Category: Serious Stuff

Serious stuff. Things to think about.

Loscon36 roundup

Loscon36 roundup

For those of you not in Los Angeles, Loscon is the annual Thanksgiving weekend science fiction convention hosted by LASFS (The Los Angeles Science Fiction Society).

I came first on Thursday to set up my artwork. Yup, artwork. I’ve been doing a lot of computer generated imagery and I finally decided to see if anyone else liked it. I was motivated by the fact that one piece I’d donated to an charity auction at Aggiecon had been bid up to over $1000.

In fact, somehwat before the convention started I was the surprised recipient of a phone call from the famous John Hertz. John wanted me to be a docent for the art show. Docents guide tours of the art show. I was quite flattered and hestitatingly accepted.

With help from MJ and Charles Matheny, long time friends and perennial art show runners, as well as Art Show directors Elizabeth Klein-Lebbink and Jerome Scott, I got everything set up, sorted out and had a visual education into exactly how small two 3′ x 4′ panels really are (I brought way too much stuff).

On Friday I had a panel on the Writer’s Track, “Books every writer should have.”

Saturday morning I was late to my first panel, “The Delphic Oracle.” I had imagined that I was going to be the only panelist and was quite surprised when I discovered that I had Harry Turtledove, Ed Green, and a slew of others. They were all confused as to why they were there but in a short-short I had managed to get them into the game and they were all thrilled. In fact, for the rest of the convention, Harry would look at me and shake his head, muttering, “Delphic Oracle.” Apparently it was a huge hit, just as it has been at Aggiecon and Dragon*con.

On Sunday my docent tour started late because I misjudged the time it took to get there but it went well.

Sadly, I was on a panel when it was time to break down the Art Show but I hurried out as soon as I could to find that Charles, MJ, and others had kindly taken down my stuff for me. Apologizing profusely, I packed my stuff and discovered that I’d actually sold several things! Yippee! I was quite pleased.

All in all it was fun but I think the biggest hit was “The Delphic Oracle”, so I’m hoping that it will get scheduled to later in the day next year and we’ll have a bigger crowd.

A whole new world

A whole new world

In an interesting twist, I was looking to the past and discovered a link to the future.

A long time ago I spent a year at a University in the States. The most memorable part of that year was falling in love with computers and computer programming. This was in the era of punch cards and batch processing. Instant gratification? What’s that? I could take days to write a program and hours to run it (or have it fail to run due to a simple typo).

But I got into computers through a special class, “Introduction to Urban and World System Dynamics”. At the heart of the class was the study of something called “The World2 Software Model.” This was a very early attempt to understand how civilization interacted with the world. It was the predecessor to the “Club of Rome’s” climate model, and so the predecessor to many of today’s models.

Anyway, I studied it, learned BASIC, FORTRAN IV, and Assembly all in the space of half a year. And I re-wrote the original model because I felt it was flawed.

However, I went off just recently looking to see if anyone still had the software wandering around on the internet, preferrably ported to some modern language (Java).

Somehow, I found Michael Wesch and his Digital Ethnography of Kansas State University. I found him through his equally engrossing World Simulation Project which wasn’t quite what I was looking for but seems far more interesting in its own right. Certainly, from what little I’ve seen, the students at Kansas State University are lucky to have his course offerings and, in a world of infinite money and infinite time, I’m pretty sure I’d arrange to have myself sitting in on one of his World Simulations!

But all this is only in preparation to the point of this posting.

Dr. Wesch is a cultural anthropologist who, among other things, decided to study the whole youtube.com phenomenon. And he produced a presentation for the Library of Congress which he (naturally) posted on youtube.com.

What intrigues me most about this whole engrossing 55+ minute presentation is a remark he included from Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk of 2007 (here) in which Lessig points out that our current laws of copyright are creating a culture among our kids where they, in order to be creative in their own right, see the laws as an obstacle to overcome and therefore are encouraged to act as criminals.

And that’s a scary proposition.

I highly recommend checking out Dr. Wesch’s video and also Dr. Lessig’s TED talk.