Copenhagen wrap-up

The keynote yesterday led to an interesting discussion.

Early in your lecturing career, you may be interested mostly in avoiding embarrassing disasters and making a decent showing. And for this reason, you might breathe a sigh of relief if the questions aren’t that tough.

After a certain point, however, you’ll be confident in avoiding huge disaster because you’ve done this enough times and there haven’t been any (or at least not many) big disasters. At that point, you’ll really start to love the tough questions, even when they’re phrased with a grain of hostility. They give you new problems to chew on, and usually you can either find a solution on your feet, or after just a few hours’ thought, and it leads to more refined ideas the next time.

There were several nice tough questions yesterday (and none involved any hostility; this is Denmark, after all).

That was also perhaps the best acoustics of any small lecture hall I’ve ever spoken in. The microphone was barely necessary, and it was easy for everyone in the house to hear every audience question clearly. Or at least it was when I was in the audience the previous day, for the other keynote, and so I assume it was the same during mine.

My next talk is in Barcelona on March 30.