Quote of the Conference: Geodesic Spaces of Normal Shrinkage

"I call it 'geodesic spaces of normal shrinkage', in honor of George Costanza."

This may be the quote of the conference. The talk in question is this one.

A Fun Scientific Name (And Other Similarly Fun Names)

Death match: Macaca fuscata fuscata versus Yo Yo Ma versus Boutros Boutros Ghali. And, yes, I am thinking of a certain Seinfeld soundbite right now. A certain album by The Police also came to mind.

Some scientific disciplines get so many of the fun names...

Happy Festivus!

Yesterday was Festivus (a holiday for the rest of us). I forgot to blog about it on the correct day, and I vaguely remember being late about wishing people a 'Happy Festivus' last. Well, it turns out that I was completely delinquent last year and a few days late in 2005. To my credit, however, I wasn't as late this year, although that really just says that I found something sooner that reminded me of it. I had dinner with my family last night, but it wasn't technically to celebrate Festivus. Moreover, there were no Feats of Strength and few Airings of Grievances at dinner, so we certainly didn't celebrate it in any proper manner.

Unlike the old entry to which I linked, I don't plan on ranting here.

I'll post a few more entries in the next few days (such as some end-of-year media reviews), so stay tuned.

Seinfeld metaphor of the day

You can find the Seinfeld metaphor of the day at this website. (I saw this link on Rob Neyer's blog.)

In other news, I still have to finish preparing my talk for tomorrow. I shouldn't have spent all that time thoroughly looking through one of my 2007 SURF student's papers. I really need to be less accomodating when they wait to the last minute on these things... Commenting on their papers when I need to prepare my slides is not what I should be doing at 1am.