I stayed in a dormitory residence at the university, that was quite humbling. It's a bit like being back in college, with communal restrooms and everything!:
The best part was that mine was the only door with a plaque on it. It indicated that I was staying in what had been, in 1974, "Puff's Place". Honest. Puff's Place.
These are vaguely out of order, and I'm really too lazy to re-sort them. These are a few of the very cool people I met and frolicked with at the conference. I don't know much about the guy on the far left, but the others are (from left, in the last photo) a guy who sells cryonics insurance, a very catholic transhumanist, a great guy who runs imminst.org, and a guy who (I think) runs longevitymeme.com. All really swell people.
One of the coolest things about Toronto was the fact that they had amazing architecture right in the middle of the skyscrapers. Strangely, even the skyscrapers were aesthetically superior to most of the ones I've seen.
This building said "Department of Hovsehold Science". Did they really have household sciences before they had the U?
One of my absolute favorite things about Toronto was the fact that almost everything in the university area was covered in ivy. I mean covered. It was breathtaking.
Speaks for itself. The storefront had 1 old-fashioned black barber's chair in the middle of a clean empty room. It may just as easily have been to bleed people:
More neat touristy architecture and the like. I think that tall needlte thing is the CN Tower. According to the very fabulous Jeff who gave me a brief tour in the small amount of free time that I had, the tower does nifty things for relaying signals around Ontario. As an aside, I've known Jeff online since about 1995 or 1996, and he was just as cool in person as I expected him to be!
Toronto has a lot of neat little ethnic areas. Chinatown was right near the University, so I got to wander down there quite a bit. I dined one evening in their Little Italy (with Jeff), and also got to see their large Korean section. Very interesting city.
Some more random shots of the university and surrounding area. That ivy - my god. It's so wonderful!
In Canada, grey squirrels are totally black. But they all ran away when I tried to take a picture.
A flyer for the conference!
This was spraypainted all over the city's sidewalks. My only thought when I saw it was that I question women all the time. They're insane. (I didn't realize my foot was in the shot!)
I walked past this building many times before I took a closer look at the roof. That was painted on!
More random touristy stuff. IVY!!!!
This was a nifty sculpture that was just like one of those hollow masks they showed me in psychophysics, where even though it's backwards, your brain reconstructs it as though it were 3-dimensional in the right way!
The first day of the conference was a separate symposium that took place within Trinity College at the university. It was gorgeous, but I didn't really get any photos inside the lecture room.
More random bits of architecture and ivy:
Another flyer!
I have no idea why this doesn't exist in Oregon.
Ads in Toronto seem more obnoxious than they are in the US:
There was a shoe museum. You heard me correctly. A shoe museum.
If you don't recognize this bar, you might be an alien. Chrissy and Janet were nowhere to be found.
They don't mince words in Canada:
The last of the touristy bits:
I also stopped briefly at the very cool Merril Collection of Science Fiction in the Toronto public library. It was very impressive, even though they don't let people browse through the climate-controlled collection!
