Sleepless in Brooklyn

Last Sunday afternoon, I rode the train from Penn Station in Baltimore to Penn Station in Manhattan to begin my conference week. I was accompanied by two colleagues. We did some card tricks to pass the time. I showed them the only one I could remember, which involved Markov chain coupling. We took the subway to Brooklyn, then a cab to our hotel, which, unfortunately, was not the conference hotel, which, unfortunately, was out of our price range. Anyway, after checking in we found the nearest subway station, a good fifteen-minute walk away, and rode around to various functions for the next five days.

My talk was Wednesday afternoon, in the last session of the main conference. I had given a practice talk to colleagues a week before, and they had a number of suggestions I had tried to incorporate, and then sitting through other talks the first two days I had some additional ideas. I had made this joke about "Let's Make a Deal" and the Monty Hall paradox, which had originally been on the fourth or fifth slide. Well, I decided that if I wanted the audience to be interested, I might as well get them primed up front. I moved it to the first slide. And it worked! At least, I have no other explanation for why they laughed at the next slide, which I hadn't realized was funny.

Thursday I had to work on my workshop paper. This is the one that I tried to make my ticket to Australia. We ended up submitting it to a workshop at this conference on the topic of computationally hard problems in language processing. But my advisor didn't think it was finished, and I spent most of the day making figures to illustrate various ideas in the paper, and then we were up until 6:30 am finishing the text. Most papers are limited to eight pages, but because this was late-breaking work, it wasn't going in the printed proceedings so we didn't have a page limit, and that was a recipe for disaster. We now have a nineteen-page workshop paper. I rode the subway back to my hotel, slept for two hours, then got up and went back to the conference and sat through another day of talks.

I and two colleagues rode the train back to Baltimore, leaving Penn Station at 7:35 pm. One was the same as the ride up, the other different. We played hearts with a stranger who sat next to me in the booth, and I shot the moon on two straight hands by taking all the tricks. The weekend was pretty relaxing, but I still don't feel like I've caught up on all the sleep I was deprived of. The paper is on my web page if you dare take a look. It's the top one.