Scifoo Part 2

1. Scifoo WAS AMAZEBALLS.

2. Twitter is a narcissistic waste of time. Actually it is an amazing platform for letting groups of strangers spontaneously form around an issue. For example, I wanted to meet with people for a beer beforehand, but didn’t know anyone. Searching on twitter for “scifoo” revealed there were people meeting by the hotel pool. Converted!

3. Everyone was spectacular. You meet this introverted scientist who talks about his latest quantum this, or cosmological that. Can you work out that he sold a 10M copies of a book on cats?

4. An astrophysicist lamented not bringing a telescope. So one of the organisers says “Google needs a telescope” and buys a 10 inch telescope on the spot and we start looking at Saturn!

5. Google provided unlimited food, alcohol, and ice cream. Everyone got a smart watch.

6. The toilet seats were heated and there were little fake campfires to sit around. The campfires and the toilets were in different locations.

7. The best talks featured:

a. Building a telescope for finding non-equilibrium chemistry (life) on other worlds.

b. Spending 2 months a walking a backhoe 50 miles through the Sahara desert because of a broken axel.

c. This guy who really loved fungi.

d. Evolving robots!

8. The format was really effective for seeding discussions. I used it to explore the question – would you wear wearable tech?

9. I learned that introductions should be a striptease. For example:

What do you do?
I make rubber bands
There must be a trick…..
Do you know what a rubber band is?
Yes
Do you know what Bluetooth is?
Yes
We make rubber bands with Bluetooth.
I knew it! So what do they do then?
Blah blah blah.

10. I would kill to go again.

Scifoo

I am hopping on a plane to Scifoo in a few hours.

What is this?

Scifoo is an “un-conference” put on by Nature, O’Reilly Media, Digital Science, and Google. They invite between 200-300 people every year to the Googleplex and talk about everything.

No. Really. Everything. There are proposed sessions on astronomy, politics, engineering, economics, ethics, art, education, computer theory, disease, maths, lobbying, and magic. That’s just scratching the surface.

The format?

We show up at Google. Talk about what we intend to talk about. Talk about it. Talk about the process of talking about it. Talk about it some more. Then talk about all the things we just talked about.

I think I have died and gone to heaven.

What’s the point?

The top minds on the planet all in one place having an intellectual orgy? If you have to ask stop reading right now and go drag your knuckles through the cave back to your uncooked protein lying bludgeoned on the floor.

What’s my plan?

Meet everyone. I want to learn about the most esoteric subjects, I want to really understand if calcium had a role in the development of macroeconomic theory in the 16^th century. I want to introduce the world to StretchSense and our vision of the future. I want to leverage minds wiser than mine to learn how to truly promote scientific and technological concepts into the classroom, the media, and the marketplace.

Blog. Scifoo runs for 19 hours a day but I am going to valiantly try to keep a diary and communicate my experiences. I think people will be interested and it will help consolidate my thoughts. Maybe I need to take a breathalyser and chart my blood alcohol content next to each post….

Am I excited?

Yes I am excited.

http://www.digital-science.com/sciencefoo/