry-cleaners, massive green areas, superb public transport, bars that never close ...

The conference was quite hard work (nine to six Sunday through Wednesday meaning that I end up with a week feeling as if it contains two Fridays); met up with various people from my past, all of whom seemed to decide that I needed luring back into academia, or at least luring into long evenings spent sipping Pilzener, eating predominantly pig-based dishes, and discussing how much fun life as a post-doc is. I don't think it'll work, if only given quite how incomprehensible I found some of the talks; there's clearly some sort of taboo about mentioning actual equations or numbers in algebraic-geometry talks.

Aside from that, and walks through the Tiergarten and down the Spree, I've visited what's presumably going to be a travelling exhibition of artefacts from Alexandria harbour - granite colossi, a six-metre-high tablet describing in hieroglyphs the achievements of a minor Ptolemy, golden earrings, and more ceramic bowls of uncertain use than you could shake a stick at. Diorite survives immersion very well, though pink granite tends to lose its polish.

Charlottenburg and Potsdam tomorrow, and then on to Poland; but I seem to be spending the afternoon today buying sunscreen and waiting for washing-machines to finish, having spent the morning recovering from the last few evenings.

Comments

[rwl.livejournal.com]

I spent about a week in Berlin last September. It's a grand city, and I do look forward to going there again someday.

As for Poland, I've been there eleven times. Where are you going?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Szczecin for one night, by train from the new Berlin Hauptbahnhof, then Gdansk for two, Warsaw for two, Krakow for three, and a flight home. Pure tourism.

[rwl.livejournal.com]

It's a great country. I've never been to any of the western cities of Poland, but I've visited Warsaw, Krakow, and Gdansk often enough that they're very familiar to me.

[emperor]

IME, equations and oral presentations do not go together well.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

There are roughly three models of maths presentation.

There are ones with a long series of PowerPoint slides, which tend to be implementors showing off the capabilities of the software they've built and incidentally the new theorems they had to prove to make the software possible.

There are chalk-and-talk presentations, some of them even starting with series of definitions; good teachers give good ones, superb researchers sometimes less so, and it's very easy to assume the entire audience understands p-adic integration.

But the standard algebraic-geometry is usually done with overhead slides, and these are full of diagrams in which two squiggles intersect two other squiggles and I get the impression that everyone in the audience other than me understands exactly why the squiggles are placed in certain arrangements, and exactly what this means about the Brauer group.

But there's a big distinction between talks with lots of written backing explaining precisely what's been found while the narrator explains how she found it, and talks which say what they've been doing without explaining why they're doing it or why it's a thing worthy to be done.

[you may well see in this something of why I'm drawn to sciences in which the observable universe is there to be observed as arbitrator]

[ellarien]

talks which say what they've been doing without explaining why they're doing it or why it's a thing worthy to be done.

These are regrettably common among the short contributed talks at the astronomy meetings I tend to go to, too.

[(Anonymous)]

Why would you want to shake a stick at a ceramic bowl? To threaten it? Chastise it? Naughty ceramic bowl, tell me what your purpose is!