Science Foo Camp ended last Sunday;I took high resolution pictures of the session boards and mugshots of attendees, and put them on Flickr. it’s now Friday, but between the travelling, the catching up with work, and yet another presentation on geobrowsers (this time at the British Antarctic Survey proper), it’s taken until now to put this to blog. I’ll keep it short and intense, just like the camp.

The big lesson for me at Science Foo was just how much informatics has revolutionized science over the past decade. (Quite possibly, everybody knew this except me.) I ended up choosing sessions I am not well versed in — in other words, not so much virtual collaborative web 2.0 blah blah blah in favor of the physics of light, power laws and evolutionary development — and in each case, the science would have been far poorer were it not for Matlab’s modeling prowess.

If I have to have a favorite session, it would be the one entitled “Evolution of genes and gene expression + 3D maps of baby flies!” given by Jason Stajich and Angela DePace, both of UC Berkeley. They started exactly where my favorite book of the past few years — Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful — left off; a book, by the way, which I would love to get back from Felix if and when he finally finishes it.

The news from evo devo is this: Embryo development is explicable at the bit level, genetically, and so is evolution, through a precise understanding of how and when genes are expressed and how the smallest mutations in the regulatory bits of the genome controlling expression can lead to significant developmental changes. It amounts to a slam dunk for evolution, and the basics of it are just five chapters away for the interested layman, yet evo devo has still not budged the “standard model” of genetics that non-scientists continue to labor under.

The session on the physics of light was given by the entirely engaging Michael Berry, who also happened to be the first person I talked to as I arrived at Science Foo on Friday. I am very glad I didn’t google him perform a Google search on his person until just now, as I would have been entirely intimidated — Sir Michael Berry has an actual physical phenomenon named after him. As it was, I managed to follow the first half of his talk; for the rest, the pretty pictures in Michael’s presentation kept me in thrall.

Other notable sessions I attended:

Chris Anderson on whether the long tail obeys a power law or in fact a log-normal distribution (verdict in the room: It’s not at all clear we’re talking power laws pure and simple, and perhaps multiple contributory factors obey different probability distributions.)

Name drop of the weekend: “When I discussed this at Davos…”Some of the principals of the open-source Mozilla (Firefox) and Apache foundations discussing open source as a business model for, among other things, drug research.

Besides my own talk on geobrowsers, I played hookie for a couple of sessions — it’s not often I’m in Silicon Valley, so the chance to meet some of the minds behind Google Earth for dinner was an opportunity too good to pass up.

In sum: Every bit of SciFoo was incredible. The format works too.Guess who:
Let’s replicate this in Sweden this autumn. Thank you Nature, Google and O’Reilly Media for this intense experience.