Here comes the sun

I've been awful negative lately in my posts, and it occurred to me that I ought to try to lighten things up a bit.

So instead of agonizing over how much I need to get done before my trip tomorrow, I'm going to try to get excited about it instead. It's the Japanese-American Kavli Frontiers of Science (and no, I am not of Japanese descent).  Basically, I got an invitation out of the blue to attend this symposium, whose premise sounds a lot like, "let's throw a bunch of smart people in a room together and see what happens."  So I said, sure what the heck, as long as they're paying for it. And who doesn't want to go to California in December?

It occurred to me last night that this is the first conference I'm going to where I pretty much won't know anyone else there. Who will I hang out with? Will I find people to eat dinner with? What if they all hate me? ...oh, but I was going to be positive.

I guess the advantage of going to this type of meeting is that it's a lot easier to get excited about my science when I'm talking to people who aren't experts, because I'm always terrified that the experts will see through all the holes in my models and rip it to shreds before my very eyes.  The non-experts tend to ooh and ahh more, which is always gratifying.

And I'm looking forward to seeing the sun, too.