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.   :)

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.

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.

I have MUCH more coming soon…  there were so many amazing sessions and people that I’ll be talking about in future posts.  Plus, some really cool pics and maybe a bit of audio and video.

Stay tuned and thanks for being patient.

I have other things to do, too, ya know?

It’s the latest episode so, for now, you can find it here.  When it gets moved to the archive, I’ll link to its permanent location.*

Thanks to everyone who took the time to speak to me!

* Update:  Here’s the podcast episode (21 August 2008) in mp3.  And also a text transcription.

He bought the insect, which was encased in a 40-50 million-year-old piece of amber, for £20 (about $37).

“It’s a rather unusual route to come by (a new species),” Harrington explained.

I guess eBay hasn’t identified all the bugs in their system.

Read the full story on BBC News

…Basement Universes aren’t just for basements any more! The Galactomatic-1000 comes with an attractive imitation wood-grain negative-matter case that makes it perfectly at home in your den or family room. The case reduces its total mass to zero, so you won’t have to worry about imploding your house into a black hole, or discoloring the walls with unattractive gravitational redshifts (**)…

(**) Although the Galactomatic-1000 has no mass, it still has volume, so a shipping and handling charge will apply.

- Carl Feynman,
Extropy #13

Once upon a time there was a little transhumanist magazine called Extropy.  I probably still have an issue or two around here somewhere. Most of the content was serious but I remember this one fake advertisement for The Galactomatic-1000 (TM) Basement Universe.  It was hysterical.  Science comedy at its best!

Written by Carl Feynman, computer engineer and son of Richard Feynman, the piece appeared in Extropy #13 (6:2), Third quarter 1994, page 39.

The magazine and the Extropy Institute itself are now defunct.  But god bless the internet for its archival uses.

Witness the glory of…  The Galactomatic-1000 (TM) Basement Universe!

Says Dan about me: “This guy is a longtime friend and a total pro. He’ll show me up, big time. I should actually be opening for him but it’s my show so tough monkeys.”

Actually, Dan is incredibly funny and inventive on stage, and the most prolific artist I know. He publishes a new cartoon EVERY DAY!  That’s seven new jokes a week, plus he draws them by hand in pen, scans them into the computer, and colors them himself.

We previously did a 10-state, 20-city, 30-show tour of political comedy (”Bizarro’s Politi-Comedy-a-Go-Go”) during the ill-fated last presidential election season, along with pals Michael Capozzola and Jeff Kreisler.  We had hoped to play a small part in unseating the incumbent, but, alas, failed.

However, this time, we are so certain to see a regime change that we don’t even feel the need to do political humor, per se.  Although you can always count on Dan to have some biting commentary on the state of the union.  This time, at the Onion.

Tickets for the Sept. 11 Purple Onion show can be purchased here.

Where to begin? How to capture the essence of such an overwhelming experience? Nature! O’Reilly! The Googleplex! 200 certified science geniuses! No less than four (4) Nobel Laureates! And other incomplete sentences!

By design, Science Foo Camp has no real agenda until we get there and create it, and even then, it’s completely flexible. But, about three months in advance, a wiki was established for everyone to post to with descriptions of ourselves and ideas for sessions we’d like to see or lead. This was a great opportunity to learn a little bit about our fellow campers and to be that much more prepared by the time we got there, since time would be so precious.

[Note to Lee Smolin: I’m not sure about the rest of the Universe but, at SciFoo, the flow of time is very real and very fast.]

If you ever get the chance to attend SciFoo, take advantage of the wiki. Start early. Most of the campers posted brief bios with their areas of research and interests and links to homepages, blogs, companies, and organizations.  For the ones that didn’t, there’s Google.  If they’re at SciFoo, you won’t have any trouble finding ’em. Most of them have Wikipedia entries.

My only wish for “improving” the amazing creature that is SciFoo would be to lengthen it just a bit. I want more!  Perhaps extend the Friday and Sunday to full days. Give us just a little extra time to take it all in. There are so many fascinating people, so many intriguing sessions.  There’s no way to meet everyone or attend every session you’d like. With as many as fourteen (14!) simultaneous sessions in each hour time slot, no matter how much you experience, there’s still a sense that you missed out on a lot of cool stuff.

Of course, even if it were a week long, I’m sure I’d feel the same.

For the first session of the weekend, I missed Carl Dietrich’s “Energy for Long Distance Transportation” because I wanted to catch Betsy Devine’s “5-minute Talks by Smart People About Web 2.0 Tools for Science” (featuring Tim O’Reilly, Esther Dyson & Anne Wojcicki, Chris Anderson, Barend Mons, and Victoria Stodden).

And I missed Carl again, for the last session of the weekend, when he talked about his flying car, because I wanted to see Brother Guy Consolmagno explain why the Pope has an astronomer (and a meteorite collection!).

I really should’ve been at “Transforming Education - Making Science Fun and Relevant for Kids and Students,” but I wanted to hear Aubrey de Grey, Chris Patil, and Attila Csordas talk about Aging and Life Extension.

After a fascinating chat Saturday morning with Eric Wassermann on the 15-minute shuttle ride from the hotel to the Googleplex (about the experience of spirituality and the illusion of consciousness), I would’ve loved to have sat in on his session a few hours later about the ethics and implications of brain enhancement. But I also wanted to contribute to “Seducing the Public with Science” (initiated - on the wiki - by John Gilbey and Jenny Rohn – and including Tim O’Reilly, Ann Druyan, Marc Hodosh, Ben Goldacre, Eugenie Scott and others). And, at the exact same time, I was missing NASA Ames Director Pete Worden’s session on Settling Mars, and “LHC: The Universe and All That” with Brian Cox, Max Tegmark, Martin Rees, and Betsy’s husband, Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek!

Impossible choices that have to be made!

I missed Paul Stamets’ session on How Fungi Can Save the World, as well as Paul Davies’ session on Multiple Origins of Life and a “Shadow Biosphere” on Earth, and sessions on the WorldWide Telescope and brain reading neural prosthetics, the future of quantum computing, 23andMe, building better climate models, and several more – all in the Saturday 4pm time slot – because I wanted to sit in on a session with Lee Smolin, Max Tegmark, and Garrett Lisi called “Incubating Adventurous Science and the FQXi.”

It wasn’t until Sunday morning, when I got into a great conversation with the wonderful Dan Janzen about caterpillars and moths, that I realized I shouldn’t have missed his presentation the day before on DNA barcoding the world’s species - all 10,000,000 of them.

But what could I do?  I was up to my ears in dark matter - picking the brain of Patricia Burchat, head of the Physics department at Stanford, who helped me finally understand how we could know - from our narrow vantage point - that the expansion rate of the Universe has increased.

I could go on. And on. Expanding like the Universe. And that’s what the weekend was really about.

Looking over the list of campers, I figure I had substantial, interesting conversations with at least 50 different people, on probably 50 different topics – plus, I attended about a dozen sessions, asking questions or contributing comments during quite a few.

And I entertained perhaps the smartest crowd I’ve ever played with 45 minutes of science humor at my own surprisingly well-attended session, Saturday night after dinner (while, just down the hall, Martin Rees and Nick Bostrom led a somber discussion called “Existential Risks & Global Catastrophic Risks.”)

There was something for everyone.

In the end, there were some people - like Jim Hardy and Chris Patil and Brian Cox and his wife Gia Milinovich and John Gilbey and Nick Bostrom and David Bauer and Lars Jeppesen and Simon Quellen Field - with whom I had multiple chances to chat. And, yet, there are scores of people I never met. I had no idea (until I was back home in San Francisco) that there were four Nobel Laureates among us; I met only one. On the final day there were some faces that didn’t even look familiar to me… had they really been here all weekend?

[more to come]

]]> http://www.sciencecomedian.com/blog/2008/08/19/science-foo-camp-2008-chapter-1-the-wiki-what-i-missed/feed/ http://www.sciencecomedian.com/blog/2008/08/18/symmetry-breaking-reviews-rational-comedy/ http://www.sciencecomedian.com/blog/2008/08/18/symmetry-breaking-reviews-rational-comedy/#comments Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:56:36 +0000 Brian Malow http://www.sciencecomedian.com/blog/?p=245 I’ve been writing up my notes from Science Foo Camp, anxious to get something online about the unconference that ended a week ago already, and from which I’m still on a serious high.  Meanwhile…

symmetry breaking has a new review of my “Rational Comedy for an Irrational Planet” show.

symmetry breaking is a blog supplement to symmetry - a great particle physics magazine that explores not only the science but also the people, the culture, and the policies of science.

It’s published every other month by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center - national laboratories funded by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy - and, therefore, the magazine is available for free - in print as well as online - to anyone.  Subscribe here.

The review is written by David Harris, editor of symmetry, who attended my show at the Punch Line Comedy Club, here in SF, last Monday, August 11, immediately following SciFoo weekend.

He also invited me to write an essay on being a science comedian for the print version of the magazine.

Thanks, David!