Yesterday we all went down to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was having an open house. The kids really enjoyed themselves, looking at the space probe mockups, watching the cool movies, and having the Mars rover roll over them. Besides just watching them and grinning, my wife and I liked walking around and talking to the scientists. Every scientist I've met (that is, in my experience) loves to talk about their work, and what they've found, and what they're working on now, and so on. Kinda like open source people.
I still think of JPL as "the place that Larry used to work." I first encountered his name (jpl-devvax!lwall I think it was) around 1985, not with Perl, but as the guy who wrote the rn newsreader, and the greatest thing that happened to installing software on Unix, the Configure script. I still remember literally laughing out loud when the script figured out all the stuff about my custom stetup. What a great piece of work.
