A Curious Statistical Anomaly

Got up early today, packed, got breakfast, and checked out before going to a panel called “Where’s HAL?” From the title, we figured it would be about AI and hopefully, where we stand now and where it’s going. Well, it was about AI but more about what it is and why we’re not where we expected to be. One interesting fact, iRobot says that based on customer calls, 3/4 of people who own a roomba or scooba name them. I know we named ours but it’s interesting that so many people do.

We then checked out the dealers room. We usually end up buying a few books from Larry Smith and this convention saw us picking up several books that hadn’t, for some reason, come across the SFRevu desk for review. Larry seems to always have some interesting books that don’t seem to show up anywhere else — and thus if you don’t see them at his table, you can’t be expected to know about them to ask about them from another seller. There were lots of nifty things in the dealers room but we mostly concentrated on books. Michael Walsh had some interesting titles — as he usually does. He’s another bookseller worth checking out (Old Earth Books).

Then we looked over the program book and figured we’d just head home. Perhaps we missed some really exciting program items this month but since the pocket program was very light on program descriptions, it was really hard to tell what they were about. When there were program descriptions, they didn’t do much more than elaborate on the title with no real detail. So, if I missed some great panels, let me know.

All in all, we had a great time. We got to connect with a lot of friends we don’t see that often outside of conventions. We did get to a few program items that were very interesting and informative. Connie Willis is always a treat. The art show was fabulous and I got a poppet with a cat mask by Lisa Snellings-Clark. We actually bid on two pieces but only got one. I’m so pleased she has the poppets available. I love her work but can’t afford any of her larger pieces so I enjoy them at each art show where they are displayed.

Then it was home again, home again, jiggity jig. And I’m ready to be home. Somehow, I injured my shoulder and caught a flu-ish bug. One of the side effects of working at home seems to be that you don’t get a daily dose of germs from being around people who swap germs just by breathing in the same air, shaking hands, and doing normal people greeting people stuff. So, every time I go to a convention, it seems I come home with some sort of bug that has to party in my system for a while.

Luckily, my next convention isn’t until July (ReaderCon). I should be raring to go by then.

We over slept today — and boy did we need the extra sleep. So, we made it to the Singularity presentation at noon. This was a presentation of the fourth episode of Stranger Things called “Latchkeeper”. First there was an interview with the author of the episode (Matt Wallace). Then a couple of acts of the episode, a break for some announcements, and the rest of the episode.

I was really amazed at the production values of the episode. The story was immediately engaging, had a bit of humor to the dialogue, and definitely got you to that moment when everything changes and nothing will ever be the same. For me the problem was the ending — it should have ended 1 minute before it did because the ending ruined the whole thing (at least for me). I hadn’t seen the video podcasts before and it was obvious that most of the people there were fans of the show and/or the writer and producers. At times the presentation had the feeling of an Amway sales talk but it didn’t need the hard sell — the product is good enough to sell itself — and they should let it. We left after the finish of the episode while they were gearing up for more rah-rah.

Next we searched for a meal. Back to the mall/restaurant area and this time pizza and coffee. We took everything back to our room to eat. After looking over the programming for Sunday, we found there really wasn’t anything to go to until the interview of Connie Willis at 4 p.m. So we cleared up email, visited with some friends and off to the interview.

Connie Willis is one of those people who if you ask her a question and just sit back and listen will keep you interested and entertained. I wrote down a lot of authors to check out along with a few movie titles and book titles. The interview was followed by a reading from her newest book. She’s been working on it for six years and it’s done and being tweaked and will soon be off to the publisher/editors. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing All Clear when it comes out.

The last time I listened to Connie be interviewed I went away with a list of authors and books and found some that I’ve really liked. For example, I don’t think I’d have every read Three Men in a Boat without her recommendation. I then went on to read another book by Jerome K. Jerome. I also tried P.G. Wodehouse and found delight in his humor and writing. Again not an author I probably would have tried without a recommendation mainly because he’s not an author that comes up much among my circle of friends. I still haven’t read H. L. Mencken but he’s now on my radar and I’ll get to it soon.

There’s really not much for the rest of the day and evening. Maybe we’ll find something just to have something to report on but maybe we’ll spend some time just relaxing.

The first program items today began at 10 a.m. So, we bundled out of bed early to get something to eat before going to the first panel. Paul had to find a post office and went on a coffee/hot chocolate search.

10 a.m.: On the use of dogs and ocean liners as literary devices in SF. Panelists: Connie Willis, Bill DeSmedt, and Joy Ward.

This was an interesting panel as they discussed the getting the reader involved and caring. It was pretty much agreed that killing the dog is not a good thing and neither is putting a child in jeopardy. The problem is that movies and some authors cheat and kill pets or put a child in danger only as a short cut to showing someone is evil or to get a quick setup rather than to work at the writing. You can kill a dog/cat/whatever but it should be because of the impact it will have on your characters and the stories, not to get an emotional reaction from your reader — the emotional reaction should come from the story. I’m probably not expressing it as clearly as they did in their discussion. If you do it, it has to be for a good “story” reason. There was a lot of talk of animals in SF and how they are used with loads of examples and discussions (sorry you weren’t here).

Talk then turned to the Titanic and its use as a literary device. Mention was made of The Onion‘s headline “World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg“. The discussion meandered over many areas including how so much of the research material doesn’t actually deal with the sinking of the ship but as a metaphor for just about any problem you can imagine. It’s also useful because as a tragedy the ship was sailing along then smacks into an iceberg and there’s 2:20 minutes to realize that this is it and you’ve going down and, most likely, dying. So, there’s time to have the characters react and deal with what’s happening. The best movie was said to be A Night To Remember.

Next, we visited the Art Show. Lots of lovely pieces on display. John Jude Palencar is the Artist Guest of Honor and there were some wonderful works of his on display. Some is so creepy it gives me the shivers and some so sublimely beautiful that you could just stare at it for hours with a different feeling to the shivers.

We dropped by the Capclave table to chit chat. Capclave is the Washington DC area’s local convention. I covered last year’s convention in this blog. This year’s guests of honor will be James Morrow and Michael Dirda.

2 p.m.: Plagues as a theme. Panelists: Carl Cipra (moderator), Michael Flynn, Perrianne Lurie, and Connie Willis.

Connie Willis and Michael Flynn have both written books that had plagues at the center of the stories. Perrianne Lurie is an MD. Discussion again was wide ranging on various diseases past, present, and future. One of the interesting items was discussion of the 1918 flu epidemic in the US that killed thousands of people. What came up was how people of the correct age when asked remembered that this uncle, aunt, brother, sister, cousin, and so on died then but they just never talked about it. That, when a disaster is so catastrophic to family, people just seem to close it off and go on like it never happened. The audience then talked about similar reactions to 9/11. There’s a lot of literature out there that deals with plagues. Panelists believe that SF deals a lot with post-apocalyptic worlds and if it’s not a bomb it’s usually a plague. There’s still a lot of areas that can be explored but it is getting a bit overused now.

With nothing to do until a panel at 5 p.m., Paul and I went off to stalk a meal. Luckily there’s a fairly large complex of shops across the highway and many restaurants in varying price categories. This time we chose Panera — love their sandwiches.

5 p.m.: Blended genres: Panelists: Carl Cipra (moderator), Chris Lester, Connie Willis, J. Ardian Lee.

All the panelists agreed that genres are artificial designations that are set by publishers to help sales. That the important thing is to write the story you want to write and let an editor/publisher worry about marketing and putting it in a genre. What gets put on the spine is not something that the author has control over. However, there was some discussion and (to my mind) legitimate grumbling how when a traditional fiction (usually famous) author puts in an element of SF it’s touted as the best thing since sliced bread even though, in the SF field, it’s been done, years earlier, and usually better. And the current reviewers seldom, if ever, mention the similar or better works that have been done previously. They talked about how often people say they hate SF or Fantasy or whatever but that this book (whatever the author just wrote) is so good they don’t consider it SF or Fantasy or whatever. That this attitude on the part of readers doesn’t exactly work to break the SF/F/whatever genre ghetto. There was also some discussion of Readers (those who read just about anything good they find no matter what the genre designation) and Recreational Readers (those who seem to just read within a narrow definition of what is a worthy book determined by other people than themselves). Interesting and lots of food for thought in this panel.

Now we have a few hours until the Masquerade so thought I’d get this written up. This is the first year that I haven’t had to pick which of the three or four great panels to go to each hour. For some reason, even though there’s 10 rooms of programming in several tracks, I’m having a problem even finding one panel per time period that I want to see. At least this year, I’ll have plenty of time to visit the dealers’ room, the Art Show, and visit with friends. I wonder if I’m getting jaded or this is just one of those years when the programming doesn’t match my taste. It feels weird to be at loose ends like this during a con that has historically kept me running from panel to panel so I wouldn’t miss anything.

9 p.m. Masquerade: The Balticon masquerade is always worth taking the time to for. This year there were 32 entries (not all for competition). The young fan costumers were as usual a mixed bag of cute, sweet, and really interesting. The novice costumers certainly prove that they’ll be serious competitors in the near future. There were some outstanding costumes. My only complaint is that seated you can’t really see the costumes clearly below mid-chest level. This year, that problem was rectified by having live video of the contestants shown on a large screen next to the stage so you got a good look at the costumes clearer and sharper than you could see them from your seat. Someone said that they thought that they might be broadcasting the masquerade on the hotel system but no one could confirm that — if so, it would have greatly added to the comfort level to see them from your hotel room. On the other hand, it would not give the costumers the audience feedback that they so richly deserve for all their hard work and long hours in putting their costumes and presentation together. One of the memorable costumes was an assemble piece of Sleeping Beauty and they had the fairy godmothers changing the color of the gown as they prince and princess danced — it was amazing as it changed from pink to blue. Very clever bit of design and technical thinking on this one.

Hyperion here. Today I attended a fantastic (possibly in more ways than one) program item entitled “Hot Fusion”. Tom Ligon, who worked with Dr. Robert Bussard before his death last year, gave a presentation concerning the work being done in Inertial-Electrostatic-Fusion. The names being dropped are all reputable and famous, so there’s a good chance that everything presented is on the up and up, but I’m not a high energy physicist, nor do I play one on TV, so I pass on what was said without attempting to validate any of it for scientific muster.

Unfortunately the room was dark so I was unable to take notes, which would seem to be a very important thing when trying to describe advances in high-energy physics. I did take snap shots of the slides he put up so I do have some reference material, but please bare with me if you know anything about this and find that I’m less than totally accurate. For more details he recommends looking up his article, “The World’s Simplest Nuclear Reactor Revisited”, which was published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in the January/February 2008 issue.

In the corner of the room was a small fusion reactor that was brought in for display purposes. According to Tom, if fed a supply of deuterium, the reactor would indeed result in nuclear fusion. Of course it would only be a “ping or two”, but it does prove that fusion should really be cheap and easy. He didn’t directly denigrate the official Tokomak Fusion project, but I’ve heard enough bad things from reputable scientists to know that most scientists have little hope that this will be any more than multi-billion dollar jobs program, never reaching break-even, never mind being commercially viable. What little I have heard of Inertial-Electrostatic Fusion over the last decade has sounded far more promising, and Tom gave an update on where the researchers in the field are. We were also treated to small snippets of history, which were kind to some, and rather damning to others. I think it’s best to leave those details vague.

The basic concept of IEF fusion is that instead of trying to heat up particles in order to make them fuse, it’s more efficient to set up looping electro-magnetic fields that force the electrons and deuterium (or protons and Boron) to make multiple high-speed passes at each other and let the laws of statistics force them to collide at high velocities if given a bit of time, which due to the old laws of the thermodynamics (which says that heat is basically just a function of the movement of molecules), sets up the same conditions as the more traditional fusion experiments, but in a much smaller space, with a lot less muss and fuss.

Researchers have been working for years to refine the confinement schemes to maximize particle flow and minimize particle loss due to accidental collisions between the particles and parts of the reactor. And apparently a few years ago, success was reached, although they destroyed the reactor by trying to push it beyond its limits. Now they’ve built a new and improved model, and seek full peer review before announcing anything prematurely.

What would this mean if it’s all true? According to Tom, one railroad car of boron-11 would generate enough electricity to power the United States for a year. A reactor the size of an office-desk, powered by a one-liter bottle of deuterium, could power an average city for a month. If, and I stress if, this is true, it would basically eliminate power from ever being an issue of supply and demand ever again. Tom hopes that a 100 Mega-Watt demonstration reactor could be on-line within 5 years.

And, since this is a science fiction convention, what would it mean for space travel? Dr. Bussard drew up plans for a single-stage, fully reusable, space plane which would be able to reach Low Earth Orbit (LEO) carrying 35 tons of cargo at a price of about $27/kg. Note that the current costs are anywhere between $4,000/kg – $10,000/kg. LEO to the moon was quoted as $24/kg, and LEO to Mars would be $232/kg. Of course these prices have to be taken with a grain of salt, but if even the order of magnitude is correct, it would open up the whole solar system to fast cheap travel.

Again, I don’t pretend to claim any of the above is actually true, but I have to admit that the people saying it aren’t considered nut cases or glory hounds, but actual reputable scientists. And an old geek like me can’t help feeling a bit of that old Buck Rodgers excitement at the thought that maybe, just maybe, I’ll live long enough get to stand on Mare Imbrium and watch the Earth rise after all. I’m not betting the family farm, but I’ll keep watching and hoping.

Paul and I will be at Balticon this weekend. We’ve just got a few more things to do before loading up the car with our bag of clothes and toiletries, then the bags of electronic equipment (laptops, router, wireless cards, phone rechargers, camera recharger, cables for all activities), a small bag of snacks, and my knitting bag.

I remember when my son was a baby there was one bag for me and about 5 for him to go anywhere for a weekend. Now it’s one bag for us and multiple cases and bags for the electronics. I’m looking forward to a day when everything is built in. I can’t really use a PDA for much other than a calendar — sorry but my eyes need to be able to see the itty bitty screen in order to do anything more than that. We tested out a sub-compact laptop once and it was really nice except that it had to be plugged in all the time (battery life was about an hour — maybe two if you were really, really cautious). So, I’m always wondering when things will get better for those of us who travel to conventions and want/have to write up reports each night from a hotel room. {start rant: Of course, if we paid the exorbitant rates for daily connectivity in the hotel we could pare down some of the weight but the weekend would cost almost as much as the monthly charge we pay for our service which we can travel with — so no thanks, I don’t like to give in to people/businesses that are just looking for more charges to spring on the customers. end rant}.

So, hopefully, we’ll be posting daily reports about what we see, hear, and listen to at the convention this weekend. Posts will be at the usual unknown spontaneous schedule — so keep checking back.

UPDATE:

We’re here. An hour and a half drive and we arrived about 7PM. Got our room. Moved in our bags and stuff. Set up the electronics. Then found registration, stopping a few time on the way to say hi to old friends and new. Got our badges — stopped to schmooze with a few more people and then managed to make it to opening ceremonies.

Connie Willis is one of the Guests of Honor. She mentioned that she’s from Greeley and that she’d heard that her family is safe — no damage from the tornadoes. Luckily she heard from them after she deplaned and before getting phone calls from others asking if her family was okay. Instant communication is a wonderful thing when things happen in the right order.

They announced the other guests of honor, who chose to just stand and wave rather than talk.

Artist Guest of Honor: John Jude Palencar
Music Guest of Honor: Urban Tapestry
Ghost Guest of Honor: Douglas Adams (the Pangalactic Gargle Blaster & towel waved)

The 2007 Compton Crook Award Winner (Naomi Novik) announced the 2008 Compton Crook Award Winner Mark Van Name.
Then we had a short video presentation for the Singularity presentation on Sunday at noon, a filk song (preview of the 9PM performer), and some belly dancing–Kallisti Tribal (who were very good but a bit long — 4 musical numbers).

After the Opening Ceremonies, we stopped into the Meet and Greet party in the Con Suite following the rumor of Chocolate Cake. Yes, there was Chocolate Cake and also lots of other nice goodies including fruit, vegetables, chips, crackers, cheese and — best of all for me — coffee. We took some photos of a few hall costumes, talked to some friends, and since Connie was encircled moved on to the 1984 party.

The 1984 party (hosted by Bill Lawhorn and Cathy Green) was well attended and set up in two adjoining rooms keeping the hard liquor separate from the soft drinks so that minors were only allowed into the soft drink area. Everyone was talkative and friendly. There were party favors depending on what you rolled on dice — you were, depending on what you rolled an Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, or Epsilon. A nice theme that worked out well and got people talking.

We later moved to another party and caught up on other friends we hadn’t seen for a while. Laura Anne Gilman actually had an Asus Eee PC. I’d been seriously considering one of these for travel and after seeing the one she had, I’m sold on their utility. It’s light (about 2.5 pounds with battery) and with the capability that is needed when traveling and a good size that fits in a purse comfortably. She did a quick demo for several of us and Asus just may have some more customers now that we’ve touched it and seen it in action — nice screen too.

Then, wearily, we managed to find out room. This hotel is more like a AD&D maze than a hotel at times, with corridors that seem to go on forever in some Escheresque manner. Having found our room and written the post for today — that bed is looking awfully comfy. So, good night and more tomorrow.