NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2016 Feb 13, 16:26 -0800
Yes, very worthwhile! I'll have to see if I can attend and maybe do a presentation or two. Here's the main web page for the gathering:
http://sot2016.cfa.harvard.edu/. Note that the standard registration fee is $400, but you do get four lunches in the deal.
The conference is listed as June 5-9, 02016. The five-digit year, as I see it, is a hint of the influence of the Long Now Foundation which has been advocating five-digit years as a way of emphasizing long-term, multi-millennium thinking for nearly 0.02 millennia. If you visit their web site, longnow.org, you'll see that they list their founding date as 01996.
Back on the Science of Time conference page, the "The Science Organizing Committee for SoT 2016 [...] responsible for establishing the scientific and technical content of the program" includes some familiar names:
- Catherine Hohenkerk (Co-Chair), Her Majesty's Nautical Almanac Office, UKHO
- Jay Pasachoff (Co-Chair), Williams College Arnold Rots (Co-Chair), Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
- Rob Seaman (Co-Chair), Network Time Foundation
- Steven Allen, University of California Observatories / Lick Observatory
- Elisa Felicitas Arias, Bureau International des Poids et Mesures
- Ludwig Combrinck, Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory
- Pavel Gábor, SJ, Vatican Observatory
- Daniel Gambis, International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service
- Alyssa Goodman, Harvard University
- Mizuhiko Hosokawa, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology
- P. Kenneth Seidelmann, University of Virginia
- Kara Warburton, International Organization for Standardization
- Owen Gingerich, Harvard University
I met five of these folks at a conference near Philadelphia a few years back. This was the conference that was also attended by science popularizer, Neil deGrasse Tyson, which allows me to boast to geeks that "Neil deGrasse Tyson called me a Time Lord" and "I'm listed in the credits to his radio show above Bill Nye, Science Guy". No seriously. If you know any geeky folks (outside NavList, that is), they will be impressed. Everyone else? Nah. ;)
Frank Reed
ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA