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In China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, there is a scene in which Mayor Rudgutter parleys with the ambassador of Hell. It’s a negotiation he has performed before, but is nevertheless disconcerting; although the ambassador appears as a well-spoken and immaculately dressed man, his words are accompanied by a faint echo from deep in the Pit below, “in the appalling shriek of one undergoing torture.”

I’m pretty sure I heard the same thing on the phone with Orbitz last night.

Our story begins several months ago, when I booked a round-trip ticket to attend a conference in Greece. (I normally wouldn’t even bother relating this little adventure, except that extensive focus-grouping has revealed that readers love nothing more than chronicles of our travel-related follies.) It was in September, just after I had moved to LA, and various things came up that couldn’t be neglected — unfortunately, and uncharacteristically, I ended up canceling the trip at the last minute. Which was too bad, as I had paid $1600 for the fare on Orbitz.

But all was not completely lost — they let you keep the unused ticket for up to a year, and later on you can exchange it for some other international trip on the same airline (paying whatever change fees and fare differences apply, of course). As it turns out, I’ll be traveling to England later this month, so last week I attempted to use my credit from the Greece flight to pay for the ticket.

It wasn’t as easy as it might have been. First, despite being one of those explicitly web-based companies that wants you to do everything online, and makes some effort to hide their phone number from you, this specific transaction is one you can’t do on the web, you have to call them up. Where, of course, the department you want to speak to is not one of the options you are given by the automated voice system that answers the phone. But that’s not the issue here. Once I did reach a human being, I explained what I wanted to do, and was told that I needed to mail the paper ticket back to them via a service that could track its progress, and call back once I could demonstrate that the package was in transit.

So okay, I did that, and Sunday called back, ready to get a new itinerary. In fact I had previously gone onto Orbitz and found exactly the itinerary I wanted. It was a little complicated, since I wanted to fly from LAX to London, take the train to Durham a few days later, and then fly back to LA from Durham, but I found a semi-reasonable set of flights that got me back to LA only half an hour after midnight. And a tiny bit of extra trickiness, as the return flight from London to LA (after a short flight from Durham to Heathrow) actually stopped at Dulles for two hours before continuing on with the same flight number — as I painstakingly described to the guy on the phone.

But at least it was a relatively cheap ticket — only $700 or so. Once they added a $200 change fee and various miscellaneous gouging add-ons, the whole thing came to about $1000. Which was less than the $1600 I had originally spent, so I was going to be out about $600. (What, you didn’t think they were just going to give it back to me, did you?) But I accepted that, as you always lose big-time when you try to make such changes.

But then yesterday when they emailed me the itinerary, there was a bit of a surprise. (Yes, for some reason it takes a day to email the itinerary — some times the Tubes are just a little clogged, you know.) And the return flight had me going from London to Dulles and staying there, not continuing on to LAX. I might not even have noticed, had I not gone to choose seats on the flight — all of the flight numbers and departure times were right, which is all I usually pay attention to.

So I called again, and explained the problem. In particular, I explained that I had asked to take that flight all the way back to LAX, and their agent had obviously not typed that in, which was their mistake. They pointed out that the agent verified the itinerary with me before booking it, which I’m ready to believe is true. It was my mistake not to catch that the flight he had me on didn’t continue to LA, although an easy mistake to make — that’s what happens when you pay attention primarily to the flight numbers and departure times.

Can they fix things by putting me on the flight that I had asked for, the leg going from Dulles to LAX? Sure they can — for the fare difference, plus another $200 change fee, for a total of $300 extra. Even though they had screwed up? Yes. Could that $300 come out of the $600 of free money I was already giving them? No. How many minutes of frustrating phone conversation would it take to uncover these pleasant truths? About 45.

So $300 of my money has disappeared into the ether, as the result of an easily-correctable mistake. It’s not my first bad experience with Orbitz — they are notorious for doing things slightly wrong, and making them nearly impossible to fix, or at least gouging you whenever a fix is required. For example, if you book a hotel through them, the hotel is completely unable to fix or alter anything about the reservation; only Orbitz can do so, and they’re not always so helpful about it. (Other examples of Orbitz’s evil ways here, here, here.) But it will be my last, as I’m not going to be using them any more.

In fact, I’d like to call for a boycott. If I remember correctly, Bill O’Reilly was able to bring down the government of France by asking his listeners to stay away from French products. Surely if CV readers stayed away from Orbitz in droves, the company would spiral into a tailspin of bankruptcy and shame. (Or at least give me a sense of personal vengeance, which is more important.) So let’s get on that right away, okay? It’s about time we used the power this blog to make the world a better place.

And suggestions for alternative sensible ways to make complicated travel arrangements are welcome.

As I write this, it’s a cold dreary rainy Saturday morning here in the BlueGrass Airport in Lexington, Kentucky — I’m waiting for my delayed flight. Testimony that life as a physicist is not always so glamorous. In fact, readers of CV could get the opposite impression - that we are globetrotting celebrities, darting here and there to deliver lectures, attend meetings, and work with colleagues. It is true that physicists tend to have a heavy travel load. Going home today, I will log my 90,000^th flight mile for 2006 on United Airlines alone. Sometimes we visit exotic locales, but most of the time we travel so that we can spend our days discussing science in a windowless room in places like Batavia, Illinois. Sometimes, even when we travel to popular tourist destinations, we still spend our time in windowless rooms, prompting the phrase Travel Abroad, Stay Indoors. In particular, I remember a meeting in Paris, where all I saw was the inside of lecture halls, and even had working dinners in hotel restaurants with bad food. I might as well have been in Cleveland.

So, why do physicists travel so frequently? My family continuously asks that question and one aunt in particular is convinced that my life is one big vacation. The answer is simple: science is all about interaction. The image of an eccentric white-haired gentlemen working away, alone, in his ivory tower couldn’t be more false (on several counts). There are two main aspects to progress in science:

• Research: Yes, a scientist does have to sit down and do the actual work, and yes, that can sometimes be rather tedious. However, before one sits down to do the work, you gotta have an idea. Preferably an interesting idea. That idea usually does not arrive in a single eureka moment while sitting in isolation. Well, actually maybe it does, but only after interaction with colleagues. After listening to lectures, reading papers, discussing points, and then churning ideas over (and over and over) in your head.
• Dissemination: Even if you’ve done Nobel prize winning work, it doesn’t matter if no one knows about it. You’ve got to sell your work. Publication in a prestigious journal (or posting on the arXiv) is not enough. A significant fraction of the new material physicists learn is absorbed by listening to talks. I guess we never abandon the notion of learning at lectures.

So, what are the sorts of business trips that physicists take? My trips have included all of the following this past year:

• Conferences: We attend conferences to (i) give talks describing our own results, performing the dissemination part of our job, (ii) listen to other talks, gathering new ideas and staying up to date, and (iii) interact with a wide variety of colleagues.
• Workshops: These are usually working meetings, where we perform a calculation that is oriented towards a specific goal (i.e., study of XYZ at the LHC) and have intense discussions with fellow workshop participants.
• Summer Schools: Here we present a lecture series to a group of students. I must admit that I like summer schools that are held in nice or unusual destinations where I can spend time walking and taking pictures after my lectures are finished.
• Seminars/colloquia/public lectures: We give individual lectures for dissemination and attend them to learn and gather new ideas. It’s particularly important for young researchers to go on the seminar circuit so that they can become known.
• Collaboration meetings: This is mainly for experimenters to stay abreast with the results within their detector collaboration. Can you imagine the LHC detector collaboration meetings, with roughly 2000 participants, discussing the intricate details of Higgs searches and possible discoveries! As a theorist who works closely with experimenters, I have been invited to give pep talks (a theoretical interlude if you like) at many collaboration meetings, and I always thoroughly enjoy doing so.
• Visit a collaborator: This is clearly on the performing research side of the job, when collaborators meet face to face to develop ideas and further progress on a project.
• Committee/panel meetings: This is taking an increasingly larger fraction of my time. Most commonly, we serve on peer review panels to review a set of grant proposals or potential experimental projects for their scientific merit. I have also served on panels which advise the DOE and NSF on broader funding issues and which have written literature to explain the merits of a project to various audiences.

So, my trip to Kentucky? To give a physics department colloquium on Discovering the Quantum Universe. I enjoy communicating the excitement of my field and the impending scientific revolution we expect at the LHC!

I spent the end of last week at the National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center in Irvine, California. This happens annually, and is a fascinating meeting at which young (-ish, i.e. below 45 years old) scientists from across the disciplines come together to speak and participate in discussions about a range of topics.

I was there to chair and give the introductory talk in a session titled “How Many Dimensions does the Universe Have?”. I was supposed to give an overview of the idea of extra dimensions, how they might avoid detection, and why one might want to think about the idea in the first place. After that, I was followed by Gary Shiu, who talked about the role of extra dimensions in string theory, and then Jonathan Feng, who talked about testing extra dimensions.

Our session was fun, and people seemed to enjoy it. But I had most fun at the other sessions. The complete list was:

• Artificial Photosynthesis / Alternative Energy Sources
• Biometrics: Identity Technologies
• Evolutionary Origins of Human Cognition and Behavior
• Extrasolar Planets
• How Many Dimensions Does The Universe Have?
• Memory and Learning
• Paleoecology
• Prepare Immediately for Whatever Happens Next

As has probably become clear from my posts, I travel to a lot of different conferences of different styles. There are always some interesting sessions and plenty of creative people to talk to. Even so, this meeting was the most intellectually stimulating such event I’ve been to in quite some time. I attended every session and spent almost all the time outside of them discussing aspects of the science either with the speakers or with some of the other attendees. Some of these were in my own, or related fields (David Berenstein, Albion Lawrence, Per Berglund, Fred Adams and our very own Risa), while many others were experts in some of the non-physics topics listed above.

There were far too many excellent talks to report comprehensively, so I thought I’d just focus on one that I particularly enjoyed. In the session on Memory and Learning, Matthew Walker delivered a highly entertaining and fascinating talk on the role of sleep in learning and consolidating memories. Matthew spoke at length about his work, but it was a particularly simple experiment that seemed to get most people’s attention.

The method was to take two groups of students (who, apparently, are a plentiful and cheap source of subjects for these experiments) and to put them through the same set of events. First, they were taught to perform a simple task that, if I recall correctly, involved rapidly punching in sequences of numbers on a pad. The students were then tested twelve hours later and again twenty-four hours later, to measure how well they had learned to perform this task. The difference between the two groups of students was that one group underwent the initial training in the morning, while the second group did so in the evening.

So what were the results? Well, the group that trained in the evening showed a large degree of learning (success on the test) on both tests - the morning afterwards and later that day. However, the group that trained in the morning showed only some degree of learning in the evening, but a much greater degree (a 40% increase), equal to that of the first group, the following morning, after a good night’s sleep.

This is pretty fascinating, demonstrating that a significant amount of important learning goes on during sleep. But there’s more. You might think, just from this experiment, that you don’t properly learn something until you sleep, and so you just have to wait until you get a chance to go to bed and you’ll finally learn what you studied. However, other experiments show that if you don’t get a good sleep in the twenty four hours following studying or training, then you never get the benefits of learning during sleep, no matter how much sleep you get when you eventually go to bed.

There are many examples of situations in which these results are important but, for those of us in education, it is worth pointing out to our students that that all-nighters are awful if you really want to learn your subject matter and that a good night’s sleep may make the difference between failing and acing an exam.

Talks like this for two and a half days, followed by a delightful dinner with Risa and Sean (who drove out to see us on Saturday) made this just about the perfect trip.

OK, I know I’ve been slacking on the blogging front recently, and thought I’d explain myself by way getting back into the swing of writing.

As you know if you’ve been reading Cosmic Variance, I recently spent three weeks in Australia as a Sir Thomas Lyle fellow at the University of Melbourne. A week ago I left there and took a lengthy (about 30 hour) trip back home, which left me exhausted, as you might expect.

I had a tremendous time in Melbourne (as described here, and here), but am also very glad to be back home. Nevertheless, there were piles upon piles of research, teaching, and administrative/service tasks waiting for me upon my return, and these have entirely consumed the last week.

Despite these pressures, I left all of them behind on Monday and attended our semesterly Cornell-Syracuse Joint One Day Theory meeting, this time held at Cornell. We had another impressive meeting, with mostly great talks. I was delighted that the students and postocs with whom I’ve been working did excellent jobs, and found the day even more useful because my Cornell collaborators and I were able to sneak some work on our paper in during one of the breaks.

Today I was back at Syracuse, but tomorrow afternoon I head out to California to chair and deliver an invited presentation in a session titled “How many dimensions does the universe have?” at a National Academy of Science Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium, at the National Academies Beckman Center in Irvine. This should be a really fun time (although a lot of work), discussing science with wonderful people in very different disciplines from across the U.S.. My co-presenters are my good friends Jonathan Feng (from U.C. Irvine) and Gary Shiu (from U. Wisconsin, Madison), so not only will I get to hear their (usually terrific) presentations, but I’ll also get to hang out with the two of them, which I haven’t got to do for a while. Saturday night the meeting will be over, and I’ll take advantage of being close to L.A. to meet up with Sean for dinner.

So, as you can see, it’s been a pretty busy time for me. Coupled with sitting on three departmental committees (chairing two of them), and teaching my class, it’s been a pretty crazy time. We’re all busy, so I shouldn’t make too many excuses, but after this trip I won’t be flying for over two months (something of a recent record for me), and I hope to be able to return to regular blogging.

If you are a scientist looking for a place to get a drink in Melbourne, you could do worse than visit The Croft Institute. This is a seriously freaky establishment that you get to by going up an alley that runs off another alley.

These are very dodgy surroundings indeed, and you are surprised when you finally enter the bar itself and find it to be a nice-looking, although odd, place. It is odd because, as described on their website

The Croft Institute is hidden up a series of laneways, on a site that was previously vacant for over two decades. Set over three floors, The Croft Institute houses a laboratory on the ground floor, a hospital themed waiting area and bathrooms on the middle level and a 1930’s styled gymnasium on the top floor.

There also used to be a licensed vodka distillery on the first floor, but when I visited there the other night (I only looked at the first floor) the bar staff told me they didn’t make their own vodka any more. Nevertheless, they made me a reasonable martini and served it in a proper glass, not a beaker, as I had half expected.

There are a few nice long, low couches to sit on, but the rest of the seating is on lab stools, pulled up to lab benches. It distinctly reminded me of being in high school chemistry class, because all the equipment is getting on a bit.

It is definitely a quirky place, and it got me thinking a little about other bars that must exist around the world, dedicated to science, or at least with science as a theme. If you know of one, please let us in on it in the comments.

On Saturday, I slept in a little, to get rid of the last vestiges of jet-lag, and got up at 9am, showered, dressed, grabbed a book and headed out to Lygon Street, half a block from my apartment. I spent a lovely leisurely morning in the university neighborhood, getting cappuccino and croissants at Thresherman’s Bakehouse, followed by a wander around the stores, and a second cappuccino at another cafe.

Then I dropped by a local wine merchant to pick out something for my apartment. I am very partial to Australian Shiraz, and here my choices were so varied that it took me forty minutes to pick out something, and even then, I felt that it was essentially a rather random choice, within my chosen price range. On the way back, I stuck my head into an internet cafe to check email and comments on Cosmic Variance, and then deposited the wine back at my apartment before heading out to meet my good friend and one of my hosts here - Ray Volkas - who treated me to a wonderful Saturday in Melbourne.

We started with a very nice lunch at Chocolate Buddha, a cute Japanese restaurant in Federation Square, across from the famous Flinders Street Station. After that, we took a long walk through town, stopping for an excellent espresso at one of the countless excellent coffee shops, and ending up at the Melbourne Observation Deck, from which we could see the ocean, the whole of downtown, Melbourne Cricket Ground, the roads along which the grand prix is held, and lots more.

Next stop was the Crown Casino. I only really had time to take a quick look at the poker room (where 2005 World Series of Poker winner Joseph Hachem played occasionally, I believe), but there is a distinct possibility that I will find time to go back and play for a while before leaving Melbourne. Ray and I had a nice drink in the atrium bar at the casino, before resuming our tour with a quick walk through the National Gallery of Victoria, which was hosting the final day of a wonderful Picasso exhibition.

We decided not to queue up to see the exhibit, opting instead to head to the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, which is housed in a remarkable building, constructed from rusted metal (at least in appearance) and in which we strolled through a (mostly) thought-provoking exhibit of the work of Gillian Wearing.

Modern art is notorious for making one thirsty, and, since we had passed one of the most famous pubs in Melbourne - Young and Jackson’s - on our way into the city center, we walked back across town and stopped in for a couple of pints there. Pubs are something I miss a lot about my home country and it is fun to experience something very close, at least as far as ambience goes, so far away from home.

Before dinner we decided to drop in to The Gin Palace for a spectacularly good martini (OK, I know this is sounding like a boozy day, but it was the weekend, and some ways to see new cities are just so much more fun than others). This gave us just the kick required to get us over to Chinatown, for dinner at The Spicy Fish where we had the famous entree of the same name - a wonderfully prepared dish that is probably the best food I’ve had in Melbourne so far.

No “lads day about town” is complete without a nightcap, and so we headed to the Melbourne Supper Club, to finish off the evening with an after dinner drink (Madeira for me) and a Cuban cigar (that’s right America - a filthy communist cigar - aaaghhhh).

A truly wonderful day, full of culture, fine food, fine drinks, fine cigars, and great company. I’m already a fan of Melbourne, with two weeks left to enjoy its other pleasures.

Well, I’ve finally arrived in Melbourne. I left Syracuse on a 2:25pm flight on Monday, landed in Dulles an hour later, waited there for a couple of hours, took a 4.5 hour flight to LA, connected to a 14 hour flight to Sydney, and then, finally, caught another 1.5 hour flight to Melbourne.

Despite a number of possible pitfalls developing along the way (which I won’t bore you with here), the flight actually turned out to be hassle-free, and I did get to weigh in on the side of all that is good and right (you know - science) towards the end of it.

On the long haul flight from LAX to Melbourne, I ended up in a row of three people. One of these was a true Aussie caricature. A pretty nice guy, for sure, but particularly if you’re a Brit, you’ll know exactly what I mean by this. It was the equivalent of meeting an Englishman wearing Union Jack boxer shorts, with a can of beer in one hand and a bag of chips in the other. But it was the other seatmate who turned out to be the one I ended up discussing science with.

For almost the entire flight we didn’t really exchange words, since either one or the other of us was sleeping, or I had my isolating earphones on and wasn’t up for chatting. However, as the flight came to a close I had to crack open my laptop to look up some immigration information, and when he saw the sciencey stuff splashed all over the screen he asked what I did. When I told him, he then asked me if I knew anything about zero-point energies. I told him that I did indeed, but, before I could brighten up at the thought of having a science enthusiast next to me, he then said

“I use those in my treatment methods”

At times like this a healthily populated decision tree pops up in one’s head. Do you smile politely and say something bland and pop the earphones back in? If not, and you engage the person in a discussion, how do you ensure that it doesn’t go off the rails? Do you have an exit strategy? What is to be gained by each of these possibilities?

In this case, my decision was simplified considerably by the fact that the plane was due to land in an hour, and that would provide a natural end to the discussion, whichever way it went.

So I asked him what he meant by that and he proceeded to tell me that he’d had a career in computing, but had been able to develop this amazing new treatment for asthma, cancer, and pretty much anything else that ails you, which involves controlling your emotions (there was something in there about tapping into the zero-point energy of all matter, but that’s as close as I got to seeing where all that would come in).

He told me that his treatment, or method, works. Rather than respond with the traditional British Rationalist reply - “What a load of old bollocks!”, I instead I asked him what he meant by “work”, and he said that he meant that he has personally seen it cure people of cancer. I asked him whether there had been any double blind trials involving statistically significant numbers of patients, and, to my surprise, he said that there hadn’t been (OK, that bit wasn’t surprising) and that he realized that was what it would take for his method to be accepted and that he was hoping someone would eventually come forward with the funds to support that.

He was really very sincere and pleasant, but obviously deeply misguided at best (please don’t arrive in the comments section championing this kind of nonsense). But what kept getting at me was that he would good-naturedly listen to what I said, agree with it mostly, and then keep saying that the method clearly worked. When I continued to challenge him on this definition, he then said that he didn’t have the technical knowledge to go up against someone like me (a scientist), but he had practiced the technique and seen it work. He also came out with many of the old favorites, like “people used to think that the world was flat, until they dared to go and find out if it was true”, to which I gave him back the old “it’s great to keep an open mind, of course, but not one so open as your brains fall out” (Snap!).

Anyway, now that I have a computer again, I’ve been able to look this guy up and it turns out his process has a web site called: The ZPoint process for instant Emotional Healing. Take a look - it is all that you may have imagined it to be from the above description of the conversation. Try to resist the temptation to bang your head against a wall after visiting the site - trust me, it hurts.

Melbourne is great. I’ll be posting more soon about the department, the city, the people, and my time here. In the meantime, keep your eyes open wide for those cranks and charlatans.

I bet you all are not aware, but there is a new test of nationality being performed when one enters the US. I arrived in the San Francisco airport on Monday night, passed passport control, picked up my luggage, and went to hand in my customs form, which is the last step in the arrivals process. The customs agent stopped me dead in my tracks. He first asked, “Are you an American.” Obviously I answered “yes” straight-away. Then he asked, “OK, then, what is the square root of 98?”

Now, this is a question that me of all people (given what I do for a living) can answer, instantaneously. But, at the time all I could do was turn towards the guy and utter “HUH?” There were three things on my mind:

I had already passed passport control. This guy was a CUSTOMS agent. Why was he checking my nationality?

I had been traveling for 23 hours. I left my hotel room in Venice at 5:10 AM, took a boat to the train station, took a train to the mainland, took a train back to Trieste (I won’t mention the trauma associated with catching that train or knowing that it was the correct train…), took a bus from the train station to the airport in Trieste (I won’t mention the trauma wondering if the bus was going to make it on time to the airport so I could catch my flight), took a flight to Munich, sat in the Munich airport for 4 hours, then finally took the 11 hour flight back home to California….I understandably was a bit dazed after all that!

I was smuggling suspicious cheese in my backpack. The last thing I needed was a customs agent with funny questions! I was in Europe, meaning I went to a cheese shop, selected some cheese, and they carved out some hunks from the large rounds of cheese and wrapped it in wax paper. There is no packaging and no information on the pasteurization process…

So, after I gave my intelligent answer of “HUH,” the guy burst out laughing and said, “Yes, of course you’re an American. You don’t know anything!”

I wonder what would have happened if I had been awake. My normal, instantaneous response would have been “7 times the square root of 2″. I wonder if I would have been arrested if I said that….

Hey, Lufthansa has wireless in the sky — how cool is that! So here I am at roughly 38,000 ft, somewhere over Canada, 6.5 hours into the flight with 4.5 hours left to go…. I’m on my way home from the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, where one of the last summer schools of the season just finished. The topic was Expecting LHC, which was the hot topic for summer schools this year. In fact, everybody who is anybody had one. The LHC is turning on next year and everyone wants the new crop of graduate students to be prepared!

The school was great and I enjoyed the whole experience. (But, then again, I adore Italy!) My lectures were on Non-Supersymmetric Physics Beyond the Standard Model and Extra Dimensions. That’s both a fairly broad and specific topic! I first reviewed the symmetries of the Standard Model, which any model of new physics must clearly satisfy, and briefly covered something called Little Higgs models as they contain new quarks, new gauge bosons, and new Higgs bosons, all at once! However, I spent most of my lectures on Extra Dimensions, covering the motivation, basic theory, and collider signatures for the main models. Other lecturers covered the Standard Model (QCD and Electroweak and Heavy Flavors), Higgs, Supersymmetry, and the LHC accelerator and detectors.

The students were great! It is always a joy to lecture to a room full of enthusiastic students. They were chock full of good questions and were not shy about asking them, so the lectures (and the coffee breaks, and the meals) were very interactive. There were about 100 students registered from various places ranging from Pakistan to Palestine. This set of kids shows that the world is full of eager, bright and budding physicists!

The main program of the ICTP is to foster the development of theoretical physicists from developing countries. The Center was founded in 1964 by Abdus Salam, a theorist from Pakistan who was a co-creator of the Standard Model, and it serves its purpose very well. There are many shining examples of successful theorists who have worked there, including Gia Dvali who co-invented the model of Large Extra Dimensions (a main feature of my lectures) while he was there.

Us lecturers were very well looked after, pretty much as described by Sean when he lectured at their Cosmology school earlier this year. Since he already posted a picture of the guesthouse, I will share a picture of the jellyfish with you instead. (Be thankful you are spared my numerous sunset shots.) The small bay of the Adriatic Sea where the ICTP and its Guesthouse sits was filled with the things, about 1-2 ft long. Superb!

Having arrived back about a week ago from my extended weekend in GoogleLand, I am finally ready to spill the beans about the mysterious and stimulating Science Foo Camp.

I arrived at my hotel on Friday afternoon and, after a brief rest, joined some other attendees in the lobby and waited for our ride to show up. I felt a bit like Charlie, waiting with Grandpa Joe for Willy Wonka to turn up and open the gates to the chocolate factory.

Our bus dropped us at the fabled Googleplex, and throngs of “camp counselors” (young Google employees) escorted us to the registration desk, after which we had our photos taken, and wrote lists of topics and words that described our interests below. These were then taped to a large board in the main hall.

While we were restricted to a small part of the complex, which itself is huge, I saw enough of the place for it to become clear that Google must be a terrific place to work. I recall the mid 90’s, when dot-com workplaces took care of every possible employee need, without charge. Although that bubble burst violently, at Google at least the culture seems to have retained that spirit. It isn’t just the walls of snack selections and beverage choices that are dotted around the place, or the outstanding cafeteria and catering staff, or the on-staff nutritionist. It is also the clear thought that has gone into constructing a collaborative environment that must make it particularly fertile for innovation. For our meeting, the “foo bar” helped also

Our first and only scheduled meeting was an introductory session in the largest meeting room. Here, after welcoming words from Tim O’Reilly (of, well, O’Reilly Media), and Timo Hannay (of Nature), we spent a half hour or so introducing ourselves, one-by-one, to the 150-200 other participants. And it turns out that my co-campers were a truly eclectic bunch; scientists, technologists, engineers, computer scientists, publishers, and science fiction writers.

It quickly became apparent that the intention was to throw this group together for a couple of days of barely-structured mayhem. Our host turned around a large board, with open hour-long slots in about ten rooms of differing capacities listed on it. We were instructed to “swarm the board” - rush up and enter discussion/debate/demonstration/educational sessions on any topic we thought interesting, with the resulting tapestry of ideas then forming the basis from which one could plan one’s own schedule, much as one does when picking through parallel session talks at a regular conference. Here’s a selection of the topics:

• Sending Stuff to Mars
• Mysteries of the human Genome
• A Cool Mathematical Idea from your Field in 15 Minutes
• Education in “Second Life” and the Future of Collaborative Learning
• The World Wide Telescope
• Coping with Politicized Science and “Scientized” Politics
• Open Science Discussion: Open Peer Review, Science Blogs, Science Wikis
• The Nascent WEBMIND
• Science and Spirituality
• How Anti-Copying Technology is Bad for: Science, Competition, Art, Expression, Innovation, …, Humanity
• Bioethics
• A.I. in Planetary Exploration (Titan)
• Self-organization in Evolution

I could go on and on - these are just a somewhat random picks from one of the wikis that I still have access to. I certainly didn’t attend all of these sessions, but I think it is fair to say that I learned something from almost all of those that I did participate in.

I tried to choose a spread of topics to sample the different kinds of thinking that were represented by the range of participants. Some of my sessions were rather close to what I do, such as the discussion of various mathematical properties of images, initiated by a well-known physicist, or the rapid-fire summary of interesting mathematical techniques from different fields. But some others were wildly different (if you haven’t heard of Project Orion, you should take a look at it - it is a hilarious and terrifying example of what one could get money for in the fifties).

One session I attended concerned technology that is designed to prevent the free distribution of legally purchased digital entertainment. The discussion leader was a science fiction writer and technology expert who has been extremely active in this area. It was fascinating to hear his perspective. This wasn’t about stealing music instead of legally downloading it. Rather, the discussion centered on the restrictions that are placed on you after you have purchased it. The canonical example was Apple’s iTunes and iPod (both of which I use frequently), their constraints on the number of devices one can listen to the music on, and the deliberate decision to use a format that means that your downloaded music won’t play on any other player that you might want to buy.

I went to a demonstration of the immersive, interactive online “game”, Second Life, which some participants felt had tremendous educational possibilities. Second Life has to be seen to be believed. One the one hand, it really feels like a game, and those of us who grew up with some of the earlier incarnations of role-playing games will recognize many of the features. However, in Second Life one is not trying to achieve some pre-specified goal, but instead you are supposed to live out an extension of your physical life. While this clearly isn’t for everyone, and I’m not sure I see myself using it any time soon, I did see that there were a number of ways in which one could use this technology for innovative educational purposes. Keep your eye on it, because the numbers of people participating is growing and, interestingly for educational issues, the age and gender mix of participants is much more reflective of that in real society than is true of regular computer games.

As a final example of the kinds of activities I took part in, I went to a session that was billed on the board as “Science and Religion”, but which the moderator actually wanted to be more broadly about Science and Spirituality. I don’t think my views on such things are a secret to any regular Cosmic Variance reader. However, I did want to attend, because I am fascinated by the thought processes that, in clearly highly intelligent and accomplished people, can lead to, in my view, a gaping hole in their intellectual rigor.

The session was fine but somewhat frustrating. There was much discussion of spiritual experience, but I tried and tried to get a clean definition of this and was unsuccessful. In particular, I wanted a definition that would make it clear whether “spiritual” was supposed to mean a type of feeling that was mysterious and enjoyable, but could in principle be due to complex biochemical and neurological processes, or whether “spiritual” was intended to imply something outside of the physical view of reality. I think there were people from both camps in the room, but I did have a hard time getting a clear answer anyway and felt a little frustrated by how some technically educated people can view certain aspects of the world so uncritically.

The meeting ended on Sunday afternoon and, after the closeout session I went for a couple of beers with some people I’d met there, before heading up to JoAnne’s place, where she had invited me to dinner. We had a lovely time - it’s always great to see JoAnne - and enjoyed fine food and wine, and I was even lucky enough to see the famous tomato plants just a few days before their problems developed.

When I got to the airport for my redeye flight I felt tired, but happy and satisfied; and that’s where the fun ended and a small personal nightmare began. For as I waited to board the plane, a rumbling of the belly began which, by the time I had taken my seat, had reached an unignorable crescendo. The accompanying symptoms were unmistakable - I had a pretty nasty case of food poisoning. Since the door was still open, I asked to get off the plane and, between rushing off to deal with symptoms that we need not go into here, was able to reschedule a flight for the next morning and book into a hotel at the airport. I spent the rest of the night extremely unhappy, and managed to fly out the next morning, dealing with a few delays and finally getting home late on Monday. Not a fun way to end a great weekend. I can’t think of what might have given me the food poisoning. Certainly it was far too soon for it to have been any of the wonderful treats that JoAnne served me, and the Google food was so fresh and good that I think I will settle on blaming it on a bad pint in the mid-afternoon.

But my overriding memories will be of Science Foo Camp as a wonderful experience. It was well conceived and well organized, and Google was a splendid host. They provided us with a wonderful space, great food and drink, and a group of smart, knowledgeable and helpful counselors who made the whole thing run so smoothly. I can’t thank the Nature, O’Reilly and Google folks enough for their invitation, their hospitality and their vision in putting together such a wacky and fun weekend. I would definitely go back; although their plan is to try to get mostly new people each year they do this.