Rob Renaud's Friends

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time to post my favorite video clip again
Put down your red white and blue spatula for 6 minutes and listen...

Cowboy
Remembering Aaron Wilkinson 6 years later and missing my friend. Please go watch some videos of when he was in The Moldy Peaches here http://punkcast.com/104/index.html and think loving thoughts for his family.

More corporate academic-publishing shenanigans
Not Elsevier, this time. The rumor is that SAGE Publications, the corporate publisher of the journal Political Theory, have bypassed the journal's editorial board and unilaterally imposed a new editor. As one commenter (6/17 6:44 on the first thread below) states, "The idea that the editorship of the journal is to be determined directly by them, apparently with no formal consultation with members of the existing editorial community, is like the idea of a faculty search being run by a couple of corporate honchos from a University's Board of Trustees, without consultation with current members of the faculty of the relevant department."

See here, here, and here for discussion, but so far (despite a signed statement by one of the editorial board members) there's a lot more heat than light.

FOCS accepts
The FOCS accepted papers (with abstracts) have been posted. Since not every conference is doing this, I think it bears repeating that the addition of abstracts to these lists is a very welcome innovation of recent years.

And while I'm making a short link-only post, an amusing photo gallery that I was pointed to recently: the Russian solution to the art-gallery problem.

SHOWS
Americathon 2009 July 4th featuring Kimya Dawson
Join us for a Liberty Hall fundraiser on the 4th of July.
BBQ at 5 PM, with accomodations for various diets.
Music will begin around 7 PM, possibly with a short first set by David Rovics, after which Kimya Dawson will play.
At 9 PM we'll be screening an almost completely forgotten comedy classic from 1979 called Americathon. Who's premise seems eerily relevant today.
$5 admission, all proceeds go to Liberty Hall. Give more if you can, you're getting a hell of a deal.
311 N Ivy St. One block south of Fremont St and 2 blocks west of Vancouver Ave. Portland, OR
All Ages

Thursday July 16th
Kimya Dawson
tune-yards
Kusikia
@ Northern in Olympia
All ages

Saturday July 18th
WHAT THE HECK FEST
7:30pm to 11:30pm- Port Warehouse
1. Katy Davidson the Jam Band
2. Ô Paon
3. Karl Blau
4. Vanessa Renwick
5. Kimya Dawson
6. Wolves In The Throne Room
http://whattheheckfest.com/schedule

Tuesday August 4th
STRETCH-PANTS SUMMER PARTY 2009
Paleface
Your Heart Breaks
Tender Forever
Kimya Dawson
No One and the Somebodies
Turbosleaze
Margy Pepper
Bash Brothers
Apollo Ghosts
Olympia Free Choir
and more...
Starting at noon in the deep westside of Olympia
address to be announced later
$10/potluck

Wednesday August 5th
Kimya Dawson
Paleface
No One and the Somebodies
Turbosleaze
@ The Vera Project
Seattle
All ages

Three sets of photos
With all my traveling, I'd become delinquent at processing my photos, but I've caught up again (it made it easier that I edited the sets down to half a dozen photos each):

A school concert in which my son played viola, held at an auditorium at the local Lutheran college.

My recent trip to the Netherlands consisting of photos from the sculpture garden at the Kröller-Müller museum, a hike through Zuid-Kennemerland National Park, and the view from Marc van Kreveld and Bettina Speckmann's apartment.

Montpellier, France including a dinner with some other WG participants.

Monthly Flowetry
*I used to write a period poem every month, but haven't written one in a long time. This one just came to me yesterday on the way home from the park.

Monthly Flowetry- A haiku in 3 parts

Crampy and bleeding
Totally overheated
Needing to cool down

Dropping pants to sit
Bare assed on the muddy beach
Would feel great right now

I would do it if
I wasn't surrounded by
Other people's kids

Report from WG
I just returned from Montpellier, France, where I was invited to speak at WG 2009, the 35th International Workshop on Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science.

This was my first trip to France, and Montpellier was a very charming place to visit. It is in the south, and though not quite on the Mediterranean itself it has a very Mediterranean feeling. The conference organizers put together an interesting and educational excursion for us in which we learned some of the local history by visiting three local landmarks (the opera house, an old pharmacy, and the top of the gateway arch) and drinking a different wine in each. We learned that Montpellier is a new city for France, being only a little over 1000 years old, but it is home to one of the oldest medical schools in Europe. It's on the old pilgrim trail from Rome to Compostela, markers for which run through the town, and although the language is no longer spoken in the area there are several inscriptions for tourists written in Occitan. The nearby mountains were a refuge for the Cathars when they were persecuted by the Catholics, and there are many open squares in the city due to the monasteries and other buildings that were torn down in the French revolution. My hotel was on one side of the old quarter, now mostly a shopping district, and the conference was in an old movie theater on the other side of the quarter, so I had a very pleasant walk every day to the conference (only getting lost twice), and my bad high-school French was enough to get by with the people who didn't or wouldn't speak English (rather more of them than I've encountered in other parts of Europe).

The conference itself is about graph algorithms, both for problems on arbitrary graphs and (a larger fraction of the papers) for important special classes of graphs. There were too many interesting talks to describe them all in detail, so let me just mention a few.

( Read more... )

All in all, a good conference, and one I would attend much more regularly if only it weren't so far away.