If you're intending to prepare a paper for the Beijing salt symposium next September, breathe a sigh of relief. The deadline for submitting papers has been extended from December 15 until April 30. Check the Symposium website for details.
mpiweb.org, the voice of the meeting planning industry, had a clever article in its October issue: it identified the "Ten Meetings that Rocked the World ." They include:
1. Marco Polo meets Kublai Khan in 1274 fostering in an era of global trade.
2. The International Olympic Committee in 1894 reviving the ancient Greek games to encourage competition in sport, not war.
3. John Lennon meets Paul McCartney in 1957, the birth of the Beatles and a new style of music.
4. The Fifth Solvay International Conference in 1927 bringing together such intellectual luminaries as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and launching a new age of quantum mechanics-based technology manipulating subatomic particles (e.g. lasers, transistors, diodes, etc.).
5. Dumbarton Oaks Conference in 1944 which led to the creation of the United Nations.
6. Ray Kroc meets Dick and Mac McDonald in 1954 leading to the birth of "fast food."
7. The Hampton Court Conference in 1604 producing the King James version of the Bible which represented the primary literature for its age.
8. The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the beginnng of the women's rights movement in the U.S.
9. The organization meeting of the Black Hand Secret Society in 1911. Ten Serbs created a cell of Serb nationalists who, in 1914, assassinated Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and precipitated WWI.
10. The Baghdad Conference in 1960 creating OPEC, the world oil cartel.
Did you pick up on the "salt" meeting? #4, the Solvay Conference. Okay, it's a stretch, I know.
Organizer Ernest Solvay had been sponsoring these conferences since 1911, the first one also being star-studded (Marie Curie, Max Planck and a younger Albert Einstein). Solvay was a Belgian chemist who became a philanthropist later in life. Fifty years before his first "Solvay international conference," in 1861, he had developed the ammonia-soda process for the manufacture of soda ash (anhydrous sodium carbonate) from salt (sodium chloride) brine and limestone (as a source of calcium carbonate). The process was an improvement over the earlier Leblanc process. Solvay Chemicals is still heavily into salt-based chemicals and, within the past decade, sold its salt business to K+S, both Salt Institute members, to make esco, the European Salt Company. At one EuSalt meeting in Brussels, we were able to tour the Solvay House.
October's SI Report includes stories on Gov. Schwarzenegger's veto of the California softener ban bill, January-June US salt sales and stories on consumer food choices and new research showing risks of high aldosterone levels (caused by salt-reduced diets).
