I recently went to a workshop on canonical quantum gravity in Warsaw, organized by Jerzy Kijowski and Jerzy Lewandowski, and I learned some interesting things. I'll talk about some of them in this issue, and some in the next.
Conferences are a funny thing.
On science newsgroups on the net, there is very little talk about conferences. This is probably because the people who really understand conferences are too busy flying from one conference to the next to post to newsgroups very often. Academic success is in part measured by the number of conference invitations one receives, the prestige of the conferences, and the type of invitation. For example, a big plenary lecture on an impressive stage, preceded by a little warmup where someone explains how great you are, counts for infinitely many talks in those parallel sessions where dozens of people get 10 minutes each to explain their work before the moderator begins to make little coughs indicating that it's time for the next one, while all the while people drift in and out in a feeble attempt to find the really interesting talks. Still, giving any sort of talk is regarded as better than giving none, so academics spend a lot of time doing this sort of thing.