Snow in the city

After working Saturday and Sunday at a conference, I was quite looking forward to having Monday off. Presidents’ Day, don’t you know.

I was also looking forward to Sears delivering a refrigerator to replace the one here that packed it in a week before.

However, when I got up Monday there was more than a dusting of snow, and it came down most of the day. Which meant no refrigerator; now rescheduled for next Monday. Maybe.

But I’ll admit that the snow looked pretty if you weren’t concerned about being able to eat at home. Viz. the Madison building at the Library of Congress:

Science grows on trees

In the exhibition hall at the AAAS Annual Meeting, they had something I found interesting: a Science Wish Tree. Well, three of them.

The deal was they had red tags for scientists to write down their greatest wishes, and blue ones for the non-scientists.

A couple of the reds:

Including one that seems to have a bit of an edge:

And a couple of blues:

To be honest, I’m not sure that people understood the red/blue significance, because I’m not finding a distinction between practitioner and non-practitioner issues. However, here’s one that articulates definite science pain:

The family of science

You see some interesting sights when you visit the Family Science Days at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I was there this weekend, and the place was a positive hive of activity. It really was a treat to watch the way even the smallest kids got wrapped up around various scientific inquiries.

The adults were a hoot, too.

Here are a couple of shots—one of the posters on display:

(What animal do you see?)

And one of…well, the embodiment of the science of Africa booth:

Conference capitalism

Working a booth for three days at a conference gave me a lot of time to consider the closed ecosystem of the conference venue/hotel.

In this particular case, it was the Marriott Wardman Park, but it could have been pretty much anywhere. The Marriott WP is in the Woodley Park/Adams Morgan neighborhood of the District They Call Columbia, so it’s not like it’s the only place out in the middle of nowhere. But it’s still closed.

If you don’t want to take your food and drink from the hotel, you have to walk outside to one of the eateries on Connecticut Avenue or Woodley. And if you’re dodging between seminars, workshops and sessions, that’s extra time you don’t have. (The conference provided no food to the general attendees, so you fended for yourself.)

Moreover, this past weekend we had temperatures in the 20s, with a wind chill even lower, so making that short trek was even more daunting a prospect.

The hotel was Metro-accessible, so that’s how my colleagues and I got there the first day. But on the second, one of them drove in and parked in the Marriott’s garage. He commented, “I realized the hotel’s business model: extortion.”

And that’s basically what you get in that closed eco-system. Everything comes with that we-can-get-away-with-this surcharge. If you didn’t want to bundle up and brave the arctic wind outside, you just sucked it up. A plain brewed (not even cold-brewed; whatever that is) coffee is $4, and don’t even think about refills. So is an apple or a banana. A bare-bones sandwich is $8. A prepacked salad of a fistful of greens and a slice of tomato is $10.

And parking your car for two hours is $26.

But it’s more than that. The closed ecosystem means that service is also we-can-get-away-with-this lackadaisical. Things get done (ish) when they get done. Or they don’t.

This point was driven home to me on Friday, when a colleague and I went to get one of those overpriced sandwiches at a coffee-and-prepacked sandwich stand, the only budget (relatively) alternative to the hotel bar or restaurant. It being lunchtime, the line to pay was extensive, and nearly immobile. I noticed two contributory factors:

In an age where everything related to credit card transactions is done electronically, with purchases under $20 requiring no signature, the Marriott’s sandwich stand printed out receipts and required customers to sign them. (With the line for the tip included, so at a minimum you had to zero that out and write in the total in addition to your signature.)

But then one of the two women working the cash registers picked up her cash drawer and walked away. Apparently her shift was over, and there was no replacement. Twenty people lined up were not a concern at all.

Closed ecosystem. It’s like the Mafia, but with sales tax.

Gratitude Monday: A day off

I’ve spent the past three days working a booth at a conference. Even though I didn’t have to stand through the whole thing, as I’ve done at other conferences and trade shows, I’m still completely knackered, because I was “fronting” a product I know very little about. That kind of thing just beats the daylights out of you.

So today—on what should have been the third day of a three-day weekend—I’m grateful to finally have a day off. I’m thinking bacon and French toast and finishing yesterday’s Washington Post.