The Week That Was

A week filled with conferences that was as much amusing as it was baffling. It started off with a powwow conference involving some of the biggest names in theoretical physics and research. Which made it so much funnier when the bitchiness of the participants (99.9% male, there was only one female participant who wasn't a family member of a participant) came out full force from day one.

Guess male egos are as fragile and testy as female ones huh?! Then the tea was poisoned - seriously, it had an overpowering smell of detergent. Goodness! And don't get me started on the food. So apart from giving half the audience headaches from the technical presentations, they wanted to kill us with the refreshments. And bear in mind those refreshments brought the other half of the audience out of slumberland into the land of the living.

It was with a sigh of relief that I went on to attend the tech conference. It was, surprisingly, fun. Ok, I'm no techie but at least I understood most of what was going on and in any case, there was enough wry humour going around to make things bearable. Tellingly, no one bothered to answer the contentious questions I threw out there. No one wants to ponder the consequences/side effects of profiling via big data upon health insurance. Tell me no one worries that with all the focus on covering themselves that insurance companies are not looking for ways to streamline their client base so as to cut the payout probability.

It was hilarious that this guy who was the age of some of my former students was trying to emphasise the stability of the UAVs to a friend of mine who asked. Bear in mind, the military use UAVs have always had stability problems, would commercial use UAVs be that much better. If so, hmm, what does that say of the designers and engineers who work on the military use models? And out of nowhere, this cute researcher popped up and for once, I seriously considered hitting on someone while on business. Only three things stopped me: I don't want to damage my professional reputation, he is 5 years younger and he looks like my ex fiancé the one my friends labelled the Spanish psycho.

But seriously, it's been loads of fun. Inspirational in some unexpected ways. The optimism of researchers who talked about doing things simply for good rather than $ contrasted with the slick elevator pitches. The solving of a problem here and now in the case of The Drinkable Book stood in stark contrast to the driverless car enthusiasts arguing over range of use and refusal to engage with questions on the ethics of accidents involving driverless cars.

And finally, the relentlessly monotonous presentations of bureaucrats were thankfully erased by the humour and sense of Google's Director of Games who joked about installing jacks on people's heads for connectivity with the internet - one guy raised his hands to express his wish to be the recipient of such a jack - seriously dude, you aren't being cool, you're showing how desperate you want to seem cool. Hope you even considered what Mical said about receiving a DOS on your own brain once the hackers get to your brain LOL

So how did your week go? Hope it was as fun and more productive than mine was.

No work done on the writing, beta readers forgive me!