TITLE: Off to Strange Loop
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 30, 2021  4:42 PM
DESC: 
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<img src="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog-images/conferences/strangeloop2018/conference-screen-small.jpg"
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 After a couple of years away, I am attending Strange Loop.
<a href="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018-09.html#e2018-09-29T18_19_10.htm">
   2018</a>
 seems so long ago now...

<blockquote><em>
 Last Wednesday morning, I hopped in my car and headed south to
 <a href="https://www.thestrangeloop.com/">
    Strange Loop 2018</a>.
 It had been a few years since I'd listened to <b>Zen and the Art
 of Motorcycle Maintenance</b> on a conference drive, so I popped
 it into the tape deck (!) once I got out of town and fell into
 the story.  My top-level goal while listening to <b>Zen</b> was
 similar to my top-level goal for attending Strange Loop this
 year: to experience it at a high level; not to get bogged down
 in so many details that I lost sight of the bigger messages.
 Even so, though, a few quotes stuck in my mind from the drive
 down.  The first is an old friend, one of my favorite lines from
 all of literature:

 <blockquote><b>
 Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.
 </b></blockquote>

 The other was the intellectual breakthrough that unified Phaedrus's
 philosophy:

 <blockquote><b>
 Quality is not an object; it is an event.
 </b></blockquote>

 This idea has been on my mind in recent months.  It seemed a fitting
 theme, too, for Strange Loop.
</em></blockquote>

 There will be no Drive South in 2021.  For a variety of reasons,
 I decided to attend the conference virtually.  The persistence of
 COVID is certainly one of big the reasons.  Alex and the crew at
 Strange Loop are taking all the precautions one could hope for to
 mitigate risk, but even so I will feel more comfortable online
 this year than in rooms full of people from across the country.
 I look forward to attending in person again soon.

 Trying to experience the conference at a high level is again one
 of my meta-level goals for attending.  The program contains so
 many ideas that are new to me; I think I'll benefit most by
 opening myself to areas I know little or nothing about and
 seeing where the talks lead me.

 This year, I have a new meta-level goal: to see what it is like
 to attend a conference virtually.  Strange Loop is using Vito as
 its hub for streaming video and conference rooms and Slack as its
 online community.  This will be my first virtual conference, and
 I am curious to see how it feels.  With concerns such as climate
 change, public health, and equity becoming more prominent as
 conference-organizing committees make their plans, I suspect that
 we will be running more and more of our conferences virtually in
 the future, especially in CS.  I'm curious to see how much
 progress has been made in the last eighteen months and how much
 room we have to grow.

 This topic is even on the program!  Tomorrow's lineup concludes
 with Crista Lopes speaking on
<a href="https://thestrangeloop.com/2021/the-future-of-conferences.html">
   the future of conferences</a>.
 She's been thinking about and helping to implement conferences
 in new ways for a few years, so I look forward to hearing what
 she has to say.

 Whatever the current state of virtual conferences, I fully expect
 that this conference will be a worthy exemplar.  It always is.

 So, I'm off to Strange Loop for a couple of days.  I'll be in my
 basement.
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