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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n 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 … Continue reading ![\"scifoo1.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.stefangeens.com\/scifoo1.jpg?resize=468%2C581\")
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