It's an amazing book. It's been long since I've gotten so much enjoyment out of reading a popular science book, even though at the beginning I thought it was a bit too basic for me. At first it seems to be aimed at an audience with a very minimal understanding of science. For example, Dawkins considers it necessary to clarify that a computer model of an object does not mean that a miniature version of the object lives inside the computer.

( Here is the quote: )

So this book, as one might guess, is easily accessible to a non-scientist. And yet it does not dumb things down. Quite the opposite. Perhaps it's a fortunate choice of subject matter, but this book, like few others, can lead a reader to uncover philosophical implications that go beyond the subject matter.

( The eternal game of cheaters versus cooperators plays out at the level of genes )

But it wasn't so much the math that made this book fascinating, as all the diverse, sophisticated strategies the genes engage in to propagate. Sometimes you can't help but get a feeling that the "behavior" of the genes is driven by nothing more than keen intelligence. And yet there is no "behavior" and no "strategy" in the real sense; genes, of course, have no minds and can't consciously come up with strategies to reproduce; what appears to be a behavior is merely a consequence of a very simple fact: a gene that encodes a trait or behavior that helps a body to make more descendants will become more populous. To see how intelligent-like behavior of enormous sophistication emerges from this simple logic was to me the most fascinating aspect of the book. While "emergent behavior" has been a popular buzzword for the last few years (or maybe it came on my radar only recently), I haven't read a popular science work that illustrated this concept so well -- and this book was written 3 decades ago! (Admittedly, I haven't read "The New Kind of Science". But it's been on a lot of smart people's quack radar, so I'm not sure I should invest time in it.) Thus, the philosophical impact of "The Selfish Gene" transcends its subject area.

My Mother's Day was as close to perfect as it gets. At my request Steve gave me the whole day off from mothering, so that I could go out and do anything I wanted. First I went to ACA regular Sunday brunch at the Romeo's restaurant. The ACA'ers, even though most of them are childless, wished happy Mother's day for me and one other woman. She is relatively new to the ACA, very outgoing and energetic. She and I schemed about bringing in more diversity into ACA by way of ( families with children )

After the ACA meeting I went to Cafe Caffeine to write. The coffeeshop was empty, which was good, but they should not have left the radio set to a station that played 70s hits. It really does not go well with writing science fiction. :-) But then they put on a record of Tuvan throat singing. Now that's a music I could write to! I wrote for 3 hours, achieving a higher word count than on a typical Sunday, but it was still ridiculously low by real writer standards. For one thing, it's hard to write a story where your characters don't perceive the world by any of the conventional senses, such as seeing or hearing. You have to make do without any of the vision- and hearing-related verbs and nouns! It surely can slow you down. Though it wasn't so much this constraint that slowed me down, as the little voice in my head that kept saying, "this is just stupid".

At some point I caught myself feeling like I a pathetic loser for sitting at a coffeeshop for 3 hours straight. So I left. I got home early enough for Erika's bed time ritual, giving Steve a well-deserved break.

I don't mean to flood this journal with Erika-speak, but... on Mother's day, of all days, I'm entitled to post another of Erika's funny sayings, am I not? :-)

Erika was playing with a "baby" doll that has a pacifier attached to its clothes. "This is for the baby's mouth!" she said, picking up the pacifier. I asked what is it called. She paused to think: "Uh... fireplace?"

Erika says: "L" is for elephant!

I reply: No, elephant starts with an "E". Like Erika! (She knows her name starts with an E.)

Erika: No, I'm not an E! I'm an F! I'm still Free! (She means three.)

It's funny how, after being 3 for only a week, she keeps saying she is "still" three. As if she's afraid she might slip back to 2 at any time. :-)

In addition to the "still 3" phase, she is currently going through a couple other phases as well:

1. Asking me every 5 minutes if I am happy. She asks Steve too, though perhaps not as often. The question "Mama, you happy?" usually comes out of the blue, unprompted by anything. But sometimes when I talk to her sternly in response to her misbehaving, she quietly says: "you're not happy". She does not even ask: she states it as a fact. So she understands I'm displeased. But does that make her behave? Of course not! ;-)

2. Backseat driving. Erika has recently learned the rules of traffic: "red means stop, yellow means get ready, and green means GO GO GO!" So now when she's riding in my car, she keeps telling me when to stop and when to go. She gets annoyed when I wait at a green light to make a left turn. She sees the light turn green and commands me: go, mommy, go, go, go! But of course I have to wait for the oncoming traffic to clear the intersection. Erika apparently wants me to throw myself right into it. :-) As adults we instinctively understand why that would be suicidal even if we know nothing about the traffic laws. But a 3-year-old has not yet developed an intuition regarding speed and momentum. A good thing for me to keep in mind.

On May 3, 2008 Center For Inquiry Austin hosted Dale McGowan's seminar "Parenting Beyond Belief: On raising ethical, caring kids without religion". A lot of things he said were common sense advice for secular parenting. Expose your children to as many religions and myths as you can. Talk about baby Jesus in the same breath as about baby Hercules. That way any particular myth is less likely to seem special. Let them change their minds a thousand times.

Interestingly, Dale McGowan is the second person (the first was Nica Lalli) who said that their kid, when told the story of birth of Jesus, said, wait, wait, I know this story -- God came down from above and put a baby in a woman -- that's Life of Brian! (Hmm. It makes me wonder if I'm showing my daughter the right movies. ;-))

It must be said that despite exposing his children to all sorts of myths, ( there are two religious notions he does not give equal air time to )

So, common sense advice. But the way he says it is very entertaining. He has a ton of wonderful little phrases and anecdotes to illustrate his point.

( Who will lay a blankie on my grave? )

( Or, weird things we accept as normal if exposed to them since childhood )

Then there is the concept of a child's moral development -- another area where religion is widely considered indispensable. Dale says questions of morality are no harder for atheist parents than for religious parents, simply because those questions are hard for everybody, including religious people. It's just that secular parents have a different set of tools for addressing those questions.

( He made interesting observations about children's moral development )

There were many more things he said, which I have to omit, because I didn't take very thorough notes. He seasoned his talk with many funny personal stories. It all made for a memorable seminar.

At the ArmadilloCon programming brainstorming meeting, people were asked to come up with ideas for discussion panels, and also to state who they think would be good on that panel. No ideas were off limits, except totally unrealistic ones -- don't come up with an idea that requires a presence of a person who certainly won't be there. So for example, a panel on Pirates with Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley won't be considered. An interview with a dead writer wouldn't work either. To which K replied: why, we could have a "seance fiction" panel with Arthur C. Clarke!

For Erika's birthday we took her out to Chuck E Cheese, a restaurant that has arcade games and other kinds of game machines for children. I've discovered one can entertain a 3-year-old at Chuck E Cheese pretty cheaply, because she can play with the equipment without actually putting coins into it. The games don't work, at least not the way an adult would expect, but Erika didn't know what to expect, so she had fun anyway. The machines have moving parts that can be wiggled and jiggled and tugged on even before you put coins into it, and while you don't get full functionality out of them without paying, it didn't matter for Erika. She found ways to amuse herself.

As a birthday present Erika got a little bicycle, or rather, a quadricycle -- it has two little wheels attached to its "main" back wheel. Even so, she can't ride it quite yet. She does not seem to understand the concept of pushing the pedals to make them go in circles.

I guess I'll try to somehow recap the year that has passed since her second birthday. All I can say is she's becoming more interesting. It is now possible to have conversations with her. While Erika's distinctions between reality and imagination, as well as between things that happened today and in the past are tenuous at best, it is often possible to find out useful nuggets of information from her about what she did on a given day. And some of them are not even made up. :-)

And here are some things I could not believe I would hear my child say. Especially not at 2.

"I'm hungry! Let's go to McDonalds!"

It's all daddy's fault. ;-) He took Erika to McDonalds too many times. But after I said it troubled me that Erika started to think of McDonald's as a default place to eat, we cut down on those outings.

On the bright side, Erika is starting to say funny things. For example. She climbed high up to the top of a ladder on the playground and sat there for a while. When I asked her to come down, she said "I can't! I'm looking for cats!" Another time she saw a woman walking a little dog in the park. She said: "The doggy's got a fluffy tail! He's got fluffy hair all over the place! Just like dada!"

Being in Texas, the Nebula award ceremony had to have some Texas flavor, and that was amply supplied by the MC John Moore and the toastmaster Joe Lansdale. Moore started by explaining Texas dialect to the out-of-state folks. He said, "in Texas you don't say 'I'm going to have a glass of wine', you say 'I'm fixing to mosey down to Hospitality Suite and rustle up a Shiner Bock'. And right now I'm fixing to introduce our toastmaster. He's a kick-ass Texas writer, and I mean it literally: he founded a school of martial arts."

Joe Lansdale's speech was the highly anticipated highlight of the award ceremony. Everyone in the Texas fandom knows Lansdale is pretty damn funny. And his speech was funny indeed, although a bit rambling. I managed to remember a couple of anecdotes Joe told; for the sake of brevity, I'll compress the details which, in my opinion, didn't add much to the story. (Though what do I know? Perhaps readers adore Joe Lansdale precisely because of those details I consider rambly.)

His point was that Texas is such a weird place it can't help but inspire science fiction. Here is an incident that happened to him and an even stranger one, to another Texas writer. Lansdale also listed his rules for the attendees of science fiction conventions.

Michael Moorcock, who was bestowed a title of SFWA grandmaster, gave an acceptance speech I found (rushes to pull on asbestos underwear :-)) as unmemorable as any of his books. I've read three of those before giving up. Moorcock's speech still did not inspire me to read his prose. So shoot me. I think he was saying something about those dark ages when science fiction was despised by the society-at-large, and when the mainstream media viewed SF writers and fans as "geeks with slide rules for genitals" -- the only phrase I remember from his talk. :-)

But he had his own funny stories to tell about life in Texas -- and why he likes it here.

Pictures from the Nebula awards can be found in my photo gallery.

On Sunday I took Erika to Extreme Fun, a children's indoor playground. It has standard issue inflatable "castles" and slides, and is a good place to spend a few hours when rain makes outdoor play impractical. My experiece at Extreme Fun calls for the corny MasterCard commercial formula:

-- A pass for a child under 3: $6.50

-- Free wireless internet: $0.00

-- A 6-8-year-old girl who takes your child under her wing and plays with her for an hour: priceless.

Especially when combined with the above-mentioned free WiFi. Thus, mommy can blog while the child is being entertained.

And I did not even have to feel bad about it, because the "impromptu big sister" entertained Erika better than I ever could. She took Erika on a grand tour of the playground, helping her climb up the slides, and holding Erika in her lap when they went down. I don't think I could have done it so well myself, since the playground equipment is not optimized for people my size. Erika followed her like a lamb! She never listened to me with such rapturous, devoted obedience. :-) At some point I noticed Erika's socks had come off, but then I saw the older girl holding the socks in her hand as they went from slide to slide.

After a while the girl disappeared -- perhaps her family went home, or maybe she finally got bored -- leaving Erika alone (but with socks :-)) So I did not have a chance to thank her for showing Erika a good time. Too bad. Coming home, Erika told dad: "I found my sister!"

Here is my brief recap of Nebula Awards, which were in Austin last weekend. I could not pass up a chance to go, although there wasn't much for fans to do. It's a pro event, after all. The only fannish opportunities were to mingle with the pros at the autographing session on Friday and to watch the Nebula awards ceremony on Saturday. So I did both.

( I missed a chance to meet a person I would have killed to meet 20 years ago )

On Saturday, as I was driving to the award ceremony, my camera stopped working. No, it does not mean I take pictures while driving. :-) The camera was hanging on my neck, and it turned on by itself. It does that occasionally, I don't know why. Even a little jostling can cause it to turn on. But when I tried to turn it back off, it did not -- it got stuck in a halfway state with its lens partially extended. I tried to troubleshoot it the only way I knew -- by changing the battery. :-) It didn't work. I'll take it to a camera shop to see if they know of a quick fix. If not, I'll root through drawers for an extended warranty, on the off chance I bought one for this camera.

So it sucked not to be able to photograph the Nebula awards ceremony with equipment any more decent than my cell phone camera, which produces postage stamp-sized pictures so blurry your own mother wouldn't recognize you. And that's a shame, because there were some faces that begged for crystal-clear pictures. I'm talking, of course, of Michael Chabon, the winner of this year's Nebula for best novel ("The Yiddish Policemen's Union"). I remember when Chabon's wife, Ayelet Waldman, wrote that famous column for New York Times where she said she loved her husband more than her children. She said she could survive a death of any of their 4 kids, as horrible as such event would be, but if anything happened to her husband, she would see no reason to go on. Oh, what a shitstorm this column set off in the blogosphere! How horrified all the santimommies were that any woman would admit such feelings! So what I'm saying is, after I laid my eyes on Michael Chabon, I could kind of see how she might feel this way. :-) Even though my taste in men does not run towards delicate Elvish features combined with boyish charm, but... a face like that made me wish I had a good camera to immortalize it. I'm just sayin'. :-)

I'll write more about the highlight of the award ceremony -- Joe Lansdale's speech. I made sure to write down the stories he told before I forgot them. Some were funny; some were way too rambling for my taste. If I post them, I'll make sure to trim down the word fat (fortunately, I already forgot the details I consider irrelevant :-)) ... But what do I know -- maybe the rambliness is why people adore Lansdale?

I cut my 9500 word story down to ~ 5500 words. Still on the wrong side of the 5000 mark. To cut another 500 words would be like losing weight by cutting off an arm, though...

I wrote another story in record time: 3 days. I wrote it as a throw-away exercise based on a prompt -- and then discovered it was 4 times as long as the maximum length allowed for this exercise. The upside is, it's only ~ 2300 words! The downside: this was just one scene. The whole story had only one scene. So I guess if I want to stay within the magic limit, I can't have more than 2 scenes per story. But for me that's not enough to develop an original idea.

As I try to get rid of excessive words, Erika gains new ones. Some of them are not quite what I expected to hear. Or rather, I expected them in some theoretical future, just not so soon. For example. As I pushed Erika around a store in a shopping cart, she called me a poopoohead. Several times and very loudly! So that no one around could fail to hear. She didn't mean it as an insult, rather as a new and delightful joke. She laughed as she said it. And of course, I could not even tell her to shut up, since every attempt to hush her would have made her say it again and again. :-)

Here's another reading group discussion report pulled into the daylight from the recesses of my hard drive.

13 people attended the FACT reading group discussion of Alfred Bester's "Stars My Destination". Almost everyone has read something by Bester before. Most of the group has read this book when it first came out. Almost all of them re-read it anew before the discussion. Only one person did not finish the book.

This novel is set in the 24th century, when most humans have developed an ability to "jaunt", or to teleport. The protagonist, a bad-guy antihero named Gully Foyle, seeks to avenge an injustice done to him in the past. His corporate masters left him for certain death, which he escaped against all odds, and now his mission in life becomes to destroy them. They are hunting him too, since he knows a secret so important they'll stop at nothing to extract it from him. During this wild interplanetary chase, he (supposedly) matures mentally and emotionally, and discovers he has a special ability on which the fate of the world hinges.

Many people admired the visual impact of Bester's writing. ( Bester draws vivid scenes in a few well-chosen words. )

The aging of the book, or lack thereof, was an important part of the discussion. Most readers agreed that "Stars My Destination" held up very well over time. "It didn't have computers, so we couldn't make fun of them using slide rules, etc." said a reader. But ( some details give it a dated feel )

( such as attitudes toward women )

The readers noted also that the main theme of psychic power-assisted teleportation was very 50s. Back then there was a widespread belief that ability for teleportation lay buried in the human psyche, waiting for the right circumstances to be brought out. There was even military research done in that direction, or rumors thereof. Unsupported by any evidence, this notion fell out of fashion.

( The premise of jaunting seems flawed to me )

In case this review sounds too negative so far, I must say most people in the group liked the book very much -- except me. They liked Bester's highly visual style, and the story itself; to me the plot of the book seemed full of arbitrary digressions, and the style didn't save the book. I still don't understand why they liked it. :-(

One area where Bester was acknowledged to be innovative was the choice of protagonist. ( Antiheroes were a novelty back then. )

As far as the protagonist's redemption, most readers agreed Gully experienced character growth. After being so obsessed with revenge, he finally starts to mature and realizes that revenge is not really where it's at. One reader speculated, though, that the ending might have been the best kind of revenge Gully could have over the humankind. On the face of it, Gully's final act is supposed to teach the humanity to become better, but its consequences are ambiguous, and it's not clear what his intentions were. Despite that, or perhaps because of that, some readers called the ending "brilliant".

I finished a story. In just two months! That's record time for me. All the while I thought of it as being a short story, which is a first for me too. I guess I assumed it was going to be short because I wrote it so fast. (Yes, 2 months is fast for me. So shoot me.) So I thought I would pat myself on the back. Then I loaded it into Word and ran the word count. Oh, bummer. It's around 10000 words. The same length as all of my other stories! At least the ones written in the recent years. I seem to think in 10000-word format and I don't know how to break out of it. That's a non-insignificant obstacle to advancing as a writer. Writers' workshops accept stories under 5000 words. So do writers' critique groups. Magazines seldom, if ever, accept stories over 5000 words from unpublished writers. A 5000 words' worth of good will is about the maximum you can expect from a reader if he or she has no reason to believe those words are going to be very good. So I'm still left in a quandary of what to write for the ArmadilloCon workshop. Not to mention that I've signed up for the Fencon workshop this year too!

I'm now trying to cut my story down by half. How I'm supposed to do that, I have very little idea. Perhaps by summarizing pages and pages of dialogue in a paragraph or two? Hmm. I guess sometimes the right technique is "tell, don't show". :-)

Time for another old book discussion report.

4 people attended a CFI Science And Religion in Fiction book club discussion of "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini in September of 2007. The two main characters of this novel are two women who were given away in marriage, against their will, to the same brutal, abusive man. The story follows them over a quarter of a century, during which Afghanistan endures a few dictatorships and a long, grueling war.

( It provides a window into women's lives in Afghanistan )

( Some of those insights may appear counterintuitive to a western reader. )

"A Thousand Splendid Suns" is very easy to read text-wise: the plot is straightforward, the motivations of the characters transparent. One reader was impressed that the author, despite coming from a different culture, was able to make this novel accessible to an American reader.

However, on an emotional level this book may be difficult to get through. It's hard to read about heroic women whose lives are dire from the start (at least Mariam's was; but Laila didn't have an easy childhood either), and they were going to only get worse with time. You know their lives will get worse when the Soviets invade Afghanistan, and much worse when the Soviet occupation will be replaced by the infighting mujahideen fractions, and then worse again when a Taliban dictatorship will replace the mujahideen war.

Here I must note something I found a little disappointing about this book. I expected that a novel set in Afghanistan during the rule of Taliban would at least touch upon the topic of the nature of religious fundamentalism. ( But there is nothing like that in it. )

On March 19, 2008 Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist and popularizer of science, gave a public lecture at the University of Texas in Austin; it was preceded by a reception hosted by the Center of Inquiry Austin. Though I didn't have a chance to exchange more than a few sentences with Dawkins at the reception, I formed some kind of impression of him as a person.

( Very well spoken and hip on technology )

Yay for the older generation scientists who know how to leverage internet for political change!

An entire report on this event can be found on my SFragments web site. Here are some of the highlights (all the links point to various parts of the same article).

I found Dawkins' lecture topics familiar, even though I haven't read his books where he expounds on them. I guess I've absorbed his ideas by osmosis. The questions the audience asked revolved around whether atheists should adopt an in-your-face or a conciliatory tone with general public; some of the questions were more unusual. (Would you ask a well-known skeptic to support his reasoning with astrology? :-)) Then someone asked what Dawkins thinks of transhumanist visions. Finally, a concept he wanted us to take away from this lecture, if it was the only thing we would take away: why evolution is NOT equal to random chance.

Pictures from the reception and the lecture can be found in my photo gallery

If after my previous post I was caught listening to Catholic liturgical chant, it would be equivalent to Elliot Spitzer being caught in the embrace of ladies of the night, wouldn't it? :-) And yet I admit freely of this skeleton in my closet; this is not even the first time I do so. A year ago I posted a link to an awesome chant I just had to share; and recently I've stumbled upon another set of great chants, performed by the same amazing group, Ensemble Organum. I could mumble and make excuses for myself, saying that I'm enjoying this music as part of my cultural heritage, without taking the lyrics literally. :-) But instead I'll just say that when it comes to Ensemble Organum music, all sins of hypocrisy are forgiven; this is a music that moves Heaven and Earth.

So here is a page of links to free and legal MP3s of Corsican chant. They come from Ensemble Organum album "Chant Corse: Manuscrits Franciscains (XVII & XVIII C.)" It's noticeably different from Gregorian Chant: it is far from atonal, it has well-defined, easily memorisable tunes (catchy, even) and it feels less churchlike than folksy. Despite all that, it's still majestic. My favorite ones are Laeta Devote, Tantum ergo sacramentum, Paschalis admirabilis, and Kyrie eleison, but all of them are very good.

On an unrelated note, last night I showed Erika the full moon as we were driving home. She was so taken with it ("it's pretty! it's cute!") that she wanted to continue to watch it after we came home. We went outside. The moon was over the house of one of our neighbors, a woman who Erika met on the street a few times before. "It's the lady's moon!" she said.

if I didn't know this was ABC news:

Because the Bible Tells Me So? During Private Museum Tours, Denver Children Learn About Creationism

A company called BC Tours ("BC" stands for Biblically Correct) "take paying customers on tours of such places as the Denver Museum, the zoo, and fossil sites, giving an explanation of nature, biology and paleontology with a strictly Biblical interpretation."

Here are some examples of how they "interpret" paleontological evidence:

( Quotes that might make you blink )

And this is how they dance around some uncomfortable evidence:

( ...he stepped past and turned his back... )

And to think that I was shaking my head when one fellow CFI'er told me what her creationist sister-in-law does when she takes her children to a natural history museum. Faced with dinosaur exhibits, she covers the explanatory plaque with her hands and says to kids: "oh look, dinosaurs! They are only 3000 years old!" She couldn't hold a candle to Jack and Carter. :-)

It's kind of ironic that I found this article today. Just yesterday I went to a public lecture by Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist and science popularizer. (I'll blog about a meeting with Dawkins later, when I organize my pictures.) I had to read this article to as not to get too comfortable in an illusion that reason will eventually triumph... :-)

This is the first time I'm writing a tribute to an Important Person Who Has Died. But of all the writers who have shaped my taste in science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke was probably the most influential.

I'm sure the net is already full of tributes to Clarke by people who personally knew him, and I can't brag having personally met any of the classical SF legends. (Though I know people here in Austin who had met Asimov!) In a world of six-degree connectedness, the closest connection to Clarke I can claim is 3rd degree. I once knew an Indian guy who told me Clarke funded a scholarship for one of his classmates, a brilliant girl who wanted to study aeronautical / astronautical engineering.

And yet I feel compelled to write some kind of tribute to this author, because few other writers' works invoked in me a Sense Of Wonder in all capital letters the way Arthur Clarke's did. It may be because I read most of Clarke's works in my childhood and teenage years, when I was far more impressionable than now; I probably would not have been as impressed with them if I read them first as an adult.

Or maybe I would have. Since an early age I was drawn to eschatological themes, and those themes figure prominently in Clarke's major works, such as 2001: The Space Odyssey, Childhood's End. The obituary in the New York Times touches this aspect of Clarke's writing indirectly. It says: "For a scientifically trained writer whose optimism about technology seemed boundless, Mr. Clarke delighted in confronting his characters with obstacles they could not overcome without help from forces beyond their comprehension."

I find this curious too, now that NYTimes has put it this way, and yet I identify with Clarke's fascination with "forces beyond comprehension." That's what attracted me to his stories too. It may be even more odd given that I never believed in any deities, not even as a child. However, in Clarke's stories the incomprehensibly powerful entities and the eschatological changes they bring to the humanity are never supernatural. Their power comes from mastery of science and technology. I don't know what Clarke's religious views were, but a worldview that comes through in his writing is definitely secular humanist.

I can't say I liked each and every of Clarke's books I've read; they seemed of rather uneven quality to me. For example, "Rendezvous with Rama" left me indifferent. I find Robinson Cruso'esque scenarios boring. :-) Throughout the book I was hoping the explorers will eventually meet the aliens that built Rama, but no such luck. I vaguely recall that one of his novels (forgot the title!) seemed to be written solely to praise the idea of raising whales for dairy and meat. Whale milk is a great replacement for cow's milk! That was the only science fictional element in the book. :-)

And I remember losing my interest in the Space Odyssey sequels around the 3rd book. I don't remember much about them anymore, except that it seemed they devolved from the Sense of Wonder to the characters' interpersonal drama.

However, there is a certain novel by Clarke that consists mostly of interpersonal drama, that I hold very dear. A Fall of Moondust. The plot is very simple: a tourist vehicle on the Moon falls into a lake composed of dust, where it gets stranded without even an ability to emit a call for help (radio signals do not penetrate moondust). A diverse bunch of individuals are brought together in a mission to find it and rescue the crew and passengers before they run out of oxygen. Despite lack of far-fetched science fiction concepts, the charm of this novel lies in how this event changes everyone involved.

While I don't think Clarke's writing stood out for exquisite style, I remember one of his lines (don't remember which book it came from). It goes something like this: "He found not happiness, but peace, which is just as important, and lasts much longer". (This can't possibly be an accurate quote, because I read that book in a language other than English. This is my translation of an inaccurate memory of Clarke's quote in another language. Only the gist of it stayed with me.)

So anyway, even though I haven't read anything by Clarke in a long time, and my current favorite writers are half a century younger than he was, I still feel an empty spot after his passing. Back when I was a child just starting to discover wonders of science fiction, writers like Clarke loomed larger than life in my imagination. And now that he's gone, it's like closing the doors to that period of my life.

(It's not a band. I don't go to concerts. :-))

Now that I've posted them, I can point the reader to the pictures of an interesting art machine -- a mutant vehicle, if you will -- I saw at the Plutopia party at South By Southwest last week. The party in itself was a bit disappointing compared with last year's; very few costumes, not many art / tech pieces (the Robot Group did not seem to come up anything more interesting since last year than a ping-pong printer; all it does is print text on ping-pong balls. As soon as I approached it, the guy manning the printer gave a long, autoironic spiel acknowledging the printer's uselessness. :-)) There were fewer performers and more speakers, such as Bill McKibben (I remember only one line from his speech about his grassroots movement against global warming: "We realized that it's not enough to screw in a fluorescent bulb over a breakfast table. We needed to screw in a new senator.")

But anyway, the coolest thing at Plutopia was the one I saw after I left. For obvious reasons it could not fit inside Scholz Garden and had to be parked on the street. It was a long white many-ribbed worm powered by bicycles. Nestled between the ribs was a total of 6 bicycles; plus there was a seat in front for drivers, a team of two young women, one of which was clad in a sexy devil costume. She said the name of this vehicle was Rattlesnake. (Not a worm, then.) The woman hopped into the drivers' seats, roped a few bystanders into taking passengers' -- or rather, co-drivers' seats, and took the thing for a ride on a nearly empty street. The snake turned tight corners with surprising grace. One thing I don't understand, though -- as in other projects of collaborative pedalling, like the ones I saw at the Maker Faire -- is, what happens if one of the riders does not pedal. Or pedals out of phase with others. Nothing, perhaps? And what about the steering? Was the driver the only one capable of steering, or the other bikers too? If so, what would happen if one of them tried to steer the thing in the opposite direction?

I've been shopping for a new ultraportable laptop for a while now. There is a particular laptop I think is really neat, but it's not available at the local stores. So I've been trying to order it online. The first place I ordered it from told me they are out of stock (even though their website said it was in stock) and didn't know when they were going to have them, so I canceled my order. Then I placed an order for the same laptop on TechOnWeb.com. You would think a store with a motto "where geeks go shopping" would know what they are doing.

( I thought I was a geek. It turned out I'm a FRUAD )

"Infinity does not exist in our dimension"

A bunch of the ACA'ers went on a pub crawl last Friday. The crawl started out at Dog & Duck pub, the home of the ACA'ers happy hours; then we went on to 6th street. On the way there we were approached by folks who were handing out fake million dollar bills. It was some kind of Christian evangelist thing. Along the edge of a "bill" in small print there were questions such as "will you go to heaven"? Since most of us wore "Godless pub crawl: pubs, not popes" T-shirts made for this occasion, we must have been a tempting target for evangelists, and there seem to be quite a few of them hunting for souls to save in the nightlife district on a Friday night.

Not surprisingly, two of them got into an argument with Matt, the president of the ACA. One of those guys told Matt he would prove there is a God in 30 seconds flat. Needless to say, their argument lasted a lot longer, and most of the ACA'ers got bored and wandered off to our next stop, the Darwin pub (no connection to Darwin that I could tell!) It became tedious quickly, but not before I had a chance to hear this gem of an argument. The evangelist attempted to argue from the "first cause", to which Matt replied: if everything must have a cause, then who created God? The evangelist guy said, God doesn't have to have a cause or creator, he always existed. Matt said something along the lines of, you can't simply dismiss a question of whether God has a cause; just like it is meaningful to ask that question about anything else, it is also meaningful to ask it about God; you can't just arbitrarily declare that God has no cause. Matt tried to explain it by analogy: no matter how big a number you can think of, you can also imagine an even greater number, and so on all the way to infinity. The evangelist guy somehow felt existence of infinities threatened his beliefs. He said, no, I don't have to (imagine an even bigger number). I can stop any time. Infinity does not exist in our dimension, he added.

I loved that last remark. :-)

I blame science fiction. :-) Seriously. I blame popular sci-fi shows and movies for putting terms like "infinity" and "dimension" into the vocabulary of people who cannot grasp these very simple and intuitive mathematical concepts... but don't shy away from using them in a debate!

After the Darwin pub all the ACA'ers went on to their next stop, but I decided to save my liver and go home.

Pictures from the godless pub crawl can be found in my photo gallery.