As many of you know, I will be heading to Burning Man this weekend. That’ll put a crimp in my blogging for a week since I won’t be bringing my tablet to the playa.
There are a lot of misconceptions about Burning Man, often propagated by those who have never attended, but sometimes propagated by those who have attended and did not understand the event. It is often characterized as a lot of drugged out former hippies walking around nude. Certainly you might find a few, but walk the halls of Congress and you’ll find the same (except for the nude part perhaps). Heck, our president is an ex-coke abuser.
In reality, Burning man is more of a music/arts festival and an experiment in radical participatory community and survival. Heck, even the CEO of Google has been in attendance in the past.
In any case, just to show how tame this temporary community can be, I was going over the events calendar and found this gem: Daily Mathematics Discussion/Presentations/Lectures Detail. Sweet!
Oh you know this geek will be there. I may even give a short presentation as I’ve always liked discussing the Monty Hall Problem. It’s a very simple problem, but there are always holdouts who love to argue against the correct answer. Besides, I should keep it simple. You really can’t expect to engage a bunch of drugged out nude hippies in deeper conversations about the whether axiom of choices should truly be accepted as an axiom of set theory.