SoCal

I'm at SFO now, on my way to Los Angeles for the annual Fulbright science retreat. These things are always lots of fun. More importantly, they are a great excuse to have informal conversations with scientists from many different fields. This is always really interesting, and often sparks new ideas that wouldn't come up otherwise. In particular, it was at one of these retreats that I cemented my decision to quit doing "traditional" physics, and start doing research in theoretical neuroscience.

By contrast, most conferences are single-discipline.

From LA, I'm off to San Diego for the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting. This is a huge meeting (over 30,000 scientists!), and is single-disciplinary (although neuroscience is a pretty multidisciplinary field, so this is a bit of a misnomer).

Hopefully I'll have a chance to hit the beach (and maybe do some dinghy sailing in the warm SoCal waters... a nice contrast from the frigidity of the ocean in the SF area), in addition to some serious sciencing.

That's all for this (decidedly low-content) post. I'll write something more serious about the role of statistical priors on decision-making when I get a chance.