As mentioned briefly in the previous post, I spent the weekend at the SciFoo 2022 “unconference” out in California. This is an annual invite-only gathering organized by O’Reilly publishing (The “Foo” partly originated as “Friends Of O’Reilly”) and hosted by Google at one of their research branches in Mountain View, CA. They put us up at a hotel directly across the street from Stanford, but I spent minimal time there, just getting lunch after my Friday morning arrival, as the meeting itself started at breakfast and ran late into the night.
This is run as an “unconference,” so the program isn’t set in advance but developed on-site, basically by people writing topics on Post-It notes and sticking them to a big board. This produces a mix of discussion sessions that are of broad interest to the folks who have assembled and a few things that are really just one dude with an axe to grind. There’s also a lot of unstructured time— meals and then open-bar cocktails-and-discussion time after dinner— to allow people to discuss things informally.
I don’t have any extremely coherent things to say coming out of this, and wouldn’t want to be overly specific about any of the sessions (which aren’t precisely confidential, but are not supposed to be widely broadcast). I’ll offer a few scattered notes about various aspects of this, though:
— The travel part kind of sucked. I’m not sure if things are genuinely worse across the board post-Covid (some things clearly are, like the closure of a bunch of eateries at Midway Airport in Chicago), of if just being away from air travel for a couple of years makes it all seem worse. The two intermediate airports I was in— Midway and Harry Reid International in Vegas (formerly McCarran Airport)— were crowded, chaotic, and featured some of the worst customer service I have ever seen. The San Jose airport was relatively nice, at least (though their giant mural of hands is kind of creepy).
— The Google facility where the meeting was held is very nice, though almost comically in line with Silicon Valley stereotypes. All the meeting rooms we had access to were nice, and the conferencing and presentation tech worked pretty well (the meeting was somewhat hybrid, with a smallish number of folks attending remotely), as one would hope.
— At the opening session, they asked us to describe our interests in three words or phrases. I ended up going with “Physics” “Liberal Arts Education,” and “Dogs.”
— I got to meet Scott Aaronson in person for the first time, and spent a good while talking with him (we’ve interacted online for years). I also met Derek Muller from Veritasium, though I stupidly failed to get a picture with him to definitively prove it to The Pip (who watches that channel on YouTube), and Ben Orlin from Math With Bad Drawings (though I didn’t make that connection until stupidly late).
— Random things I was not previously aware of that I learned about there include: the data-science-for-good group Data.org, the Falling Walls foundation, the Primetime Learning program developed in Finland, and the 1-D video game Line Wobbler.
— The sessions I went to were a mix of work-relevant stuff (quantum tech, science education) and weird stuff (alien signals, artificial intelligence and ethics). As noted above, I don’t have much coherent to say about these, but there are a few things I’ll definitely think a bunch more about and will maybe write about later. There were also a bunch of “Lightning Talks” that I think were being recorded and might be made available somewhere later.
— Conversations over meals and drinks were definitely the highlight of the whole trip. Lots of very smart, very interesting people always makes for fun hanging out. Again, not readily reduced to share-able content, but generally fun.
— Sadly, I had to leave early enough on Sunday— there was only one option for a flight back to Albany that day— that I didn’t get to see anything then. Had I realized that Monday was a holiday, I would’ve stayed over, but I’m a dope, so I didn’t.
— The food was generally good, with the exception of Sunday breakfast, where the only hot options all involved eggs (I don’t like eggs) and the only muffins were all blueberry (blueberry baked goods are revolting to me). That’s very much a Me Thing, though. They had the usual catering-service problem that the hot water urns in the basic cafeteria section had previously been used for coffee and thus were no good for tea, but they had a fancier coffee area with an actual clean hot water feed, so I good my caffeine of choice.
All in all, a fun experience, and I would be very happy to go again if invited (I was originally supposed to go in 2020, but that got moved to a virtual format). As annoying as the travel was, it was totally worth the trip.
If you’d like to be at the front of the line to learn what I think about any of the topics from this that I’ll be thinking about more, here’s a button:
If something about this moves you to say something, the comments will be open: