SciBarCamp

I'm at SciBarCamp, my first unconference. Lots of compbio!

Dinner at Miyake. Added 3 people on twitter, many of whom have been tweeting as it happens.

http://twitpic.com/9qlwj

the Bay Area experience

Today I met a cross-section of the "creative class"... which was fun and interesting. It's also interesting to look at the culture that arises in such environments. Our highest value is openness #opendata. Not only do we want data to be free, but we want to produce lots of it, rather indiscriminately. It's no surprise that Twitter is their icon... and we are living up to Herb Simon's prediction. Although there's an element of trendiness and geek-chic to this, most people seem to be the real thing.

Experiencing this sort of thing was one of my main reasons for visiting the Bay Area.

Also: I got WiFi at the BART, and in a moving car in downtown Palo Alto (though neither worked very well)

The whole idea of an unconference is that it's a dynamic event, in which the audience decides which events take place. Today this involved making proposals in A5-sized pieces of paper containing a number of bubbles, and "voting" by filling in a bubble. This information is used for room assignment.

Here's something about the people I met today:
* I met at least 3 transhumanist types
* One lady works for Nature Magazine, Second Life division (she's just 1 out of 2.5).
* Dawei Lin, Director of Bioinformatics Core at UC Davis, has made Lego models of a virus at the Maker Faire
* 23andMe, a personal genomics company, has a representative
* PLoS has a representative
* Melanie Swan
* Tantek, who is just "t" on Twitter, and gets annoyed at n00b twitterers (migrating from MySpace) who write "at" as "@t".
* Naomi Most, science radio show host, who took my picture with simonfunk