From http://www.newspacejournal.com/2013/02/21/new-insights-on-that-private-crewed-mars-mission/:

This publication obtained a copy of the paper Tito et al. plan to present at the conference, discussing a crewed free-return Mars mission that would fly by Mars, but not go into orbit around the planet or land on it. This 501-day mission would launch in January 2018, using a modified SpaceX Dragon spacecraft launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket. According to the paper, existing environmental control and life support system (ECLSS) technologies would allow such a spacecraft to support two people for the mission, although in Spartan condition. âoeCrew comfort is limited to survival needs only. For example, sponge baths are acceptable, with no need for showers,â the paper states.

The IEEE Aerospace Conference is in March -- next month. That's pretty interesting timing.

I respectfully disagree. I've been to four LISA conferences (sysadmin conference run by USENIX) since 2006, and I see very little that is comparable; there are the various LOPSA conferences (LOPSA-EAST, Cascadia IT Conference), but they're simply not at LISA's scale. Want to hang out with a thousand other sysadmins? Get training from Ted T'so on recovering borked disks? See what Google is up to -- or the small IT shop at the university down the coast with 1/20000th the budget? There's simply nothing else out there that matches it.

As for the rest of the conferences, all I know is the summaries I've read in ;login: and the material that I've watched/listened to on their website. (And btw, HUGE kudos to USENIX to opening access to their proceedings, talks and papers.) But at the very least, they make damned interesting reading, and have made me very curious about things that are going on outside my narrow focus.

I don't have the breadth of experience you do; I concentrate on system administration because I love it, and I've been doing it less than ten years. I'm definitely an interested amateur (at best) when it comes to topics like security, or file systems, or OS design. But I'm always surprised how much of USENIX conference material touches on areas of interest or direct relevance to me, and at the very least browsing their papers is a wonderful introduction to some research and work I'd miss otherwise. I'm sure (with the exception of LISA) there are more focused conferences, or better known ones (DefCon is one that springs to mind). But I can't agree that USENIX is "past its sell date".

(And in passing, thanks very kindly for all the work you've done for the Open Source/Free Software community. Kinda boggles my mind that I'm debating you...)

Ha...I recognize the panel on the tape drive here:

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/all/18

I wasn't around then, but I've been reading up on him and all the rest of the Apollo astronauts since. I'm filled with wonder every time I think about it.

Thank you for everything, sir. I hope your eternity is a pleasant one.

Well put. Fare well, Mr. Armstrong.

(Whoops, just saw that you said it was part of textual criticism...)

Thanks for the term "stemmatics" -- I was familiar w/the concept but knew it as "textual criticism", which I think is probably a great deal more broad than this. What's always bugged me about this concept -- perhaps unfairly -- is whether or not it has any experimental evidence to back it up. My impression is that it's a bunch of heuristics based on a preference for simplicity. Is there any experimental evidence to suggest that texts do grow/change the way these rules say? (I'm not asking for you to chip in (although you're welcome to - hey, your journal :-), more just outlining my next bout of reading in my spare time.)

Sorry to jump in, but I happened to read a neat paper in Nature about something like this a while back. It was called Rise and fall of political complexity in island South-East Asia and the Pacific. TThe article is behind a paywall, but there's a general summary from Wired magazine here, and another aimed at fellow researchers here.

My half-assed summary: the researchers use phylogenetic methods -- ways of looking at genomes from organisms and estimating how long ago they had common ancestors (I'm sure Samantha could give a better/actually accurate explanation) -- and see if it can be applied to societies to see how they change over time. In this study, they looked at a bunch of different groups in the south Pacific and tested different models about how political organization could change (would people go from loose tribes to highly-organized kingdoms in one step? what about the other way around?). It was interesting stuff.

Many thanks for the explanations!

The researchers I work with deal with microarray data a lot, and have built a tool to help compare datasets (http://www.chibi.ubc.ca/Gemma). I'm becoming more familiar with the technology as I go along, but the heat maps and the dendrogram legends (is that what they're called?)...man, those are some dense infodumps.