Pop!Tech Memes

Pop!Tech 2005 was a great conference, again. I made notes only when something struck me as interesting or memorable or quotable, so this list of memes is very quirky just based on my in-the-moment reactions!

  • " Barcode of Life" - Robert Hanner. My summary of this is that it is a specific gene sequence that can be found across a very wide spectrum of organisms, which has the characteristic that it is more or less the same in individuals from a single species and very different in individuals from different species. Such a sequence can be used to establish the borders between species. See Barcode of Life.

  • " Buy something, and get not only the thing, but the factory with which to build it." Robert Hanner. A metaphor for thinking about what makes life special - the thing can reproduce itself, hence it also acts like a factory. His company is ProtoLife.

  • " A right handed person, if they lose their right arm, will quickly become a left handed person. They will have no problem learning to use their left hand as well as they used to use their right hand."Todd Kuiken, discussing amputees and prosthetics. Also remember Jesse Sullivan, the patient who demonstrated an amazing new kind of prosthetic.

  • " Backing up the Biosphere" - Peter Diamandis, impresario extraordinaire, director of the X Prize. Describes vividly why the human race should work on establishing a presence in places beyond earth. It's the ultimate off-site storage for life. Also, take a look at the X Prize Store

  • " The day before something is a major breakthrough it was a crazy idea that would never work."Another meme from Peter Diamandis.

  • " Methane Hidrate", the ice that burns!

  • " Soon there will be more people living in Bombay than on the whole Australian continent.", Suketu Metha

  • " In Bombay there are sections with more than 1 million people per square mile!, also Suketu Metha.

  • " That's not a vision… that's a hallucination!", Bunker Roy, founder of the Barefoot College in India.

  • " Indians are the second smartest people on earth … after the Chinese!" - According to Bunker Roy, supposedly a comment made by Bill Gates in India. See Christian Science Monitor.

  • " Go from the Aha! to the So What?" Slogan of the Push Conference, a conference that some people are describing as the "new Pop!Tech"

(By the way, different folks blogged Pop!Tech in gory detail. Check out the front page for a list of bloggers.) Technorati Tags: poptech