I found this sign one one of many abandoned buildings in Canberra, which not only appeals to my affection for the walking (or writhing) undead, but is suspiciously apt. Not that the city is a burned-out husk or anything. In fact, it’s pathologically clean, neat and orderly. It just… has a certain feeling that it was made to hold far more people than live here, and something Stepfordish has happened to the rest, and the remaining Australians have abandoned their, um, more Australian characteristics to live out lives of urban planning and business casual and faux-Irish pubs in office blocks.
Still, the weather has been fantastic. High 20s every day and barely a cloud in the sky. I’m already sunburned.
The Machine Learning Summer School has been great. While not every session is applicable to me, I’ve gotten a lot out of hearing Bernhard Schölkopf talk about kernels and Satinder Singh talk about Reinforcement Learning. They’re the kind of people you want to hear at this kind of thing: experts who have the skills (mad skills, some would say) to present the information clearly, and with an infectious enthusiasm for the material.
Link to my Canberra pics.