Wow what a great weekend. I gave my talk. A few people said they liked it, and I hope that they did. I started out describing what a carcinogen was and how to detect it. Went from there to the fact that it has been shown that plants can convert some of the non carcinogenic chemicals sprayed on them into carcinogens. How little we know about how chemicals are degraded and changed in the environment, to all the toxic chemicals in our groundwater and how little we know about them and particularly their breakdown products. And finished up with the idea of using a constructed wetland to clean up well water before you use it in the house. There have been requests to try and post the slides online and I will try to do that on the blog — here if that’s where you’re reading it.
And the rest of the talks were fantastic. Paul Wheaton’s keynote address was mind blowing. We gave him a standing ovation, of which he deserved every second. I saw initially that it was going to last 2 and a half hours and I said to myself, there is no way I’m going to sit through somebody talking for 2 and a half hours. Well it started at 4:30 p.m. and at 7 I was standing with the rest giving him the ovation he deserved.
The only thing, _only thing_, that I am somewhat concerned about is that there were a lot of people who still advocate killing anything they don’t like. There was this huge guy with tattoos all over and who was talking about a spider in his beehive and wanted to know if there was something he could put in his bee hives that would kill spiders. Not only is this wrong on so many levels but I asked him how many people he knew who had been killed or injured by spiders. Answer: none
Then I asked him how many people he knew who had been injured or killed in automobile accidents. His response: well it’s not the same.
So this huge 6 foot plus guy is afraid of a little spider and this little scrawny runt he’s talking to who, he probably thought he could squash with 1 finger, isn’t :-)
Ahhhhhh I love I irony. And he was such a manly man laugh, laugh, laugh.
Bob