Georgist Conference in Pittsburgh, Part Seventeen

To continue with the afternoon of Wednesday, July 24, we had the Council of Georgist Organizations business meeting. There was discussion of renaming the umbrella group, and of it becoming a 501(c)(3) organization.

Plans were made for the 2020 conference in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and there was discussion of meeting every other year after that, instead of every year.

There was also discussion of Students for Liberty and Liberty Con in Washington. It would be good to get some libertarian/classical liberal students interested in Georgism. A motion to look into sponsorship was passed. Then the meeting adjourned..

Two Talks

On Monday, there was a presentation by Nathan C. Frey from the University of Pennsylvania, “Machine Learning in Materials Science and Chemistry.” I had asked my supervisor whether I could take an hour of training time to attend, but he decided (reasonably enough) that it didn’t pertain to my work, so the answer was no. I instead took an hour and a half of annual leave to attend; think of it as a mini-vacation. I do have an M.S. and Ph.D. in Materials. To summarize the talk, machine learning isn’t going to make human scientists obsolete any time soon, but for some purposes, it is useful in suggesting what materials can be used for certain applications.

On Tuesday, the Patent and Trademark Office Society held its annual meeting, and in addition to the induction of new officers and presentation of awards, we heard a brief lecture from a distinguished inventor, Rick Hamilton, who has 966 U.S. patents to date. He had three big pieces of advice for inventors: build your foundation, look critically at existing solutions (there may be better ways to accomplish things), and Always Take Action. He illustrated the last with his account of an inventors’ group which he advised; they just talked, and the people assigned to do actual write-ups of promising sounding inventions complained that they were too busy, so nothing got done.

This lesson should be useful even to people who don’t plan to be inventors.