The irony of smoking a fat cigar or two while attending a life science conference is not lost on me.

But among my many weaknesses, occasional tobacco ranks high.

So when I saw a withered old man who, as it happens, looked exactly like a tobacco leaf, rolling cigars on the sidewalk of San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter, I got up from my dinner table to buy a few.

Cigars

I had only a single $20 bill on me, and he was selling his cigars for $12. He let me have two for an even $20 and wasn’t bothered about the shortfall.

His stock of cigars was magisterial, stacked like logs across the width of his covered table, two- and three-deep.

He barely looked up as I handed the money over, stuffing it into his belt before hunching back over his little mounds of tobacco.

I carried extra money on every subsequent night of my trip, hoping to give this craftsman more business, but he never reappeared.

Enjoying my cigars will have to wait untill after I've endured the transatlantic flight home.

It would be rude to subject my bioscience colleagues to second-hand smoke, even if we are dining outside.

And we’re enjoying some delightful, if astonishingly expensive sushi, expensed on the company, of course.

My assortment of raw fish, pickles, and salads is not nearly robust enough to support inhaling 20 grams of Nicaragua’s finest export.

For now, I’m content to enjoy the evening sans smoke.

The Gaslamp Quarter is remarkably tranquil.

Being mostly free of traffic, diners are free to spill out onto the pavements, kept warm in the evenings by industrial patio heaters.

I assume it’s named for its lanterns, but it could just as easily be named for the patio heaters. There are so many of them.

Not that anyone seems to mind the gas bill. Then again, there’s clearly so much wealth in this region, why would anyone have to mind it?

Everything costs at least double what I’m used to seeing charged. The sushi costs triple.

Although we speak the same language and share a similar political outlook, I feel extremely abroad in this affluent area of gregarious, ample, maximal America.

Scientists

Having finished our meal, we headed to one of downtown’s many sports bars, drinking being customary after conference days.

While ordering drinks, we struck up a conversation with one of the conference strays drinking alone at the counter.

He researched music therapy, and his ideas were interesting enough at first.

He wanted to use specific combinations of notes and frequencies to elicit particular emotional responses in patients.

When I pointed out that this is, in essence, what music already does, the atmosphere soured.

Like all bores, he was quick to explain how wrong I was.

Music, in his view, was a frivolous precursor to a more “pure” system—a deterministic input–output machine where the right sequence of tones would produce the correct emotional state.

Anything not written for this purpose was, apparently, suboptimal.

I suggested that conveying and eliciting emotion is precisely what musicians aim for when they write music.

He hissed at this, and I could feel myself plummeting in his estimation.

Songwriting, to him, was a bastardised perversion of his core idea.

Pressing on, I said that if music were reduced to assembling the most “optimal” melodic components, it might not qualify as music at all.

At this, the conversation tipped fully into the absurd.

He compared me to his poor wife, an opera singer, saying I was “one of those people” who believe the arts are sacred and shouldn’t conform to scientific laws.

Hearing this from a fellow scientist was too much.

I reminded him that human responses to music are subjective and nowhere near well understood enough to start applying fundamental rules.

Thinking his goal misguided was my opinion; believing things that are evidentially unsupported was simply poor science.

Something in him wilted when I said as much, and his final defence—delivered verbatim—was: “All artists want to get paid or get laid.”

And there you have it.

I suspect he believed a superior scientific understanding made him a better candidate for fame and success than Ed Sheeran. Having achieved neither, he’d become bitter.

He cut a sad figure: drunk, argumentative, and alone at a bar at night in San Diego, hundreds of miles from home.

Hundred-million-dollar yachts

I needed air.

A cigar would have been wasted after my chat with Michael Nyman’s afterbirth, so I opted for a walk along San Diego Harbour.

It’s postcard-perfect at dusk, and fits the definition of “iconic” with the massive Coronado Bridge curving away from the low hills of Tijuana, as if it were reeling from the border.

The gulls and lapping waves do wonders to clear my head after my beers and absurd chat in that humid bar.

But I felt very out of place.

I am a scientist, but I’m not of science. It’s something I’m good at and can earn a living from, not something that occupies my hobby time.

In that respect, I’m alien among the 30,000 scientists attending the conference who, to use that hated word, seem so passionate.

As if to confirm what I was thinking, I walked past the superyacht Anawa, moored in San Diego Harbour. It’s estimated to be worth a cool $100M.

It’s moored next to M5, another expensive tub that’s worth a bargain $50M.

Their beauty is undeniable; their design is art.

But I’m not of wealth in the same way I’m not of science, and beyond their outer beauty, they seem merely a diorama of modern excess.

No wonder a beer here costs so much. And to think some people consider cigars indulgent.