Sampling FOCS

Rahul Santhanam reports from Philadelphia.

I'm in Philly for FOCS, and will be reporting on the extravaganza for this blog, including the drama and suspense of the talks ("Will there be heckling?" "Will he make an Obama joke?" "Will she break the 20-minute barrier?") and the drunken revelry of the business meeting. Typically, I have a few simple rules for attending talks:

1. No conflicts with my regular 4 am - noon bedtime.
2. Attending a double-digit number of talks is just as good as attending no talks at all.
3. The title better have the word "complexity" in it.

But with my reporting duties as an excuse, I've resolved to discard my old inertial lifestyle and tax my brain with the new and unfamiliar. Facility location, electronic commerce, quantum entangled games – bring it on!

You could help me with this. If you're a theory junkie who couldn't make it here and there's some talk you really wanted to hear, let me know and I might be able to give you some idea – the barest idea, or at the very least a fictional idea, of what it was like to be there…