I had the strangest dream last night. I don’t remember all of it, but there was a skeleton of a dinosaur with a fake nose and flamingos on it, and I was walking underneath a space ship with some people, and later a journalist poured me wine in a water glass, and there was a robot, and fossils of crocodiles, and the former technology adviser to Obama was playing viola with the director of the New York Hall of Science strumming accompaniments on guitar at an indoor campsite, while in the background aluminium plates were flying off a magnetic field and people were discussing the multiverse and human flight, and someone built an ancient clock out of LEGO, and all the food was free, and people wrote haikus on a whiteboard, and stuck giant post-it notes on another board, and I saw what chords look like in four dimensions and heard the sounds that atoms make, and some of my friends were there too, but never in the same place all the time – I’d just run into them here and there, and we’d talk, and then strange things would happen again.
There was much more, but I don’t remember it all. I just wrote down some notes, before I forget, because that’s the thing with dreams – if you don’t write them down immediately, you can’t remember them the next day.
5 comments
It sounds like a great deal of fun. Great, great dream. Wish I had an excuse to be in it, too.
_all the food was free_
Sounds like it’s “Mike’s”:http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=39 dream as well.
Gee, I wonder why Textile markup works on your blog comments and not on “Anthony Fejes'”:http://blogs.nature.com/fejes/2010/08/bioinformatics_tool_development_part_5_-_reinventing_the_wheel.html? I had to try to remember any html, and then when I did the comment got sent to moderation anyhow just a minute ago. Grr.
Awesome. So gutted I couldn’t make it in the end. My previous SciFoo also felt like one big dream – especially talking about aliens with the Astronomer Royal, Eric Schmidt, Paul Davies and a Dyson or two.
Heather – the comments are now fixed (I hope). See my comment on Anthony’s blog.
I’ve jsut had vcomment problems on Kausik’s blog.
Eva – I’m just envious. Who do I blackmail into getting me (and GrrlScientist) places in next year’s event?
You know, that sounds kind of fun, but I still think that the “un-conference”, non-agenda approach would drive me absolutely bananas. I’d probably end up skipping it all and working on a grant in my hotel room, or something. And I wonder about the ability (or lack?) of attracting real thought leaders in different disciplines. Most people I know wouldn’t go near such a thing even armed with a particularly long pole.
I think I just permanently un-invited myself to the un-conference. Oh well.
SciFoo attracted quite a lot of honest-to-goodness scientists, because it was by invitation. At SciBarCamp we had a bit of a harder time at it, because it didn’t have the prestige of “being invited by Nature”. They also encouraged people to spend time in one-on-one conversation instead of going to a session once in a while, but with 12 (!) parallel tracks I was always interested in at least four things at a time, and just squished all my conversations into the scheduled breaks.
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