BIL, beach and hot sauce

A few of you have noticed that I'm a little darker skinned than I was previously (see photo to left). Well, the explanation is simple, it's a recent photo and I was at the beach getting my ultra-tan on. I happened to be at the BIL Conference, and was in Monterey where the beaches are. BIL was cool; the proactive social evangelism by the people behind it seemed to work pretty well. Out of the 200 people there was only one super-freak who parasitized everyone's attention (you know who I'm talking about if you were there). I met two bloggers, Lexi Bright and Shannon Clark; we bonded over our interests in small-world networks. Speaking of blogs, about 20 people there seemed to know me from the blog. My face is pretty distinctive I guess.The nerd-quotient was out of control. There was always someone somewhere deriving a proof on a napkin (sometimes you'd see two people extemporaneously deriving a proof simultaneously). Later down at the bar I had a conversation where I made an analogy to the third moment about a distribution; no one blinked. There was also this Irish guy who looked kind of like an elf who wanted to discuss the deontological implications of transhumanism over a beer (no, not guinness!). Finally, to the chagrin of some of my friends who were temporarily associated with me I attempted to make the term "tranny" an appropriate shorthand for transhumanist by regularly asking people if they were trannies upon first meeting them (the Singularity Institute was a sponsor). In my defense, gay used to have a very different connotation at one point, and I'd estimate that 20% of attendees were sympathetic to transhumanism.I also met Craig of Deep Sea News. If you were to guess who had the curried dish for dinner, would you have thought it was the guy from Arkansas instead of the brown dude? Life is full of surprises (I much recommend the calamari at The Crown & Anchor, I ordered it three times).Finally, the Trader Joe's in Monterey had only one hot sauce. And it was of the jalapeno variety. Weak!1 - Piece of advice to Irish guys with big eyes, slim build and who are not particularly lanky: don't wear a hat that makes you look like a leprechaun! It ruins the conversational flow when your interlocutor keeps wanting to psych you out by suggesting there's a pot of gold at the other end of the bar....