 Tweeting well is a hard thing. Tweeting well is a hard thing to do. But I'm so pleased with my tweet about Guy Davies because it's got such a nice picture of him. Like, I officially don't care what anything looks like. And yet... User engagement. I know, exactly. This is why we make nice figures in our papers. I know, but there's also a sense in which we're serious scientists and we care about certain things. We're serious scientists and we shouldn't care about how things look. I don't care about that. I don't believe that. Like, that's a good sign. Oh yeah, I think that's the second time we've run that out today and we only have 35 people. Two things I want to talk to you about. Yes, hit me. Besides drink this last remaining coffee. I know, we've got the last of it. Talk to me about wanting to talk about the intellectual merit for hosting these kinds of factories. I do want to talk about that. I'm very excited about that. And then I want to talk about how we make satellite versions of these. That's a hard question. Well, let's do them in that order. There's this kind of growing community in astronomy who's become a little dissatisfied with the completely standard kind of astronomical meeting where there's a schedule and people talk for 20 minutes and then there's four minutes of questions and then you roll. Hands going up. I was inspired by a set of meetings called Dot Astronomy. Rob Simpson is a huge, like, hero. And inspired by that and inspired also by people kind of complaining about how the WAS meetings are just so... We started the hack day just as a respite from the meeting where you could just sit down, like we have so many talented people at WAS, can't they just get together and hack? But this meeting is really very focused around the scientific goals of a future NASA mission. What's the style of this meeting before test launches versus after it launches? That's a very good question. In fact, one of the things that's new about this meeting relative to the things we've done in the past is this is a meeting about future data. In my mind, one of the differences is, especially like junior people, if they sort of fall off the productivity wagon, it can be a little harder. If there's real data, I think that provides a safety net. It does. It does. And here, yeah, here you can get off to the side and not really know how to address the question you're interested in. One interesting and complicated thing about this meeting is in a week you can have some unrealistic expectations because it's very hard to predict how it's going to go down. I keep my expectations very low because I know I'm going to get distracted by tons of things. So in my own personal project, I only got a few hours in this week. I learned a lot more than I would have learned if each person here had just given a talk. I definitely can walk away from meetings like this feeling like I didn't accomplish anything. I have nothing to show front. What's the paper going to be? But the truth is, I actually learned a ton. There's a knob you can dial here about expectations. And the meeting that kind of has the knob furthest to one side is the guy sprints. Because the guy spends the explicit goal is that people will produce publishable science during the week. And so there we really encourage people to come into the meeting with mature ideas. We give people homework to make sure they get in with mature ideas. I think we learn a lot of things by doing. And when you sit and listen to somebody talking about astro-seismology, it's totally different from doing some astro-seismology side by side. Active learning. Active learning, exactly. And project-based. So a lot of these things are true of middle school. The connection between middle school and professional astronomy is very strong. People often say, I went to this meeting and the talks were boring, but I learned so much in the coffee breaks. So this is a meeting that's like entirely coffee break. For me, one of the best outcomes for these meetings is I made a toy example work where I took a new skill and I put my data through it and I made a plot. And now I can do that. It's huge. As opposed to I saw this talk where Dan turned some knob and magic happened. And then you have a little note in your book like, Dan made magic happen. Here, you made magic happen. Okay, so tangent from this, and totally selfishly, remote participation. So the upcoming guy sprints, I think holding a satellite meeting at UW would be really beneficial. Dan had the suggestion this morning why not open it up to West Coast people. Exactly. To get a handful people from California, then we've got a real satellite meeting. Exactly. How do we bottle this and ship it to the West Coast? I'm part of a project with the Moore Foundation and the Sloan Foundation to think about data science. And part of that project was to think about how you do remote engagement. And I really feel like this is an open question. And this is a question we have to answer. Right now, no remote interaction system like video or anything captures the full richness of human interaction. On the other hand, the idea that you just said of the satellite meeting is a very good meeting. A very good idea because you could have the energy of the group. The thing that for me does not work at all is there's a cool meeting like this and I'm in my office in another city like checking my Skype window. Right. Just watching it while you're grading. Yeah. Exactly. I end up always just end up muting it and taking phone calls. Breakout session. Livestream it. Discussion points. Have a little phone booth. But the human thing, the coffee thing, you need other people. There's been so much austerity in the university systems that there's a lot of people who are great colleagues who don't have travel funds, who don't have teaching schedules where they can slip away. Right. So there's teaching. There's life. And there's ableism aspects of this. Like if you just say, oh, everyone needs to come to New York. There's certain people who just travels a really hard. I'm open to exploring anything we're going to need to. And frankly, we could change the world for the better. So I didn't even apply to come to Guy S. French because life, but I can take the week to do it. So I will commit here in front of God and YouTube that I will appear live via hologram. The point of these meetings is to do experiments. We're not running these meetings to have the best means ever. We're running these meetings to learn how do people learn and how do people work together. And that means we should be using these to do experiments. So let's do the experiment of having a parallel sprint. And if it doesn't work, let's make it a learning experience. We'll fail fast and try a different thing next time. All right. So I forgot to ask you, when did you start wearing cowboy boots? It's funny that you ask because it actually relates to astronomy, which is that I used to work on the London Digital Sky Survey. And when you went to the observatory, I had to fly in through El Paso. Guess what? Cowboy boot capital of the world. So I bought a pair just because it was funny. And then it turned out they were just the most comfortable shoes I've ever had. Amazing.