Not one of the cool kids….
I had to go to a symposium in honor of one of our faculty members who turned 80 this month. I learned quite a bit about his research, both past and present, and it was quite interesting to learn about the history of ribosome discoveries, since this is one of my favorite subjects. And this was the first meeting that I was “required” to go to that I was actually interested in all of the talks!
I don’t want to get too much off on a tangent from what inspired me to write this particular post, however. Mainly I wanted to make a comment about how many people I saw who brought their laptops. This in itself should not be all that shocking - what a great way to take notes on the talks and be able to find them at a later date! What, to me, was a bit disappointing was that the people I could see with their computers were mostly not taking notes. Here’s the short, most likely predictable, list of what I saw going on:
1) People checking/sending email (always tempting when bored!)
2) People working on either presentations for a seminar or class or working on their own papers
3) People instant messaging
4) People playing various laptop games, including solitaire (of course!)
I will, unfortunately, admit that I was tempted myself to check my email, and I did use one of my peers’ laptops to write notes back and forth during a couple talks - and I did get distracted. However, she actually used her computer in a smart way to look up information or papers about each speaker and their data as they were talking. I found this to be rather handy in understanding more thoroughly what a few of the presenters were referring to. And this is something I would do if I were bold enough to bring my laptop into talks at a conference. On the other hand, I would only be able to do this if the given location had internet access at which point I would be MUCH too tempted not to chat online or check my own email. 
