Friday we left Zebula in the very capable hands of our local babysitter and set off on a date of dinner and dancing.

Dinner was quite good. We tried a new Italian restaurant that opened up right in the middle of town. The appetizers were excellent, and the main dishes were satisfactory. It's not my favourite Italian food in town, but then again it's more bistro/Mediterranean than strictly Italian.

The dancing component of the evening was great. I didn't have to do any dancing myself, which certainly contributed to my enjoyment. There was a street festival on, and our dinner ended at just the right time for us to wander down the street and take in a performance of breakdancing by a trio from New York City. I say trio, though really there were two dancers and an MC. The dancers showed off some incredible moves and feats of raw athleticism. Elements of the show would not have been out of place in a Capoeira performance or in an Olympic floor routine. The dancing was a welcome distraction from the stifling heat and humidity, which mercifully abated over the weekend.

The rest of the weekend was a mix. Saturday was spent mostly driving around from store to store in awful weather, not really finding the things we were looking for. Sunday was more pleasant, consisting of visits to Nath's parents and a lovely housewarming party. The day ended with late night Chinese takeout in the company of Ecogrrl and Clevermonkey. Singapore noodles!

The Thingo family just returned from a lovely week spent at the top of Blue Mountain. The vacation was made possible by my parents, who were nice enough to rent us all (including my brother!) a great cottage on the mountain. The Thingos were required to secure transportation (in the form of a rented van), and to show up. Actually, I suspect that Zebula was the only one who needed to go. Let's face it: the whole trip was just an excuse for my parents to get their granddaughter fix. All other details were really of secondary importance. Okay, my mom would ultimately have preferred to spend the week lying on a beach somewhere hot, but mountains and hiking were a necessary bribe to convince us to come.

The timing of the trip was especially good because it coincided with the first week of the Olympics. We don't have cable and can't pull in CBC via antenna, so we were looking for any way to watch the Games. The well-appointed cottage ("large family home" might be a better description) afforded us that opportunity.

Those of you who are watching may have seen races that ended in photo finishes, in which case you'd see an image like this one:

There's clearly something wrong with the image. It's distorted, but how? My father posited that what we're seeing is a regular photograph, but the exposure is so short and the runners moving so fast that it appears distorted. I didn't buy that. I suggested that it might be a non-linear projection. Perhaps the aperature was slit-shaped and every row in the image had its own centre of projection, similarly to the way tall buildings are photographed (I think).

It turns out that we're both wrong. The correct explanation is given in this article. In fact, a very high-speed camera is capturing a sequence of images of just the finish line, at a rate of a thousand a second. Each image is a very narrow vertical stripe. If you string those images together horizontally, you get an "animation" of the finish line as all the runners are passing through it. You can scan the composite (from right to left) and find the first vertical stripe that isn't just an empty picture of the finish line. The stripe tells you who crossed first.

There's one thing that still bothers me about this explanation. Everything that doesn't move relative to the finish line should appear as a smeared horizontal stripe in the composite. That's almost true here, except for the Swatch logo in the background. That logo can't be visible on the field. Presumably it's hacked in later. I guess that's only fair, since Swatch controls the timers at the events.

Anyway, unless we spend the week at sports bars our Olympic viewing ended yesterday. It's probably for the best -- we were getting fed up with CBC's advertising anyway. We can follow the rest of the events via the internet.

The non-TV-related part of the vacation was very enjoyable. I hiked with Nath, Zebula and my dad, and biked with my dad. We all visited the Scenic Caves (though I didn't make an attempt at "fat man's misery", a particularly narrow passage). We spent a fair amount of time with my cousin and her family (who have a commodious condo in Collingwood), and my grandmother who was staying with them. I ODed on cribbage, beat my father at Trivial Pursuit (!), and creamed him at Scrabble only to be creamed in turn by my mother. I'm pleased to say that we only ate out twice. Oh, and I got almost no work done, but I suppose that's the point, isn't it?

Nath doesn't really buy into the whole blogging experience. She's willing to read this site, but she doesn't spend much time looking at others' blogs, and she certainly has no intention of starting one herself. Whenever I make some reference to a blog, or to the many sites I check every day, she rolls her eyes and makes a comment about wasting time. I tell her that there's nothing wrong with blogging itself, but that it's simply a mode of communication she doesn't appreciate. I'm not sure she believes that.

Yesterday, however, her opinion was overruled. A group conversation turned to the subject of blogging. Nath tried to say that blogging was dumb. Then she realized that the other adults in the room were me, Elbie, Ecogrrl, Clevermonkey, Dr. Orbifold, and Teaphile (Zac, who clearly doesn't have a blog because he is referred to by his name, hadn't arrived yet. Zebula can't read or write and can therefore be forgiven for not having a blog, though these same impediments don't prevent countless others from having them).

There was time when I might have claimed that blogs were Good, and that Nath's feelings about them were misguided. However, as I've become older and crankier, I'm no longer willing to make such dogmatic assertions. After all, I still don't see the point of cellphones and I hope never to own one, even though 116% of the rest of the population carries them. Blogs are simply another new medium/technology, one that happened to click with me and not with Nath (happily, we are in agreement about cellphones).

Off the top of my head, I derive two positive benefits from this web site. First, I get to communicate with widely-scattered friends whom I don't see often enough. Given that I'm a lousy correspondent, this site is a slightly more reliable way for them to know what's going on in my life. Second, it avoids the social situation where you have to repeat the same long-but-interesting story each time you run into a friend (especially tedious if a friend who has already heard the story is with you when you tell it to another friend). Instead, you start to tell the story and the friend says, "yes, I read your blog". Now that's admittedly just a slightly different flavour of social awkwardness, but at least it's more time-efficient.

I was in southern Kansas over the weekend, at a conference that I very much enjoy attending. The quality of the work presented (and the quality of the presentations themselves) is highly variable. But the personal interactions, both social and intellectual, make the whole thing worthwhile. The fact that it's not an entirely serious, sober affair causes Nath to refer to it as "your little play conference". So be it. If the conferences I attend feel like play, then I should think that I'm doing something right.

One positive aspect of the conference's ancestral home in southern Kansas is that there are no exterior distractions. There are no sights to see, no beaches along which to stroll. On the flipside, there used to be no food to eat apart from the abysmal cafeteria food on campus, which, if one enters into a stimulating mealtime discussion, can at least be tolerated. Happily, a wonderful cafe opened up recently right next to campus, providing the missing piece that makes the campus the perfect place for an isolated conference.

I gave my talk and got some positive feedback, watched a few good talks and a larger number of not-so-good ones. There was plenty of music, too. The conference's habitual professional musician was there as always, with an interesting twist: this time he brought along a 1728 Stradivarius which, if you can believe it, a friend had offered to him on indefinite loan. When I first met him he played a Guarneri (another famous violin maker), so the Strad is mostly thrilling for its brand recognition. Other music was provided by several excellent pianists and by a very talented concertina player making her conference debut. I played a couple of tunes on the piano too. The response was mostly polite encouragement; I'm still pretty rough and I'm definitely not used to playing in public. But I am taking lessons (that's a story for another entry!), and they can expect more from me next year. By the way, next year's conference is in Banff. I am so there.

One night, we went on a field trip to the science museum in Wichita to see "Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon Cosmic Light Show". The show, which takes place in an Omnimax-like dome theatre, consists of an hour of computer graphics imagery projected on a sixty foot dome while Dark Side of the Moon is played over the speakers. It's a pretty good idea, and the technology is amazing, but the visuals are corny and unappealing. You might as well put the CD on at home and watch your screensaver for an hour. Or be trippin' when you go to the show, I suppose. It's a shame, because there's a real opportunity here for Big Impressive Graphics. In fact, one could break into this world, if one were so inclined, by submitting an animation to Domefest. Just thought I'd include the link for animation-savvy readers (and you know who you are).

My return from Kansas marks the end of this year's conference season for me. I have no further academic travel plans, and I expect that the next conference I go to is at least nine months away. With luck that will be long enough to cleanse my system of the bad juju of air travel.

[update: 05 August at 23:36]: Whoops -- "and" should be "at" in the subject line.