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extrapenguinWorldcon Friday! I finally got to buy some books: A Memory Called Empire (which I read while queueing) and the three volumes of Monstress. On the way to the CCD, my minion and I bumped again into schneefink!
The ethics of secret power Fri 10:00 Wicklow Room 4
Marcus Gipps (M), E. C. Ambrose, Stephanie Katz, Taiyo Fujii
- what does secret power mean for society? secret superpowers vs secret powerful orgs
- where are the Harry Potter verse soup kitchens? (if there is no cost to using that power, why no sharing?)
- if it's just one mortal guy with the superpowers, secrecy makes sense (since people want to kill him etc)
- we like characters who hide things because we find that relateable [Ed. Note: didn't quite catch this fully]
- what is the ethics of villains being stronger than heroes in fiction?
- we've switched from villains being secret orgs to being corporations with good PR
- SFF's advantage is enabling the writing large of differences in ethical approach + changing dynamics from reality
- in SFF one can change the paradigm so that characters have actually sacrificed to achieve stuff, instead of "I'm an investment banker and super rich because my parents went to Yale" or whatever
- should we be worried more about secret power or openly wielded power, cf Donald Trump and Twitter
- is the secret power even being used, and is it being used ethically?
- the Broken Earth series, the Culture's Exceptional Circumstances, and Earthquake Weather were brought up as examples of works where the secret powers are not necessarily evil nor necessarily right [?]
- if writing a work in a universe with secret powers, people will question why the protagonist doesn't have them
- the power of mind is actually a secret power that's found even far outside SFF [Ed. Note: it's also my favorite one!]; an audience member brought up that eg tech skills would come across as secret powers to those who don't have them
- if you don't hide it, people will come take it away, or you'll fear they will
- SFF is often not so much escapism as empowerment: projection into an ideal self who is more heroic, smarter, and saves the day
- people have studied the banality of heroism, ie how to create systems that push towards good – one way is stories; evoke the hero within, and people might step up in extremis
- heroes often have a mentor to ensure they use their powers for good – where can we give the public such mentors?
This was a nice and in-depth panel I enjoyed, especially the contributions from E.C. Ambrose, who seemed very well-thought. I was deliberating between this and the space opera panel, but the description of this one was more interesting and I didn't want to sit through a recap of "But what is space opera?". Queueing up for the 10:00 panels was nice and easy – I only had to turn up at 9:30, instead of an hour ahead. Alas, I had to skip the questions so I could rush to Point Square for my next panel.
Colonising the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud Fri 11:30 Odeon 1
John Bray (M) Mary Turzillo, Gary Ehrlich, Dr Laura Woodney
- terminology! the Kuiper Belt should be the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, so they shall be called Trans-Neptunian Objects
- TNOs vs the Oort Cloud: TNOs are in the plane of the solar system and formed there, while the Oort Cloud stuff is from the gas giants' orbit and kicked into a spherical halo
- TNOs that venture between Neptune and Jupiter are called centaurs; further in and they become comets
- stuff is mostly ice (water, methane, carbon dioxide) with other planetstuff in traces
- water is a major component of concrete, so the engineer guy speculated we could make a form of concrete from TNO matter
- if ice stays cold, it sets harder than concrete, so if you're going to leave it cold, no construction necessary
- the lack of sunlight means energy is a problem, but the transition from amorphous to crystalline water is exothermic (and probably causes some of the explosions on comets that we see as they start to head in) so we could extract energy from causing the amorphous water ice to crystallize
- geothermal energy works on anything with a warm core, including Mars and probably Pluto, based on the images we got back
- Mars-sized TNOs are possible, as are ice giants that are more Neptune-sized
- volunteers for the first TNO colonization missions would either be religious dissidents or convicts given a choice between going to the TNOs or death
- low energy transfers would take 45 years (so colonists in cold sleep), and with current rocket tech, the minimum is 10-15 years
- colonizing the Oort cloud is a step to interstellar travel – stars' Oort clouds get tangled in each other and objects might change gravity well
- bases would be remote but not completely remote, so you'd see the enemies coming for longer, but you're still in cultural contact with Earth, as it's still in the light-hour range
- TNO stations to deflect comets as a planetary protection measure!
- if you want to spin up Venus, energetics of deflected TNOs might be better than using stuff from the Asteroid Belt
- if the Moon is a waypoint to Mars, might Pluto be one for the TNOs, and then e.g. Eris a waypoint/transfer station for colony ships?
- one might have a cycler (asteroid in an elliptical orbit), or a chain of them as a sort of express pathway Earth to Oort
- it's more likely that people convert their transport ship into the O'Neill cylinder or whatever as Step 1 instead of the asteroid/TNO, which is the Step 2 thingamajig
- TNOs could hold oceans (there were 1000 Pluto-sized things in the early solar system), so is there energy for life?
- Pluto's geological features suggest energy to allow planetary overturn
- anthology rec: Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, published by the Arizona Stat University's ... something; the anthology is on humanity colonizing every bit of the solar system
- bone loss will be a problem, but we can solve that with drugs (salmon calcitonin), bioengineering, or becoming cyborgs.
This was a wonderful panel and super worth all of it! Dr Woodney is an actual NASA scientist and had a lot of relevant stuff to tell. 10/10 was worth.
Then I had lunch (probably at the Korean?) and did the actual book-buying in the CCD before rushing to my next queue at Point Square with my book in hand. They weren't emptying out the rooms there, though if you did exit your movie theater, they'd toss you downstairs to the end of the all rooms queue. (There was a small top floor where the theaters were which was accessible mostly by escalator; we apparently broke the escalators a few times because there were so many of us.)
Neuroscience for writers and readers Fri 15:30 Odeon 4
Benjamin C. Kinney
- energent systems: a system that's more than just the component parts (eg no analysis of engines will tell you how traffic works)
- transcranial magnetic stimuli activate cells, so they can trigger movements, sensations, and even really bland hallucinations
- fMRI measures whether or not hemoglobin is oxygenated
- brain areas beyond motor and sensory contribute pieces, not functions, so stuff varies over time
- mirror neuron: doing X and seeing X trigger the same neuron, but the presenter said that calling that empathy is the wrong level of analysis ("which engine part caused that traffic accident")
- computations require many cells; the wheels are not the car
- does the brain work like a computer? [spoiler: no]
- the computational model has been an intuitive one and the guiding principle of neuroscience, but not how the brain works
- brain is information processing, but is it useful to us to think of the brain as a PC?
- conscious attention is a time- and space-limited searchlight, but the brain fills in the blanks
- saccadic suppression means that if you have a saccade at the right time, you acn cause the stopped clock illusion
- perceptual awareness is a constructed phenomenon
- intuitions don't always work and the brain is a kludge, hence logical fallacies
- humans are special because we grasp, coordinate socially, throw with an elbow-whip, and sweat (good for endurance purposes) -> all movement-based adaptations!
- the brain is for movement! action > consciousness
- the affordance competition hypothesis is that basially the brain is for choosing between action opportunities
- brains don't execute algorithms, so brain uploading is akin to uploading a cheetah to a racecar just because both go fast
- different bodes lead to different cognition (based on both DNA and development) so the brain is enslaved to the body in a sense
- brains are good at prediction (of the world and the body) and plasticity
- optimization isn't worth it so the brain is a master of "good enough".
This was an enjoyable presentation! I knew some of the stuff and a lot of the other stuff made sense when stated. It was at a very good place in the "new information to connect to existing ones" level.
Medical effects of biological weapons Fri 16:30 Odeon 4
Paul Hulkovich, Tricia Tynan
Paul Hulkovich and Tricia Tynan (Ph.D) present a class on the medical effects of biological weapons.
Okay, this was mostly overviewing stuff like bacteria (anthrax and the plague), viruses (smallpox and ebola), and a very brief aside on toxins (ricin and botulinum) as potential bioweapons. (Time ran out.) There were gory pictures. I learned some interesting things from this, such as there being a vaccine for bubonic plague, and that the US FDA has approved a drug to treat smallpox – despite smallpox being eradicated in humans since 1980. IDK if I'd have gone here again, even if I am not squeamish, since the auditorium was overly warm and I guess there could've been stuff I preferred on elsewhere? Ah well. Don't look up the pictures for injection anthrax.
After that, we had dinner at the Korean place again. They served a sort of makeshift hotpot. The rice bowls were tiny and I was left hungry.
Speculative biology: an evolving field Fri 19:00 Liffey Room-1
Dr Helen Pennington (M), S. Spencer Baker, Dr V Anne Smith, Adrian Tchaikovsky
- humans have rewired the entire ecosystem to be human-centric (useful species and those who live on our waste are allowed to live, basically)
- good at adapting to us != terribly adaptible – rats and cockroaches wuld die with us (no rats found when abandoned Viking settlement returned to!)
- keys to climate change survival will be adaptability for land animals, movement for sea and flying animals whom humans can't block that easily
- was the evolution of oxygen inevitable, or were there other options? on Earth, O2 lead to multicellular life and the oxygen catastrophe was sort of inevitable
- some insects have very complicated behaviors, like the bee or [some species of] jumping spider
- hives don't actually have hive minds, they have coups, regicide, and competition
- vertebrates have better, adaptive immune systems, so they ousted insect once they invented herbivory
- if you delay the invention of herbivory + give vertebrates a more shit immune system, you could have an ecosystem where the herbivores all have exoskeletons and the carnivores are vertebrates
- there was a noteable increase in theropod brain size around 65 million years ago, so dinosaurs might've been able to invent civilization had the meteor not hit
- the panelists' favorite invertebrates for sentience were trilobites (Adrian Tchaikovsky, having already used up spiders and cephalopods for his novels), slime molds (Helen Pennington?), and cuttlefish/the nautilus (V Anne Smith?); Spencer Baker, upon being informed that snakes were not invertebrates, stated that he didn't have one
- there's also the question of what is life; we have cellular life, while eg Stanisław Lem's Solaris had one entire ocean metabolizing
- evolution requires something inheritable plus a reward environment, but not necessarily life!
- all of Earth is lifeforms that survived the oxygen catastrophe, even the anaerobic bacteria at the deep sea vents
- even the sea bottom is dependent on the oxygen ecosystem above
- the panel welcomes our tardigrade overlords whom we accidentally sent to the Moon
- bioengineering to create an artificial ecosystem vs maintaining ours
- between organ-growing, hyper-advanced prosthetics, and cybernetics, we'll have to think about our definitions of life
- the basic unit of life is the ecology
- octopuses survive brain trauma that'd kill humans (their esophagus goes through their brains)
- a culture (eg whalesong) cannot be resurrected by raising infants from null.
Another panel I absolutely loved! I enjoyed Helen Pennington, V Anne Smith, and Adrian Tchaikovsky as panelists here and they were super engaged with the subject due to research and personal interest. I really need to get my copy of Children of Time out, it seems. (It's in storage at my parents' due to the move.)
schneefink!The ethics of secret power Fri 10:00 Wicklow Room 4
Marcus Gipps (M), E. C. Ambrose, Stephanie Katz, Taiyo Fujii
Science fiction and fantasy often includes secret societies or even entire secret cultures, possessed of extraordinary knowledge and abilities. The audience enjoys being invited into a world cut off from mundane society, but the implications of that amount of power often lie unexamined. What are the risks and benefits of secrecy or exposure? Which works or authors question these power dynamics?
- what does secret power mean for society? secret superpowers vs secret powerful orgs
- where are the Harry Potter verse soup kitchens? (if there is no cost to using that power, why no sharing?)
- if it's just one mortal guy with the superpowers, secrecy makes sense (since people want to kill him etc)
- we like characters who hide things because we find that relateable [Ed. Note: didn't quite catch this fully]
- what is the ethics of villains being stronger than heroes in fiction?
- we've switched from villains being secret orgs to being corporations with good PR
- SFF's advantage is enabling the writing large of differences in ethical approach + changing dynamics from reality
- in SFF one can change the paradigm so that characters have actually sacrificed to achieve stuff, instead of "I'm an investment banker and super rich because my parents went to Yale" or whatever
- should we be worried more about secret power or openly wielded power, cf Donald Trump and Twitter
- is the secret power even being used, and is it being used ethically?
- the Broken Earth series, the Culture's Exceptional Circumstances, and Earthquake Weather were brought up as examples of works where the secret powers are not necessarily evil nor necessarily right [?]
- if writing a work in a universe with secret powers, people will question why the protagonist doesn't have them
- the power of mind is actually a secret power that's found even far outside SFF [Ed. Note: it's also my favorite one!]; an audience member brought up that eg tech skills would come across as secret powers to those who don't have them
- if you don't hide it, people will come take it away, or you'll fear they will
- SFF is often not so much escapism as empowerment: projection into an ideal self who is more heroic, smarter, and saves the day
- people have studied the banality of heroism, ie how to create systems that push towards good – one way is stories; evoke the hero within, and people might step up in extremis
- heroes often have a mentor to ensure they use their powers for good – where can we give the public such mentors?
This was a nice and in-depth panel I enjoyed, especially the contributions from E.C. Ambrose, who seemed very well-thought. I was deliberating between this and the space opera panel, but the description of this one was more interesting and I didn't want to sit through a recap of "But what is space opera?". Queueing up for the 10:00 panels was nice and easy – I only had to turn up at 9:30, instead of an hour ahead. Alas, I had to skip the questions so I could rush to Point Square for my next panel.
Colonising the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud Fri 11:30 Odeon 1
John Bray (M) Mary Turzillo, Gary Ehrlich, Dr Laura Woodney
Okay, there’s not too much light nor gravity out there. But there’s pretty much everything else, and we can collect light and spin gravity. How much stuff is actually out there, and how big a population could it support? What engineering challenges do we have to meet in building and sustaining such a colony, and how would habitats be constructed?
- terminology! the Kuiper Belt should be the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, so they shall be called Trans-Neptunian Objects
- TNOs vs the Oort Cloud: TNOs are in the plane of the solar system and formed there, while the Oort Cloud stuff is from the gas giants' orbit and kicked into a spherical halo
- TNOs that venture between Neptune and Jupiter are called centaurs; further in and they become comets
- stuff is mostly ice (water, methane, carbon dioxide) with other planetstuff in traces
- water is a major component of concrete, so the engineer guy speculated we could make a form of concrete from TNO matter
- if ice stays cold, it sets harder than concrete, so if you're going to leave it cold, no construction necessary
- the lack of sunlight means energy is a problem, but the transition from amorphous to crystalline water is exothermic (and probably causes some of the explosions on comets that we see as they start to head in) so we could extract energy from causing the amorphous water ice to crystallize
- geothermal energy works on anything with a warm core, including Mars and probably Pluto, based on the images we got back
- Mars-sized TNOs are possible, as are ice giants that are more Neptune-sized
- volunteers for the first TNO colonization missions would either be religious dissidents or convicts given a choice between going to the TNOs or death
- low energy transfers would take 45 years (so colonists in cold sleep), and with current rocket tech, the minimum is 10-15 years
- colonizing the Oort cloud is a step to interstellar travel – stars' Oort clouds get tangled in each other and objects might change gravity well
- bases would be remote but not completely remote, so you'd see the enemies coming for longer, but you're still in cultural contact with Earth, as it's still in the light-hour range
- TNO stations to deflect comets as a planetary protection measure!
- if you want to spin up Venus, energetics of deflected TNOs might be better than using stuff from the Asteroid Belt
- if the Moon is a waypoint to Mars, might Pluto be one for the TNOs, and then e.g. Eris a waypoint/transfer station for colony ships?
- one might have a cycler (asteroid in an elliptical orbit), or a chain of them as a sort of express pathway Earth to Oort
- it's more likely that people convert their transport ship into the O'Neill cylinder or whatever as Step 1 instead of the asteroid/TNO, which is the Step 2 thingamajig
- TNOs could hold oceans (there were 1000 Pluto-sized things in the early solar system), so is there energy for life?
- Pluto's geological features suggest energy to allow planetary overturn
- anthology rec: Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, published by the Arizona Stat University's ... something; the anthology is on humanity colonizing every bit of the solar system
- bone loss will be a problem, but we can solve that with drugs (salmon calcitonin), bioengineering, or becoming cyborgs.
This was a wonderful panel and super worth all of it! Dr Woodney is an actual NASA scientist and had a lot of relevant stuff to tell. 10/10 was worth.
Then I had lunch (probably at the Korean?) and did the actual book-buying in the CCD before rushing to my next queue at Point Square with my book in hand. They weren't emptying out the rooms there, though if you did exit your movie theater, they'd toss you downstairs to the end of the all rooms queue. (There was a small top floor where the theaters were which was accessible mostly by escalator; we apparently broke the escalators a few times because there were so many of us.)
Neuroscience for writers and readers Fri 15:30 Odeon 4
Benjamin C. Kinney
The human brain and mind have been topics of fiction since time immemorial, but our stories don’t always keep up with the science. The classic science fictional frameworks of the last fifty years have produced a lot of great stories, but a better understanding of the brain can lead us to new stories and new ideas. How can we, as writers and readers, make sense of the most complex structure in the world?
- energent systems: a system that's more than just the component parts (eg no analysis of engines will tell you how traffic works)
- transcranial magnetic stimuli activate cells, so they can trigger movements, sensations, and even really bland hallucinations
- fMRI measures whether or not hemoglobin is oxygenated
- brain areas beyond motor and sensory contribute pieces, not functions, so stuff varies over time
- mirror neuron: doing X and seeing X trigger the same neuron, but the presenter said that calling that empathy is the wrong level of analysis ("which engine part caused that traffic accident")
- computations require many cells; the wheels are not the car
- does the brain work like a computer? [spoiler: no]
- the computational model has been an intuitive one and the guiding principle of neuroscience, but not how the brain works
- brain is information processing, but is it useful to us to think of the brain as a PC?
- conscious attention is a time- and space-limited searchlight, but the brain fills in the blanks
- saccadic suppression means that if you have a saccade at the right time, you acn cause the stopped clock illusion
- perceptual awareness is a constructed phenomenon
- intuitions don't always work and the brain is a kludge, hence logical fallacies
- humans are special because we grasp, coordinate socially, throw with an elbow-whip, and sweat (good for endurance purposes) -> all movement-based adaptations!
- the brain is for movement! action > consciousness
- the affordance competition hypothesis is that basially the brain is for choosing between action opportunities
- brains don't execute algorithms, so brain uploading is akin to uploading a cheetah to a racecar just because both go fast
- different bodes lead to different cognition (based on both DNA and development) so the brain is enslaved to the body in a sense
- brains are good at prediction (of the world and the body) and plasticity
- optimization isn't worth it so the brain is a master of "good enough".
This was an enjoyable presentation! I knew some of the stuff and a lot of the other stuff made sense when stated. It was at a very good place in the "new information to connect to existing ones" level.
Medical effects of biological weapons Fri 16:30 Odeon 4
Paul Hulkovich, Tricia Tynan
Okay, this was mostly overviewing stuff like bacteria (anthrax and the plague), viruses (smallpox and ebola), and a very brief aside on toxins (ricin and botulinum) as potential bioweapons. (Time ran out.) There were gory pictures. I learned some interesting things from this, such as there being a vaccine for bubonic plague, and that the US FDA has approved a drug to treat smallpox – despite smallpox being eradicated in humans since 1980. IDK if I'd have gone here again, even if I am not squeamish, since the auditorium was overly warm and I guess there could've been stuff I preferred on elsewhere? Ah well. Don't look up the pictures for injection anthrax.
After that, we had dinner at the Korean place again. They served a sort of makeshift hotpot. The rice bowls were tiny and I was left hungry.
Speculative biology: an evolving field Fri 19:00 Liffey Room-1
Dr Helen Pennington (M), S. Spencer Baker, Dr V Anne Smith, Adrian Tchaikovsky
An introduction to the art and field of speculative biology (aka speculative evolution). Panellists will address three questions, focusing on how we make the relevant plants and animals scientifically plausible:
What is the future of life on Earth?
How might life on Earth have turned out differently if events had occurred differently?
What could life on other planets be like?
- humans have rewired the entire ecosystem to be human-centric (useful species and those who live on our waste are allowed to live, basically)
- good at adapting to us != terribly adaptible – rats and cockroaches wuld die with us (no rats found when abandoned Viking settlement returned to!)
- keys to climate change survival will be adaptability for land animals, movement for sea and flying animals whom humans can't block that easily
- was the evolution of oxygen inevitable, or were there other options? on Earth, O2 lead to multicellular life and the oxygen catastrophe was sort of inevitable
- some insects have very complicated behaviors, like the bee or [some species of] jumping spider
- hives don't actually have hive minds, they have coups, regicide, and competition
- vertebrates have better, adaptive immune systems, so they ousted insect once they invented herbivory
- if you delay the invention of herbivory + give vertebrates a more shit immune system, you could have an ecosystem where the herbivores all have exoskeletons and the carnivores are vertebrates
- there was a noteable increase in theropod brain size around 65 million years ago, so dinosaurs might've been able to invent civilization had the meteor not hit
- the panelists' favorite invertebrates for sentience were trilobites (Adrian Tchaikovsky, having already used up spiders and cephalopods for his novels), slime molds (Helen Pennington?), and cuttlefish/the nautilus (V Anne Smith?); Spencer Baker, upon being informed that snakes were not invertebrates, stated that he didn't have one
- there's also the question of what is life; we have cellular life, while eg Stanisław Lem's Solaris had one entire ocean metabolizing
- evolution requires something inheritable plus a reward environment, but not necessarily life!
- all of Earth is lifeforms that survived the oxygen catastrophe, even the anaerobic bacteria at the deep sea vents
- even the sea bottom is dependent on the oxygen ecosystem above
- the panel welcomes our tardigrade overlords whom we accidentally sent to the Moon
- bioengineering to create an artificial ecosystem vs maintaining ours
- between organ-growing, hyper-advanced prosthetics, and cybernetics, we'll have to think about our definitions of life
- the basic unit of life is the ecology
- octopuses survive brain trauma that'd kill humans (their esophagus goes through their brains)
- a culture (eg whalesong) cannot be resurrected by raising infants from null.
Another panel I absolutely loved! I enjoyed Helen Pennington, V Anne Smith, and Adrian Tchaikovsky as panelists here and they were super engaged with the subject due to research and personal interest. I really need to get my copy of Children of Time out, it seems. (It's in storage at my parents' due to the move.)
no subject
Date: 2019-08-21 21:51 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-22 18:43 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-22 15:56 (UTC)Most of what I've picked up about neuroscience from my bestie has involved kitchen metaphors (she's focused on memory and dementia) and the base question for reading any neuroscience papers: "Is this research done on mice or in humans?" (Usually the answer is 'in mice', and there are some huge gaps between mice brains and human brains.)
no subject
Date: 2019-08-22 18:25 (UTC)All the neuroscience stuff the guy brought up was done on actual humans! Mice and humans do obviously have some large differences to humans, even if lab mice are easy to experiment in.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-23 02:38 (UTC)Very intrigued by the idea of rats not being as adaptible as one might instinctively think!
no subject
Date: 2019-08-23 14:18 (UTC)The rat bit was very intriguing, yes! The implications were very ponderable.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-24 02:56 (UTC)"uploading a cheetah to a racecar" analogy is a really neat way to think about it, and I'm also really surprised by the fact that rats (and cockroaches) aren't as adaptable as I would've guessed.
(thank you for sharing the continued Worldcon reportage!)
no subject
Date: 2019-08-24 10:36 (UTC)The "uploading a cheetah to a racecar" and "one can't understand traffic by looking at the spark plugs" bits were very apt analogies and also very memorable, so kudos to the presenter.
I'll do the Sunday ones later today!
no subject
Date: 2019-08-25 11:57 (UTC)And yes, you should read "Children of Time" ;)
no subject
Date: 2019-08-25 12:29 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-25 12:33 (UTC)Moving indeed sucks -.- I hope that overall it's going ok though!
no subject
Date: 2019-08-25 12:41 (UTC)