My photos from Halloween are now online. Pumpkin picking, carved pumpkins, my son and his friend in costume, that sort of thing.

I just finished uploading five new sets of photos:

• Mathematical sculpture at Trinity College Dublin. Or sort-of mathematical: the artist may have intended one of these sculptures to model DNA, but to a topologist it looks like a torus link. Apparently every year the Hamilton Workshop on Geometry and Topology uses one of these as a logo, but they're running out: soon they'll have to go with the kitschy sculpture of a buxom Molly Malone outside the college gate.


• Dublin. Or the parts of it that I saw outside of Trinity and Guinness. With my usual complement of graffiti.


• The Guinness Storehouse. Supposedly Ireland's biggest tourist attraction. I didn't take many photos inside, although I found the tour quite interesting; most of the photos are of the 360-degree view of the Guinness brewery that one gets from the bar at the top of the tour.


• Chicago. The weather was not really conducive to photography but I took a couple of shots anyway.


• Graph Drawing 2009. If you didn't go, now's your chance to see what you missed. If you did go, you can see how many photos you and your friends are in. I hope none of the ones I kept are too embarrassing or unflattering. ETA: The GD09 web site now also links to another set of photos by Pranava Jha.

As promised, I've finally put up Diana's photos from Banff, complete with grizzle bear.

Much of the delay was due to a chain of reinstallations of software and libraries I needed to perform to get my web photo gallery software working again after upgrading to Snow Leopard. Why doesn't software just work? (Asks the computer scientist, who should know better.)

Ok, my Banff pictures are up. Here's a small sample:



More coming later after I sort through the ones Diana took while I was (mostly) going to talks.

After Southern Oregon we took a drive down the north coast of California to visit my parents in Mendocino and see my mother give a reading from her newly published poetry book (from March Street Press). Before Diana and I left the kids and took off for the Canadian Rockies, we had some time for a family hike, and I pushed for Russian Gulch State Park, in part so that I could take a photo of the bridge that now adorns the Wikipedia article on the park. But it was a very pretty hike, with a waterfall at the end, and I took some other photos as well, and even kept a few of them. Gallery here.

Returning to my backlogged vacation photos: after the Rogue River Rafting, the next block of time on my vacation was a visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, where we saw Don Quixote (a new and somewhat metafictional adaptation by Octavio Solis), Much Ado About Nothing (an interesting production set in post-WWII Sicily), The Servant of Two Masters (extremely funny, the high point of the visit), and Macbeth (appropriately dark, spooky, and dramatic). But we also had two free days between rafting and the theater, which we used to see the Oregon Caves and Crater Lake.

Anyone who's been to the lake will know that it's (a) gorgeous; (b) very heavily photographed; and (c) very difficult to photograph well, due both to the very wide field of view that the lake spans from any of its viewpoints and to the striking electric blue color that the water takes on due to being the deepest and purest lake in the US. Nevertheless, I couldn't help trying again (I'd been there twenty years earlier, as part of my honeymoon, but I don't have scans of my photos from that time.) I'm not sure that I succeeded any better than previously, despite this time having a nice DSLR and fisheye lens, but the photo gallery is here.

Earlier this month my family and I went rafting on the Rogue River, as I hinted in my previous post; Diana and I had done this once before, years earlier before we had kids. The trip involved four days of floating on the river, two nights camping, and one night in a lodge, through Rogue River Journeys, the sister company of the one we'd taken on the Kern the previous year.

The weather for the trip was a bit unusual: the first day started nice and sunny, but not too hot (in contrast to the previous week's 110+ degree heat) but ended with a freak thundershower. Some of the rain hit us while we were still on the river but the larger part waited until we were safely under a canopy at the campsite, so it was more exciting than annoying, and we got a great sunset complete with double rainbow. The next day was cold and grey (not the best weather for getting soaked in rapids) but fortunately it warmed up again and was sunny again by the last day.

This was billed as a family trip, so there were many other kids near in ages to ours. Most of the families were from nearby Humboldt County, in northern California, but there was also another Southern California family. Everyone had a choice of lazing away the trip on an oarboat paddled by one of the guides (Sara's choice for the whole trip), participating in the paddling on a paddle boat, or taking small one- or two-person inflatable kayaks down the rapids oneself (the most fun, but also the most effort). Mostly I stayed on the paddleboat, but I took a kayak for the morning of the last day.

Photos here. Most of them are by Diana (I didn't feel comfortable taking my more expensive camera on the water) but I borrowed her camera and took a few shots of the post-storm sunset.

Another gallery of photos from Galice, Oregon, about a half-hour drive down the Rogue River from Grant's Pass and the jumping-off point for our recent river rafting trip on the Rogue. Mostly, though, this set was an excuse to take some informal photos of my daughter Sara.

Some photos from the Turtle Bay Exploration Park in Redding (the northernmost point of California's Central Valley, at the base of Mount Shasta), including an exhibit of lego art, Santiago Calatrava's Sundial Bridge (the support tower of which forms the gnomon of the world's largest sundial), and more: photo gallery here.

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.

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.

My son's tenth birthday was last weekend; we fixed up my pinball machine for the party, and held a scavenger hunt in which teams of the boys took pictures of themselves next to various pieces of scenery in a neighborhood park. Photos.

I've now put my photos from Volker Strassen's Knuth Prize lecture at SODA online. I've also uploaded two of them to Wikimedia and used them to illustrate the Wikipedia articles for Strassen and the Knuth Prize; if anyone has a need for a freely-licensed version of any of the other photos, I'd be happy to upload them there as well.

I already have something of a tradition of recording limericks that people have included in their technical talks, so, for the record, Strassen's was:

An E.T. residing on Vega
determined the size of ω.
  In Praha, at night,
  he told me that quite
positively ω was nega....

In the following slide, he encoded a conjecture that ω (the exponent in the time bound for matrix multiplication) is strictly greater than two into another poem. Fortunately, the quality of the poetry provided a lower bound, rather than an upper bound, on the quality of the rest of his talk.

• Bernard Chazelle's talk “Natural Algorithms” (describing a convergence time for a simple model of bird flocking that is both upper and lower bounded by a logarithmically tall tower of powers of two, if I remember correctly) was quite entertaining and played to a standing-room-only crowd, and I heard that some latecomers weren't able to get in at all. The system we've had at some SODAs of having meeting rooms of varying sizes and guessing which talks would be better attended had some drawbacks, but the present Harrison Bergeron system of making everybody equal does too.

• I'm sorry to have missed the first data structures talk, on pairing heaps, due to said Chazelle talk. But the rest of the data structures session (including the one with Chazelle's name in the title, in a different session from Chazelle's own talk) was good. The triple threat of John Iacono, Erik Demaine, and Mihai Pătraşcu presenting their equivalence between a geometric problem (augmenting a point set so there is no rectangle with only two opposite corners present) and dynamic optimality for online binary search tree data structures was again particularly entertaining and standing-room-only.

• Gary Miller roped me into taking photos for Volker Strassen's Knuth Prize lecture, in which he described some of his major past results. (Someone who understands it better than I should add his law of the iterated logarithm to his Wikipedia article, which is in other respects as well quite bare-bones.) So photos will be appearing here shortly, and I'll likely add them to the Wikipedia articles as well. But they won't be appearing until I get access to a compact-flash card reader (as I left mine at home) and in any case will probably have to wait until after the conference when I have time to sort through them and postprocess them. I ended up using both my own Canon 40D and 50mm prime lens (I didn't bother to bring a zoom this time) and Erik Demaine's brand-new 5D mk II and 24-105 zoom; the 5D is a sweet camera. Thanks, Erik!

• Jeff has posted the annual drinking game rules. Sadly I did not partake so I have no details to report.

Happy New Years, all! We had a fun touristy New Year's Eve Day in San Francisco, viewing the Da Vincis at the Legion of Honor and shopping for chocolates at Ghiradelli Square. The Legion of Honor has a great view; it was foggy today but I thought that only gave it more character. A few photos.

Now that my own parents live in Mendocino, we usually stay with my in-laws when we visit Palo Alto. But this time, they were renovating their house and staying in a too-small nearby apartment, and we didn't connect with my parents' friends Don and Wendy (who would have happily lent us their Stanford-campus apartment) until too late, so we stayed at the Hotel California, in the California Avenue shopping district. Diana and I had lived two blocks away when I was doing my postdoc at PARC, years ago, not to mention having both lived in other parts of Palo Alto long before then, so it's a very familiar neighborhood.

The street has undergone some changes over the years: Kirk's Hamburgers is now a Starbucks, the movie theater is now a running shoe store, the bookstore with the mossy fountain on the corner is now a pizza parlor, and the other book store is now a stationary supply store. But a lot of it remains the same.

This morning, having nothing better to do (the hotel internet access being a little problematic), I took my camera out for a spin. Here are some of the photos I took.

We had a quiet Halloween this year — many of the houses along our street leave their lights out, so the hordes of kids who live in our neighborhood tend to pass it by for more inviting ones. Timothy decided to be a ninja and went out with a friend dressed as (his mother told me) Ichigo from Bleach. Sara is getting a little old for trick-or-treating, but decided to go with a friend at the last minute, and ended up being a sparkly vampire from the Twilight series of books. Photos here, a few of Timothy and more of our jack-o-lanterns.

The Graph Drawing 2008 web site now has hundreds of photos from the conference. Probably not of interest unless you were a participant. And the following more specific links are probably not of interest unless you're me, but I found a few of myself at the opening night reception with Maarten Löffler, at a coffee break with Bettina Speckmann, watching the talks with Elena Mumford, giving my talks on xyz graphs and diamond lattices, chatting with Roberto Tamassia, outside the talk site with Alex Wolff, and at the banquet.

It's a little scary how quickly ones' kids grow up. My daughter Sara just turned 14. I've been taking the same photos of her for half her life now:



The bottom right image is from a small gathering Sara had yesterday (too informal to call a birthday party any more), after which I took her and two of her friends to see Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which just opened.

Despite a few awkward transitions near the end, I enjoyed the movie a lot, and thought it was quite sweet. ( Cut for spoilers )

I spent the last Saturday of my week in the Netherlands sightseeing in Belgium.

Herman Haverkort took Elena, Chris, Jasper, and I on a road trip in his Citroen to Bruges, where we spent the day being tourists, seeing the clock tower and the Michelangelo sculpture and the lace umbrella stores and the medieval architecture and the retired nuns on bicycles, eating waffles, and drinking plenty of good Belgian beer. We then stopped in Ghent on the way back for dinner at a place called The Crypt, which served a very fine beef stew (the overdecorated all-you-can-eat ribs joint we had thought to try being too busy).

We had planned to prepare for the trip the night before by watching In Bruges, but at the last minute Chris decided on Miller's Crossing instead. I had a second chance to watch In Bruges on my return flight from Crete, but sadly it was on a tiny low-contrast LCD screen that I couldn't stand to watch for more than a few minutes, and the airplane noise and lack of sleep didn't help my concentration either, so I didn't get very far into it. Miller's Crossing was good, anyway, though it had little to do with picturesque Belgian cities.

Photos here, a bit more touristy and snapshotty than usual.