New Year’s Memoir – 2024 Edition
November
Sometimes I can be quite frustrated when I finally settle in for a good work stint after staccato work interspersed with conferences and family visits. So here I was, about to get into the Ethics Wiki stage of the project because formal-informal aligned definitions with hyperlinks seem preferable to lengthy .kif files and fitting everything into the official SUMO ontology1Some parts of the ontology probably should/will make it in. And then my Ph.D. defense was announced to be on Wednesday, November 29th. I was also asked to help lead some exercise sessions for an AI course at CTU for mechanical engineering students this month. None of us knew much about the process. Generally, a 20 minute presentation for “lay-researchers” was needed and to re-read my thesis to be up-to-date on what I did way back in 2018 😆🤓.
Meanwhile, back to the photos. Lasse Blaauwbroek came to Prague and presented some latest work related to The Tactician, which does online learning to assist with proofs in the Coq proof assistant. Below is a representation of the mathematical universe where objects are sized proportional to their usage.
Alcoholic hot chocolate is quite delicious.
We finally saw the Blacklight Theater, which I’ve seen signs advertising for years. The show was surprisingly artistic with gags for kids and esoteric dances with adults. I won’t disrecommend it 🙂.
At a small Centrála party, I saw a friendly face doing his first live act. It was pretty nice. Congratulations, HANZZZ.
True Detective’s birthday party set was a blast. He showcased his multi-genre flair going from techno through disco and even into psytrance a bit 😉.
There are also artsy friends who organize different kinds of low-key parties. This one, Switch Sessions, commemorates the 1973′ Athens Uprising and was held on Struggle for Freedom and Democracy Day, a Czech public holiday.
Before to the party, I spent my day working on my own ‘freedom’ from the Ph.D. apprenticeship, aiming to become a voting member of the academic review process 👨🎓.
The Fenix Festival Remembrance party lived up to my expectations from the warm-up party in Spring. If anything, I might find them more open socially than the festival 🫣😝. This time they had a bed + couch at the side of the dance floor, which is a dreamy touch. Anna came with me and learned the joys of psytrance parties and their atmospheres, so my dream of the psy-party date came to fuller fruition. A really cute cherry on top is that a girl I’d asked out in the past remembered and congratulated me on finding a partner, wishing us well 🥰. If one is going to check out psytrance parties, I highly recommend one like this as a first.
On the way to balfolk, I passed by Julian. I’d seen a friend raving about this lovely chap and was thrilled to see him live. The guitar and cheery vibes are pretty good. 😊
And allow me to introduce another of Anna’s bands: Čtvrt na Smrt, a non-folk band. This concert celebrated the release of their new album, which is apparently done by baptizing it on stage.
The following Sunday, there was an event, Solidarity Beyond Borders to support queer SWANA refugees. The term SWANA was new to me and stands for, “South & West Asian & North African”. I like it. The term “Middle East” has always seemed strange to me. The SWANA music-infused edm was really good and new dance-friends were made 😀 😀 :D.
As to the Ph.D. defense, I’d hoped it could be a warm and fuzzy ceremony where esteemed researchers recognize my contributions as valid and believe that I did the work I claim to do.
I found the state exam at CTU to be quite pretentiously obnoxious with some Kafka-esque elements, e.g., asking me to choose a list of 9/25 topics to be grilled on at a “master’s level”. Each topic had a one-line description and it “would be unfair” to tell me any further details as to what they actually expect. In practice, they follow a pretty simple outline and the questions are not that hard, so it would probably be “too easy” if they actually told us what we should know by heart. Studying for a vague yet strict oral exam was psychologically rather taxing. The good news is that I was one of the last to receive this treatment. A junior Ph.D. student says that they’ve revised the system into a more reasonable one: now one presents on the first half of one’s thesis and is questioned on theory related to one’s work. Three cheers for sanity!
The next piece of good news is that here the defense seems to be relatively chill thanks to the pre-filter of the state exam. My constructive critique committee 2Usually called ‘opponents’. had overall favorable reviews and asked reasonable questions about the work, without much critical feedback. So after some discussion and questions from the lay-researchers, the defense was done and I graduated to the level of voting academic 🤓. It probably went about as well as it could with heartfelt warm fuzziness :D.
In Czech-style, we celebrated with beer. Bless the stout.
A friend-of-a-friend from a psytrance party invited us to a Meet Factory open day where we could see what the resident artists are working on, which felt like a cute way to celebrate.
This artsy American style was cutely refreshing. The ghostly opossum ~