an hectic trip!

The trip to Hamburg had started inauspiciously: a heart attack (someone else’s heart) in the métro (RER) has frozen the train traffic completely on Tuesday and I was lucky to find a taxi that managed to drive me to the airport in the nick of time. As there were warnings of strike in the Hamburg airport today, I decided to pack early and left DESY long enough in advance to reach the aiport by public transportation: it is only once I cleared security and sat at the gate that I realised I had forgotten my PC power box/cord in my room at DESY. What a drag! Anyway, I managed to buy a universal adapter in Paris on my way back from the airport and still to attend Adam Johansen’s seminar on Rao-Blackwellisation of particle filters at the Big’MC seminar. An interesting exploitation of missing variable structures within missing variables in a hidden Markov chain! (I missed the reason for the O(NM) computing time, though.) On the way home, I reflected on how little I had seen of Hamburg: a nice train system, a green and pleasant suburban area south of DESY towards the Elben (Groß Flottbeck), while running this morning, and…the airport! I wish I had had the opportunity and the time to get a glimpse of downtown Hamburg.