I attended the annual conference of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE), held in Munich from August 30 to September 2. This is a belated reflection and photo dump.
I started attending ISEE in 2009. I think I have missed it twice, so this was probably my fifteenth time. With around 2,000 participants, it was apparently the largest meeting yet. Personally, though, I find myself feeling a little more disappointed each year. The presentations seem increasingly stuck in a rut: not much feels new, and there is a sense of the same circles gathering among themselves. Perhaps that is an arrogant thing to say. But on the flight there, a professor from another university whom I happened to be traveling with brought up much the same feeling before I did. So perhaps it is not just me.
In this age of the internet and AI, perhaps it is difficult to come away from a conference with something genuinely new. Maybe the value of these meetings lies less in acquiring new knowledge than in connecting with people.
Munich struck me as clean and quiet, yet also lively. This was my first time in Germany, so I cannot say whether that is true of the country as a whole. Conferences have taken me to quite a few cities, but few have made me think, “I would like to try living here.” Munich was one of them. The English Garden (Englischer Garten) was especially wonderful for running. It is a park of broad wooded areas, lawns and branching paths. I did get a little lost, but even if I had known the way, I would still have stopped to take in the scenery. I was also struck by the geese, which did not flee when people approached.
One personal experiment on this trip was taking photographs with a camera. Mine is about fifteen years old, but I confirmed that it can still produce wonderfully crisp images. My photography skills are another matter. I cannot entirely shake the feeling that my phone takes better pictures (…) but there is something distinctive about the experience of taking photographs with a camera.
