Last Meeting Day: Talks and Walks

The last day of the meeting featured some of the more interesting talks, at least for me. The two basic topics were immunology and gene expression studies. The gene expression studies were all over the place and which emphasized their dangers. On one hand, you get lots of data. Like terrabytes worth, and its really hard to sort through all that data carefully and get data you are confident in. So, we had Ad studies saying everything from 20 to 7000 genes were affected by infection. On the other hand, doing studies with transformed cell lines growing in a dish may not be the best way to find out what really happens when a complex vector (i.e. a human) actually becomes infected, no matter how many time points you take. Without all that intracellular communication, I'm not sure any of the signals you see are real. I've been consulting with a DoD group who has tried to do the experiments with actual infected recruits, and they've run into the problem of human data too noisy to deconvolute. Caught between the fruit fly and the petri dish.

Of course, everything was running late, and I wanted to both have lunch and drop off my laptop before going on the sponsored hike through Zurich. I grabbed a Co-Op kebob (best of the bunch) and headed to Paradeplatz to meet up with everyone doing the walking tour. I actually got there about a half-hour early, so I headed down towards the lake to kill some time. There was a flea market going on and someone had a collection of early seventies 45s. I didn't have time to dig through all of them, but I'm already kicking myself for not buying the Paranoid picture sleeve. I mean its SABBATH!

The walking tour was interesting, with lots of tales of early Zurich. Turns out it has been invaded by both the Romans and The Celts of all people. Talk about overachieving. Even the lady who organized the tour was griping about how the meeting was arranged, and she had asked to do the tour during the meeting, which would have dramatically increased attendance, and gotten us into a few more places. Being the type of person that has to know the origin of everything (Zurich comes from the name of a local tribe leader, Tsuri) I really enjoyed the hearing tales of all the old buildings. The tour was led by a former Master of the Carpenter's Guild, which given the role of Guild's in Zurich's history, he's basically minor nobility. It's difficult to explain the complexity of the Guilds and membership (for instance, our guide was a mathematician and knew nothing of carpentry) but its your basic boys club of insiders. The lady who organized the trip took every oppurtunity to rib the Master about the exclusion of women from the guilds. We ended the tour with him showing us the exquisite downtown guildhouse, and their collection of ornate drinking glasses donated by members over the years. In times of trouble, these were melted down to make gold and silver ingots, but quite a number had survived. The shots above/below are of the top floor of the Guild House, which looks like it could have been used for evil syndicate planning. You can see the river running through the middle of town in one shot. Also, there are a few shots of the devils in the details from one of the main Zurich church.

The train ride to Vienna was beautiful but uneventful. Basically, we came down the valley that is Austria between the alps the entire way. Quite scenic, but I didn't feel like being the tourist trying to shoot shots through the window. The best part was that Cheese was here at the end of it. It seems he has been sending me emails, but they are not reaching me for whatever reason. Must be one of those internet tubes plugged up somewhere.