• Bernard Chazelle's talk “Natural Algorithms” (describing a convergence time for a simple model of bird flocking that is both upper and lower bounded by a logarithmically tall tower of powers of two, if I remember correctly) was quite entertaining and played to a standing-room-only crowd, and I heard that some latecomers weren't able to get in at all. The system we've had at some SODAs of having meeting rooms of varying sizes and guessing which talks would be better attended had some drawbacks, but the present Harrison Bergeron system of making everybody equal does too.

  • I'm sorry to have missed the first data structures talk, on pairing heaps, due to said Chazelle talk. But the rest of the data structures session (including the one with Chazelle's name in the title, in a different session from Chazelle's own talk) was good. The triple threat of John Iacono, Erik Demaine, and Mihai Pătraşcu presenting their equivalence between a geometric problem (augmenting a point set so there is no rectangle with only two opposite corners present) and dynamic optimality for online binary search tree data structures was again particularly entertaining and standing-room-only.

  • Gary Miller roped me into taking photos for Volker Strassen's Knuth Prize lecture, in which he described some of his major past results. (Someone who understands it better than I should add his law of the iterated logarithm to his Wikipedia article, which is in other respects as well quite bare-bones.) So photos will be appearing here shortly, and I'll likely add them to the Wikipedia articles as well. But they won't be appearing until I get access to a compact-flash card reader (as I left mine at home) and in any case will probably have to wait until after the conference when I have time to sort through them and postprocess them. I ended up using both my own Canon 40D and 50mm prime lens (I didn't bother to bring a zoom this time) and Erik Demaine's brand-new 5D mk II and 24-105 zoom; the 5D is a sweet camera. Thanks, Erik!

  • Jeff has posted the annual drinking game rules. Sadly I did not partake so I have no details to report.