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Reflecting on this year’s Sci Foo

23rd September 2011
 | Kaitlin Thaney

It’s been slightly over a month since Science Foo Camp (“Sci Foo” for short), and we’ve been lucky to have a number of Sci Foo alum visit us in the weeks since the event. We most recently were joined by Scott Snibbe, an interactive designer who is working with Bjork on a stunning app for her latest (science-themed) album Biophilia. There’s also been some outstanding post-Sci Foo coverage, including a series of essays and videos in this month’s Edge, coordinated by Sci Foo friend John Brockman, culling together some of this year’s campers’ key take-aways. It features Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek, video of some of this year’s campers and words from others (I won’t spoil all of the surprise… )

Our very own Timo Hannay reflects on his experience – quite a daunting task as he’ll detail below. Here’s an excerpt from his essay on Edge, where he describes what it’s like to even attempt to sum up the highlights from the weekend. You can read more about Timo’s Sci Foo here:

“Trying to sum up Sci Foo is a bit like trying to describe the Mandelbrot set. You can give the formula, but that doesn’t begin to communicate the experience. Alternatively, you can try to summarise the overall shape, perhaps by outlining some of the main events and themes, but to me that somehow misses the essence too. So I’ll make do with describing some of the personal delights that I encountered during my wanderings among the intellectual whorls and crenulations that make up this event, even at the risk of missing the big picture (for which it is perhaps best simply to imagine the following experiences multiplied by a few hundred). […]”

Timo and I are honored to be a part of the organising team, along with our colleagues Tim O’Reilly and Sara Winge of O’Reilly Media, and Chris Dibona and Cat Allman from Google. For more information on the event, visit the conference site where you can read more about the history of Sci Foo.

Many thanks to John again for his coverage of this year’s event.