What I’ve learned so far at the PSA.

This is not an exhaustive account of my experiences at the PSA so far, but rather what’s at the top of my Day-Quil-addled head:

• I am not the only academic whose tastes run to hand-drawn slides.
• However, it is possible that I am the youngest academic whose tastes run to hand-drawn slides.
• Apparently, using Powerpoint marks me as nearly as tremendous a Luddite as using actual overheads. Keynote is where it’s at. (But I may be unwilling to actually invest the time necessary to make the transition, especially seeing as how I like hand-drawn slides.)
• A “coffee breaks” in the conference schedule for which free coffee is provided will be totally consumed with standing in line for that free coffee.
• A “coffee break” for which no free coffee is provided is, essentially, a bathroom break.
• A “coffee break” for which free coffee is provided at a location 16 floors away from where the conference presentations take place can only end in heartbreak.
• There are an awful lot of men at this conference. Women? Not so much. (Of course, this makes the coffee breaks that are really bathroom breaks more efficient.)
• If you are sick at a conference, knowing a quick and affordable source of soup within two blocks of the conference site can persuade you that maybe you’ll live.

I also learned some very interesting things about the challenges of keeping clinical trials as unbiased as possible, about which more later.
Now, I’m off to a roundtable/workshop (one of whose participants is Ben Cohen) on electronic scholarship and the history of science, technology, and medicine. I’m guessing one of the central questions will be what exactly counts as electronic scholarship. (Online journals? Databases? Wikis? Blogs?)