Floor 13 and the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting

When the neuroscientists in my audience show up in San Diego next month for the Annual Meeting, they will not be assigned a room on Floor 13 of their hotel. How do I know this? Because in the US of A we are so frickin’ superstitious about a number that we mis-number hotel floors. Oh, there will be people on the 13th floor of hotels all right, it is just that we call it the 14th floor.

Because, reasons.

A notification of poster locations came out today from the SFN and it provides the convenient navigational advice about how to locate the boards for a given poster assignment.

Hall B: Poster Rows AAA-OOO

I didn’t think that much about this until a tweep noted that assignment to any of the boards in section KKK raised an eyebrow.

Is it a little thing? Yeah, it probably is. Is it silly? No, not if it bothers anyone.

But what I take away from this is yet another reminder that there are probably very few black people in the Society for Neuroscience in any sort of position to notice this sort of business in advance and say “hey, maybe we can just skip KKK like the way a hotel skips floor 13?”.

I dunno. Maybe I’m just sensitized because we have a main stream Republican candidate for President of the United States who is overtly courting the vote of the KKK.

Thought of the day

Please explain to me why we are supposed to coddle the supposedly normal or centrist Republicans at this point. And pat them soothingly and give them cookies because finally, at this late date, they have discovered Trumpism is horrible.

What is to be gained here?