Many consider Science Foo Camp to be a gathering of the biggest, most brilliant, and influential minds of our age. As far as this might be true, my overwhelming feeling was one of oxymoronically intelligent unintelligence, in a very enjoyable sort of way of course. What else could one possibly expect with a band a theoretical physicists (including a Nobel laureate), a few TED prize winners, a bundle of CEOs and investors, the occasional inventor and entrepreneur of Bond like gadgets, the odd billionaire, the brilliant but eccentric and pathologically socially maladjusted scientist (no link to this one), at least one astronaut, a tropical ecologist, more MIT-Perimeter-Ivy league prodigies than I have met in my entire previous life, and a large cohort of Open Source/Access/Science advocates, a future forecasters (didn’t even know that was a legitimate job), one surfer dude, a jazz singer, and one very funny guy.
Cartoon drawn by Pierre Lindenbaum. Used with permission.
This is from the “Mario’s Entangled Bank” blog ( http://pineda-krch.com ) of Mario Pineda-Krch, a theoretical biologist at the University of California, Davis.
Two Nobel laureates?
Yup, Frank and Andy Fire. I managed to have an intelligent conversation with Andy, but Frank is a Quantum Physics guy. Us biology types have a hard time relating with them…
Actually, according to Google’s blog, there were 4 Nobel laureates there. In addition to the two mentioned above, also Sydney Brenner and Walter Gilbert.
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/08/scifoo-200-of-worlds-top-scientists.html