WorldCon Report
Sep. 7th, 2003 03:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupAs promised, here is my report on the 61st orldCon in Toronto last week, also known as TorCon3. Hopefully not too many of the details have faded yet.
First of all, we set out early Thursday morning with plans of making it to the WorldCon by 3:00 pm. That way we'd have time to settle in for the 4:00 pm opening ceremonies. I'd been up late the night before getting ready. Normally it would take me about an hour to pack, but since I've gotten married that is no longer true.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
taxlady always asks me to add several things to my suitcase. This means that if I don't want to pack twice I have to wait until she is doing her packing to start mine. What's worse, she seems to have gotten very bad at packing since I've known her. She used to travel a lot and have the whole thing down pat. Now it usually takes her all night to get ready for a trip the next day. The upshot was that when we set out at 9:00 am that morning, I had only had about 5 hours sleep, and my SO had had only 1, and she's the driver.
The trip was uneventful and we arrived at the city limits around 3:00, as planned. What we hadn't considered was that this was rush hour in Toronto, and even though we were going against the tide, it was still slow going into the city core. By 4:00 we were checked into our hotel rooms. One nice surprise was that my staff room-rate reduction that had been requested months before had silently been granted, so we saved $40 a night on the rooms. 15 minutes later we had managed to pick up our registration stuff at the convention center (which was about a 10-minute walk from our room)
The first thing I discovered when checking the official schedule was that I had already missed the "Design an Alien Species" panel. One which I had particularly been looking forward to. It hadn't occurred to me that there would be any significant panels scheduled before the opening ceremonies, but there had been stuff happening since 11:00 am that morning. Luckily it was only that one panel that was high up my list of things to do. I also noticed that I didn't have a souvenir book or a staff ribbon for my id badge. I was told the book would arrive the next day (and was given a coupon for it) and that I would have to see my division head to get the ribbon. I was also told that there was an update to the pocket program that I could get at the info desk.
Although it was too late to go to the opening ceremonies, a quick check of the schedule showed that "Has Science Fiction Failed as a Fiction of Science" was starting at 5:00 pm. I went to it but was disappointed. The various authors stated that the answer was a categorical 'No', but then proceeded to make excuses for why, in fact, the answer was 'Yes'.
After the panel my sweetie and I grabbed a couple of sausage-onna-bun's from a smiling hot-dog vendor outside. (I'm not surprised he was smiling, there was a line up of 400-pound hot-dog snarfing fan boys (and gals) just waiting to order their food. Luckily, the line formed behind us, and we didn't wait long for supper.) We ate the food in an urban plaza with tables just across the road, and then headed back to our room, exhausted and ready for an early bedtime. We never noticed that the opening ceremonies on the schedule update stated 8:00 pm, and we could have made them after all.
---
As was, we set the alarm for 8:00 am, since the first panels of interest were at 10:00 the next morning, and we wanted time to get up and have a leisurely breakfast before attending panels. I didn't notice that the clock's time was wrong and so we (unwittingly) got up at 7:00 instead. Its probably just as well since it took us two hours to get down to the breakfast buffet at the York Kitchen, as the place was called. The buffet was unspectacular and was certainly not worth the $30 plus tip that we paid for it, but we hadn't yet had time to scout out any cheaper places.
We then went to a bunch of panels. Which ones I cannot say for sure, since all I kept was the erroneous pocket program and not the daily updates. Still, since I know what panels I went to, I'll talk about them in the order listed in the book, even when I know that's wildly inaccurate.
So, there was a panel of psychopharmacologia called "Imbibing Engrams" which was supposed to talk about the possibility of drinking a drug that induced a desired mood or mental state. Most of the panel was concerned with a discussion of the current state of drugs for moderating mental states and their good and bad points. There was much discussion of alcohol and peyote as one of the panelists was familiar with a Navaho tribe that had major problems with the first, and no problems at all with the second. There was also a good mention of how wildly drug effects can vary depending on their method of getting into the body. Only at the end of the panel was there any real discussion of where we could go from here, and the unanimous consensus was that the brain as we currently understand it is far too differentiated from one person to another for us to concoct an over-the-counter drug for a given effect, although one could imagine a protein sequencer or the like providing a custom drink for a particular purpose.
Then there was a panel called "Creating Believable aliens in Believable Worlds: What to Consider". It sure sounded like a panel I suggested, but the name wasn't my idea -- way too wordy. Anyway, I thought that only one member of the panel 'got' the idea of creating aliens: Frank Wu. Frank (who's mainly an illustrator, with only one short story to his credit) talked about the fact that the majority of creatures on Earth are worms or other invertebrates, and that some of them have truly fascinating life cycles. He strongly advocated borrowing or outright stealing tricks from nature and repackaging them for other stories. He was also quick to point out that 1/3 of terrestrial creatures are parasites, and that even most parasites are parasitized by something. I think he put too much emphasis on bugs (which he admits to really liking) but it was far better than the other panelists talking about bird-people or rabbit-people.
"The Singularity for Dummies" was on my list of panels to attend, but I was a few minutes late and all of the seats were taken. From what little I overheard at the time, it went about the way we had expected it would.
I did manage to get into "The Nature of Sentience", which was fun although, as expected, it pretty much went over the age-old debates which fill the extropian archives. Still its nice to know other folks share my take on the subject.
"From the Ground Up: Building Fantastic Ecosystems" was a bit flat. Both Hal Clement and Julie Czerneda attended, and both have built amazingly nifty ecosystems. Unfortunately they didn't have much to say on the subject other than it was important, and its fun. Hal did report that he once build an ecosystem with an ammonia rather than a water base, and some biologists were upset. They claimed that, since ammonia contracts when it freezes (unlike water, which expands), ponds would freeze from the bottom up rather than the top down. This would mean that small pond life could not escape being frozen and killed. Hal retorted that what kills pond life upon freezing is the expansion of ice crystals inside their bodies, and ammonia crystals don't expand, so it shouldn't kill the life. Knowing, as I do, that there are creatures living on earth with natural antifreeze in them which don't die if frozen in ice, I didn't think much of the argument one way or the other.
In between all of the panels I managed to meet up with Terry, the division head for programming, who informed me that my 'brain trust' ribbon had been cancelled by higher-ups due to 'budgetary onstraints'; something that bugged Terry no end because our group was well within our budgets while other groups had completely blown theirs. Anyway, I was given simple 'Programming Staff' and 'Staff' ribbons so I was mollified. (Technically these ribbons meant that I had volunteered for work during the con and could be called upon to help, but in practice it never came up.)
By the same token it turns out that the World Domination contest had to be cancelled since we couldn't find anyone willing to run it, and we had had to cancel the debates because the U of T debating society wanted to be paid for using their judges and budget wouldn't permit.
I managed to meet up with my sweetie sometime during all of this and have a late lunch in the food court under the urban plaza across the road. They were closed for the rest of the Con though, since Saturday through Monday weren't working days. Its a shame because the food there was good and cheap (the latter being very rare in downtown TO).
In an effort to save some money we skipped supper and instead 'grazed' at the various parties on the various floors of the Royal York. By the time we had visited each party once we were full and tired and went to bed for the night.
---
Saturday started with us sleeping in due to my forgetting to set the alarm. Being in a hurry we just grabbed coffee and danishes at a Second Cup and headed to the convention proper. We ended up missing a panel or two anyway, but nothing that bothered us too much.
I went to see "The Computerization of, Well, Everything" which was fun but a bit too contemporary. It talked about RFID tags, universal object databases, ubiquitous surveillance cameras and the like, which was fun, but never got around to mentioning any futuristic concerns like digital copies of physical objects or rights to one's own DNA.
Luckily the "Death of Person Versus Death of Personality" did discus issues of cloning, memory backups, mind editing and a host of other topics. I didn't hear anything new, but it was nice to see how many folks are now starting to see the mind as a computer program and a personality as an adjective describing how a mind functions. (We still have a loooong way to go though.)
The panel on "Environmental Pseudoscience" was not what I had hoped, although it was lively. There was one radical debunker of environmental claims who quoted The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg which seems to be the latest anti-dogma book in environmental science, but seems to have interpreted it as a conspiracy theory. There was also a loon who actually gets paid for his scientific analysis of different technical positions, although I could discern no analytic ability in him. He was entirely on the side of the worst gloom-and-doom environmentalists. The other three panelists were reasonable people who showed great restraint in their reactions to the nonsense coming from either end of the table. I can't say that much pseudo science got debunked, due to the large amount produced by the two fringe panelists, but at least it wasn't dull.
"A Question of Scale" was supposed to be a panel on the reconciliation of the facts that current technology is increasingly the technology of the very tiny, while future space construction projects such as beanstalks, ringworlds and Dyson sphere's are very large. The panelists entirely failed to understand this and instead talked about large and small structures as settings in SF. I walked out after about 15 minutes.
In between all of the panels my wife and I headed out for a late breakfast at a place called 'Zupas', which turned out to be MUCH further from the Con (and in a different direction) from that indicated in our restaurant guide. As a result it took us 30 minutes or so of walking to find the place. They were nice though, and we had a yummy late breakfast (Note to self: When Torontonians say 'Corned Beef' they mean what we call 'Smoked Meat' and what a New Yorker would call 'Hot Pastrami' thus when they say 'Corned Beef Hash' they don't mean the fried mixture of corned beef and potatos I've eaten in both Vancouver and Montreal, but fried pastrami, which isn't the same thing at all.) Walking back to the Convention (by a much shorter route) we passed an add for Beck's beer that measured it in 'cubic centilitres'. I had almost passed the sign before it struck me as odd. For the rest of the Con I was telling folks that Beck's is a nine-dimensional beer. Too bad we didn't have a camera with us, as it would have been nice to get a picture of the idiocy.
Not long after this we met up with Liz Metcalfe and then Jim Wiebe, two folks that I hadn't seen in a dogs age. For most of the rest of the Con we did things together, although we often attended different panels.
Later that evening we all went out (and dragged Terry along) to the Lone Star Texas Grill across from the Convention center. It was a bit of a splurge but we'd been good and had already determined that the dealer's room was devoid of anything Linda or I would want to buy.
We then went back to our room and relaxed. After a couple of hours I went out party hopping while Linda slept, but things were kinda dull and I was soon back in our room trying to sleep (without much success).
---
Sunday was supposed to the LJ meetup at the Second Cup in the Royal York, but no one showed up but us. We stayed for half an hour, had our morning coffees and headed off for more panels.
I started off attending "The Economics of Innovation" but found the panelists to be woefully lacking any knowledge of Economics or Financing, so I snuck out.
The panel I went to instead was "The Right To Stupidity", which was a fun and spirited debate which, of course, came to no conclusions at all. The only surprise of the panel was discovering that there are educational institutions that actually advertise that they will curb the intelligence of the gifted child so as to make them more 'normal'. Eek!
The next panel was "(In)Sanity in AI" and was lots of fun, although Eliezer Yudkowsky (a long-time extropian who I finally got to meet) thought it would have been better to call the panel "(Ir)Rationality in AI", since he knew how to define that. Yudkowsky was wearing a funny button that said:
taxlady was quite taken with Eliezer, and said he had a 'Beautiful Brain' or something like that...)
"Good Plot or Good Science, Don't Make Me Choose!", was the next panel I went to. The panelists basically agreed that to write good science fiction you must work out the nuts and bolts of how everything works in as much detail as you can manage, but to include as few of those details as possible in the story. Basically, you want what happens to make sense based on what the reader knows, but not to bore them with details. If you've done enough worldbuilding you can include it in an appendix or (for large works) in a separate non-fiction book that explains the setting in detail.
Next was "Spintronics" which was an interesting topic, but the room was very hot and I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before so I nodded off. I nevertheless managed to follow what was going on, since most of the stuff the presenter talked about is available on the net. On the other hand, when he got to the question of exciting new applications for this technology, he said he was under NDA and couldn't talk about any of that. So much for the speculative part of the talk.
"Design a Truly Alien Alien" was a fun panel, but I'm afraid the panel wasn't up to the topic. There was a marine biologist who copped out with the old "My mind is too highly trained" excuse. The panelists didn't even get as far as non-carbon based life, although they did admit that it might be possible. As side topics I discovered that Stanley Schmidt had actually written a book on the subject of designing aliens but a check of amazon for reviews shows that its of limited intellectual scope (although possibly still worth buying). John Wilson, another panelist turns out to be a Futurologist and has taught courses in Futurology, but I haven't been able to find out any more about him or the courses since the Con. (I've been considering becoming a Futurologist, but I never dreamed there were accredited courses on the subject).
The last event we attended that day was the Masquerade. Terry had said that we could get in via the disabled access rather than wait in line for hours, since Liz now has to walk with a cane. Liz was skeptical of the idea since she hardly thinks of herself as disabled. Anyway, the fates stepped in and we took a wrong turn on the way to the line-up and ended up in the waiting area for disabled folks. Rather than force Liz to walk all the way back and try another route, we convinced her to sit and rest (the con really was rather tough on her bad knee.) Anyway, legit or not, we were given a 2 minute head start before the doors were open to let the hordes in. Thus we got decent but not spectacular seats. The actual show didn't start for another 1 3/4 hours after that and lasted about two hours, so we all had flat butts and/or pains in the legs by the time it ended, but it was a good show.
Leaving the Masquerade it was now party time. Linda and I went back to our room to change and then wandered the parties for about an hour or so. We didn't find any interesting conversations or food in that period, so we headed back to bed.
---
Monday was the last day of the con and things were winding down. There was just one panel I wanted to get to, and it was at 12:00 which was check out time. We thought we had set the alarm early enough that we would manage check-out and get to the panel on time, but it was not to be. We ended up in check-out at 3 minutes to noon on my watch, and
then had to check our baggage into the holding area until the evening.
By the time I got to "The Death of Money" it was half over. It looked like it may not have been too good, since from the discussion when I arrived they had yet to get around to talking about how a moneyless economy would work. Then again, they might have started with that and spent the rest of the time debating its merits. Its hard to tell.
After that final panel we met up with Liz and Jim again and decided to kill some time until the closing ceremonies at 3:00 pm. I mainly spent it watching Anime in the anime room which I had discovered by accident while looking for something else. Linda and Jim spent it online and I don't remember what Liz did. Anyway, we all went to the closing ceremonies which were both cute and bittersweet because they officially announced the End of the Con.
Afterwards we met Peter Cohen and we all went for drinks at the Royal York's bar (Note: Bartender and/or waiter was a moron. Its one thing if he had trouble getting my Slow Comfortable Screw sorted out but he couldn't even manage "Perrier with lots of ice"). Afterwards Liz went home and the remaining four of us went to Eliezer's dinner talk at a nearby "Le Commensal" of which I'll just say that the food was much better than the last time I had been to such a place. The talk was good and the discussion afterwards was animated. In the end we were there for close to three hours and they had to kick us out when they closed.
Afterwards I think Jim took the subway to where he left his car, and we drove Peter back to the Hotel so he could collect his bags and get ready to catch his train.
We then drove to Liz's place to stay with her and Steve, her SO, which was also much fun. We talked late into the night and I consumed much soda pop. (Liz is a wonderful hostess. I'm sure she doesn't normally have so much on hand, but knew I was addicted to the stuff.)
---
Tuesday morning I got up late (2:00pm if I recall correctly) and staggered to the kitchen table for coffee. By the time I had both eyes blinking in unison, a plate full of fried eggs and hash browns arrived. Did I mention that Liz was a wonderful hostess?
We spent the rest of the day just lazing around and chatting and were joined around 11:00 pm by Terry, who we had agreed to give a lift home to Montreal. Terry looked like one of the walking dead. He joined us for a late supper and then immediately crashed in the living room.
Not long after, the rest of us went to bed.
---
Wednesday morning was spent preparing for the trip back to Montreal, and taking photos. Steve mentioned what a shame it was that Jim hadn't stopped by during the Con, since he would have like to have met him again. The enormous cargo capacity of our Volvo proved itself by being able to contain all of our luggage as well as all of the equipment Terry hadn't shipped by other means. Around two in the afternoon we set out heading back to Montreal. It was a fairly uneventful drive and Terry (who now looked alive, but tired) slept much of the way. We dropped him and all of his stuff off at his place, and then drove ourselves home.
And that's it. Well Almost. We did receive a party invitation from Robert J. Sawyer and wife inviting us to a "Thanks for the Hugo" party at his place in Mississauga tonight, but we decided it was a bit too far to drive for a party. Still it was a nice gesture and proof that there can be perks for being on a WorldCon committee.
First of all, we set out early Thursday morning with plans of making it to the WorldCon by 3:00 pm. That way we'd have time to settle in for the 4:00 pm opening ceremonies. I'd been up late the night before getting ready. Normally it would take me about an hour to pack, but since I've gotten married that is no longer true.
taxlady always asks me to add several things to my suitcase. This means that if I don't want to pack twice I have to wait until she is doing her packing to start mine. What's worse, she seems to have gotten very bad at packing since I've known her. She used to travel a lot and have the whole thing down pat. Now it usually takes her all night to get ready for a trip the next day. The upshot was that when we set out at 9:00 am that morning, I had only had about 5 hours sleep, and my SO had had only 1, and she's the driver. The trip was uneventful and we arrived at the city limits around 3:00, as planned. What we hadn't considered was that this was rush hour in Toronto, and even though we were going against the tide, it was still slow going into the city core. By 4:00 we were checked into our hotel rooms. One nice surprise was that my staff room-rate reduction that had been requested months before had silently been granted, so we saved $40 a night on the rooms. 15 minutes later we had managed to pick up our registration stuff at the convention center (which was about a 10-minute walk from our room)
The first thing I discovered when checking the official schedule was that I had already missed the "Design an Alien Species" panel. One which I had particularly been looking forward to. It hadn't occurred to me that there would be any significant panels scheduled before the opening ceremonies, but there had been stuff happening since 11:00 am that morning. Luckily it was only that one panel that was high up my list of things to do. I also noticed that I didn't have a souvenir book or a staff ribbon for my id badge. I was told the book would arrive the next day (and was given a coupon for it) and that I would have to see my division head to get the ribbon. I was also told that there was an update to the pocket program that I could get at the info desk.
Although it was too late to go to the opening ceremonies, a quick check of the schedule showed that "Has Science Fiction Failed as a Fiction of Science" was starting at 5:00 pm. I went to it but was disappointed. The various authors stated that the answer was a categorical 'No', but then proceeded to make excuses for why, in fact, the answer was 'Yes'.
After the panel my sweetie and I grabbed a couple of sausage-onna-bun's from a smiling hot-dog vendor outside. (I'm not surprised he was smiling, there was a line up of 400-pound hot-dog snarfing fan boys (and gals) just waiting to order their food. Luckily, the line formed behind us, and we didn't wait long for supper.) We ate the food in an urban plaza with tables just across the road, and then headed back to our room, exhausted and ready for an early bedtime. We never noticed that the opening ceremonies on the schedule update stated 8:00 pm, and we could have made them after all.
---
As was, we set the alarm for 8:00 am, since the first panels of interest were at 10:00 the next morning, and we wanted time to get up and have a leisurely breakfast before attending panels. I didn't notice that the clock's time was wrong and so we (unwittingly) got up at 7:00 instead. Its probably just as well since it took us two hours to get down to the breakfast buffet at the York Kitchen, as the place was called. The buffet was unspectacular and was certainly not worth the $30 plus tip that we paid for it, but we hadn't yet had time to scout out any cheaper places.
We then went to a bunch of panels. Which ones I cannot say for sure, since all I kept was the erroneous pocket program and not the daily updates. Still, since I know what panels I went to, I'll talk about them in the order listed in the book, even when I know that's wildly inaccurate.
So, there was a panel of psychopharmacologia called "Imbibing Engrams" which was supposed to talk about the possibility of drinking a drug that induced a desired mood or mental state. Most of the panel was concerned with a discussion of the current state of drugs for moderating mental states and their good and bad points. There was much discussion of alcohol and peyote as one of the panelists was familiar with a Navaho tribe that had major problems with the first, and no problems at all with the second. There was also a good mention of how wildly drug effects can vary depending on their method of getting into the body. Only at the end of the panel was there any real discussion of where we could go from here, and the unanimous consensus was that the brain as we currently understand it is far too differentiated from one person to another for us to concoct an over-the-counter drug for a given effect, although one could imagine a protein sequencer or the like providing a custom drink for a particular purpose.
Then there was a panel called "Creating Believable aliens in Believable Worlds: What to Consider". It sure sounded like a panel I suggested, but the name wasn't my idea -- way too wordy. Anyway, I thought that only one member of the panel 'got' the idea of creating aliens: Frank Wu. Frank (who's mainly an illustrator, with only one short story to his credit) talked about the fact that the majority of creatures on Earth are worms or other invertebrates, and that some of them have truly fascinating life cycles. He strongly advocated borrowing or outright stealing tricks from nature and repackaging them for other stories. He was also quick to point out that 1/3 of terrestrial creatures are parasites, and that even most parasites are parasitized by something. I think he put too much emphasis on bugs (which he admits to really liking) but it was far better than the other panelists talking about bird-people or rabbit-people.
"The Singularity for Dummies" was on my list of panels to attend, but I was a few minutes late and all of the seats were taken. From what little I overheard at the time, it went about the way we had expected it would.
I did manage to get into "The Nature of Sentience", which was fun although, as expected, it pretty much went over the age-old debates which fill the extropian archives. Still its nice to know other folks share my take on the subject.
"From the Ground Up: Building Fantastic Ecosystems" was a bit flat. Both Hal Clement and Julie Czerneda attended, and both have built amazingly nifty ecosystems. Unfortunately they didn't have much to say on the subject other than it was important, and its fun. Hal did report that he once build an ecosystem with an ammonia rather than a water base, and some biologists were upset. They claimed that, since ammonia contracts when it freezes (unlike water, which expands), ponds would freeze from the bottom up rather than the top down. This would mean that small pond life could not escape being frozen and killed. Hal retorted that what kills pond life upon freezing is the expansion of ice crystals inside their bodies, and ammonia crystals don't expand, so it shouldn't kill the life. Knowing, as I do, that there are creatures living on earth with natural antifreeze in them which don't die if frozen in ice, I didn't think much of the argument one way or the other.
In between all of the panels I managed to meet up with Terry, the division head for programming, who informed me that my 'brain trust' ribbon had been cancelled by higher-ups due to 'budgetary onstraints'; something that bugged Terry no end because our group was well within our budgets while other groups had completely blown theirs. Anyway, I was given simple 'Programming Staff' and 'Staff' ribbons so I was mollified. (Technically these ribbons meant that I had volunteered for work during the con and could be called upon to help, but in practice it never came up.)
By the same token it turns out that the World Domination contest had to be cancelled since we couldn't find anyone willing to run it, and we had had to cancel the debates because the U of T debating society wanted to be paid for using their judges and budget wouldn't permit.
I managed to meet up with my sweetie sometime during all of this and have a late lunch in the food court under the urban plaza across the road. They were closed for the rest of the Con though, since Saturday through Monday weren't working days. Its a shame because the food there was good and cheap (the latter being very rare in downtown TO).
In an effort to save some money we skipped supper and instead 'grazed' at the various parties on the various floors of the Royal York. By the time we had visited each party once we were full and tired and went to bed for the night.
---
Saturday started with us sleeping in due to my forgetting to set the alarm. Being in a hurry we just grabbed coffee and danishes at a Second Cup and headed to the convention proper. We ended up missing a panel or two anyway, but nothing that bothered us too much.
I went to see "The Computerization of, Well, Everything" which was fun but a bit too contemporary. It talked about RFID tags, universal object databases, ubiquitous surveillance cameras and the like, which was fun, but never got around to mentioning any futuristic concerns like digital copies of physical objects or rights to one's own DNA.
Luckily the "Death of Person Versus Death of Personality" did discus issues of cloning, memory backups, mind editing and a host of other topics. I didn't hear anything new, but it was nice to see how many folks are now starting to see the mind as a computer program and a personality as an adjective describing how a mind functions. (We still have a loooong way to go though.)
The panel on "Environmental Pseudoscience" was not what I had hoped, although it was lively. There was one radical debunker of environmental claims who quoted The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg which seems to be the latest anti-dogma book in environmental science, but seems to have interpreted it as a conspiracy theory. There was also a loon who actually gets paid for his scientific analysis of different technical positions, although I could discern no analytic ability in him. He was entirely on the side of the worst gloom-and-doom environmentalists. The other three panelists were reasonable people who showed great restraint in their reactions to the nonsense coming from either end of the table. I can't say that much pseudo science got debunked, due to the large amount produced by the two fringe panelists, but at least it wasn't dull.
"A Question of Scale" was supposed to be a panel on the reconciliation of the facts that current technology is increasingly the technology of the very tiny, while future space construction projects such as beanstalks, ringworlds and Dyson sphere's are very large. The panelists entirely failed to understand this and instead talked about large and small structures as settings in SF. I walked out after about 15 minutes.
In between all of the panels my wife and I headed out for a late breakfast at a place called 'Zupas', which turned out to be MUCH further from the Con (and in a different direction) from that indicated in our restaurant guide. As a result it took us 30 minutes or so of walking to find the place. They were nice though, and we had a yummy late breakfast (Note to self: When Torontonians say 'Corned Beef' they mean what we call 'Smoked Meat' and what a New Yorker would call 'Hot Pastrami' thus when they say 'Corned Beef Hash' they don't mean the fried mixture of corned beef and potatos I've eaten in both Vancouver and Montreal, but fried pastrami, which isn't the same thing at all.) Walking back to the Convention (by a much shorter route) we passed an add for Beck's beer that measured it in 'cubic centilitres'. I had almost passed the sign before it struck me as odd. For the rest of the Con I was telling folks that Beck's is a nine-dimensional beer. Too bad we didn't have a camera with us, as it would have been nice to get a picture of the idiocy.
Not long after this we met up with Liz Metcalfe and then Jim Wiebe, two folks that I hadn't seen in a dogs age. For most of the rest of the Con we did things together, although we often attended different panels.
Later that evening we all went out (and dragged Terry along) to the Lone Star Texas Grill across from the Convention center. It was a bit of a splurge but we'd been good and had already determined that the dealer's room was devoid of anything Linda or I would want to buy.
We then went back to our room and relaxed. After a couple of hours I went out party hopping while Linda slept, but things were kinda dull and I was soon back in our room trying to sleep (without much success).
---
Sunday was supposed to the LJ meetup at the Second Cup in the Royal York, but no one showed up but us. We stayed for half an hour, had our morning coffees and headed off for more panels.
I started off attending "The Economics of Innovation" but found the panelists to be woefully lacking any knowledge of Economics or Financing, so I snuck out.
The panel I went to instead was "The Right To Stupidity", which was a fun and spirited debate which, of course, came to no conclusions at all. The only surprise of the panel was discovering that there are educational institutions that actually advertise that they will curb the intelligence of the gifted child so as to make them more 'normal'. Eek!
The next panel was "(In)Sanity in AI" and was lots of fun, although Eliezer Yudkowsky (a long-time extropian who I finally got to meet) thought it would have been better to call the panel "(Ir)Rationality in AI", since he knew how to define that. Yudkowsky was wearing a funny button that said:
P(X|A)*P(A)
P(A|X) = ----------- + 3d6
P(X)
although he said I was one of the few folks who got it. After the panel he invited me and Linda to a talk he was giving on Monday for the Toronto Transhumanist Society. We readily agreed. (taxlady was quite taken with Eliezer, and said he had a 'Beautiful Brain' or something like that...)"Good Plot or Good Science, Don't Make Me Choose!", was the next panel I went to. The panelists basically agreed that to write good science fiction you must work out the nuts and bolts of how everything works in as much detail as you can manage, but to include as few of those details as possible in the story. Basically, you want what happens to make sense based on what the reader knows, but not to bore them with details. If you've done enough worldbuilding you can include it in an appendix or (for large works) in a separate non-fiction book that explains the setting in detail.
Next was "Spintronics" which was an interesting topic, but the room was very hot and I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before so I nodded off. I nevertheless managed to follow what was going on, since most of the stuff the presenter talked about is available on the net. On the other hand, when he got to the question of exciting new applications for this technology, he said he was under NDA and couldn't talk about any of that. So much for the speculative part of the talk.
"Design a Truly Alien Alien" was a fun panel, but I'm afraid the panel wasn't up to the topic. There was a marine biologist who copped out with the old "My mind is too highly trained" excuse. The panelists didn't even get as far as non-carbon based life, although they did admit that it might be possible. As side topics I discovered that Stanley Schmidt had actually written a book on the subject of designing aliens but a check of amazon for reviews shows that its of limited intellectual scope (although possibly still worth buying). John Wilson, another panelist turns out to be a Futurologist and has taught courses in Futurology, but I haven't been able to find out any more about him or the courses since the Con. (I've been considering becoming a Futurologist, but I never dreamed there were accredited courses on the subject).
The last event we attended that day was the Masquerade. Terry had said that we could get in via the disabled access rather than wait in line for hours, since Liz now has to walk with a cane. Liz was skeptical of the idea since she hardly thinks of herself as disabled. Anyway, the fates stepped in and we took a wrong turn on the way to the line-up and ended up in the waiting area for disabled folks. Rather than force Liz to walk all the way back and try another route, we convinced her to sit and rest (the con really was rather tough on her bad knee.) Anyway, legit or not, we were given a 2 minute head start before the doors were open to let the hordes in. Thus we got decent but not spectacular seats. The actual show didn't start for another 1 3/4 hours after that and lasted about two hours, so we all had flat butts and/or pains in the legs by the time it ended, but it was a good show.
Leaving the Masquerade it was now party time. Linda and I went back to our room to change and then wandered the parties for about an hour or so. We didn't find any interesting conversations or food in that period, so we headed back to bed.
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Monday was the last day of the con and things were winding down. There was just one panel I wanted to get to, and it was at 12:00 which was check out time. We thought we had set the alarm early enough that we would manage check-out and get to the panel on time, but it was not to be. We ended up in check-out at 3 minutes to noon on my watch, and
then had to check our baggage into the holding area until the evening.
By the time I got to "The Death of Money" it was half over. It looked like it may not have been too good, since from the discussion when I arrived they had yet to get around to talking about how a moneyless economy would work. Then again, they might have started with that and spent the rest of the time debating its merits. Its hard to tell.
After that final panel we met up with Liz and Jim again and decided to kill some time until the closing ceremonies at 3:00 pm. I mainly spent it watching Anime in the anime room which I had discovered by accident while looking for something else. Linda and Jim spent it online and I don't remember what Liz did. Anyway, we all went to the closing ceremonies which were both cute and bittersweet because they officially announced the End of the Con.
Afterwards we met Peter Cohen and we all went for drinks at the Royal York's bar (Note: Bartender and/or waiter was a moron. Its one thing if he had trouble getting my Slow Comfortable Screw sorted out but he couldn't even manage "Perrier with lots of ice"). Afterwards Liz went home and the remaining four of us went to Eliezer's dinner talk at a nearby "Le Commensal" of which I'll just say that the food was much better than the last time I had been to such a place. The talk was good and the discussion afterwards was animated. In the end we were there for close to three hours and they had to kick us out when they closed.
Afterwards I think Jim took the subway to where he left his car, and we drove Peter back to the Hotel so he could collect his bags and get ready to catch his train.
We then drove to Liz's place to stay with her and Steve, her SO, which was also much fun. We talked late into the night and I consumed much soda pop. (Liz is a wonderful hostess. I'm sure she doesn't normally have so much on hand, but knew I was addicted to the stuff.)
---
Tuesday morning I got up late (2:00pm if I recall correctly) and staggered to the kitchen table for coffee. By the time I had both eyes blinking in unison, a plate full of fried eggs and hash browns arrived. Did I mention that Liz was a wonderful hostess?
We spent the rest of the day just lazing around and chatting and were joined around 11:00 pm by Terry, who we had agreed to give a lift home to Montreal. Terry looked like one of the walking dead. He joined us for a late supper and then immediately crashed in the living room.
Not long after, the rest of us went to bed.
---
Wednesday morning was spent preparing for the trip back to Montreal, and taking photos. Steve mentioned what a shame it was that Jim hadn't stopped by during the Con, since he would have like to have met him again. The enormous cargo capacity of our Volvo proved itself by being able to contain all of our luggage as well as all of the equipment Terry hadn't shipped by other means. Around two in the afternoon we set out heading back to Montreal. It was a fairly uneventful drive and Terry (who now looked alive, but tired) slept much of the way. We dropped him and all of his stuff off at his place, and then drove ourselves home.
And that's it. Well Almost. We did receive a party invitation from Robert J. Sawyer and wife inviting us to a "Thanks for the Hugo" party at his place in Mississauga tonight, but we decided it was a bit too far to drive for a party. Still it was a nice gesture and proof that there can be perks for being on a WorldCon committee.
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Date: 2003-09-07 02:02 pm (UTC)I didn't know there was an LJ Meetup in Toronto! If I did, there would have been 1 attendee... not enough to justify keeping it going, but a start.
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Date: 2003-09-07 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-07 07:23 pm (UTC)Oh, and I've volunteered to help with panel ideas for the NEXT worldcon in Boston, so I get to use the results of this effort to try again.
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Date: 2003-09-07 11:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 07:03 pm (UTC)I did a writeup of the one on Interstellar Propulsion. I intend to write some more about the con.