PPSN 2008, post 2

We've now been to the conference dinner, in an old steel mill. Excellent food, and an excellent place to visit. I love lo-tech and especially huge, rusting metal structures.

Towards the end of the conference dinner, DJ JJ organized a singing competition between Spanish-speakers and a group of speakers of various other tongues(Swedish, English, Dutch, Hebrew etc.). Needless to say, we lost - we couldn't find any songs in English we all knew the lyrics to. After the dinner most of us went back to our respective hotels to recuperate. In my case, I'm recuperating from the excellent Dortmund nightlife. Clubbing until 4.30 on a packed dance floor, with the beers priced 50 cents each. On a Monday. Brilliant!

So you want to know about the scientific side of things? Well, PPSN is really a very good conference. It is hard to find a paper which is not good, though it is of course easy to find papers that don't interest me. I'm not interesting in everything. For example, a theoretical analysis of the behaviour of the 1+1 ES does not interest me very much, even if it is obvious that the research is sound and the paper good. Still, there are many papers here that I like.