I awoke without need of an alarm on the second day and went for a run at 6 am. It was dark and rainy when I started out, but the rain had stopped by the time I returned to the hotel. The Marriott was pretty close to town, and I found “The Hitching Post” as seen in the movie “Sideways” while I was out running. There’s also a note in my mournal about drinking a lot of wine the previous night. Wine was omnipresent at the conference.

The morning session focused on sodium channel dysfunction, including talks by Robert Kass, Jonathan Makielski, and Yoram Rudy. They, like several other talks at the GRC: CAM focused a little more on genetics than I’m used to, which at times became confusing. Interesting to note was that one of these talks discussed a situation in which a markovian model predicted behavior in an experiment. That says a lot in favor of computer simulations, I think.

We went to the Kalyra and Sanford wineries early that afternoon, both seen in the movie “Sideways.” I’m not one for being quite so touristy, but they did have good wine. See the previous entry for a pic from Kalyra.

At the poster session that afternoon, I discovered the wonderful Eagle Castle Zinfandel (2000), which many others agreed was very tasty. It also runs under $20. I may order some from the distributor (Wade’s Wines).

My journal from the evening session hints that between dinner, alcohol, and a long day, I was pretty tired by the time the evening session rolled around. I later took it easy on the wine and discovered that I continued to be tired at evening sessions even still. They were long, sometimes stressful days. The evening session was all about potassium channels, with talks by Jeanne Nerbonne (who later complimented my backpack), Louis J. Ptacek, and Anatoli Lopatin. I didn’t take too many notes from the most of that session. I think I kind of spaced out.

This is a backdated post, intended as a summary of the first day of the Gordon Research Conference on Cardiac Arrhythmias

Travel

Travel was long, though rather uneventful. We arrived at the airport in New Orleans on time, had some trouble with checking in using the United machines, so we had to talk to someone at the counter. Aside from being rude, he also informed us that United is now charging $30/leg of trip to sit in an exit row. Not impressive, United. Anyway, we hopped an A320 to Denver, where we arrived at about 10:00 local time, or a little before. I think it was my first time on the ground in Colorado. It was warmer than I expected in February. After finding a bit to eat and some coffee, we boarded a commuter (CanadAir of some kind) for the 2.5 hour flight to Santa Barbara.

Pictures from the Denver Airport:

Once we arrived at Santa Barbara Airport (which is extremely small, by the way), we found our rental car and headed to downtown Santa Barbara just as it was beginning to rain. I pointed out a little indian place with a lunch buffet, where we proceeded to stuff ourselves. Then, to kill time until our free parking time was up, we walked up and down State St., where we found some coffee (I had Chai), Natalia and Molly looked at a variety of clothing stores (mostly through the window), and finally headed back to the car.

Pictures from downtown SB:

At the Conference

Once we made it to the hotel, I met my roommate. You see, they overbooked the conference and basically forced us to take roommates. Being the only guy on the trip, I was lined up for a single, while Molly and Blanca shared a room. I ended up with an interesting guy named David from Duke, who has a poster on mathematically modeling the restitution curve. He happened to know Lisa Fauci of the math department at Tulane, from whom I have recently taken a class in cardiac modeling.

Natalia and Molly were late (for a variety of reasons) to meet me in the lobby before the reception, so I had a seat. A woman who introduced herself as Jeannie (Genie?) from University of Wisconsin, Madison introduced herself and informed me that there was wine, but not really a crowd, downstairs. I went and got a glass of wine and we talked about our respective fields a bit. She’s a research scientist working on the genetics of protein channels, using immunohistochemistry and so on.

Had some good Santa Barbara wine, as did Molly:

and then proceeded to dinner. I was grilled by the guy I was sitting next to (Les Tung) about our implementation of regional ischemia, specifically I_K(ATP) and admittedly was not as quick to produce an answer as I ought to have been.

After dinner we headed downstairs to the first session, where we met Ray from UCLA, who is doing some interesting work on computational modeling of Long Q-T syndrome. Talks were on the subject of sudden cardiac death, and general conference introduction.

It occurred to me during that session to write a script for my 2D study that determines which simulations contain reentries and which do not. It’s a neat idea, but I don’t know that I really have time in the overall plan to implement it. I wouldn’t get much out of it at this point, but in retrospect it would have been good. I don’t know that I would have been able to write this when I needed it.

Later, a backdated entry for the 21^st.

Given some of the controversy in my personal life, and other occuring here in my blog (or more accurately, in the comments on the livejournal mirror thereof), I give you this quote from Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to his lifelong friend John Adams:

What all agree in, is probably right. What no two agree in, most probably wrong.

Found here.

I just finished Cliff Walk by Don Snyder, and it was fan-tastic.