Driving up and down Silicon valley (in my rented car), I cannot help but sense that the area is living a kind of utopian vision, with everything geared towards making life easy so you are free to create, innovate and mate to produce the next generation of rational people.

The Google campus is this vision writ small. Everything on it seems geared to making you want to stay late — beach volleyball fields, food, gym, off-beat architecture… all in the service of organizing the world’s information. The sense of mission is palpable among the Google employees I’ve met so far. It’s like a cult of rationality, and it’s a wonderful thing to behold.

That too is the feeling that I get from scifoo attendees after an evening of preliminary sessions and a series of intense random conversations about genetics, evo devo, the informatics of chemistry, collaborative mapping, open source drug development… My previous life as a journalist is doing overtime — I get to ask questions that get people talking without really giving away my own ignorance on the topic. My inability/refusal to specialize in anything in favor of embracing the general is paying off here, sort of.

Just a couple of quick vignettes — at the outside buffet dinner, some guy chatting in the next group over, with a five o’clock shadow and sneakers jeans and t-shirt, looked familiar — probably because he was Larry Page, hanging out with such a lack of affectation that it was hard not to stare.

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow is here too, and I can’t believe I actually went up to him and said his blog was an inspiration to me. It’s true, of course, but it was rather unlike me to admit it.

It’s a full day of sessions ahead. A giant calendar hangs in the lobby where anyone can book a room for an hour and propose a topic for a talk or discussion. Geospatial visualization is featured on a number of them, but I’m wondering if I shouldn’t attend those topics where I know less about, rather than more. Then, this afternoon, I’ll be meeting the Google Earth team — apparently, they like my other blog🙂