Gary -
I was only "adjacent" to BiosGroup during it's heydey (hay-day?)... but
had a love-hate relationship with Stu's work/presence even stronger than
I had with SFI as it grew out of it's original amazing little polyp of
fascinating people and topics. I don't think I ever "met" you in
person, in spite of a dozen offline convos we've had and my own
fascination with your choice/style of expatriation. You are, in fact,
roughly half-a-hemisphere away? In a semi-familiar enclave in a
less-familiar embedding in a similarly unfamiliar region of the world.
I don't know how many folks made pilgrimages TO the area specificially
to engage in such activites. Did you move here for Bios or were you
already here for other reasons?
I bumped into a Paywall with WIRED on the topic of "InfoMesa" rather
than "Silicon Mesa". My faulty memory has whiffs of references to
"Silicon Gulch" or "Silicon Arroyo" but those terms may never have made
it into print (digital or paper)? Not to conflate with Silicon Alley
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Alley> in Manhattan or Silicon
Ailee as Berlin
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Silicon_Allee&redirect=no>
(Jochen?)?
https://www.wired.com/2000/06/infomesa/
https://pubsapp.acs.org/subscribe/archive/mdd/v04/i10/html/10money.html?
and a little more digging took me to the *book* Ed Regis published
following the article in wired:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/418288.The_Info_Mesa
I recognize the cover so I probably had it in my hands at one time...
I think these references were more about the complexity-adjacent field
of Infomatics... I know we have veterans of SFI, Daylight/OpenEye,
maybe QForma, and certainly/of-course SFx and RedFish/SimTable.
- Steve
On 2/4/26 11:31 am, Gary Schiltz wrote:
My feeling is that there was a bubble of activity in Santa Fe about
complexity in the late 1990s (see Wired’s article about “Silicon
Mesa”) that burst in about 2001. Many who were there are now old farts 😆
On Tue, Feb 3, 2026 at 7:47 PM Jon Zingale <[email protected]> wrote:
I know I came to this group in what appears to be its twilight.
The in-person meetups are weirdly sad. I feel pressed to ask if it
is the case that everyone is either:
1. on vacation/ too busy
2. too depressed / failing to find inspiration
3. moved on to greener forums
4. preferring the company of LLMs
...
N. waiting for someone frail to post
Sometimes I trawl reddit or whatever discord, but I cannot help
but feel like beacons of inspiration are becoming fewer and
further between. This group has managed to inspire me, keep my
interest, for over a decade. In that time, I pushed myself to
understand perspectives that I would never have dreamed existed. I
hope there is still something to talk about.
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