This was a triumph

I'm making a note here:
HUGE SUCCESS.

Ok, so that's not totally what the trip was, but that's how I felt thursday afternoon after my talk. I spent most of tuesday night working on it (again, I'd been working on it for nearly a week), and got a small amount of sleep. I went 3rd in the session, which we'd decided on because it made a nice transition from general biological (but non-DNA) systems to the DNA systems like mine and those in the fourth talk. The whole conference was on Decision and Controls, which is a much different area from mine, and the point of the session was to introduce problems in biology that were molecule-level which controls people might find interesting.

My talk itself was about 20 slides total, and we were scheduled for 20-25m each, plus some questions time. I caught myself speeding up talking early and managed to slow back down: one of the problems when giving a talk is usually speaking too fast, making it hard to understand. Somehow all the pieces I wasn't sure would flow together actually did, even in my practice an hour before the transitions just weren't working, but they did when I actually gave the talk. There were several points I wasn't sure were getting across, and it was really difficult to connect to the audience: we were in one of the grand ballrooms, which could easily seat several hundred, but there were only about 30-40 people in the audience (fairly typical for the biological controls track) and so it was really difficult to gauge how well people were following. I managed to reiterate the main points three different times in different ways, so I'm pretty sure it came across clear. Anyways, I managed to finish and get to the acknowledgments slide right at 23 minutes. Speaking of those, there's some people who I want to thank here, cause they couldn't see the presentation: Mylanda, M^2, Erik and L: Yall kept saying it would be fine and it was. Thank you again for the support. I thought of Mylanda's comment as I was walking up to start the talk and everything seemed easier: (paraphrasing): "You've GM'd tons of games, just think of them as players and you'll do fine".

So yeah. I got to the question section and thought I'd have maybe one or two, about normal for the other talks I'd seen. As one of the other guys who gave a talk in that session put it: "Yeah, when you finished your talk I went to the bathroom. When I came back you were still answering questions." And they weren't just confused questions, but a lot of very good insightful questions.

So the talk went very well (or so I've been assured by just about everyone who went), and the conference as a whole was very good. I didn't understand a lot of the subjects of the other talks, so I spent more time talking with people, working out new ideas on stuff to collaborate with them. I also met someone who I'd known as an undergrad (we'd worked on a learning systems project course together) who's now very well known in the decision/control field, and actually remembered me.

Uncanny

There's something uncanny here. I finally placed what it is, but those reading probably need some context.

I'm in New Orleans for the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. Some may recall me working like crazy on a paper/session proposal a few months back, it was for this conference. I'm doing part of a tutorial session on biomolecules and possible feedback/control problems relating to them. (Yes, several cool things, for one I'm actually giving a talk! two, part of it is a small paper that's being published in the proceedings, three, I get to meet other people here and possibly get some people interested in my field.)

Anyways, the uncanny thing since I got here (tuesday) has to do with race: A large percentage of the people I've seen who work here are black. But I don't think I've seen a single conference attendee who was. There's certainly many different races and countries represented here, but it's still a pretty glaring gap. I think what bothers me about it is my own projection of what the people who work in New Orleans think about the conference because of that skewed proportion.

Maybe I shouldn't be bothered though, the people I've met here (both conference attendees and people who live/work around here) don't seem to be bothered. I certainly like being here, there's something about the south and how friendly people are here that I like.