“Ten, I think. She was considering selling them around the office and making enough profit to buy a new car.”

“Get me another one and a pair of scissors, will you? I think a half might be just about perfect.”

“Are you certain?”

“Never been more so.”

Duffy did as I asked, and a few minutes later I headed off for MadCon2004.

32. Thursday: MadCon2004

32.

Thursday: MadCon2004

“MadCon” is a contraction of the ironically titled “Mad Scientists’ Convention,” so named because of the derision that heralded the inaugural event in 1931. The cofounder of MadCon was Mycroft Next, who attended every meeting in the Swindon Convention Center that now bears his name and eventually won the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award in 1988. The event caters to those interested in outlandish scientific ideas, and despite being shunned by the conventional scientific community, MadCon continues to deliver top-class science to the world.

Francine Grooper, On the Edges of Science

The Mycroft Next Convention Center’s main hall was huge, noisy and filled with people. But, despite this being MadCon, it was populated by not just the insane scientists working on the very edge of accepted rules of physics and mathematics but also by journalists, industrialists, private-equity firms and conventional scientists in disguise, all eager to see what the deranged geniuses among the scientific community were up to. There were many trade stands, too, manned by both oddball and respected scientific foundations that wanted to help bring bizarre and seemingly impossible ideas to the marketplace.

There was an hour to go before Tuesday’s keynote speech, so I made my way slowly toward the stage at the far end of the convention center. The Anti-Smite Strategic Defense Shield Corporation was here in force, hoping to sell the technology to other nations who might also have cause to attract the Lord’s ire due to some misdemeanor of their own.

I passed by the large Goliath stand, which was this year promoting the idea of homegrown donor organs with zippers for easy transplanting or, for the more budget-conscious, externally worn organs that could be used on a “timeshare” basis. Beyond Goliath was someone peddling intelligent string to wrap up parcels unaided and for self-tying shoelaces. After that there was a stand where a tech firm had designed a joke-compression standard that would allow gags to be encoded digitally, stored and then played back with no loss of nuance, subtlety or humor— even after thousands of years.

“Once we can successfully synthesize gags,” said one of their reps once I had paused to see, “we’ll have found another industry that the digital revolution can destroy for no reason other than it can. We’re calling the compression standard JAPEG.”

He passed me a sheet of paper. It read:

20<run joke/chestnut/musichall/dog _ no _ nose.jok>

30<jokeclass=setup><pete> “I say I say I say, my dog’s got no nose.”</setup></pete>

40<jokeclass=retort><dave>“How does he smell?”</retort> </dave>