Something funny happened in a talk yesterday that reminded me of my 2007 note “CAUTION: RACE HORSES”. Sven Leyffer, a senior figure and indeed currently the President of SIAM, showed a photo of his research group and said

“This is joint work with a lot of young people that make me look really really –“

at which point I assumed the next word would be a self-deprecating “old”.

Instead, the next word was “good”. So self-deprecation was achieved by the reverse of the logic I expected.

In Cultural Amnesia Clive James says Edward Gibbon is exasperating because he perpetually constructs sentences whose meanings you can’t figure out until the last few words. In this case, charmingly, I knew from the start what the deeper meaning had to be, just not the details of how Sven was going to get us there.

[30 June 2023]