Karl Schroeder
Mar 17, 2008
Off to Australia
We'll be there for a month. Yes, the pets have a house-sitter
I'll be attending Swancon later this week. You can find a programme here (although, it doesn't have names on it and I'm not entirely clear on which panels I'll be on).
Our itinerary takes us first to Perth for the convention, then up to Kalbarri for a week and then outside Geraldton. If you'd like, you can check out some of these locations in Google Earth. I will be posting pix as I can, though for some of the time I will be off the grid entirely.
This is an important point: you may not be able to get in touch with me. Use email, certainly, but don't be surprised if even that doesn't work, or is delayed. The people who're staying at our house will be monitoring the phone, and we'll be giving our Aussie contact info to close friends and family; so if it's urgent you can find me. If even email doesn't work, try posting a reply to this message. I'll be checking the site whenever I can.
And yes, I'm taking the laptop, and working on The Sunless Countries while we're there.
Mar 16, 2008
SciBarCamp day 2
A fantastic ending to a highly successful first camp. We plan more
The entire weekend went off with very few hitches--the worst being a bit of schedule crunch on Saturday, but nothing that actually stopped people from presenting. I took a few more photos, but at this point there's a lot of other people who had much better cameras than my phone, and who were much better photographers; so I'll just point you to the Flickr page where many of the pix have been collected.
If you'd like more detail about what we discussed, you can drop by the SciBarCamp website and look at the program schedules. We've encouraged people to blog about the event and to tag their entries with SciBarCamp, so you can track down a lot more about it at sites like technorati.
I'd like to thank everybody who had faith in us and came. I'd also especially like to thank the other organizers, Jen Dodd, Michael Nielsen, Eva Amsen, Lee Smolin, and Jamie McQuay. Jen and Michael were the instigators and they, Eva and Jamie did most of the work; I was just along for the ride, really. Jen and Jamie in particular spent their own money to make it all happen, and deserve special mention for it.
We've talked about whether we're doing another SciBarCamp; there's no reason why not, it's a scheduling issue more than anything. I hope the meme spreads, and that it becomes a regular in Toronto and beyond.
SciBarCamp day 1
Just a blur. Here's some stuff that happened
I'll hopefully have a more detailed report about the conference later; suffice it to say that the first day was a roaring success. Here's some moments:
The morning sessions, held in Hart House's music room.
Proposals for talks, panels and discussions were posted upon these boards.
This was a surprise--we all poured outside to check out BlueSky's high-speed two-seater solar car.
Meanwhile, the robots were roving with little or no supervision...
While Melanie Swan and Darren Harnett (pictured), and Mark Tovey and I give an introduction to foresight studies and futurist techniques.
But there was much more, including participatory musical performances, discussions about the ethics of synthetic biology, the philosophy of the Chinese Room, brain imaging, consciousness studies, open source drug development, and a panel discussion with myself, Lee Smolin, and Robert J. Sawyer on the nature of time.
And that was just Day 1!
Mar 15, 2008
SciBarCamp: opening night success
100+ self-starters crammed in one room. Order ensues
Well, the SciBarCamp's gotten off to a smashing start. Last night over 100 people showed up at the Debates room in Hart House and we kicked off the event with drinks, shmoozing, and the ad hoc creation of our program.
Above's a picture of the introductions period, with everybody saying who they are and what their interests are.
The scrum. Nobody was shy; it was a complete mix-up of enthusiastic and wildly diverse people.
I'll try to post the Saturday schedule later. My favourite proposed event so far is the "Interactive Salt Lick Sculpture." That should be interesting.
Mar 12, 2008
Several Earths-worth of air
Cool graphic illustrates how much air Earth has; Virga, it seems, has more
Found on BoingBoing (and previously by them here): a very interesting graphic that displays how much water and air there are on the surface of the Earth. The ball of air appears to be about 2000 kilometers in diameter. Now, in my novels Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce and Pirate Sun, I posit an enclosed sphere of air more than twice that diameter. I hadn't really thought it through, but this means that my world Virga has several Earths-worth of air in it, probably a dozen or more. So, when I say that Virga is 5000 miles in diameter, that doesn't mean we're talking about a small world, because the entire volume of this sphere is living space, whereas on a planet only the surface is livable. So the ecosystem of Virga is far, far bigger than that of the Earth, or even of the Earth and all the terrestrial planets combined (assuming they were terraformed) by a considerable multiplier.
When I set out to write Sun of Suns, I conservatively estimated about 120 artificial suns and attendant nations inside Virga. I imagined that each nation might have a population in the low millions, but once again if you look at the volume lit by the suns instead of the area of the circle they light, it's probably safe to say that Virga could hold tens of billions of people without overcrowding.
And to think, Virga is a small world by the standards of what's possible.
Mar 06, 2008
SciBarCamp is full up
Here's a brief un-program for the event
Next weekend's first SciBarCamp is now full, with well over 100 confirmed attendees. The event's happening at Hart House, which is a magnificent location in the heart of Toronto (the University of Toronto takes up a square mile of the downtown core).
Fear not if you were hoping to come but were unable. We want this event to be the first of a regular series. Just make sure you follow the news at the SciBarCamp website, and sign up early!
SciBarCamp's deliberately vague schedule
The program for SciBarCamp will be decided in a collaborative way
involving all participants on the opening night (Friday night). This
is when all the talks and discussions will be scheduled.
The
start and finish times for each day have been decided, and are set out
below. The opening event on Friday night will be integral to the whole
weekend, so please plan to attend on this night as well as on the rest
of the weekend.