view from a hotel window

I'm in Groningen in the Netherlands for Brainspiration 2024.  This will be my last international conference before I retire, and it looks like it will be very interesting.  However, I have some free time today before the event starts, so I'm off for a bit of an explore.

that's the conference venue: not far to walk!

view from a hotel window

I'm at the University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands, ready to be part of the committee at a PhD defence tomorrow.  This is the first time I've been to a face to face defence in over two years.  I was supposed to go to one in Norway last December, but then Omicron struck.  I'm looking forward to an event not filtered through a small zoom rectangle.

UTwente has a hotel on campus: very convenient!

view from a hotel window

A collegue and I have spent the day visiting CogniGron, the Groningen Cognitive Systems and Materials Center.  We have been talking about our work on evaluating substrates for Reservoir Computing, and hearing about their work in neuromorphic computing, AI, dynamical systems, memristors, and more.  A very impressive team, and lots of fascinating work!

Here’s the view from my hotel window this morning:

the future's orange

Faith in humanity restored (for now).

Dutch election: Wilders defeat celebrated by PM Rutte

my, what big hands you have!

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green

Day two in Amsterdam.

I thought this was a lot of bikes:

suddenly bikes! 1000s of them!

until I saw this:

multi-storey bike park

My second day at CCS, and today I had lots of choice of what to go to, as there were 16 parallel sessions.  To expand my range, I chose the morning workshop on Fractional Calculus, followed by the afternoon workshop on Complexity for History and History for Complexity. Then it was the conference dinner: a magnificent Chinese meal on a multi-storey boat.

if this is Tuesday, it must be Amsterdam

So I’m now in Amsterdam, for the Conference on Complex Systems.

The view from my hotel window this morning shows how convenient it is for the station:

maybe a little too convenient for the station?

Today was our second EvoEvo project workshop, with lots of interesting talks about the evolution of evolution, mostly in in silico models.

weird view

I arrived last night in Leiden, to spend the coming week at the Lorentz Centre meeting on An Emerging Technological and Societal Transition: Preparing for the Post-Industrial World. It promises to be very interesting.

Along with most of the delegates, I’m staying at the Van der Valk Hotel Leiden (I have the tune Eye Level running through my head a lot, for some reason).  I’m in room 410, which you might think is on the 4th floor.  But no.  Rooms 1xx are on the ground floor, rooms 2xx are on the first floor, rooms 3xx are on the second floor, and rooms 4xx are … in the basement. Surely that's below sea level here?!

So I saw a rather peculiar view from my hotel window when I opened the curtains this morning.

fake grass being grazed by a fake sheep

airports lie

I had a nice hop over to Amsterdam on Friday (flew out Thursday night, flew back Friday night) for an interesting Colloquium.

Here’s the obligatory photo from my hotel bedroom window, in the centre of Amsterdam:

There were three pieces of information about Schipol airport that, when taken together, could be have been problematical.

Easyjet boarding pass: Gate closes 30 minutes prior to departure
Board announcing departure gate initially: Gate is announced 40 minutes prior to departure
Board announcing departure gate later: walking time from here to gate, 26 minutes

Fortunately there are two lies in that information.
The gate opens less than 30 minutes prior to departure.
The walking time was more like 10 minutes.

However, I did spend a considerable amount of time walking around airports last week.

Dutch non-smoking rules

I'm stopping overnight in a hotel near Schiphol airport before travelling on to my meeting tomorrow.  As usual, I requested a no smoking room.  In Holland, that means something extra:

laminated sign in the hotel room