Oh Happy (Mon)day!

I’d like to begin by saying that coming to INFORMS always makes me happy. It’s one of those things I look forward to every year. To prove it to you, here’s a photo of me at Miami International Airport right when I was about to go through security on Saturday:

Today was one of those especially happy days with many good/happy things going on:

1) I found out that John Turner (former CMU classmate) won the Dantzig Award. Amazing accomplishment! Congratulations John! I had a good feeling when I decided to attend his presentation yesterday. Can I call it, or can I call it?

2) I found out that my friends from the University of los Andes in Colombia (I went there to teach a mini-course on CP two weeks before INFORMS) won the Railway Applications Section (RAS) Challenge. Great job team KOPPA! Well deserved!

3) Got some amazing feedback on my talk about Semantic Typing this afternoon. Thanks to all of you who attended and offered comments, suggestions, and pointers to related research.

4) Attended the Tepper School of Business alumni reception and caught up with some of my grad school friends.

5) Discovered that the Social Networking Panel (MC03) was videotaped, so I’ll be able to watch it online (YouTube, I guess?).

6) Had a great time during a tweetup with (in alphabetical order of Tweeter IDs) @mlesz1 (Mary L.), @MrBoJensen, @parubin, and @tdhopper. That meeting included, among other things: me serving as witness to help Mary believe that Paul’s evil twin indeed exists, me learning how to pronounce Mary’s last name, and a group photo in which @MrBoJensen gets hugged. I wish I had had the chance to talk to @bjarnimax, but that will have to wait till another time. At least now I know what everyone’s voices sound like, and I will get all the tall-person jokes by/about @tdhopper going forward.

7) On top of all this, I had a great lunch at Halcyon. Did you know they are a “from farm to fork” restaurant? They don’t even have a fridge! Everything you eat there has been brought in on the same day from local farmers. Here’s a funny dialog I participated in: Me: “Do you have freshly squeezed OJ?”, Waiter: “Hmm…it’s not freshly squeezed in the sense it wasn’t squeezed here. But it was squeezed today, locally.”, Me: “OK. That’ll do.” As I waited for my food (which was delicious, by the way), I couldn’t stop thinking about the OR issues: what are the logistics behind their daily deliveries? Does the fresh food really taste better because it’s so fresh (I’ve never had a better tasting lettuce in my entire life), or is our perception biased by the fact that we know it’s fresh? Anyone care to perform an experiment to test this?