Old and eccentric scientist entertainment

I just returned from the 2007 American Assoc of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) annual conference in Long Beach, CA. All in all, a decent meeting this year.

Although I would argue that publications coming out of AAPG have declined in quality in recent years (too many case studies about oil fields…yawn), the meeting still attracts many great researchers from the broader sedimentary geology community.

If you’ve never been….the AAPG meeting is a single meeting for two general types; those who use geology to find oil and those who use the oil industry to do geology. If you can’t tell by this blog, I fall into the latter. The amount of data and information about sedimentary geology that this industry produces is phenomenal. If you’re an Earth data junkie like me, this is a good meeting. The topics are typically split nicely for both the nerdy and business types.

A highlight for me was seeing Emiliano Mutti speak. This guy is a legend in the sedimentary geology (particularly turbidite researchers) community. He is a short, old, Italian professor and extremely fiesty….quite entertaning. Like many scientific communities, there are always some eccentric characters that stand out. This guy is one of those characters. One of my favorite moments was watching one of my colleauges who was chairing a session decide when to cut Mutti off when he went off on a ranting tangent after asking a speaker a question.