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I’m finally back home again after a very intense week at the conference. It was a fantastic and academically inspiring time in many ways, but now I’m completely exhausted. I’ve just finished sorting through a load of emails that needed responses and a few other outstanding work matters, and I think that’s probably about it for me this weekend as far as intelligent activity goes.

It’s pretty interesting going to a conference that’s outside your area of expertise, as much for the fun of experiencing a different scientific culture as anything else. The differences are very subtle, but interesting, and two things in particular surprised me a little.

First, there were more people using Apple hardware than I had expected—-I’d estimate that a little over 25% of the laptops at the conference were Powerbooks or iBooks. Given my unofficial position as Apple Fangirl, I obviously think that’s an encouraging thing. I suppose that I shouldn’t have been so surprised given the increasing credibility of Macs as a serious development platform since the move to a BSD foundation with Mac OS X, but it was still nice to see.

Second, I was agog at the number of people using laptops during talks, and particularly people surfing or checking email. Now, it’s entirely possible that I’m just a bit out of touch (not having gone to a really big Biology conference in a couple of years), but at most conferences I’ve attended, very few people have even used laptops to take notes. A wireless connection in the lecture room does allow people to do cool things like downloading a paper mentioned in the talk, or surfing the speaker’s home page. However, some people were either parallel processing with great efficiency, or just using the time to catch up on email or other tasks.

The terrible temptation for me was to look over their shoulder and see just what they were finding so fascinating. If they were Mac users, I felt even more compelled to see what they had in their Dock. I didn’t quite feel that I had the chutzpah to open up my Powerbook, so I sat there like Dr. Luddite with my Moleskine and fountain pen. I’m planning to sort and transcribe my notes on to my computer next week, and hoping that the transcription process might prompt a bit more processing and synthesis of the ideas I was exposed to.

I took pathetically few photographs in Edinburgh—-my excuse is that I had very little free time—-but I’ve put a few up on flickr.

There’s a noise in the background of ‘Rental Car’ by Beck (on the album ‘Guero’) that sounds really like our doorbell. The sad part about this is that I’ve now been fooled by it twice within a matter of minutes; both times I actually got up to answer the the door.

I blame having my head filled to bursting point with unfamiliar, technical, complex and difficult stuff over the past week. It’s obvious that some of that information is going to have to leak out of my head before normal functioning is resumed.