Bay Area Futurists
29-Feb-08
Went to the Bay Area futurists meeting tonight. It was held in a conference room at SAP’s offices at 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304. Very nice venue, and SAP sponsored some delicious food (bacon wrapped jalepeno peppers, stuff with cheese, fresh fruit, cheese quesadillas).
The scheduled speaker called in sick, so it was open mike night. Each speaker presented a 5 minute talk on a topic of interest to them, followed by a five minute Q&A.
My favorite talks were by Eric Boyd and John Smart. Boyd talked about his website, xprizecars.com, on which he provides uniform comparisons of all known cars competing for the Automotive X-Prize. The Aptera is my favorite so far.
John Smart talked about chemical fixation/plastination as an alternative to cryopreservation. I certainly think it’s better than nothing, but I’m skeptical that it preserves enough information for restoration and that the brains would degrade during room temperature storage.
i gave a talk on the Blackmail diet. It seemed to go over well, even though I had not prepared anything in advance.
I got to meet several new people, as well as talk briefly with nasu_dengaku, who I didn’t know was going to be there beforehand.
