This evening I gave a talk at my friend Christine's fledgling Beer and Algorithms Club about oracle Turing machines and relativization. This is not my area1, so to feel more confident, I wrote down pretty much every word in advance.2 Let me know if you notice any glaring errors!
Anyway, I'm pretty excited about Beer and Algorithms. The "get together every week and discuss a paper we've all read in advance" idea had been tried in the past, but it didn't work very well because nobody would ever get through more than, like, half of the paper. But "trade off teaching a topic to the rest of the group, making liberal use of Christine's whiteboard" seems to be working much better. Hooray!
- My "area", insofar as I have one, seems to be explaining the use of
svn stto people in my research group. Well, that and the use of commas. - Lemme just warn ya -- the result is nowhere even close to good enough to be considered an "article", but it might pass muster as "long-winded crib notes".
