CS people in ties?

As noted above, I'm currently at the yearly conference for computer scientists in Germany. If you think of CS types you think of geeks, or at least I do, being a geek myself. Geeks don't tend to give much attention to how they look, I used to think. And the GI conferences have been legendary. Okay, Manfred Broy's tie collection is legendary, but he used to be pretty much the only one sporting a tie every day of the conference and they were outrageous ones. But I remember Leslie Lamport at the conference in Hamburg many years ago, dressed in a geek T-Shirt and ratty tennis shoes and nailing the suit-wearing speaker on incorrect mathematics, or Christiane Floyd madly knitting in the front row of the Kaiserslautern conference on the military uses of computing.

It's day 2 of the conference here, and the place is full of suits and ties. Even women are running around in pinstriped skirt-suits. Pretty much only the students have T-Shirts, and that is because it is the helper's uniform.

Oh, wait - there's a geek with unruly hair, a bit of a tummy and a T-Shirt! Cool, he's a local professor! But I'm worried about computing people dressing up like this - we should be focussed on how to develop systems, how to solve problems, and how to think about how our technology will affect the world and whether we really want a world like that.