Great conference! Geoff Marcy announced 6 more new exoplanets, some with multi-year periods. I asked him what he thought of the prevalance of elliptical orbit Jovians vis-a-vis our circular solar system. He said he figured around 10% of systems had reasonably circular orbits. He thinks the reason the others are elliptical is that typically LOTS of big planets form and subsequently the several superJovians gravitationally interact and modify their orbits, ejecting some, sending some sunward, etc. Interesting.

Someone asked a gravitational lens question. Our sun has a grav lens focus at 1,000 AU. Put a Keck out there and you could see outlines of continents on a planet 100LY away if lined up with the sun. Some minor technical details remain before we do thei. :)

Paul Horowitz has gone completely over to Optical SETI. One scope in operation with another new 2m all sky scope coming on line this fall here at Harvard, MA out 30 miles west of Cambridge. I gotta go read his website.

Drake was there. A great speaker. Looks robust for a total geezer.

Discussions with N = ~L Guillermo Lemarchand gave a talk where he posited the next 100 years was critical for L as we're almost half way thru a 200 yr instability period where we adjust to WMD and population growth. Interesting grapg on the growth of Democracies, and we know Democracies are unlikely to war with other democracies...

SETI@Home's Dan Werthimer was interesting even with his Bush bashing asides.

Blind Kent Cullors (remember his character in Contact?) played sounds of different astronomical sources and distinguished carrier wave detection from information demodulation and decoding.

Woody Sullivan spoke on astrobiology and afterwards in private discussion critiqued colleages Ward and Brownlee's "Rare "Earth" as being too much of "just so" stories based on our example of one.

I survived the People's Republic of Cambridge without being burned at the stake for supporting Bush over Kerry.