Last day of the conference

Today is the last day of the conference. It has a bit annoying that the wireless network that I worked so hard to get working in the conference centre has seemingly been sabotaged by one of the conference participants and started only operating as a peer-to-peer network which wouldn't go out onto the Internet.

Apparently, someone from Italy was asking the IT guys a lot of questions about the network and they tried to avoid answering them, but he must have somehow got to the server and mucked it up. As it is was Friday afternoon before the problem was discovered they couldn't get anyone out from the company (they work business hours only) , so we have been without it. Of course, I was able to go to the Guest House (as I did in the lunch break) but that meant that I couldn't work on composing emails etc during the more boring papers, as I had been earlier in the week. There were papers in every session that I wanted to attend, the day was very full.

I am also rather tired as Xenia and the rest of the student group persuaded me to go out with them the last night. It was actually great fun, although it resulted in my going to bed very late and I decided not to set an alarm this morning. I also didn't walk, but used my lunch break to go out for a walk. The weather today is very hot and sunny and I am actually relieved that it hasn't been this hot all week - I would not have been able to climb the archaeological site in this temperature I don't think.

This morning was interesting. Rochel was the keynote speaker and she was talking at first about simple number concepts and arithmetic. Later in the talk she started to talk about rational number and in particular, fractions. Before long she was mentioning the difference between ordering, equivalence and addition of fractions and whole numbers, making more or less the exact same comments I had made at the start of my talk. She then got to the next slide which said that there had already been evidence of this in the conference and cited: Humberstone and Reeve!! I was taken aback to see my name in 'lights'. After the session, she and I actually missed part of the subsequent address to talk about how much our work overlaps. It seems that she would like me to actually present a paper at Rutgers and would very much like me to go over as many Tuesdays as I am at Princeton to attend a cognitive science lunch followed by a meeting. I am quite honoured that she is interacting as positively with me as she is and I can see that we could actually get quite a lot done together.

In the evening we had the Conference Farewell Dinner. The food was excellent and for the first time since arriving in Greece, I indulged in the desserts. There were baklava and hemispherical chocolate-covered chocolate mousse. I walked back with Janet and Jerry Fodor and Gerd Gigerenza at about midnight, but it was well after 1.00pm before I went to sleep. I will need to catch up on sleep in Athens where I will be from Sunday night. I am travelling with Konstantinos in his car.

At the dinner, we were entertained by traditional dancers who were 3rd generation refugees from 'Asia minor'. I will attempt to upload some movies of the dances and also pictures of the other characters mentioned in the Blog tomorrow when I have a cable connection in the hotel.