There'll be dancing in the streets of Glasgow tonight...
So, the conference is over, and now I have to digest the mathematics and the vast quantity of sausages I consumed throughout the last week. I'm staying in Halifax with a couple of the locals who I met at the conference, being shown the city and its great profusion of bars. It's a pretty cool place: actually, it reminds me somewhat of San Diego. Port town, wide streets, pleasant weather, similar sorts of architecture, walk-aroundable downtown with lots of bars. Also, you know those stereotypes about how Canadians are all really nice? They're all true. All of them. I haven't yet done the experiment where you get 100 drunk Canadians out of a swimming pool by simply saying "Would everyone get out of the pool, please?", but I have no doubt of its success.
Yesterday, we went to see the Halifax Tattoo, which is going on this week. Our attendance was pretty random: we went along to see if we could find a brochure for it, and some guy said "Hey, you want some tickets?" We took him for a tout, but no, he had some spare tickets and he wanted to give them away rather than see them go to waste. See previous comments about the niceness of Canadians. So, three-and-a-half hours of a military tattoo, with all the usual close-order drill, bagpipe music, marching bands, field gun racing and so on, but also contingents of gymnasts from Germany and Estonia, including some people who rolled around in things that looked like giant hamster wheels and a technically simple but very nice fire poi act. We certainly got our money's worth! It was in an ice hockey rink and featured actual Mounties (the extremely impressive RCMP display drill unit), so I can cross one-and-a-half stereotypical Canadian sights off the list :-)
I've also had time to digest the discovery that my thesis project has already been largely done. Now I've had time to think about it, I can see that the approach they've taken is extremely elegant. It's not the SimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork, but then the SimplestThing is somehow very unlikely to work. If you come at it from the right direction, their approach is the most obvious thing that could work - or, to use a term common among mathematicians, it's the moral definition. It also generalises beautifully to more general types of theory and higher dimensions. In short, I'm kicking myself for not having thought of it.
In other news, I see that England have been knocked out of the World Cup. Oh dear, how terribly sad. To my great surprise, being in Canada does not give me a get-out-of-jail card wrt the World Cup: since they didn't support England anyway, my hosts remain interested in the matches.
Yesterday, we went to see the Halifax Tattoo, which is going on this week. Our attendance was pretty random: we went along to see if we could find a brochure for it, and some guy said "Hey, you want some tickets?" We took him for a tout, but no, he had some spare tickets and he wanted to give them away rather than see them go to waste. See previous comments about the niceness of Canadians. So, three-and-a-half hours of a military tattoo, with all the usual close-order drill, bagpipe music, marching bands, field gun racing and so on, but also contingents of gymnasts from Germany and Estonia, including some people who rolled around in things that looked like giant hamster wheels and a technically simple but very nice fire poi act. We certainly got our money's worth! It was in an ice hockey rink and featured actual Mounties (the extremely impressive RCMP display drill unit), so I can cross one-and-a-half stereotypical Canadian sights off the list :-)
I've also had time to digest the discovery that my thesis project has already been largely done. Now I've had time to think about it, I can see that the approach they've taken is extremely elegant. It's not the SimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork, but then the SimplestThing is somehow very unlikely to work. If you come at it from the right direction, their approach is the most obvious thing that could work - or, to use a term common among mathematicians, it's the moral definition. It also generalises beautifully to more general types of theory and higher dimensions. In short, I'm kicking myself for not having thought of it.
In other news, I see that England have been knocked out of the World Cup. Oh dear, how terribly sad. To my great surprise, being in Canada does not give me a get-out-of-jail card wrt the World Cup: since they didn't support England anyway, my hosts remain interested in the matches.