Science Comedian

SciFoo 2008: Panoramic Images

September 17th, 2008

I took a decent num­ber of pic­tures at Sci­Foo.  Luck­ily, I had the fore­sight to take a few series of shots – and, even luck­ier, I have a girl­friend who is a Pho­to­shop Wizard.

It’s not always pos­si­ble to merge images per­fectly since the cam­era is chang­ing posi­tion for each shot, but the results are pretty cool.  In fact, the arti­facts of the merg­ing process are fas­ci­nat­ing, too.  Look for the seams.

The first image is from the open­ing ses­sion.  Tim O’Reilly, Timo Han­nay, Sara Winge, and Chris DiBona can be seen up front, address­ing the crowd.  Also promi­nent, to my eye, are Gar­rett Lisi’s bald head on the far right and Simon Quellen Field’s well-appointed head in semi-profile left of center.

Click through for big­ger versions…

The next image is Google’s large indoor open space referred to as Charlie’s, if I’m not mis­taken.  Paul Davies and Chris Patil are promi­nent and the cafe­te­ria area is in the background…

The final image is from the Sci­Foo clos­ing ses­sion.  Once again, Sara, Tim, Chris, and Timo are up front.  Aniruddh Patel is near-center because he was sit­ting next to me before I stood to take these pics.

Jim Hardy – as promised, the wait­ing is over, here is your prize – you have the dis­tinc­tion of appear­ing not once, but twice in this image.  Yes, by virtue of your rest­less­ness, you have been cloned.  In fact, there were orig­i­nally three of you but one was removed.  To speak to you in your own lan­guage:  like pluripo­tent stem cells, you dif­fer­en­ti­ated into three dif­fer­ent germ Pho­to­shop lay­ers.  But only two were harvested…

Thank you, Tara.  

Science Foo Camp 2008: Chapter 2 – The Hotel

September 16th, 2008

The Sci­Foo expe­ri­ence begins before the first ses­sion – even before we get to the Google­plex (Get thee to the Googleplex!).

There was the Wiki, as pre­vi­ously dis­cussed, for first vir­tual encoun­ters.  Then Sci­Foo week­end arrived.

On Fri­day after­noon, my taller half and I checked into the Wild Palms Hotel in Sun­ny­vale.  Sadly, jeal­ously, Tara would not be join­ing me at the uncon­fer­ence.  As I frol­icked at the vast Google empire, she’d be get­ting to know every square inch of our lit­tle hotel room.  Whereas I’d be inter­act­ing with 200 sci­en­tists and sci­ence and sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers, she’d be inter­fac­ing with a stack of sci­ence and sci­ence fic­tion books.  I’d have Neal Stephen­son; she’d have The Dia­mond Age.  I’d have Ann Druyan; she’d have Shad­ows of For­got­ten Ances­tors.

Shut­tles would begin fer­ry­ing campers to the Google­plex around 5:15pm.  Tara and I went down to the hotel lobby a lit­tle early to join the gath­er­ing crowd.  We rounded a cor­ner and bumped right into Esther and George Dyson, sit­ting exactly as cap­tured here in their nat­ural habi­tat by Betsy Devine.  They were very sweet and wished us first-timers a great experience.

Min­utes later, Prab­hat Agar­wal intro­duced him­self.  Prab­hat is a for­mer condensed-matter physi­cist who now works for the Future and Emerg­ing Tech­nolo­gies Unit at the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion.  His job is to iden­tify and sup­port new areas of information-related sci­ence, and he told us about his per­sonal inter­est in how we rec­og­nize some­thing as new.  I’m still con­vinced that we rely mostly on the new-concept smell.

Jim Hardy has a pic from a few min­utes later of Tara and me talk­ing to Brian Cox and his wife Gia Mili­novich.  Tara and Gia are in oppo­si­tion, and I’m nearly totally eclipsed by Brian.  John Gilbey’s left eye makes a spe­cial uncred­ited appear­ance.  [Jim sends along this link to a big­ger ver­sion]

This was the first of sev­eral con­ver­sa­tions I’d have with Brian and Gia.  Brian is a par­ti­cle physi­cist who works on the ATLAS exper­i­ment at the Large Hadron Col­lider at CERN in Geneva.  Gia calls her­self a sci­ence groupie and broad­caster.  She’s worked on some pretty cool stuff like the CERN pod­cast and Walk­ing with Robots and the new X-Files movie.

They are not only a cou­ple but also a cou­ple of the peo­ple I’d see the most through­out the week­end.  We ended up in a lot of the same ses­sions, although I was sorry to miss Brian’s LHC session.

We talked a bit about the LHC and laughed about the well-publicized fear that it would cre­ate micro-black holes that would destroy the Earth.  Although there is a chance that MBH’s will be cre­ated, it would require that the uni­verse con­tain a few extra unseen dimen­sions, an aspect that is wished for by string the­o­rists and oth­ers but still unproven (at least by us ter­rans in our local 4-dimensional space­time realm).  Also, if cre­ated, the black holes would be so small and likely dis­ap­pear so quickly (due to Hawk­ing Radi­a­tion) that they may be unde­tectable by the LHC’s sen­sors.  A far cry from devour­ing the planet.

For an excel­lent fic­tional treat­ment of a sim­i­lar cat­a­stro­phe on Mars, check out Larry Niven’s Hugo Award-winning short story, The Hole Man.  Much fun!

A few min­utes before we started board­ing the shut­tles, Steve Goldfin­ger intro­duced him­self to me and Tara.  He lives up in the Marin area, as I recall, and we live in SF.  Steve is co-founder of Global Foot­print Net­work.  We sat together on the ride to the Google­plex, dis­cussing sus­tain­abil­ity (his field) and sci­ence com­edy (mine).

Steve also men­tioned hav­ing been impressed with some sci­ence fic­tion by Kim Stan­ley Robin­son – although we laughed when he acci­den­tally called him “Kim Stan­ley Ander­sen,” which I sug­gested was a mash-up with Hans Chris­t­ian Andersen.

I don’t know which Robin­son work he was talk­ing about but sus­tain­abil­ity was a major theme (which it often is for Robin­son) and it was not the Mars Tril­ogy (per­haps the Three Cal­i­for­nias Tril­ogy or his most recent nov­els Forty Signs of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below).

As we arrived at Google, Steve and I exchanged busi­ness cards.  I had a great time chat­ting with him, but after we left the shut­tle, I only ever saw him in pass­ing per­haps once more.

Tara reads Niven & Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye. On the night­stand: Asimov's The God's Them­selves, Sagan & Druyan's Shad­ows of For­got­ten Ances­tors, Farmer's To Your Scat­tered Bod­ies Go, Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight. Tara is a vora­cious reader.

Darlene Malow June 29, 1937 – Sept. 4, 2008

September 15th, 2008

Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001:  I spent most of the day at my mother’s bed­side, at St. Luke’s Epis­co­pal Hos­pi­tal, in Hous­ton, Texas.  That may sound like an odd place for a fam­ily of Jews to gather, but St. Luke’s is home to the Texas Heart Insti­tute and is widely con­sid­ered one of the best med­ical cen­ters in the country.

Under the direc­tion of Dr. Den­ton Coo­ley (famous for hav­ing per­formed the first suc­cess­ful human heart trans­plant in the U.S. in 1968, and also the first to implant an arti­fi­cial heart in a man in 1969), the Texas Heart Insti­tute has per­formed over 100,000 open heart pro­ce­dures – sev­eral of which I know more about than I wish I did.

My fam­ily is all too famil­iar with the halls of St. Luke’s, ever since my father’s first heart attack in 1984, his sec­ond ten years later, and the inti­mate rela­tion­ship that saw him on and off the heart trans­plant wait­ing list until, ulti­mately, he’d been the recip­i­ent of a new – well, not new but used – heart in 1996.

So, by the time my mother suf­fered a stroke on August 24, 2001, just a cou­ple weeks before 9/11, we’d already had a 17-year rela­tion­ship with that institute.

Inter­est­ingly, on the first floor of St. Luke’s Hos­pi­tal – I kid you not – there is a McDonald’s restau­rant…  as if to guar­an­tee a flow of patients.  It’s a strange but not uncom­mon expe­ri­ence to see peo­ple stand­ing in line with rolling IV’s.  It has always made me pic­ture every­one in line with IV’s, oxy­gen masks, in wheel­chairs, on gur­neys and full rolling hos­pi­tal beds, buy­ing Quar­ter Pounders with Cheese, french fries, and Cokes.

Thanks, in part, to that sort of diet, my father was only 47 when he had his first heart attack.

That’s an inter­est­ing phrase:  “his first heart attack.”  May it never enter your vocabulary.

For years now, as I’ve grown closer and closer to that fate­ful age, I’ve won­dered what’s brew­ing inside me.  My father was over­weight, a cig­a­rette smoker, and a worka­holic.  And I’m none of those things.  But how much is genetic and how much environmental?

My mother was also over­weight, a smoker, and led a seden­tary lifestyle.  Her stroke, at 64, was dev­as­tat­ing, life-changing.  She would never fully recover.

My father passed away three months after her stroke, hav­ing lived with his sec­ond heart – a stranger’s heart – beat­ing in his chest for five and a half years.

At his funeral, two men intro­duced them­selves to me.  They were also mem­bers of St. Luke’s Heart Exchange pro­gram – the sup­port group for recip­i­ents and those on the wait­ing list and their fam­i­lies.  They told me they had received the hearts just before and just after my dad’s.  His death must have been por­ten­tous to them.  I’ve often won­dered how they’ve fared with their new hearts.

My mother’s phys­i­cal state sta­blized, but in the sub­se­quent years her men­tal state would decline and plateau, decline and plateau.  Vas­cu­lar demen­tia ate away at her mind and, by the end, per­haps Alzheimer’s, too.  They’re known to pal around together.

On Thurs­day, Sept. 4, 2008, at 2:50pm, seven years and eleven days after her stroke, my mother passed away, with sev­eral of us gath­ered around her bed­side for the final hours.  I was hold­ing her hand.  My girl­friend, Tara,  was hold­ing my other hand.  There was one false alarm, when we thought she had drawn her last breath.  Shari, my mom’s care­giver, said, “She’s gone, baby.”  We cried some more but then she sur­prised us by mov­ing again.  She still had another five or ten min­utes of life in her.

We’re a stub­born lot, the Malows.

At her funeral, my sis­ter read part of an old love let­ter my father had writ­ten to my mother even before they were mar­ried 50 years ago.  He said, “You never get used to miss­ing someone.”

I guess I’ll have to get used to that.

My mom was, truly, a mom.  Her life was devoted to rais­ing her two chil­dren – the come­dian and the lawyer.  And, when we grew up and flew from the nest – giv­ing her less and less to work with – she never gave up on us but she began rais­ing dogs (Bichon Frises), mid­wif­ing a cou­ple lit­ters a year.  She also did res­cue work for orphaned and abused dogs.  On the phone, she’d lis­ten to my sis­ter prac­tice every one of her clos­ing argu­ments as she read­ied for a trial.  And every time I per­formed in Hous­ton, she came to the com­edy club and laughed as if it were the first time she’d heard the “clas­sic” jokes.

From the audi­ence and from the din­ing room table, I’ll miss her laugh.