Tales from the Binding Workshop

Gave my talk yesterday, looking at differences in the acceptability of long-distance binding of seg and sin in Norwegian, which fitted in very nicely with the preceding talk, AND I was cited (different works too!) by two people in their papers :) (the two I most wanted to meet, and not only do I like their work, but they are both lovely people, and we're going to arrange me going to Oslo in May or so).

Us foreigners were then taken to the Blue Lagoon this evening, where we paddled about in bath-warm/hot water, covered ourselves in beneficial white mud (silica mud) in the lava pools created in the run-off from a power station down near Keflavik, I turned into Beetroot Face in the saunas and longed for snow to roll in, and then we had dinner. Somehow the conversation turned to people falling asleep in lectures, and we had a bit of a 'that's NOTHin'!' competition:

• I told about my student who didn't take notes, but would sit up straight watching me, and so was very obvious when he slept;
  
• Ken told about a small class where two students side by side listed to the same side as they slept, and the rest of the class tried to work out if there was a strange gravity effect there;
  
• I told about my first years, and the guy down the front who I used to lecture specifically for, trying to keep awake;
  
• Ken told about a postdoc's job application talk, where 5 of the 9 panel member audience fell asleep in one guy's talk, and then how he fell asleep in the most recent job talk where he was a panel member, and that person got the job;
  
• someone (Øystein?) told about a class with 3 students, one of whom was a maths student who used to read the newspaper and then fall asleep in class, until a maths topic arose;
  
• Helge told about a guy who had one student in his class, who fell asleep, and mentioned later that he didn't know whether he should keep talking or not;
  
• and Höski told about a guy giving a lecture, who was so tired he actually dozed off himself in the middle of his own talk!!
  

HAHAHAH!!!