Tuesday in Chicago didn’t get off to a great start…
I thought I would start my day off with a trip down memory lane and head to the symposium – “30 Years of Conducting Polymers” – the first session of which began with a memorial of Alan MacDiarmid, who passed away in February (the obituary published in Nature can be found here – subscription required).
Well, it turns out that memory lane was a little congested – I turned up at 9:15 to hear the first talk and couldn’t even get into the room, people were standing in the corridor watching the talk through the doors! (Note to ACS conference organizers: a memorial session for a recently deceased and well-liked Nobel Laureate, especially one that features a co-recipient of the aforementioned Nobel Prize, should not be held in a room only slightly larger than one of the bathrooms onboard a Boeing 777 jet… – more on this later…)
Deterred, I went a little further down the polymer path and ended up in a talk given by Al Nelson, a former UCLA colleague of mine, and now researcher at IBM Almaden. Al was talking about polymeric self-assembly and molecular recognition, and he gets props for the best ‘’s_law">Moore’s Law’ kind of slide I’ve seen in a while… he based it on gaming systems, showing how their capabilities have progressed at a phenomenal rate – from marbles, through to Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Stuart
Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)
At the last ACS talk I went to (DC ‘05) it seemed like the organic sessions got preferential treatment (big rooms, at the conventional center instead of the satellite hotels). A session on colloids that I went to was buried in a hotel’s basement in a tiny room, and it was packed. I’m not saying the ORGN section doesn’t need/deserve the bigger space, just that it’d be nice if the other sections got what they needed too.
Can’t say I’ve ever seen Moore’s Law presented that way. Maybe that will make it more accessible to the general public?