Losing the Edge

I've packed, I'm ready to go. Just have to finish this bottle of wine and not forget to set the alarm clock. Not as hideously early as for the Canada trip to be sure: the train leaves at 7:25, quite a decent time really.

I have a little logistical puzzle to solve, having to do with transporting suitcases back and forth. It's almost one of those standard combinatorial problems in computational complexity: bin packing or some suchlike. Right now I have three suitcases here, and I am travelling back to the Netherlands twice: tomorrow, and then again at the end of January. Fine, I hear you say: take one suitcase now and two then. Yep, but consider: this means that when coming back to York I can only bring hand luggage, and that in turn means that I should not take too much stuff with me now that I might still need in January. Laptop, yes, that goes without saying; pyjamas unless I want to buy a new pair. Toiletries: be careful, before you know it it's confiscated at the airport. But what about my running shoes, what about my winter coat (which is way too warm to put on right now)?

I'm sure I have your sympathy.

At work there is still plenty to do. The paper selection for FASE is as good as done, we feel we did a great job under the circumstances. (Sometimes you just have to congratulate yourself, as hardly anyone else will do it.) Had a nice discussion with +Richard Paige, +Mike Dodds and +Chris Poskitt on correctness proofs for (bidirectional) model transformations. Might be a good place to show off the wonderful features of GROOVE. Also made some headway with two other papers. I especially regret missing the pub crawl planned for tomorrow night under the expert guidance of Richard. Well, instead I get to go to Willem-Jan's concert, which of course as a proud parent I prefer.

The Edge at dinner time

The next two weeks this place will be completely deserted. As I wrote before, it is pretty deserted even now: after asking around I got confirmed that lecturing stopped the week before last, we are now between terms. There are many Asian students here for whom Christmas means nothing and New Year occurs at another date altogether, and who do not get the chance to go home. They must have a pretty lonely time of it. There are some things organised on campus for the poor left-behind souls, a leaflet was shoved under my door the other week; still, not so interesting times.

I think I will write one more post when I'm home, probably this weekend, where I will present an overview of the analogies and differences between Twente and York. After that this blog will also shut down for the holiday; after all, it was never meant to be merely a diary (though it may have worked out that way from time to time), rather a log book of discovery and wonder. At home I am not a great discoverer, in fact I plan to sink back into wonderful, dull routine for the next two weeks.

The Year of the Dragon

I was a bit miffed that my children got to see the Desolation of Smaug before I did, but today I resolved that issue.

Before I could go there, however, the day first had to pass. It started in the middle of the night, when I woke up with a very sore throat and for a while was afraid that I was going to go through the whole fever thing again. An aspirin took care of the symptoms however, and fortunately, when day broke all nightly fears were reduced to false alarms.

The Ouse will be up again

Weather is changable these days. Yesterday morning during my run it was cold and sunny, there had been frost in the night. Today it was back to cloudy, rainy and warm - around 10 degrees. During the day the wind got worse and worse. In the evening the rain radar showed an impressive front moving up from southwest; to escape it I went to the cinema a bit early and got over dry, flying on the wings of the wind which I think was the strongest I have experienced here yet.

In the end the only other group member who joined was Konstantinos Barmpis, one of the several Greek PhD students. Well, since there are no breaks during a movie in England, not even for a movie of 150 minutes + commercials, it is not as if there is much opportunity to converse or exchange opinions even if you are with a crowd. Indeed, of all the shows and performances I have been to in York, the cinema is the one for which going alone should cause the least hesitation. I often wonder why there aren't many more solitary visitors, but there is some aspect of human nature (lacking or atrophied in my case) which causes people to not go to see a movie if they cannot find anyone else to go with them. Weird.

Did I see movie history in the making? I think not, but I had a very good time all the same. In the end, the source material simply doesn't have the scope ever to give rise to a trilogy of Lord of the Rings greatness. There might be another special effects Oscar in it, for Smaug the Golden. I agree with those who say that this episode was an improvement over part 1, but I was a bit disappointed at the chosen ending. Talk about cliffhangers! At least Radagast was less prominent: every shot of his egg-strewn head is one too many. And oh yes, I won't be betraying a secret by telling you that there's a she-elf in it (sorry, not my terminology) conjured out of nowhere to keep the story going - not to mention Legolas of course (filled out visibly) but at least he is plausible since he is, after all, Thranduil's son. Despite all the embellishments I think the film fails to pass the Bechdel test which requires that it have two named female characters talking to each other about something other than a man.

The Cityscreen has a crappy 3D projection. Remind me to avoid 3D for the rest of my stay.

The length of the film had the pleasant side-effect that the rain was over and the full moon was lighting my path when I made my way back. Even the wind was down to very gusty and failed to blow me into the river.

Life goes on

Granary baps: my staple food in York

Monday

The plan was to have a proper English breakfast at the Edge on Monday morning. They do breakfasts as well as dinners; I haven't tried them yet as there is really no need and it would disrupt my hopefully ongoing process of slimming down; but as a conclusion to Elise's visit it sounded like a fun idea. However, dinner on Sunday (late!) had been so copious and Elise was dozing so lustily when it was time to execute this plan that nothing came of it. Instead we took a very leisurely time getting up and having a bap (one of those words that I am sure I never learned in school) in the apartment.

When returning from Scarborough yesterday we had already bought a ticket for Elise's journey back to Manchester airport. She was to go there in the morning, look around a few hours in Manchester itself and then catch her flight at the end of the afternoon. Buying the train ticket confirmed the outrageous pricing strategy that I had first found out, to my detriment, while coming back from Canada via London: the price for the same stretch can more than double if you take a later or earlier train. In this case we used that to our advantage since there was no great hurry.

Musilon

All went quite smoothly. I saw Elise off after we returned the rented bicycle. See you on Friday! A very short period this time. I will be home well in time for dinner, then that evening Willem-Jan is giving a concert with the choir he has joined, which fortunately I will also be in time for.

Most of Monday afternoon went into another round of selecting the papers for the FASE conference, in a skype call with my co-chair, Stefania Gnesi. Most of the Programme Committee members have been diligent in contributing to the on-line discussion of the merits and demerits of the papers they have reviewed, so that we were able to accept and reject some 20% of the outstanding submissions. Next round on Wednesday. The whole thing is taking more time than I anticipated, maybe that's an effect of having more time available on the whole. If you want something done quickly, give the job to a busy person!

What with my illness and Elise's visit, there has hardly been time for physical exercise the past week, and I was glad to be able to pick up the routine through another Body Pump session. I'm actually, finally, starting to notice some improvement. Afterwards however I was so tired that I decided trying to continue working could only be counter-productive, so I decided to leave everything to early Arend and call it a day.

Tuesday

The grind, as in back to the grind, suggests an unpleasant job or task, and is therefore a very inappropriate description of my in many respects luxurious circumstances here. Still, this short period between Elise's visit and the 2-week holiday coming up feels a bit like filling time. Furtunately there were still some things to look forward to: Christmas dinner with the Enterprise group on Tuesday night, and The Hobbit on Wednesday evening. When I mentioned my plan to go there (in fact I already booked a ticket) that actually found some response, so in a very minor sense I managed to organise a Film Night!

Class diagram (orange) decorated with OCL constraints (white)

The Enterprise Group was visited today by Ed Willink, a very Dutch-sounding name for an English guy whom I had met before several times. One of those people who seem to be able to to everything at the same time: running his own company, sucessfully too as he finances more than one of the EngD students I had occasion to mention some weeks ago; and simultaneously doing relevant academic work. He has taken over the torch in improving an industry-standard for constraint specification, called OCL (for Object Constraint Logic); this is the closest to formal (first-order) logic you can come in industrial practice, and so it is quite relevant in all ongoing efforts to transfer some of the insights from academic research. Ed gave an illuminating exposition of the newest plans and the slow, sometimes painful process involved in creating a standard that will serve all diverse interests and still be formally precise.

In the evening there was the Christmas dinner at Akhbars, the same place Elise and I celebrated the end of her visit on Sunday. Preceding that we had some drinks at the Duke of York. Not the most inspired name of all time you'll agree, but with an interesting side story. This is a new bar, serving Leeds beer, and apparently licenced without much support from the bars and shops in the neighbourhood. Louis Rose declared that he could not be seen going there as he has a good friend managing one of the other bars on the same (King's) square. (Did I mention before that York is absolutely packed with bars and/or pubs?) Evidently there is a deep rivalry of which, of course, as an outsider I happily know nothing at all. Gangs of New York was mentioned as an analogy - I hope that is not to be taken too literally.

I attempted a few more ales, then it was dinner time. Christmas crackers on the table: I gained a wafer-thin paper hat and the following world-class joke: "What do you call it when a farmer repairs his trousers? A cabbage patch". My choice this time was on the edge of my tolerance for hot food. I learn nothing from this since the names of the dishes disappear from my memory one minute after I put them there. To douse the flames we had some more after-dinner drinks with the most lively of the bunch, but all firmly within the range of decency: when I got home it was still well before midnight.

Extramural sights

Scarborough Fair

Disappointment: on Sunday no car rentals are available in York. Quite a surprise, as a lot of shops are open. Maybe it is consistent, come to think of it: with the shops open, you wouldn't want potential customers to drive out of town? Whatever the reason, of the five different rental companies I looked up, none were in business.

That was Castle Howard and Whitby out of the window, but there still was the train as an alternative mode of transport, with Scarborough on the other end. Since Elise had never been there (and like myself, had had no idea that it was located anywhere near here) this was not such a bad second. Another day of going around in York did not particularly appeal since both of us have already seen the really touristic sites: the Minster, the walls, the railway museum.

While looking up the text of the well-known ballad on Scarborough fair - well-known to us from the Simon and Garfunkel song but based on a traditional English ballet - I discovered to my amazement that it is not a love song at all but a breaking-up song. If you see my former love he says, tell her I will come back to her when she makes me a shirt without seam, using no needle, and washes it in a dry well. OK she says, you find me some land "between the sands and the salt sea" and reap it with a sickle of leather; when you're done the shirt will be ready. That song will never sound the same to me.

King John's castle, ruined during a Civil War siege in the 17th century

I didn't see much of Scarborough either of the times I went there before, as I was intent on getting out of the town as quickly as I could. I had seen there was a ruined castle on a high peninsula, so that is where we made for this time, after passing through Scarborough's sad excuse for a Christmas "market" (stalls along the main pedestrian street). It turned out to be a very worthwhile visit, there's some interesting English history bound up with it about which we once more knew very little. In any case, the castle originates from the early 12th century, which is venerable even to English standards.

Between the sands and the salt sea

Down from there we headed south instead of north, to the harbour and a Victorian hotel and spa. The waterfront at the harbour reminded me quite a bit of Whitby: the same row of casinos and game parlours, but they were not quite so pervasive here, and there was some evidence of an active fishing industry. A bit nicer. Further along the beach there were these grand 19th century buildings, more than a little dilapidated but still in use, though probably (hopefully) much more in summertime than now. This must have been a popular bathing resort in the early 20th century, There were some furniculars up the cliff, one of which, claiming to be the oldest one in Britain still in operation, was in operation; we took it up, then walked along the esplanade back to the harbour.

Fish & Chips vs. the Traditional Fry-Up

Finding a decent lunch spot among the fast food sheds was not entirely trivial, but after some wandering around we managed. The schedule for the afternoon evening, involving the train back and then the pantomime which was due to start at 18:30, left only a brief slot for dinner before the show, so the plan was to take a sizable lunch and then go to an Indian restaurant afterwards. We hadn't had a proper dinner yet in York, and this being the last night that sounded like a good plan.

The Pantomime Phenomenon

More than 20 years ago, when Elise and I were not yet married and my parents were living near Cambridge for a few years, we visited them over Christmas and they took us to a pantomime. I think this is one of the most closely guarded secrets of English culture; indeed I had never heard of this and have not heard of it since, except through some references in Monty Python's Flying Circus, which has several episodes involving "pantomime horses" (two men with a bedsheet) and once a "pantomime Princess Margeret" (I think it was). That doesn't tell you much.

A pantomime is a mixture of a cabaret and comic theatre, hung loosely on the frame of a well-known children's story such as the Grimm fairytales. Ours was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It is very much a family thing, with a lot if interaction of the call-and-response type (Yes it is! No it isn't! Yes it is! and so forth) and is part of the Christmas/New Year's rituals. Lots of nods to popular culture and recent events, lots of winks to the adults. You can call it cheesy, corny or any other type of foodstuff; I think no Englishman would contradict you. Maybe this is the English answer to the Weihnachtsmarkt, come to think of it.

The show began at 6:30, and it immediately became clear that for a large part of the audience it would be a late night out: numerous small children decked in their Christmas best, complete with blinking coronets and twinkling staffs. I was asked before the show even started, very politely too, by the 8-year-old sitting behind me if I could sit a bit lower please. Fortunately this performance was not sold out, so there was room for reseating and in the end there was no need for back-breaking antics on my part.

A larger contrast with last night's opera is hard to imagine. Well, not quite true: if that had been one of the dramatic ones the contrast would have been even greater; but in terms of extreme ends of serious cultural events it was very odd to see these on consecutive nights. The pantomime was even more unruly than I remembered from last time, probably because it was a pre-Christmas show; indeed it was chock full of Christmas references, to the point where the story just halted mid-stride and the actors began to do a persiflage of the Twelve Days of Christmas (maybe better known as the Partridge and the Pear Tree), with the audience joining in. The "five gold rings" of the original were replaced by "five toilet rolls" which soon disappeared into the audience and until the end of the song were being thrown back onto the stage and kicked back into the audience; one disappeared into the balconies. All to the huge enthousiasm of the kids, obviously - and the parents as well, frankly. I even confess to being very much amused myself.

Für Elise

There were songs (One Direction, Psy, Bruno Mars); dancing by a troupe of around 16-18 and another much younger group of around 10, both quite good in fact; gags and jokes galore as expected. Elise and I probably missed a lot of references. The emphasis on Christmas did steal some time off the actual story: the kiss of life and the wedding were both very much abbreviated. The low point was when the prince began to read off some names of children who celebrated their birthday, and other messages that parents probably paid for to have declaimed. Apart from that though it was really great fun.

Afterwards we went to Akhbar, an Indian restaurant which is also the first I went to when I came here; the one where they hang the nan bread on a stand. It was past 21:00 when we finally had something to eat. That made it a bit late for our unpractised stomachs, we didn't manage to do full justice to the meal; even more so when I arranged a desert with a bit of fireworks to celebrate Elise's birthday in a few days. Ah well, sometimes you just have to work a bit harder...

Intramural sights

Proof of the egg

Saturday was the day I was going to show off my knowledge of York: the places I have frequented, the things I have discovered - to be topped off by a performance of Falstaff, broadcast live from the Metropolitan Opera in the other York.

After the eggs were produced and consumed, the first thing on the programme was a short walk over Heslington West, via laundromat, restaurant (closed), supermarket (closed) to the Library Cafe (opening just when we arrived), back around the lake. Cold winds, empty grounds, clear skies, good impression.

Then, taking advantage of the rented bike, a tour over Heslington East, including in particular Richard's office. This had the double function of also giving me the opportunity to clear out, which was necessary since Richard will be back again on Monday. Since I had not been to the office either on Thursday or on Friday, I had completely forgotten about this. I'm allowed to use Radu's office for the next week, after Christmas we'll see. For now it was a question of collecting all the papers strewn all over Richard's office into a single pile, putting the coffee cup on top, and marching everything two doors further along the row.

An angel

Sport Village with swimming pool and equipment; then via the rails-converted-to-bicycle-paths to the city. We actually passed the now-abandoned Rowntree chocolate factory (see my earlier post) which I had not seen the previous time as it was dark then. It's huge but crumbling, a sad sight. Roald Dahl can't fail to come to mind.

From the deserted campus and the equally deserted bike trails we plunged back into tourist-riddled scenes. What with all the walking and cycling it was most certainly time for lunch, but before we had found a likely-looking reataurant (the Slug and Lettuce, I'll take suggestions for explanations of the name) we had discovered our first ice sculptures of the "festival of angels". Though the day had started off quite brisk it was by this time back to Friday's balmy temperatures, the ice was dripping furiously and the curious childrens'  hands did nothing to slow down this process. All in all, the angels did not move us to burst into songs of praise and glory.

The Christmas market was a lot more lively than on Friday, but anyone travelling to York on the strength of the Tubantia's enthousiastic report of the wonderful Yorkish reply to the traditional German Weihnachtsmarkt is in for a disappointment; or as we say in Dutch, will come home from a cold fair. They do their best, and it is a gallant effort, but no, the true sense of the word Kitsch is lost on the English.

More interesting was a demo of the ice sculpting process itself, going on at another square. Here we saw a moose emerging from a block of ice, in a process involving ever-finer tools but ending with a blowtorch. (This was to smooth away all the edges.) Fascinating, and a good deal faster than Michelangelo rescued David out of the marble.

We concluded the day with Falstaff. This was to be a screening very much like the Spartacus ballet I have seen months ago, except that it was not brought to us not from east but from west: live from the Met, shown at the Cityscreen cinema. (There are screenings in the Netherlands, too; in fact my mother alerted us to this, though they will go to the encore tomorrow so I can't wave at the screen.) With some effort I persuaded Elise that it would be interesting to join a pre-performance meeting of an "opera interest group" that I had seen announced, quite coincidentally, when I went to a movie some time earlier. As it turned out, this was the first ever time they had organised something like this, and for us it was a very good introduction. All Elise and I had seen from Verdi before were some of the famout tragedies - Aida, La Traviata and the like - but this is his only successful comic opera, which he wrote at the ripe old age of 79. We were also not aware that Falstaff is a character from more than one Shakespeare play (there he is again! I recently learned while playing Scrabble - or rather a mobile app variant thereof - that the very rich English vocabulary includes the fanciful word "bardolator" for people who idolise S.). All this and more we learned in the one hour before the screening started.

Falstaff: not only witty in himself but the cause of wit in others

I know it is silly to applaud in a cinema for a performance broadcast from thousends of miles away, but we did it anyway. This was wonderfully ludricous and ludricously wonderful. Falstaff is a big fella, as both he himself and his opponents do not stop stressing. Obviously in very different terms: Falstaff sings praises of his "magnificent belly" from which a "thousand tongues proclaim his name"; others use less lyrical terms like "tub of lard". The singer performing Falstaff,, Ambrogio Maestri, has been born for this role. I do not for one moment believe he had to put on fake layers of clothes to become that tub of lard. He has sung the part 200 times and woe to the director who tries to teach him anything about it. But apart from the music (no need to extol the virtues of Verdi) and the performance (not just Falstaff's, the others were great too but his makes or breaks this), also the staging was by an order of magnitude the most elaborate I have ever seen. It was time-travelled to the middle of the previous century, and the degree of detail in which a '50s kitchen was reconstructed, to name just one scene, made us understand how it can be that, according to the commentary, the revenue from the tickets still pays only 50% of the cost of the production. Opera at this level is, pure and simple, a structural, permanent financial black hole. But what a magnificent hole!

Trouhy collection at the Trembling Madness

We had ordered dinners during the interval, which came in a cardboard box with a glass of sparkling wine, and turned out to consist of sandwiches of acceptable quality. Our lunch had been extensive enough to make this all that was required. To round off the day we tried the last pub on my list, the Willow, but having found it (with some trouble) we essentially did not dare go up: a long dark stairway over which hung a sign "open only for regulars and university students." Might have been fun to pretend we fell into one of those categories, but being tired we didn't feel like making the attempt. Instead we had a final glass at the Trermbling Madness, then it was back to the apartment for a good night's sleep.

And so this is York

While Elise is still sleeping, I will take the opportunity to fill you in on the last day.

The expected arrival time in York was around 13:00, so I had the morning available to get some final work done. Not my most productive half-day it has to be said, what with checking the weather and the plane landing times - it was delayed by an hour - shopping and thinking about how best to organise this and the next days.

In the end I decided to take not the bus but the bike to the station, to leave myself the most logistical freedom. Very probably Elise would want to see the appartment first and unload herself of her luggage; then it would be back to the city straight away. All of which can be done by bus, slowly, or by bike, fast. So my proposal was to hire a bicycle straight away, which you can do at the station, and take the fast option.

The train was on time - shifted by one hour because of the flight - and first we did some hugging. The bicycle scheme was found acceptable: in fact she got a Gazelle, with all the things that as a Dutchwoman you expect a bicycle to have (lights, lock, the works) already attached by default. The trip up and down went very smoothly, although it is clear that E's condition will not allow bicycle tours of any length. The appartment was bigger than the impression she had gotten from my posts (readers: picture it bigger!) and in all ways acceptable.

In the town we ticked off a number of the planned items. Ordering a dinner during the break of the Falstaff opera tomorrow. Getting an extensive lunch at Thirteen Thirty-one. Visiting the Christmas market - a disappointment really, not very festive or even crowded: we were either too early or too late, it was not easy to say. The ice sculpture thing will start tomorrow, and very probabably it will be much more crowded then. A stop at the Bar Convent, which happened to have its Friday session yesterday, for two quick games (Marrakech and Coup), so Elise could get the atmosphere. Then, finally, into the wild Yorkish nightlife that I have not dared to dive into on my own.

I had gotten some tips for bars to visit, with resounding names like the House of the Trembling Madness and the Evil Eye. These turned out to be pretty much next to each other, and both were maskerading as beer/wine shops. Quite peculiar really, and I would never have gone in had I not had these tips: you first had to go through the shop front to the back, respectively the attic, to find the pub.

The HotTM was upstairs in an old timbered attic hung full of (quite possibly fake) hunting trophies, which looked very welcoming (seriously!) but also quite full. The Evil Eye turned out to be more of a cocktail bar, and was in contrast at this hour (19:30 or so) rather empty. We had a bottle of wine there, but since the music was also quite loud, conversation was difficult and there were too few other people to converse about anyway; hence we made another attempt at Trembling Madness. This time we found two stools and had a very enjoyable couple of hours looking at the Christmas crowd.

Since Elise had had a long day, and the bonus of an additional hour, we did not make it a very late night - quite late enough, in fact. There will be two more days to enjoy, after all. The weather looks to be friendly: it is quite warm for a start, and for Sunday the forecast is sunny, the current plan is to rent a car then and drive around, probably up to Whitby. We'll see how things develop.

Which brings me back to this morning, Saturday. I had a not very restful night on the magical air mattress (which I had not let swell up quite enough), then a run this morning, now it's time to bake some eggs and get Elise up!

Wolcum Yole

Working, working...

I might have mentioned that I am one of the Programme Committee (PC) chairs of the Fundamentals of Software Engineering (FASE) conference taking place in Grenoble early April next year. This involves a number of different activities, from advertising the conference in order to draw as many good submissions as possible, to distributing the papers that have been submitted among the 30 members of the PC for reviewing, then making sure the reviews are in, and this week, guiding the process towards a collective decision on what is going to be accepted for presentation at the conference and publication in the proceedings. For this we have been set a quotum of between 20% and 25%, meaning that more than three quarters will be rejected for this conference. Publication is a big deal so this is A Serious Responsibility, and since the discussions are all conducted via electronic media - in contrast to a physical PC meeting which used to be the rule up to 15 years ago - it takes a lot of coordination. Busy, busy, busy. In addition there is the workshop paper that we agreed to write during the Banff experience last week (how long ago it seems already!) and on which I pledged to invest time. What am I doing wasting my time to write blogs?

York Minster, sold out for The Sixteen

Well, as my faithful readers know, during my stay in York I have not yet failed to make time for things other than work. As I mentioned in my last post, I had reserved a ticket for a choral performance of the Ceremony of Carols by Britten - I had the title wrong then, got mixed up a bit between Britten and Dickens - combined with other stuff since the Ceremony will only last 20 minutes or so. It was, in fact, Poulenc, Britten and a smattering of medieval Christmas carols, peformed by a British chamber choir of sixteen singers, called The Sixteen. (Just imagine the intense and excruciating discussions that went into that name.)

What a treat! What an absolutely fabulous experience! The Minster itself is one of the extravagant wonders of gothic architecture of course, and to hear those intricate harmonies performed so flawlessly in that acoustic heaven is truly transcendental. Close your eyes and you bask in sound. It is a marvel how well these contemporary composers managed to arrange music that can be heard and understood when performed in a space this large. In contrast, the medieval carols were just a breathing space, simplistic and noisy.

I liked Poulenc maybe even more than Britten. We did sing the Ceremony of Carols with the Twents Kleinkoor; but I had forgotten the harp and I'm sure that with the exception of one of the Carols we had an arrangement that had room for male voices. I now realise it is originally set for female voices only. Call me a male chauvinist: I tend to prefer male-only choirs over female-only (go see Pitch Perfect though, one of my favourite movies!) - still, I was almost in tears and certainly had goosebumps.

Yes, the record has been set straight! This is what singing should be!

Postscriptum

After all this solemnity, here is my Challenge of the Day: parse and explain the picture on the right.

OK, you had a head start, after having read the above and maybe looking for a while at the center of the picture before. But would you be able to make heads or tails of this if someone asked you at some other occasion? There used to be a TV show (don't recall the name) where they showed pictures and asked the contestants what they thought they saw. More interestingly (at least to me): when will computer algorithms have progressed to the point where they can do this sort of thing as well as humand? Forty years ago the litmus test of artificial intelligence was playing chess as well as a human; now that has been achieved, we have to set our sights higher, and image recognition is harder than you might realise.

The long arm of Father Christmas

From the Tubantia: Kerstmis in York!
(Twinkling courtesy of Google)

Back on track. Temperature: down. Coughing: under control. Nose drip: not so you would notice. Smell: present. Full steam ahead!

On the other hand, it seems as though this place, meaning the university, is closing down for Christmas. The campus supermarket is no longer open Sundays or in the evenings, and they have run out of pumpernickel. (Elise, can you bring some from Hengelo?) The Glasshouse (if you remember, the restaurant on the Heslington East campus), which I prefer to the Edge though that is a lot closer by, turned out to be closed as well when I wanted a quick bite before Body Pump. Are there no lectures any more, two full weeks before the Nativity? Must ask.

Student creativity (The Edge)

In the meanwhile, I'm busy preparing for Elise's visit, come Friday. Exciting really: I can show her all my toys, and in doing so renew my own fascination with this place which has inevitably sunk into routine by now. By sheer coincidence, there was an article in the Tubantia, the local newspaper of Twente, about the Christmas market in York, which was praised as being one of the most attractive in England. When I went to get new batteries for my watch two weeks ago I saw the stalls being built. There will also be the ice sculpture Festival of Angels, and we are going to two shows, a live broadcast from the Met of Falstaff (tip from my mother) in the Cityscreen, and a pantomime in the Grand Opera House. (If you have never been in England around Christmas time, I am sure you do not know what a pantomime is! It has very little to do with what we call pantomime -pronounced the French way- in the Netherlands. I'll post about it at some later occasion.)

This is also an occasion to find out how easy it is to live as a couple in this apartment - which is what it is actually meant for. Since there is no way we can sleep comfortably in the bed together (I only fit on it diagonally) I have borrowed an air mattress of one of the PhD students of the group. It turned out to be an electrically inflatable one, and since I had never seen such a thing before, for your enjoyment I made a video of the inflationary process: The Miracle of the Air Mattress! (If you watch it on YouTube you can enjoy my rather dull commentary in English by switching on captions.)

I'm sure we will have a great few days. For Elise a nice diversion, since the kids in her classes are giving her hell. I might not have time to post about it extensively though! Anyway, first I have a concert tomorrow: a choir in the Minster singing Britten's Christmas Carols. If it had been on Friday I know Elise would have loved to go there, too: we actually sang the Christmas Carols with the chamber choir where we met. So far the singing I have undergone in York was not of the highest quality (Festival of Remembrance, Dicken's Christmal Carol musical) though the English have a great reputation for singing. I have every hope that the record will be set straight tomorrow.

Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better

The benefit of being ill is how wonderful it feels to get better. It's not quite enough of a benefit to make anyone wish for illness, but this is a case of counting your blessings. Just as warm and sunmy days are much more appreciated after a stretch of autumn weather than in a permamently sunny climate, so having been ill generates a positive feeling of wellness afterwards, at least for a short while.

I confess that illness in general does not bring out the best in me. I am not a good patient (too self-pitying) and worse, I am a very bad nurse (way too impatient). Character flaws, for sure. For me, illness almost always takes the form of bouts of (high) fever, caused by throat infections (I went through a lot of those as a child) or, as in this case, a common cold. I'm very happy that I am mostly spared symptoms like nausea, which can be much more debilitating than fever, however high. At its peak you just float somewhere, not quite aware of the world around you. Strangely obsessed dreams revolving around some random small event that lasts all night. This time it was actually not so bad; not having a thermometer at hand I can't really say, but at least I felt able to stay at the keyboard in my appartment and do some work all day. There is some danger that it wasn't all that coherent.

I'm not quite there yet - I am now in the phase where all sensation of taste has disappeared, or rather that part that is experienced by the nose rather than the tongue. The first time this happened to me it lasted several days, and I really began to wonder if taste would return to me. It is actually rather horrible to feel the texture of what you are eating and sense saltiness, bitterness etcetera but nothing of the actual flavour whatsoever. There's a guy called Rob Rhinehart, a software engineer no less, who has mixed up every kind of known nutritious element into a goo he calls Soylent and advocates as all you need to eat and not requiring any preparation apart from dissolution in water. The main benefit he claims is that you do not lose so much time preparing and eating food. What a stupid premise! Food is part of what makes life worthwhile, it is what time is for! This is really an inversion of values, like having lots of money as your ultimate goal and forgetting that money is only good for buying the things you actually need or like. I have more sympathy for Cypher, the defector in The Matrix, who preferred tasty virtual food to the snot-like porridge he had to make do with in the real world - not unlike this Soylent, in point of fact.

So there - end of rant, and end of post.

Pandora strikes

I suppose it was to be expected that at one point or another during my 4-month stay in York I would be less than robustly healthy. As it turns out, such a point has been reached now, quite possibly nudged by the combination of weather and tiredness.

Yesterday (Sunday) morning I woke up latish, but did not let that deter me from taking a short run followed by an omelet. I hope to get to the point where the thought of an omelet will set me running. I also hoped to convince my body that it was indeed daytime and, moreover, any head- and throataches were just phantom pains. (Strictly speaking, if your headache is a phantom pain, that means you no longer have a head.) That seemed to work fine.

For the rest of the day I mostly sat behind my keyboard to catch up on blogs and mails and washing, and to do some coding. Quite relaxed, in fact. The only other outdoor activity that I had planned was to go and watch Saving Mr. Banks in the cinema, but when looking up the starting time my eye fell on another option, Nebraska, which also looked interesting and was showing slightly earlier.

It turned out to be a different film than I expected. Gritty is the word I want to use here: that applies both to the photography (black-and-white, no attempt to make the world any prettier than it is, which with a setting in depressed rural US is not very pretty) and to the characters: most of them stupid, venal, unpleasant. Not very uplifting - in other words, not really a film for an escapist like myself. Possibly at some other time, with another audience and in another mood, the movie could also be quite funny. Maybe I should try this on January 1.

After another not very restful night, I can describe my current condition best by citing a song from Cabaret Ivo de Wijs:

Je kent het wel: die kriebel in je benen
Je thermometer stijgt, je hebt geen keus
Je moet naar bed, het voze virus is verschenen
En het jaagt het snot bij liters
Door de roodgeworden gieters van je neus

Je hebt de V, de V
Da's niet zo dodelijk als K, en niet zo slepend als TB
En als ze zeggen: zeg, MS is stukken erger hoor
Dan zeg jij: ja, dat zal wel wezen, maar de V komt veel meer voor

After math

Predictably, the last few days are somewhat of a blur. The time difference travelling east is known to be more disorienting than travelling west. This time around the difference in climate adds to the effect: on the outbound trip, I think the temperature at my destination was within a few degrees of that at my starting point, but it is more than 40 degrees warmer here now than it was when I left in Banff.

Friday: finishing off

There are different kinds of scientific events. Regular conferences consist of back-to-back talks of around 30 minutes with a short QA-session at the end of each, interrupted by coffee and lunch breaks during which you typically talk to people you already know or in some cases to the speaker of a presentation that had something particularly interesting. In a four- or five-day event, participation will drop towards the end since the saturation level for new information has been reached.

In a workshop like this on the other hand, the group of participants is smaller which invites more mingling and actually getting to meet new people; and the programme is much more diverse, including sessions where the purpose is to discuss rather than just to listen. If the discussion is constructive and focussed enough, you may actually come to a point where you feel that you have achieved something new. (New means publishable.) The last is what happened this week: with the group that was discussing benchmarks we decided to push for a paper on our ideas, to be submitted to a workshop (of the first kind) on Bidirectional Transformation taking place in April next year. The paper still has to be written, of course: deadline next Friday. I promised to take good part of the writing on me as (given my sabbatical) it is easier for me to make time for this than for most of the others.

(Reading back, I see that the above gives the impression that what I called a "regular" conference is a waste of time and money. That is not true however: it serves another very important function, namely that of dissemination. The prime purpose is not to achieve new results, but to present previously achieved results to colleagues with similar interests.)

The Friday morning was devoted to the wrap-up and planning of a next edition. There have actually been two workshops of this kind (a working workshop) on this theme before, though this is the first one I have been invited to. (That's another distinction: working workshops are typically invitation-only.) I like this topic, I think there are connections with what I have done before that mean I might be able to contribute something here.

Last minutes in Banff: waiting for the bus to arrive

After lunch, for most it was time to leave. Around 10 of us took the same bus to the airport; most were booked on a flight leaving 15 minutes earlier to Frankfurt. The other English participants stayed on a day longer to work on a collective project. Only Frank Hermann, aother German (the research area is dominated by Germans) but currently working at the University of Luxembourg, took the same flight as I did, but he would have to wait 5 hours at Heathrow for his connecting flight.

The plane was again no more than half full, and though I did end up with a neighbour, after takeoff I moved to another seat with more freedom of movement. Takeoff was delayed for almost an hour for various reasons, one of them being the need to defrost the wings. Night occurred somewhere on the way, hard to tell when exactly.

Saturday: Getting home

On eastbound transatlantic flights they simulate night by dimming the cabin lights and closing the shutters for a few hours, then faking dawn by reversing those steps. Fewer food and beverage services during the so-called night. I always try to stay awake, to make sure I am tired enough the next night to sleep well. In this I succeeded reasonably well with the help of some movies that I had missed in the cinema (for the record: World War Z, Monsters University and Planes, in that order of decreasing quality).

Setting the mood at King's Cross

By the time we landed in Heathrow I was worn down to 5- and 10-minute mini-periods of sleep, but the activity involved in collecting luggage and getting to the train woke me up for the most part. Not enough to remember that I had bought a return ticket on the Heathrow Express to Paddington, unfortunately, so I got a new ticket. Waste of money, but not so much as on the next leg, from London King's Cross to York, where I paid an astounding 96 pounds for a 1-way ticket, without even realising this at first as the payment was electronic. When I noticed and compared this with my old ticket for the other direction, bought via the internet, which had cost only 44 pounds, I actually went back to the counter to inquire, but was told that, yes, reserving via the internet was indeed a lot cheaper and this was the right price for a ticket bought on the day of travel. Wow!

It got even a bit more ridiculous a little bit later. I had bought a 1st class ticket for the privilege of a table and electricity (and regretted doing so given the price) but when the conductor checked it on the train it turned out to be 2nd class only. I then remembered the man at the counter saying something which I hadn's quite understood about "upgrading to first class being cheaper", and that's what the conductor explained as well: it is better to buy a second-class ticket and updgrading it on the train, than to buy a first-class ticket straight away. That seems completely backwards to me, but I have indeed also at some point (20 years ago or so) bought a return ticket for some English train trip because it was cheaper than one-way. I was too tired to want to move to 2nd class so I got the upgrade. At least the policy for transactions on the train is not so hostile as in the Netherlands, where you face a fine of 35 Euro whenever you have made any kind of mistake in buying a ticket and have to repair that on the train.

This was the last hitch, fortunately, and without further noteworthy ado I got to York and onto the bus to the University. Since it was now around 15:00 my endocrine system thought it was time to wake up, and doing the necessary shopping required less willpower than I had foreseen. By the time I had to decide whether to spend the evening playing games I felt fit enough to do that. For the rest of the day I remaind totally confused about the hour and even the weekday - the fact that it seems to get dark an hour earlier here than it did in Banff didn't help - but that didn't stop me from enjoying Coup, Die Säulen von Venedig, City Tycoon (a new one) and Marrakech.

So, back in the groove! The Canadian adventure is over, successfully. Over to the next challenge: showing off York to Elise when she comes here on Friday.

Baby, it's cold outside

Just after having decided that I would not try to adjust further to Canadian time, this morning for the first time I woke up after 6:00; in fact I was awakened by my neighbour using our shared bathroom, at 8:00. (A first door leads from the corridor to a front porch with further doors for one bathroom and two bedrooms.) Of course that meant I couldn't use it, which was annoying. I have no complaints about our accommodation otherwise, but this particular aspect is a minus.

I thought we had a cold day yesterday, but according to the official sources, when I made my way to the breaksfast hall this morning it was an astounding -36 degrees Celcius. That is by a large margin the coldest I have ever experienced. I can't even say I really experienced it, because I do not think our skin is equipped with the right receptors to distinguish between, say, -20 and -30 or -36; between +15 and +20 we can feel very fine differences, but below freezing point it is just cold, or very cold, or maybe even extremely cold, none of which are very accurate terms. I do remember a Lithuanian postdoc telling me that at -40 it starts to be dangerous exposing bare skin to the air for more than a minute or so; it will blister very quickly.  I never thought to be in a position to verify that statement, and in fact I didn't try to verify it now. All I can say is that my lips do not like the combined exposure of the last few days.

We had an interesting day today. In the morning I gave my position statement, which was well received and generated some interesting discussion. Essentially the message was that in transforming between models you should not only get your results right on the syntactical level, but also on the level of semantics, or meaning. The database example I used in my yesterday post to illustrate the principle of model transformation is not really appropriate to explain what I mean by meaning: for that you have to imagine different types of models that do not only describe data but also actions. Think for instance of the old tax forms, before it started to be routine to submit them electronically: they typically had flow charts showing under what circumstances you had to fill in which questions. Such a flow chart is also a model, and you might want to transform it, for instance to a program that tests those conditions automatically and selects the appropriate questions for you. But then you want to make sure that the meaning of the original flow chart is preserved in the program: you do not want to miss tax deduction opportunities! Thus, semantic-preserving model transformations; an interesting complication to a problem that is already far from trivial.

Remains of the day

In the afternoon we continued, in the same smaller group, the discussion and taxonomy of benchmarks started on Tuesday, this time with the aim of at least filling the space of BX benchmarks with at least one concrete instance. Hammering this out revealed further misunderstandings, but resolving those is also a good way to learn other people's perspectives. We agreed to continue this evening, in fact a few minutes from now.

Later that same evening

A fruitful continuation of our discussion later, we even have a concrete plan to submit a paper to the BX workshop, for which the deadline is next week. That's very tight, but we might just be able to work it. Almost all of my colleagues are very deadline-driven, so aiming to write a paper is about the only way to make progress anyway; if in the end we don't make it, still we may have gotten far enough to continue and try to get it published elsewhere. A tangible outcome of this workshop!

Tomorrow I will be travelling back; do not expect any post. In fact, I will have to wait and see how fit I feel on Saturday. It's another Beyond Monopoly! day, if at all possible I plan to go. This blog comes second to that.

Louise and Agnes

The morning started early, with snowdozers disrupting any human dozers by scraping off the last remaining centimetre of snow, and probably a few millimetres of tarmac as well. I have come to the conclusion that Canadians hate snow with a passion, or that the Banff Centre employs too many people.

We are now halfway through the week, and it starts to make sense not to try to complete my conversion to GMT-7 (Canadian Mountain Time) as I will be flying back two days from now. Seen in that light, I should thank the snowdozer. (Thanks!)

It was a brilliant day today, not a cloud in the sky. As a consequence the temperature started at -24 Celcius, rising to -18 in the course of the day. In the morning we stayed snugly inside to listen to position statements, a kind of short presentation (15 mins) meant to provoke or inspire, but unfortunately by most of the presenters today used to advertise some of their past work, in a kind of regular conference talk squeezed into a timeslot too small for it. The record was 32 slides (I personally prefer to stick to no more than 2 or 3 slides a minute).

Lake Louise, 14:30

The afternoon was reserved for our scheduled midweek excursion. After some discussion of possible alternatives the organisers had settled for a trip to Lake Louise, about one hour drive in a rented bus. Initially there was talk of skating and ice sculptures, but apparently it is too early in the season. Temperatures like today's are not common even here, at least in December. Taking the initiative (as I felt there was a surplus of fear of the weather conditions) I pointed out that there was sun, no wind and a completely level trail along the lake that those without proper shoes should have no trouble walking; but also the possibility of a longer round trip up to a smaller lake for the more adventurous - daylight permitting: sunset is at 16:35 and the schedule would have us arrive there around 14:30. Something for everyone, in other words. No worries, in yet other words. This was received positively, but as such things go I was straight away (not entirely seriously) bombarded as tour leader.

It all worked out very well. Slightly less than half of the group decided to be adventurous and go up to Mirror Lake (more a pond than a lake, really). The trail was hard-packed snow, in a very relaxed gradient, not a problem at all to walk. Arriving at our destination after some 45 minutes, the consensus was that to go for the round trip was unwise given the remaining distance and uncertain descent; instead we went up one more stage to Agnes Lake, where there was even supposed to be a tea house. This second leg got us a bit closer to the tree line, so that we could look out over the valley. We were on the northeastern side, meaning that we had very little benefit of the sun at that hour, but the valley was still sunlit and lay utterly clear at our feet.

Ice tea

No tea today! The teahouse was closed. Indeed there would have been very few customers, we met no one else on the trail. No problem really, except that it meant we could not linger very long: while moving easily kept you warm enough (no wind!) standing still for any length of time above a minute was not advisable (estimated temperature at that elevation and hour: -28 Celcius). Going down we made very good time, so that we could enjoy a hot drink in the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise, another monstrosity built by the Canadian Pacific Railway, like its brother in Banff whose praises I have already sung. A Glacial Warmer for me: coffee, chocolate, brandy: it, too, made very good time going down.

P.S.

If, like me, you are wondering whether Louise was maybe the older sister of Agnes: wrong, no relation, Louise Caroline Alberta was a daughter of Queen Victoria and wife of a Canadian governor who also gave her name to the state of Alberta in which Banff lies; Susan Agnes MacDonald was the wife of a Canadian prime minister.

Challenges and benchmarks

The lecture building

Though I am slowly adjusting to both the height and the time zone of this place, I still wake up early. This morning it was 5:30 when I decided I was too wide awake to fool myself into thinking that I could sleep any more, especially since I had anyway set my alarm clock for 6:00 to go spinning. It was tough: the class lasted an hour instead of the 45 minutes I am used to, and probably the somewhat thinner air does not help either. The benefit comes afterwards: I did not only feel quite virtuous for having carried my intention through, but also alert and awake.

It has stopped snowing (according to the weather forecast it should be clear and sunny from now on, though quite chilly, with -15 degrees max). They were already busy clearing the paths when I returned from the fitness facilities to my room. Well done!

Research in action. Do not erase!

Bidirectional transformation (BX) is about defining ways to convert back and forth between data models that need to be kept in sync with one another, in such a way that their consistency is guaranteed. An appealing example is a patient database of a hospital and the personnel database of a company: both may contain a record of the overall health of a person, and it can be disastrous if one of them shows an employee to be healthy whereas the other shows that patient to be dead (to give a fairly radical example). Yet it is unthinkable that the two databases are merged into one that is used by both parties: to name just one objection, there is confidential information in each of them that should not be accessible for the other. In this case you transform the data by making sure that the relevant information is consistent and that updates in one data base are correctly propagated to the other, and you do it bidirectionally because such updates may occur on either side. Thus, BX. The same principle applies not just to databases but in many other fields as well, hence the participants from different research (sub)communities.

After-lunch walk

The morning was devoted to the presentation of several challenges that participants had prepared, meaning particular questions or problems within the area of Bidirectional Transformation. I proposed one of those myself, based on the work I have been doing in York. Though the facilities at the Banff Centre are in some ways rather outdated, the building where the lectures are taking place, the TransCanada Pipelines Pavillion (do you want to take a guess who sponsored it?) has a nifty fixed camera installation that allows automatic recording and even live streaming of presentations. Thus, you can see me presenting my stuff here. I was one among six and was allotted 12 minutes for my spiel, but it did draw some interest from the audience; this may lead to some cooperation later this week or after the workshop.

After lunch there was time for a short walk through the sun and snow, then we locked ourselves in again; this time in smaller groups to discuss mutual interests, partially driven by the challenge presentations of the morning. When there are 5 or 10 tools all of which claim to support bidirectional transformation, how do you evaluate whether those claims are justified and which of the tools does the best job? For this it is useful to have some stock examples and benchmarks, and the field of BX is too new to have a generally agreed-upon set of such benchmarks. The discussion group I joined made it its goal to inventorise the need for benchmarks: what should be covered, how should they be presented? Useful stuff in principle, although we will have to wait and see what will come of this in practice: intentions are always good but time is always short.

Some of the tools that are available were demonstrated in the last hour of the afternoon. Again, I took the opportunity to show off what I and others have been doing in the last 10 years, in the form of the GROOVE tool. It's always difficult to judge how this comes across though, expecially at the end of a long day. Typically, if no one asks a question during or after a presentation, that is a bad sign; in this case, I did get a few questions, but the amount of interaction was not overwhelming.

The food is excellent here. Buffet style, but with plenty of choices, many of them quite tasty. Hard to resist! A good reason to keep balancing this with some physical activity. Tomorrow afternoon there will be an excursion to Lake Louise, another of these places of stunning natural beauty. The idea is to take a hike there, if the temperature allows - which it should, unless there is too much wind. That's excuse enough to skip spinning in the morning, though if I'm up early again I may change my mind.