Have you ever gone to an engineering or scientific conference?

I just returned from one on Wednesday and boy...what an experience...nothing like white paper presentations about probability distributions and six sigma and then later drinking until the wee hours of the night either talking about work or making of fun of the people who are geekier than we are...hahahaha

I've gone with several of my biology professors (most in the fields of genetics, ecology, and genetic evolution b/c that's my focus), and there is nothing better than getting shit faced with your professor while discussing how stupid fundies are in Kansas :)

And yeah, it's a good time. :D

Last one I was at, I sat in between two birding GODS and watched them shoot tequila. :D

Symposium on Diving, Undersea Developments and related equipment. (In the seventies)

Very interesting.

180

Quality Engineer maybe?

it was a simulation conference

:7

His favorite part is the "booth babes" (as he calls them),the model-types who hand out info at the various display booths touting the latest scientific advancements. He and the guys he works with rarely see women who look like that, so it's a big deal to them.

that's funny ..."booth babes"

that's the technical term. Very desirable gig at the IEEE Power Engineering Society winter meetings.

to be a somewhat attractive woman in engineering.

the funniest part of the conference I attended were the badges...hung about our neck around our stomach area. so to find out your name people had to look at your stomach and then roll their eyes up to your face...which made everyone look like they were checking out each others bodies....my coworkers and i got a good laugh out about that..

... and try to make up more entertaining titles for the talks. For example, "Plant macrofossils on the Oregon Continental Margin" really ought to be "20,000 Leaves Under the Sea", don't you think?

My all-time favorite conference was a polar ecology/climatology meeting in Yellowknife, where one speaker was so boring that the session chair fell asleep ... and the guy droned on for 20 minutes past his allocated time because, since he was some major government bigwig, people were too scared to interrupt.

I have to admit that I am all conferenced out for now, after helping organize 2 major meetings at my school (which, in its wisdom, got rid of the entire Conference Services division, leaving it up to a bunch of amateurs to tarnish the university's name with a hastily-assembled event).

No shit, back in my past life.

I met a lot of very nice people, just like everyone else, just with a different job.

one is semi-retired and making wine...another is into sculpture....

Now this may sound silly, but I shit you not, its the reason. Its because for the most part the people you meet at such events are doing pretty well financially.

Now don't get me wrong, for the most part these guys and gals aren't raking in the bucks, but they aren't doing badly either. Thing is they are smart enough to save too, so by the time they rake up enough seniority to be sluffing all around the country on the company buck they have the cash to indulge themselves. That makes for some interesting hobbies.

There's also the obvious. For the most part you don't land at those sorts of get-togethers unless you put in some successful college time beforehand. I'm not saying that some of them can't be dumb as stumps, but for the most part they tend to be pretty well educated folks. Some of them even got back into the habit of reading after college. Those would be the better ones.

makes a big difference...i know that myself and that is why i count my blessings....i am by no means wealthy but i am doing okay...(both hubby and i are engineers)

and the people there are by in large very well educated and they enjoy learning...

At scientific meetings I love to go to talks about which I know nothing (between the talks I have to attend).

Some of the things people study about which I've not contemplated are beautiful.

Sounds boring to me.

I am in the RF world and it's a relatively small community. Same groups of people most years and over the last 15 years or so I've gotten to look forward to the drunken debauchery with them once or twice a year. Some the few times it's truly good to be a geek. IEEE MTT-S will be in San Francisco this year. What better place for a pub crawl?