Every day it's a dead time, step by step

The keynote speaker was Peter Singer. In 1975 Singer published Animal Liberation, a cornerstone of the modern animal-rights movement, as he took the philosophy of utilitarianism and explored how its ethical drive toward the minimization of suffering required humans stop treating animals so cruelly. The conference was to reflect on the past four decades of animal ethics and how Singer's work shaped it.

Singer spoke in English, with an apology about his French not being up to it, although his PowerPoint slides were bilingual, and they had a translator for his speech. The conference was explicitly bilingual, with English or French acceptable at the speaker's preference, although Singer was the only person who had a translator available. Many people were able to put together slides with both English and French captions. My mediocre knowledge of French, left almost unused since middle and high school, let me carry on to what I think was the gist of most of these slides, but it wasn't easy going. bunny_hugger would do about as well as me, between her better knowledge of Spanish and her having a translation app on her iPod.

Lunch was off in the building the campus information booth had been in, and we thought it was just a simple if tasty salad. We sat opposite a pair, a women who spoke English quite well, and a man who apologized he spoke almost no English. (If I'm not grossly mistaken he's one of the people who would speak the next day just after bunny_hugger, and would go on at such length I worried they might wrestle him to the ground.) The most of what he did say was that there was another course if we wanted more to eat; it was a vegan shepherd's pie. Vegan is the way to cook for an animal-rights conference, though it's challenging to make something that's clearly French cuisine without such animal products as eggs, cheese, or milk. Still, they made it, and quite well.

bunny_hugger and I sat together through the various panels. She was unnecessarily worried about me being bored. I loved being at an academic conference, though, and the social rhythms of the philosophers speaking was close enough to that of a mathematical conference that I didn't feel out of place. We did write some notes, on the conference-provided notebooks, to one another. Some of it was her explaining to me points that I just had no familiarity with. Some of it was a bit of riffing on our experience. (``We now open the floor to shorter speeches disguised as questions.'' Not my original joke, but a reliable one.)

I was enjoying being there, but I was also getting hit by the jet lag and the exhausting nature of all the travel we'd done and the work of sitting in place from 9:30 am with occasional breaks for small cups of coffee or tea. After a couple presentations I kept nodding off through I took bunny_hugger's advice. At the next break, then, I left for the hotel room. I wanted to set a wake-up call in case I threatened to sleep through dinner, and either dialed the automated wake-up call number wrong or else they don't operate during the day. I did have my wristwatch, though, and could figure out how to set the alarm to go off. What I couldn't figure later was how to set it to stop going off. I resorted to setting the alarm time to sometime I'd normally be awake and trusted that when it went off I could apologize to whoever else was listening to the beeping.

I needed a particular wake-up call because bunny_hugger wasn't sure whether she'd go to dinner directly from campus, or whether she'd come to the hotel room first. It turned out she did come to the hotel room, about the same time I woke up, independently of my wristwatch alarm, which isn't that always the way?

Trivia: Until 1948 NBC News films were shot on 35 millimeter film without sound, just like theater newsreels. Background music from a ``mood library'' would be added on-air. Source: Please Stand By: A Prehistory of Television, Michael Ritchie.

Currently Reading: Obsession: A History, Lennard J Davis.

PS: Reading the Comics, June 20, 2015: Blatantly Padded Edition, Part 1, another mathematics-comics roundup this week. Some weeks are like that. Another to come tomorrow!