Sunday, July 31, 2005

Big Jewish Studies shebang happening on Har Hatzofim this week. I don't usually go to these things, but I went today and discovered there's quite a culture gap between Jewish Studies conferences and artificial intelligence conferences (my usual haunt).

Every speaker (without exception) at an AI conference has a really zippy powerpoint presentation which is accompanied (with occasional exceptions) by utterly incomprehensible explanations, preferably in an unintelligible Outer Mongolian accent.

At Jewish Studies conferences, I discovered today, fireworks are frowned upon. I used overhead transparencies for my lecture, which must have marked me as some kind of technogeek. Apparently, you're supposed to sit and read your text in a monotone word-for-word from a written text. Looking up from time to time is permissible but not obligatory. The accents were intelligible and the talks might have been comprehensible but I wouldn't know since I can't listen to lectures while in an induced catatonic state.

2 Comments:

Blogger mnuez said...

Hey, some of the folk may be kinna boring, but the range of talks and topics is absolutely fabulous. And some of the guys are actually quite interesting. The most interesting of the talks that I attended was a Mormon straight out of Brigham Young who lectured confidently on the Hebraic etymology of Moroni's revelations. And wadda you know, some of the students in the room actually found his talk interesting and informative. American morons mostly.

Anyhow, y'just got to go to the right talks. And come on, admit it, some of the "papers" were actually enjoyable and read by less than terribly boring professors.

6:32 AM  
Blogger Steg (dos iz nit der šteg) said...

I wish i were still in Israel so i could go. I remember seeing posters about it.

What was your presentation about?

9:00 AM  

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