Another point for conferences, IMHO, is that you might learn something you were not expecting to. Here's a scenario that I've seen repeated quite often in conf

Another point for conferences, IMHO, is that you might learn something you were not expecting to. Here's a scenario that I've seen repeated quite often in conferences: You have two talks you are interested in with some free time in the middle, so you pick some other talk to go, if only to fill in the time, and end up discovering an aspect that you didn't even knew would be useful.