We've been off at the Fourth Alcor Conference on Life Extension Technologies in Pacific Grove, California. (This is quite near the Pebble Beach golf course where Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open by such a large margin. The main effect on us was to make travel difficult.) It was an interesting conference mostly about cryonics (see my cryonics page for the basics). There are two schools of thought here: the bio fundamentalists who are working on perfecting the freezing (or vitrification) and thawing process to minimize damage to cells from ice crystals, and the nanomedicine advocates who believe it will change everything in a dramatic way. The bio fundamentalists are closer to making it work, but it's a controversial area of research with very little funding. Nanotech is purely hypothetical but has major backing from the US and others. President Clinton announced a big nanotech initiative at Caltech in January and nearly half a billion dollars is budgeted for work this year. It's kind of like the tortoise and the hare, but I'll be happy to see either side win.