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.