Today the internal post brought me the last two homeworks from an Axiomatic Set Theory course I completed in 2004.

(Ah, nostalgia. “The idea for this construction is due to Alex Ma. The messy details and confused notation are entirely my own.”)

Now this is obviously nonsense. We already have height-adjustable chairs, which give you the full range of body-to-desk relative positions. The real motivation, I suspect, is more sinister.

Because there’s a power cord coming out of the back of the desk. It’s not connected to my computer, or my extra speaker set, or even the phone. It’s connected to a small box on the back-underneath of the desk, concealed in a larger metal framework that looks structural but apparently is only there to keep the box and the power cord out of sight.

What could it be? My guess is something like the “black box” flight recorder on an airplane. So that if I crash and burn they can retrieve whatever research problem I was attacking just before the end. (I imagine a commission of enquiry and a dusty ledger of forbidden research areas: “This one has accounted for seven PhD students and one Assistant Professor already, we cannot allow you to pursue it I’m sorry.”)

Although if that’s the case then either they’re pretty sure I’m not going to crack, or they don’t expect it to be research-related.

The black box isn’t actually plugged in.

No, really, they’re making me more employable … by giving me money to buy books with.

They have no idea what they’re in for…

(For those who really need the facts, it’s a new scheme to provide resources for university employees who want to take courses or whatever outside their normal functions, but which would make them more employable. To get us enthusiastic about it, they enclosed €35 worth of book tokens, “waarmee u alvast een stimulans kunt geven aan uw employability”. Yup.)

For those who don’t know, ESSLLI is the European Summer School for Logic, Language and Information. It’s two weeks of intensive coursework (if you take a full program you can do four sessions a day, making eight week-long courses, plus the daily student sessions and four evening lectures spread over the fortnight) with around 300 attendees, mainly MSc students and PhD candidates, in this case smack in the middle of Dublin.

Needless to say I didn’t work as hard as all that.

I did attend courses (and presented a paper at the workshop on Language, Games and Evolution) but I took some time off for browsing bookstores and music shops, juggling, and just wandering the city.

Although I had my camera with me, there are cursed few photos that (a) were of something interesting, and (b) worked. So I’m going to point at the ESSLLI2007 tag on Flickr, where those more talented and more assiduous than I have posted a bunch (at last count, 365 shots!). Conveniently enough, I stayed at the same hostel as ‘merpeltje’ and we hung out a lot, so she managed to document a whole lot of stuff I missed.

Like the day trip to Glendalough, when Wouter shouted me out of the shower because we had 15 minutes to make the bus instead of the hour and a half I thought we were sitting on, and in the rush I forgot my camera. It’s a lovely piece of Ireland, even if designed for massive tourist throughput. The mist came down, it rained (flickr), there were mountain goats and heather (flickr), there were ruins and tombstones (flickr) and after four years of Amsterdam being up in the hills again made me awfully homesick… From the bus on the way I caught a glimpse of two deer drinking on a little promontory, silhouetted against the reflection of the sky in the water… it looks awfully naff in a painting, but in real life it made me leap out of my seat and shout. (Admittedly a moment of stillness would have suited the mood better, but you always think of these things too late.) Believe it or not, on the return trip there was another deer in exactly the same spot.¹

That wasn’t the only beastie sighting of the trip. The first day we rocked up to Trinity College (where the courses were held) there was a fox calmly surveying the tourists and waiting for the lady feeding the cats to move on so he could muscle in on the scraps… This photo clearly shows my mad skillz with a camera, and less clearly shows the fox. I reckon he’s weighing up the chance his SUV gets towed while he’s tucking into a quick dinner.

Which leads me, by a clever segue, in two directions at once. First there’s the fact that some nasty little insects decided to snack on me, leaving my legs most unsightly:

More cheerily and less hairily, there’s the very merry culinary story of the Isaacs Hostel Gelegenheidsband and Citchen Krew, comprising myself (bottlewasher and Defender of the Saucepan), Wouter of the Main Course, and Crumbles Marieke. I happened upon the other two after they’d already figured out the Isaacs kitchen system:² roughly eighty backpackers wanting to cook their meals, and seven and a half saucepans to go around the five working hotplates. We developed a nuanced technique (chiefly involving bribery, flattery, occasional threats, and brute stick-to-it patience) for collecting the necessary implements, and turned out multi-course culinary extravaganzas on almost every night.³ I’m not exaggerating, we’re documented: here’s Wouter making coq au vin, the entree and dessert of our final banquet (the burned-looking thing is my Rhubarb Cream Flan, and not as blackened as it looks; the shamrock adorns the Custard That Didn’t Burn). They made (and I ate…) scones. Even the shopping was a barrel of (admittedly peurile) laughs.

There’s even a YouTube moment: killing time in the kitchen I started juggling, with Wouter doing his best to send a ball or two into the coq au vin.

That wasn’t the only juggling we did either — the other two were keen enough to buy balls, and I had one fantastic session with a Dublin native who taught me club-stealing (much harder than with balls) and a wicked two-person three-club pattern where you’re constantly changing places and swapping clubs. If anyone in A’dam wants to try it out give me a shout — if you own clubs so much the better, since I don’t, but it should be adaptable for balls as well.

It wasn’t all fun and games though. A summerschool is, after all, a serious business.

And we took it seriously.

I’ll admit that I spent a disproportionate amount of time in the Celtic Note cd store. I came away with some good trad stuff (thanks to Carl Vogel we managed to catch a session (flickr) as well), and the following photo, confirming that I was really in Ireland:

While I didn’t spend as much time in bookshops as I might have liked to, it was quite long enough for both my wallet and my baggage allowance… Here’s a couple of the more ideosyncratic shelving strategies on display:

… and for all those discount philosophers out there:

I made it in to see the Book of Kells, which was stunning (see some blurry photos of my reproduction here). Unfortunately it costs eight euros to visit, so I didn’t get to follow my plan of going every day to see a new page… and in fact I ran out of time for a return trip. The one page I saw, though, was fantastic — the detail is so much more visible ‘in the flesh’⁴ than in a glossy photograph. I stayed about an hour, and would have happily done it again on a new page.

Besides the shopping and touristing, we spent a lot of time just walking around. Dublin has nice parks, a good feel on the streets (at least in the daytime — I took a wrong turning one evening and got my first ever sighting of someone in the act of shooting up…), and clear infrastructural support for the confused tourist:

The locals seem pretty happy to be there too.

And for those who made it through that epic post, a wee prize: the only photograph I took in the whole bleeding two weeks that I’m really pleased with. It’s a view of the Liffey, looking west in the evening. Surprisingly difficult to leave.

Notes:

1. A nasty thought just came to me: probably there’s a tourist trap somewhere close by, and a fence just out of sight around the headland, keeping the probability of a photogenic composition nice and high…
2. In fact to be honest I only directly contributed to about three meals… Didn’t seem to slow the others down though.
3. We’ll pass over the Dropping of the Pizza and The Custard That Burned, especially since in each case we had enough other courses to serve as successful fallbacks.
4. Literally, in this case.

Most Friday afternoons we have some sort of lecture, either internal and informal or an invited speaker. Today my supervisor gave a talk, which was notable for two reasons. Firstly, he managed to reference the work of (by my count) between one third and half of the people in his audience, most of whom disagreed loudly with his conclusions. (It’s exciting to work in such a fertile research community, but it’s a bit nerve-wracking when you have to present your own ideas…) The second thing notable about the talk was how prominently animals featured, and thus how difficult it was to take seriously.

First there’s the title: “What can we do with counterfactual donkeys?” (cf. transparent tigers, for Borges fans). Then there was an extended discussion about the truth conditions of the sentence “If any animal would escape from the zoo, it would be an elephant” (hinging on whether, under Robert’s analysis, an escaped zebra would magically turn into an elephant). The conclusion seemed to be that this is avoidable if the existential ranges over “bear individuals”, although I must confess to some confusion on this point.

This tendency isn’t confined to the one talk, or even to this institute. In Dunedin I worked on a dialogue system that could handle not only donkey sentences but also “Around the mulberry bush the monkey chased the weasel”. A DIP abstract from just a few weeks ago discusses pairing epistemic possibilities and hypothetical wolves (I recall this talk also involved monkeys, although I seem to have lost the notes describing just where they fit in).

I know all this stuff has deep philosophical implications for what “meaning” is and how we should represent it, but I can’t help sitting in the back row and giggling about hypothetical wolves and counterfactual donkeys. I may be in the wrong line of work.

Update: apparently philosophers also have a fondness for parsnips.

Longer version does not include any stories of getting lost.

Concerning why I went there in the first place: Games and Decisions in Pragmatics II was great, I saw some really interesting talks and got helpful feedback and so on. My talk went ok, despite staying up too late the night before (I met some Dutch guys at the hostel — funny how Dutch has become my “instant connection”).

The hostel. Don’t stay at the A&O Zoo. It was expensive, no breakfast, grumpy people. On the second evening I moved to the Generator, which was much nicer. Far-too-self-consciously-hip decor and music playing all the time, but friendly folks, and much cheaper.

It’s a bit far out of the center though. Here’s a helpful tip: get one of those two- or three-day transport passes, it turns out that Berlin is big. I walked over a lot of it (it’s how I like to get the feel of a city) but wore myself out pretty quickly. (Oh, and just because the Generator is on Storkowerstrasse doesn’t mean you take the Storkowerstrasse stop on the S-Bahn. Duh.)

Here’s another tip: don’t go in the winter. At least, not if you want to see the city in daylight, and especially not if you’re planning to attend talks from roughly sun-up until an hour or so after sun-down (roughly 4:15 I guessed). It didn’t help that on the extra day I took to explore it was overcast — in all I think I saw the sun for about two hours max., over three and a half days.

Another problem with winter-time sightseeing is that museums tend to close. Or (in one instance) move their collections to somewhere persistently unfindable on the other side of town. I did manage to get to the Bauhaus Archive, which was small (the museum part — apparently the archive itself is enormous) but fascinating. As well as a bunch of finished products (and a well-stocked gift shop) I was particularly interested in the collection of working drawings, studies, and so on. Not enough typography though (a few poster designs, and a stencil alphabet study, missing —to my delight— the letter ‘e’). Might have to go on a type pilgrimage through the Netherlands instead.

You’re still waiting for the “I got lost” story, aren’t you? Well, I didn’t. Really. Honestly and truly. But I did take a compass with me, attached to my keyring, and I did make heavy use of it. It was overcast, remember, and I was using the metro system a lot. Pop up out of the ground somewhere you’ve never been before, and it’s handy to know which way down the street you should be setting out.

Speaking of the metro: I spotted an interesting difference between the Dutch and German attitude towards ‘black riding’. (Ticketless, that is, not on evil horses hunting down helpless hobbits… you already got that. Ok.) The Dutch method is to turn out a posse of GVB employees, wearing brightly-coloured GVB jackets. They get on at a normal stop, a few black riders get off casually using a different door, and nobody gets swords stuck in their shoulders. (I’m sorry, I just can’t stop.) The Berlinners, on the other hand, are intent on catching the perps. They’re in plainclothes. They wait until the train has left the station. Then they swoop down, lightning-fast, one from each end, making sure that they’ve checked everyone before the next station. It’s almost Darwinian: like they’re asking you to improve the gene pool by frantically leaping from the window and dying in the snow.

(Another odd sort of Darwinian gesture: the escalators in a certain bookstore (where I ended up spending several hours, and several tens of euros) all run upwards. If you’re incapable of climbing stairs, they’re happy to help you to the top floor (foreign language, maps and atlasses, self-help) but from there you’re on your own. Can’t get back down? We’re probably better off without you.)

I said snow: while I was there the daytime temperatures ranged roughly from -4 to 2 degrees. It didn’t actually snow during my stay, but there was plenty of leftover, and ice on the streets. I took one minor fall, thankfully without witnesses, and thereafter practised my penguin waddle assiduously.

And that’s basically it. Yup: I spent in three nights in one of Europe’s party cities and didn’t enter a single club, saw one museum and no parts of the wall, and in fact spent a goodly portion of my time in the English-language section of a bookshop. Funnily enough, I enjoyed it a great deal. The train ride home got old after the first five hours though. By the time I hit Amsterdam again I had finished every book I bought.

Time for another trip, maybe?

This could hardly have been better organised if I’d tried. Although I’ve been officially a PhD student since August 15th, I only defended my MSc thesis last Monday, so this was really my first week of settling into the new position. And the first thing I walk into is a workshop aimed squarely at my PhD research, at least in broad outline. It’s been an extremely full couple of days, with talks from 9am until 6pm and some really great presentations. While a lot is not directly useful for what I’m going to be doing, there were some really interesting ideas flying around that will probably spark some side projects for me.

It was the first talk after the lunch break, always a problematic time for staying awake. I’ve gotten into the habit of waking up pretty late, so starting at nine was a big effort for me. This morning I didn’t manage it, due to unwisely hitting the town last night, but even Friday after a full night’s sleep I dozed off in the hour after lunchtime. So there I was, head discreetly propped on my hand, eyes shut and face hopefully composed in an attitude of contemplation. (More likely twitching and drooling gently onto my arm, but optimism never hurts.) Klaus Zuberbühler was describing some evidence of syntax, or possibly discourse, in any event interesting structure, in the alarm calls of these putty nose monkeys. And he played samples.

These are weird noises, even when you know to expect them. They have names like “hack” and “pyow”. And they’re a really strange thing to be called back from the land of nod by, especially in a room full of evolutionary linguists.

I love my new job :-)

The topics of the two defences are “Logical Perspectives on Distributed Knowledge and its Dynamics” (Floris) and “Analysing the complexity of games on graphs” (myself). For those unfamiliar with the MSc defence, we give a 40 minute presentation then our examining committee asks some pointed questions, after which they retire into a huddle to decide on the grade to assign. Traditionally this is followed rather swiftly by disappearing off to the pub, to celebrate or commiserate as appropriate.

I’ve placed my thesis online, along with some Java software I wrote for exploring games on graphs as an addition to the thesis proper.