Scifoo is magic. The first excitement is how many people you DON’T know. That means that you are going to be stretched in unimaginable directions. Then there are the people you do know – virtually – but have never met. Then the sessions which are often very direct and pragmatic while others are way out. We observe Chatham House here – no names, no opinions – but there’s enough we can talk about. Like the project to embed a poem in a archeobacter genome (yes, it makes sense). Are there life forms on earth based on other principles than DNA/RNA/proteins? That led to a fascinating explanation of 2-D electron gases at 30 millikelvin.
So one person I was delighted to catch up with was Pavel Curtis. Pavel is a visionary who influenced much of what I did during the 1990’s. Pavel worked at Xerox PARC and created the legendary LambdaMOO, a text-based virtual environment (MUD) based on OO programming, hence MOO. LambdaMOO was (is?) a vibrant community with often several hundred players and with the freedom to develop its own democracy or anarchy. For modern users of high-performance graphics games it may seem ridiculous that ASCII text can hold much power – but it can, in the same way as a bare stage and the spoken word can recreate fantasy lands.
I’ll deal with some of the sessions on a per blog basis, but among today’s were:
superblog. The leader was becoming successful in running his blog as a magazine, contrating writers and bringing increasing an significant advertising revenues. If it goes right you can earn sizeable amounts. But we discussed the many other reasons why we blog and it was interesting that two of the members were doing it as part of creative arts. We also noted how the traditional blog following of commenters was now dispersed over twitter and friendfeed.
Making ice cream with liquid nitrogen. Tasted great. Pictures later
The Enernet – an energy network based on Internet principles. Based on a Moore’s law like approach to energy (it will become exponentially cheaper – I came in late so I missed how this would happen).
Wolfram Alpha. Making progress (it seems to have corrected the bugs I reported some time ago)
The two sessions I’ll deal with in detail are Open Data and Wave.