MODELS!

Yesterday evening was great.

I had a choice. Because I'm doing this blogging and know Elizabeth Clements in the Fermilab PR office, I scored a pass to Wired's Nextfest. This is an expo that shows off what Wired and others think is cool futuristic technology that is coming. Very much a show for Geeks. And about 30 minutes before I set out downtown I got the following email from Susan, a friend who works at DDB Chicago.

There's a Ford model party on Thursday evening, June 23, if you'd like to come (I've been asked to share my invite with friends, but I have no details yet -- MODELS!).

I especially like how she put the word models in all capital letters. :-)

So... which one should I go to?? I figured that since it was a party it would go late, and Nextfest ends early, I could do both!

Nextfest is the sort of expo where you can see the Motorola phone that will be coming out 3-4 years from now. It isn't just consumer electronics. There was a GE locomotive simulator there. My favorite area of the show was the one run by GE. They had a number of scientists there who could speak in technical detail about the projects they were working on. That was great. GM has developed a chasis that is Fuel Cell powered -- this is one of the "tops" they have put on it. They had lots of imersive environments and games that detected who to shoot at by watching the motion of your hand with a video camera. NASA had a cool robot display -- a crab that walked under water to sweeps for mines. It is powered by mu-metal, which expands and contracts depending on its temperature. I asked why not use that on the Mars rover, but the problem is no one knows how to dissapate the heat in air. Underwater it works well. And it is controld by a circuit that emulates a lobster's nervous system (I kid you not -- animals were harmed in figuring out who it works). The fellow who was there was a neurobioligist. Hawaian shirt. Lot of fun to talk to.

The most frustrating display was, suprisingly, the MIT media lab. The great thing was it was full of graduate students. One thing they had was a pretty cool cube of lights with each light individually addresable. I couldn't figure out, off the top of my head, how they did this with so few wires -- so I asked. "Trade Secret" was the response. Annoying.

I was done by 9pm... and the model party was already done!!! What a lame party! I ended up meeting a bunch of people from that party out for dinner (no models). It was a great dinner.

Finally, after dinner broke up, I caught up with a totally different group of friends. Greg and Erin were having their wedding aniversery drink out with a group. Earlier that night, Greg, who works as the Lincoln Park Zoo's photographer, had put on a show covering almost 30 years of his work. A pretty good night for the two of them, if you ask me.

You know how you look at yourself differently from others? Erin was introducing me to some people I didn't know and she said "This is Gordon, who was always dating the most beutiful women." The way I remember it was that I was eternally single when I was hanging out with those guys. The time she refers to, by the way, was when I was a post-doc living in Chicago -- about 5-9 years ago.

The other weird thing I realized while writing this up is that I always associated Erin and Susan in my mind -- they were always at the same cool parties. I don't think I've seen them together in the last 5 years. Funny how things change over time...