Seminars are great
Oct 28th 2004Wallabynerd alert
A good seminar has a good topic that’s well presented. Something original, something significant, something relevant to the audience’s own work. With good questions at the end.
Or, it has a bad topic, presented poorly. A bad topic presented well can still be entertaining; a good topic badly presented is just sad. A warm room helps a bad seminar, so does a speaker who turns the room lights way down.
Bad-topic seminars are good, because they free the mind to think about other stuff, in proximity to lots of other people thinking. (Most of them are thinking, anyway.) I suspect that a whole roomful of people thinking boosts the thought-power of each individual, even if they’re not all thinking about the same thing, even if they never exchange a word about what they’re thinking.
It was a bad seminar today. (No offense intended to the distinguished speaker or his topic, but it was heavy on theory, his slides were dull and difficult to read, and I understood very little of it.) But a useful one, in that I now have an idea for something that my advisor “suggested” finding a way to do just yesterday. Now I just have to see if it works.
Oh, and shake off the nagging feeling I’ve had all evening that there’s someone I forgot to tutor tonight.