Some things I learned at the World Congress

1. Inflection makes a big difference to a public lecture.
   
2. If your lecture is about Talmud, don't give a blow-by-blow account of the sugya.
3. Germans and Spaniards speaking in English are often (though not always) very difficult to understand.
4. The Friedberg Genizah Project has a program that can match together Genizah fragments from the same codex. 30% success rate, whatever that means.
5. The Princeton University Sefer Hasidim Database will be available at the end of the month at this address.
6. The new edition of Midrash Shmuel, edited by Barchiyahu and the late Tirtsah Lifshitz, has been published. So has the second printing of Elazar Hurvitz's 2006 catalogue of Westminster College Genizah fragments (ואכמ"ל).
   
7. It's exhausting.
   
8. Not much about Halakhah in the Middle Ages.