I’ve spent the last two days at ETech in San Diego, watching many diverse presentations from some incredibly intelligent people.

At the EFF Pioneer Awards, Cindy Cohn gave an award to Mark Klein, the AT&T engineer who blew the whistle on the NSA wiretapping case. It was wonderful to see Mark being honored for his heroism in the case, and Cindy’s speech was very moving (full text of speech here on the EFF site)

Last night we attended EFF Pioneer awards and a release party for the Walt Disney Internet Group. Ironically, EFF (a non-profit) gave away free drinks, while Disney (oh so profitable) charged.

I’m currently at a talk on Brain Imaging by Daniel Marcus. Did you know that your brain begins to decline in volume around age 30 and loses about 1% per year after that? Scary. He’s currently discussing fcMRI, a way of looking at correlated activity in the brain. This is a new way of looking at the brain using Quantitative radiology. They say they can actually detect when and where people are thinking about certain things. Amazing.

On my list of talks today is Web Visualization, Antigeneic Cartography, and Disaster Technology: What is working and what is coming.