MIT Talk

Posted byRandall 175 Comments on MIT Talk

(Note: Firefox crashed just as I was finishing this post. This is a terse recreation, as I’m about to collapse.)

I gave a talk at MIT yesterday (now the day before yesterday). It was wonderful. I had never really done this kind of thing before, but it went so much better than I expected. I had someone tell me afterward that my talk was better than the one by the Penny Arcade guys, and that I was funnier in real life than in the comic. It’s hard to imagine better praise than that.

The talk sold out early and the place was packed:

I was stalked by RoboRaptors and pelted with playpen balls (which fell from the ceiling in the middle of the talk, courtesy some mysterious party) :

Feeling a lot less tired than I look in this picture, I signed playpen balls (with jokes about spherical geometry), comic prints, tickets, and — at one point — breasts.

There are more pictures here.

Firefox keeps crashing. Here are some brief Things I Did:

– Made fun of audience member’s mom, said “fuck you” to some of the world’s top young computational linguists, and answered a question by whistling the “Katamari Damacy” theme.

– Finally managed to give davean credit for all his work, in public, in circumstances where he couldn’t escape. He pretended to be annoyed later, but only a little.

– Met lovely people who twirled burning things at high speeds out on the lawn at night.

Oh, and I don’t know of any video of the lecture yet, aside from one bit floating around. It should be out there somewhere. But hour-long videos with troubled audio are no fun — what I’d like to find is a transcript, like the one of the Penny Arcade talk (although those are a lot of work to create). But I’m content just remembering how cool it all was.

Thank you to everyone involved, and I’m sorry to everyone who I couldn’t give enough time to that night (after the lecture, I was meeting and talking to so many people that I had trouble keeping track of who was where and when, or who I was speaking with from one minute to the next). But it was a lot of fun. Let’s do this again sometime soon.

175 replies on “MIT Talk”

  3. Giving a talk at MIt, i too have never done such a thing in past. Touncycphe only thing I can say is try it and if you have additional question about it then all I can say is try then your question will be answered. thanks you for sharing it online.

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  8. aw, the photos are no longer at the link, nor at the link on the page suggested when you click on the link in your post. bummer.

    -steve

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  11. MIT Tech Talk (abbreviated Tech Talk) was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s official newspaper until September 2009 when it ceased publication. It was written and published by the MIT News Office, both in print and online, with print copies distributed throughout campus free of charge. The publication schedule was roughly weekly, with an issue out most Wednesdays during the academic term.

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