I had the pleasure of getting an assignment at this highly interesting event.

It was very well organised, with a speakers’ room with refreshments that I was asked to show up in for a briefing on the day before. Except it didn’t take place due to adverse weather having put paid to the travel plans of the German finalist (number 3 on the list) I was assigned to. So one has to improvise, which I did by grabbing last year’s finalists’ catalogue on the way out to get a feel for the kind of submissions.

The usual organisational stress of such large events made sure that I received the slide deck for the presentation at 1:50am on the day, by which time I was fast asleep, compulsory for a job that requires maximum concentration because every word matters.

On the day I was needed for the Q&A session after the presentation, and this is where we came across ‘root mean square error‘ and ‘Ausgleichungsrechnung’, or ‘curve-fitting‘, as it is known in English, at which point I would love to talk about how different language communities name things… and about curve-balls.