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Bienvenue à Montréal!
05/19/06
by Shaw
Let me preface this column by mentioning that I am currently intoxicated. I can't explain exactly why this is the case: I only consumed one and a half 710 ml bottles of Molson Extra. I don't think this is the only item responsible for my intoxication: I am high on life. Oh, and I just smoked a massive - and legal - Cuban cigar. A Romeo y Julieta No. 2, to be exact.
Who will claim responsibility for this???
But mostly on life. That is because I am in Montréal, specifically, le Quartier Français. I am here for the 2006 Annual North American Meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic. This conference is basically the biggest gathering for elite logicians and motivated grad students in the entire world. Which means there are about 100 people here--100 insane, freakish people who are unable to interact with other humans on the most basic level. When Clay heard that I was going to a mathematics conference, our conversation went as follows:
Shaw: |
So I'm going to Montreal next week. | |
Clay: |
Why the hell are you going to Montreal? You honestly travel more than anyone else I know. | |
Shaw: |
There's a math conference there. | |
Clay: |
What? | |
Shaw: |
A math conference. | |
Clay: |
Oh my God, you absolutely have to do a game diary about the math conference. | |
Shaw: |
Why? | |
Clay: |
I don't know, I just can't imagine any way that wouldn't be funny. | |
Shaw: |
Why's that? | |
Clay: |
Oh my God, is there a bigger bunch of losers in one pl-- | |
Shaw: |
Fuck you, Clay, I'm hanging up. | |
Phone: |
[Dial tone] |
Two things came out of this conversation: 1. Clay is really liberal with his use of superlatives, and 2. Clay has absolutely no respect for me or my station in life--I didn't appreciate Clay making the claim that this conference would be full of losers, especially since I'm one of them. However my initial thinking when I arrive at every math conference is to agree with him: mathematicians, in general, appear ---- P.S., buzz gone ---- to be, well, insane freaks, with huge beards, crazy halting voices, and bathing issues. But of course, in the math world, personal hygiene and small talk are not valued nearly as much as intellectual prowess, which means, unfortunately, that when I go to a math conference, I am the loser. I have been to this annual conference three times now, and I have had the same experience every time. I walk to the registration desk, and immediately I am eyed suspiciously by all in the room--clean cut? no beard? clothes that match? sandals with no socks? this guy can't possibly be a real mathematician. The group decision: a full snub. No one talks to me without provocation or necessity. Any conversation necessarily goes as follows (GBMP = Generic Bearded Math Person, regardless of gender):
Me: |
Hi, I'm Chris. | |
GBMP: |
Hi. | |
Me: |
Where are you from? | |
GBMP: |
[Names better school than Maryland.] | |
Me: |
That's cool, what do you work on? | |
GBMP: |
Uhhh... recursion theory. | |
Me: |
Oh, that's cool, who are you working with? | |
GBMP: |
[Names pretentious famous mathematician] How about you? | |
Me: |
I'm a grad student, my advisor is Laskowski [also happens to be a famous mathematician, though not pretentious] |
|
GBMP: |
[Ears perk up momentarily] Awesome, is he here? | |
Me: |
No, I'm here with some other students, though. This is-- | |
GBMP: |
[Abruptly turns and leaves] |
This has happened more times than I can count. The experience is closely parallel to what used to happen when I met guys at GW who were in fraternities, and once they found out I wasn't in one myself and was thus unable to introduce them to any hot girls, they curtailed all interaction. Also similar to college, there is no hope of socially interacting with the crowd at such a thing, no chance of making friends. Thus our M.O. is always to attend the talks by day and go to the bars at night. Fortunately my friend Greggo is also here, and he has long hair, so we had enough street cred to have four second conversations with exactly two math people. The only conversation I had this week so far with anyone that wasn't Greggo was a 25 minute-long conversation with some girl at the opening reception, during the course of which I discovered that she a. isn't a mathematician, b. doesn't work for the ASL, and c. doesn't live in Montréal. In fact, I have no clue why she was at the conference. She was clearly an outsider. Probably just for the free wine.
Here is a sampling of talks I went to today:
9:00am The two Layers of Logic
This was a linguistics talk more than anything else. The speaker was a jointly appointed philosopher/mathematician from Stockholm who was clearly more intelligent than anyone else in the room. His talk consisted of handwritten slides containing a list of synonyms for "action" and "result." I honestly think that I got nothing else out of this talk, and I even like linguistics. For those in the know, I would guess that he gave this talk after reading a paper by J. L. Austin, and just wrote down what he remembered.
10:00am We hold these truths to be self-evident. But what do we mean by that? Subtitle: Frege, Zermelo, and rationalism
Incredibly, this was the dullest lecture I have ever seen. The reason this is incredible is that I have seen a whole lot of dull talks. I have given some pretty dull talks. But this guy actually made slides consisting of full-length prose, ¾ of which was quoting directly from the writings of Frege on the subject of the talk. He then read the slides word for word without looking up for 45 minutes. And the first thing I thought when he opened his mouth was, "this guy sounds like Richard Dreyfuss." A few minutes later, my friend Greggo grabbed my notes and wrote in the margin:
he's just reading to us from this book?
it's like a book on tape read by richard dreyfuss
A rare unscripted moment in his talk really summed up the whole thing: "I realize this is a bit tentative as far as Frege scholarship goes." I'll say.
In the afternoon, we had some pretty fulfilling talks in Model Theory, which is the area I study:
4:55pm A pointless definition of parallel
Nothing about this talk's title or abstract made me want to go to it. So I didn't. I regretted that decision when I found out the talk had been given by a guy who Greggo and I had pretty much decided was clinically insane, as we had seen him the day before swatting at imaginary flies and giving people the evil eye during some previous talks. It was my loss not being able to hear him speak.
The next two talks were actually interesting, but I repeat their titles here for posterity.
5:25pm Fine structure in ACFA
5:55pm Properties preserved under homomorphism
Tomorrow promises some more exciting talks, most notably a lecture titled A monadic adjunction between ω-Categories and computads. I can't wait to get up in the morning.
Since everyone has already stopped reading by now, I will finish this column by describing, DJ-like, my thoughts on Montréal and French Canada. In deference to Clay, I will number my thoughts.
1. When people say French Canada, they're not kidding. Everyone in this city has actually convinced themselves that they are in France. All the signs are in French, everyone speaks French to you everywhere you go, and all the signs are in French, most of them only in French. There would be nothing wrong with this except for the fact that we're in Canada! Everyone here speaks English just as well as they speak French! The only reason they're speaking French on the street, I am convinced, is so they can pick out the tourists. Even the homeless people are all bilingual, and there are lots of them, most of them with dogs that they use to help them beg for money. One guy we saw had a sign that said, "Visions of a Cheeseburger." I really liked this sign for some reason... if I had a cheeseburger in my pocket at the time, I definitely would have given it to him. Additionally, all of the style is European:
2. Greggo is vegan. It must be really hard to be vegan anywhere, but especially when you travel to a foreign country where you can't understand the ingredients on the menu. The thing is, we're in Canada and everyone speaks English, so it is mostly just frustrating: we could quite easily find out whether or not a place is vegan-friendly, but we would have to go through the same routine every time:
It was frustrating even to write this down. Fortunately with the advent of the Internet, we have just been looking up the restaurants in advance and then going to find them, hoping we won't need to stop someone on the street and have the same exchange as above.
3. Maybe this all sounds negative, but I don't mean it to be. Really this just implies a lack of preparation on my part... I didn't think of going to Canada as something that would require carrying around a phrasebook. In fact, the city is beautiful, and I'm really glad the conference is here this year, rather than in Pittsburgh, which is where I went last time.
4. Oh, and of course, in Montréal, they have legal Cuban cigars, but no cigar stores. This implies what I feared: only tourists buy Cubans in Canada, which means that they only sell them in tourist souvenir shops at a 50% markup. I bought two, and the first one was the best cigar I have ever had.
5. Another thing they have in Montréal is hole in the wall bars. Greggo and I went to a place called Bière en Fût for beers last night and tonight. I believe this name means "Beer on Tap"... this is a guess, because my French dictionary tells me Fût means "Shaft" and I would like to think that I wasn't drinking at "beer on shaft" for two nights. The good things about this place are that they have beer there, they allow cigar smoking, and there is almost no one there, which reminds us of Town Hall, our favorite bar in College Park. The weird thing is that we have encountered the same mildly belligerent drunk French-speaking freaks two nights in a row. Last night one guy harangued us about the different animals featured on the Canadian two-dollar coin. Tonight the same guy greeted us with fist-pounds and a slew of slurred French. I doubt he is understood very well in either language. Also tonight, the bar featured live music, of sorts. There was a guy playing popular hip hoppish music from 3 years ago on a crappy CD player that kept skipping (think Crazy Love and Sean Paul), and would occasionally play keyboard solos over the CD. Then he would turn off the CD and play Blondie or Elton John and sing along to a karaoke arrangement of the background stored on his keyboard. All of this was accompanied by a drunk woman with an incredible fupa to waist ratio, dancing like Elaine on Seinfeld and being groped by every local male in the place. I have never really seen anything like this before. Again, I don't think this is typical French Canada. You can be sure we'll be back there tomorrow night to see what Friday night looks like.
6. Basically, being at a logic conference and being in French Canada are similar, in that in both cases I don't belong: I speak a language everyone else knows, but no one wants to hear.
7. Maybe in 20 years, the sections of the US still speaking English will become quaint havens too... we'll all be holed up in our little "American USA" province, with everyone everywhere else speaking Spanish. I should figure out where this place is going to be and buy a house there soon.
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