loncon: science
Sep. 11th, 2014 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twoelevenas part of loncon 3's superabundance of programming, it had a very strong science track. it wasn't just the usual space science, but also included biology, the dismal science (economics), and a few other disciplines. i deliberately went to only a little of the science track as part of my continuing attempt to see stuff other than what i know i'll like.
nonetheless, i saw a bunch of science stuff.
there were three lectures on "speculative biology", the art or science of coming up with plausible exo-biologies. the first presentation was just a set of quick introductory talks by a bunch of people who play with the ideas.
the second one really got into the state of the art: gert van dijk's furaha and c. m. koseman's snaiad. both of these are well-developed worlds populated by odd...ly plausible things.
van dijk really gets into forms of locomotion that make physical and biological sense, but never evolved here. i really like his tetropters:
mechanistically, they fly by clap-and-fling, a technique used by some insects, but all our bugs do it only on one axis, not two. tetropters make better use of their wings than real bugs do, because they have a higher lifting duty cycle (two claps per wingbeat).
koseman started out with some sketches and then back-rationalized biology that would make something like them. his main effort has been in developing a huge range of animals in a number of distinct taxons, so the world seems to be plausibly populated and evolved, with many biomes and niches occupied by multiple critters, the way the earth is.
i happen to like the titaniformes, such as these guys:
the third talk in the series was given by dougal dixon, of after man fame. his current book is greenworld, which isn't out yet. he was apparently presenting stuff from it, but his talk was at the same time as the masquerade, so i didn't bother to go.
my notes say that at some point, one of the speakers mentioned the TV series the future is wild, also about speculative biology, but i know nothing more about it.
the fermi paradox in light of kepler, thursday 19:00
panelists: gerry webb, guy consolmango, helen fraser, david nordley, charlie stross
they talked about the fermi paradox, but not necessarily in light of kepler, since they didn't mention it. even more so than typical for cons, the relationship between loncon panel discussions and their titles and abstracts was tenuous. as is also typical, this is both good and bad: good, because the discussions are often more interesting anyway, but bad because that makes it hard to figure out what to see.
also, i've rearranged the order of what was said for clarity of presentation. (i also have the talks/topics out of order for the same reason.)
there was a general consensus for “life is common, but intelligent (or technological) life is rare”, with a couple of variations. nordley felt that bacteria are common, but everything else is rare, which at least kinda-sorta agrees with our geo-biological history. relaxing that to “complex multicellular life” gets a better match, since the time since the cambrian explosion is only 10% of the age of the Earth. (other biologists will doubtless point out that that's not quite right, but 90% "few, simple" critters to 10% "many, complex" critters is a fine way to look at the problem in terms of what we might expect to find.)
stross pointed out that we're reasoning from ignorance, since we don't actually have starflight and so don't really have the slightest idea what's out there. after a guy in the audience asked a related question, “how long do civilizations last?”, the panelists mentioned the other reasoning from ignorance problem we have: can we recognize other civilizations over long distances? for example, our abandonment of powerful analog broadcasts for weaker digital signals means that our 1950's past technological civilizations would have a great deal of trouble detecting our current one. of course, hypothetical alien civilizations face the same problem: would they recognize our civilization even if they were looking right at us?
but to the point, um, frankly we don't know how long technological civilizations last, though stross was being pessimistic and argued for mere centuries.
nordley made an interesting observation that if starflight is very expensive, hypothetical civilizations might establish only a few extrasolar colonies, and most of their interstellar expansion might be driven by exploration. so, unless they're trying to very hard to find every other civilization, they don't need to explore much of the galaxy to have a representative sample. in short, we may simply have been missed by other civilizations exploring sparsely and/or far away.
the “starflight is expensive” point came up in a few different ways: stross pointed out that to colonize a world, we need to move enough of our biosphere to sustain ourselves. we don't know how much that's going to to take, but it's unlikely to be small, even with a minimalist diet (cf britian's WW2 diet). fraser mentioned that space travel is simply difficult for us: we have lots of problems in zero gravity (bone and muscle wasting, drugs act differently). and both of those are (more or less) details on the question of how you move enough people to establish a settlement on a planet in another solar system.
starflight is expensive and hard were the twin themes of a series of panels and talks put together by the institute for interstellar studies (I4IS), who think about how to send ships to other stars with real physics and plausible technology. i saw two of their talks, both of which included alastair reynolds, a popular SF author and an entertaining speaker. which is, of course, why the loncon concom put them back to back in a small room.
far centaurus: the pros and cons of interstellar travel, sunday 16:00
alastair reynolds held forth on relativistic travel. his stated theme was “the speed of light is the cosmic speed limit. deal with it. And while you're dealing with it, let's look at the history of sub-light interstellar missions in SF”.
i was surprised that the earliest treatment appears to be a 1940 don wilcox story about generation ships, apparently “the voyage that lasted 600 years”, but reynolds' slide was up only briefly, and my notes have only that author and a date of 193[0-9] (I missed the last digit). I want to assume reynolds did his homework, so i'm puzzled.
current sub-light ships often feature transhumanist hand-wavings about uploaded minds. it's not a bad idea, other than the assumption that it could work in the first place. regardless, reynolds recommends greg egan's disaspora and “wang's carpets”, the novelette from which it's derived, as good stories about the idea.
our interstellar future
rachel armstrong, alastair reynolds, stephen baxter, chris welch(?), andreas hein
this was a random q&a panel meant to follow all the I4IS talks, nearly all of which were short (half-hour). my notes say the panelists ended up answering only one question, but they did so at length. they might have talked about other stuff, but if so, i didn't think it was worth recording.
question: why would we send ships to other stars, and where would we go?
baxter: alpha centauri, to explore its planets
hein: we'd explore a reachable but interesting world, for example, a water world
welch: exobiology or astrophysics (both scientific exploration), resource exploitation (assuming there's something worth the cost of shipping home). where is limited only by our technology.
reynolds: he started his answer by saying he was “annoyed by modern astronomy” because he can't write hard SF that either isn't or won't soon be wrong (because we already know some about the planets around a bunch of stars, and the next generation of planet-hunting telescopes will tell us even more). that said, he thinks we'd explore an earthlike world, or (if we can) go visit eta carinae for astrophysical exploration. (η-car is ~8,000 light years away, so getting there isn't easy)
armstrong: we'd settle other planets, but we'd send terraforming ships first (directed panspermia). i was surprised at her answer. while it's physically possible, and certainly a reasonable approach if we did want to settle other worlds, i'm not convinced we'd find a way to make it cheap enough to do, or if we did, that we'd bother.
i found both of the I4IS talks striking. for a science-fiction author, reynolds seemed rather pessimistic both about the possibilities for new physics -- i hold out some hope for alcubierre's math, despite the tiny problems with reduction to practice -- and for human exploration of other stars, even with today's physics. conversely, armstrong's belief in directed panspermia seemed a bit hard to swallow, since it implied a human civilization able to embrace time horizons and pay-offs longer than all of recorded history.
finding the furthest quasar, thursday 18:00
since i didn't get into the talk on jupiter¹, i went to a talk by daniel mortlock on finding the most distant quasar. it was a straightforward astronomy methods talk, which makes sense out of the large astronomical databases i play with. i found it interesting not only because of the subject, but because with a few changes, it would have been an fine non-specialist talk at a general science conference, such as a AAAS meeting. i wasn't expecting to find legitimate science at loncon.
1: one of loncon's persistent problems was trying to do far too much for far too many people in far too little space. loncon seems to be one of the most well-attended worldcons, and the program was the broadest we've yet seen. for a fair number of time-slots, there were 20 parallel tracks running, which put it on par with the largest of scientific conferences. that's simply excessive, since unlike professional conventions, it's not really possible to have somebody report back on what happened at talks one didn't attend, very little is recorded, and there's no published proceedings.
i got into the habit of going to panels very early, sometimes leaving the previous panel early in order to attend ones I really wanted to go to... and it didn't always work. it worked less well for dïe überblönde. with the result that i was irritated and she was frustrated and sometimes angry.
the problem was exacerbated by space limitations in the convention center, and the apparent inability of the concom to guess how well panels would be attended. i overheard other people at the con complaining about this and proposing various solutions (polling, soft registration, etc), suggesting we're not alone in being displeased.
liveship trading: fantasy economics friday 18:00
william hafford, robin hobb (aka megan lindholm aka margaret astrid lindholm ogden), juliet mckenna, max gladstone)
this discussion stuck to the topic, because the panelists had actually discussed it ahead of time, and because the moderator actively worked at keeping it on topic. OTOH, dïe überblönde didn't show up as insanely early as necessary, and couldn't get a seat. (folks from the convention center were actively chasing people away, fearing the fire marshals of doom.) she was somewhere between very distraught and furious, since she'd really wanted to see it.
mckenna said she really emphasizes economic realism in fiction: she'd wanted a blurb describing her writing as keynes meets tolkien, but her publishers wouldn't go for it. she felt writers tended to overestimate trite genre plot drivers in fantasy stories (cf dianna wynne jones' tough guide to fantasy land) and underestimate economic ones, such as resource scarcity.
hobb started by saying she does a lot of practical research, such as how one runs a butcher shop without refrigeration. which seems like an a useful thing to do, but i tried to read one of her fantasy stories under the hobb brand and found the opening (non-economic) conceit so utterly stupid that i wrote off that brand. so i'm not sure how seriously to believe that she takes her own advice. (the stuff she publishes under the lindholm brand is pretty good, and i recommend her wizard of the pigeons.)
my notes for this panel are scattered, as the panelists talked about a wide variety of economic topics, most relating to fantasy one way or another.
hafford opened with a general question: what is money? we all think we know it when we see it, but what we actually mean by it is pretty slippery. sure, it's a tool (method?) for storing and moving value, but what exactly does that mean? and how does that work in practice? we typically think of bits of rare metals as money in fantasy settings, but historically, lots of things have been used as money that aren't metals: salt was used in a number of cultures. mckenna pointed out that in the british isles, butter and lace were sometimes used as currency in rural areas (and were often good ways for women to make money).
these days, we're more aware of the value of information, attention, and access, but none of those are new valuable things. letters of introduction have been valuable things for millennia, and information has been valuable to traders pretty much as far back as we have records which can tell us about it. and yet, rarely are those mentioned as money in fantasy settings. which is odd, because in some settings, wizards spend lots of time chasing after bits of arcane knowledge. with vancian magic – and some traditional magic based on “true names” – knowledge is very real power, but little of it seems to be offered for sale.
fantasy is missing a bunch of economic things, according to the panelists:
mckenna: canals for moving goods, and transportation in general. where are the grain ships and caravans? where do all the metal goods the dwarves make go and how do they get there?
hafford: storage – everything from containers to warehouses – and other logistical infrastructure.
hobb: resources and geography. only exotic resources seem to come from anywhere (mithril from moria, say). geography is often just window dressing, and seems to have no observable effect on how, where, or why people live. cities in alpine mountains make great book cover art, but need a really good economic reason to exist. just hauling all the food they need up the impressive-looking mountains would be a huge drag on their economies, so something's got to pay for that.
(given the volumes of loving detail authors lavish on describing things in their fantasy worlds, i don't think their omission of economics is due to lack of space, but lack of clue. since SF suffers from authors who can't multiply, fantasy can suffer from authors who can't figure out where the groceries come from.)
gladstone mentioned that barter shows up a lot in fantasy, but real barter systems tend not be based on haggling – trading N apples for a hammer – but on classes of goods considered roughly equal. (though i can't remember the example he gave.)
all that said, hobb named a few good examples of real economics in genre fiction: dune, which of course is built around the setting's most valuable commodity and the effects its economics has, and patrick rothfus' name of the wind and the rest of the kingkiller series.
i'll also toss in LotR, though tolkien was working from now known to be embarrassingly wrong scholarship which believed the middle ages endured a complete economic collapse (all the bridges mentioned in middle earth are broken, many formerly-large cities are in ruins, and the only long-distance trade is dwarven peddlers selling metal goods). which is an interesting setting to write about, even if it has nothing to do with reality.
i had a brief chat with hafford after the panel, asking about the odd child of the coinage metals: copper (and its alloys, especially bronze). while it's been used for coinage for a long time, it's also an extremely useful metal. for long stretches of history, copper was not only money² and art, but also tools and weapons. (even up until the modern era, church bells were melted down to make cannon during wartime, and then the cannon were melted down to make new bells during peace.) which means copper's various uses have complex economic effects (like salt's do) and we don't fully understand them.
2: he mentioned that many of the ox-hide copper ingots we've found have the same size and weight, and some collections appear to be cast from the same mold. that suggests that they weren't just a convenient size for moving around, but were in fact currency. if so, they're the oldest currency we know of, pre-dating coinage by about a thousand years.
how space missions happen, monday, 16:30
jordin kare, geoffrey landis, laura burns, gerry web
a bright and cheery talk on the nitty-gritty about getting stuff into orbit or onto other planets. by and large, we don't: the infant morality rate for space projects is pretty grim. that is, most space missions never get beyond proposals, and of those that do, most don't get beyond paper studies. actually building hardware, much less launching it, is rare. working scientists, especially academics, will find this unsurprising.
they'll also be unsurprised that the missions most likely to be launched are military, followed by commercial missions and national prestige projects, and finally scientific missions (other than those that turn into prestige projects, like hubble). nor will they be surprised that what matters for getting a mission off the ground is politics, money, and science (in that order). engineering pretty much doesn't matter: if the government wants it, it'll happen.
geoffrey landis wasn't any more optimistic about CubeSats and other low-cost approaches. sure, they're cheap enough to fail – which helps immensely getting them built in the first place -- but they're parasite cargoes on other people's launches, so there are far more of them designed and built than there are rockets to take them to orbit. most of them sit in boxes or on shelves.
the bottom up: the fantastical world of human waste, sunday 21:00
rachel erickson
erickson is an entertaining speaker on all matters scatological. i didn't take any notes, but she cleverly has her notes online. despite her disclaimer, they're pretty close to the talk she gave.
nonetheless, i saw a bunch of science stuff.
there were three lectures on "speculative biology", the art or science of coming up with plausible exo-biologies. the first presentation was just a set of quick introductory talks by a bunch of people who play with the ideas.
the second one really got into the state of the art: gert van dijk's furaha and c. m. koseman's snaiad. both of these are well-developed worlds populated by odd...ly plausible things.
van dijk really gets into forms of locomotion that make physical and biological sense, but never evolved here. i really like his tetropters:
mechanistically, they fly by clap-and-fling, a technique used by some insects, but all our bugs do it only on one axis, not two. tetropters make better use of their wings than real bugs do, because they have a higher lifting duty cycle (two claps per wingbeat).
koseman started out with some sketches and then back-rationalized biology that would make something like them. his main effort has been in developing a huge range of animals in a number of distinct taxons, so the world seems to be plausibly populated and evolved, with many biomes and niches occupied by multiple critters, the way the earth is.
i happen to like the titaniformes, such as these guys:
the third talk in the series was given by dougal dixon, of after man fame. his current book is greenworld, which isn't out yet. he was apparently presenting stuff from it, but his talk was at the same time as the masquerade, so i didn't bother to go.
my notes say that at some point, one of the speakers mentioned the TV series the future is wild, also about speculative biology, but i know nothing more about it.
the fermi paradox in light of kepler, thursday 19:00
panelists: gerry webb, guy consolmango, helen fraser, david nordley, charlie stross
they talked about the fermi paradox, but not necessarily in light of kepler, since they didn't mention it. even more so than typical for cons, the relationship between loncon panel discussions and their titles and abstracts was tenuous. as is also typical, this is both good and bad: good, because the discussions are often more interesting anyway, but bad because that makes it hard to figure out what to see.
also, i've rearranged the order of what was said for clarity of presentation. (i also have the talks/topics out of order for the same reason.)
there was a general consensus for “life is common, but intelligent (or technological) life is rare”, with a couple of variations. nordley felt that bacteria are common, but everything else is rare, which at least kinda-sorta agrees with our geo-biological history. relaxing that to “complex multicellular life” gets a better match, since the time since the cambrian explosion is only 10% of the age of the Earth. (other biologists will doubtless point out that that's not quite right, but 90% "few, simple" critters to 10% "many, complex" critters is a fine way to look at the problem in terms of what we might expect to find.)
stross pointed out that we're reasoning from ignorance, since we don't actually have starflight and so don't really have the slightest idea what's out there. after a guy in the audience asked a related question, “how long do civilizations last?”, the panelists mentioned the other reasoning from ignorance problem we have: can we recognize other civilizations over long distances? for example, our abandonment of powerful analog broadcasts for weaker digital signals means that our 1950's past technological civilizations would have a great deal of trouble detecting our current one. of course, hypothetical alien civilizations face the same problem: would they recognize our civilization even if they were looking right at us?
but to the point, um, frankly we don't know how long technological civilizations last, though stross was being pessimistic and argued for mere centuries.
nordley made an interesting observation that if starflight is very expensive, hypothetical civilizations might establish only a few extrasolar colonies, and most of their interstellar expansion might be driven by exploration. so, unless they're trying to very hard to find every other civilization, they don't need to explore much of the galaxy to have a representative sample. in short, we may simply have been missed by other civilizations exploring sparsely and/or far away.
the “starflight is expensive” point came up in a few different ways: stross pointed out that to colonize a world, we need to move enough of our biosphere to sustain ourselves. we don't know how much that's going to to take, but it's unlikely to be small, even with a minimalist diet (cf britian's WW2 diet). fraser mentioned that space travel is simply difficult for us: we have lots of problems in zero gravity (bone and muscle wasting, drugs act differently). and both of those are (more or less) details on the question of how you move enough people to establish a settlement on a planet in another solar system.
starflight is expensive and hard were the twin themes of a series of panels and talks put together by the institute for interstellar studies (I4IS), who think about how to send ships to other stars with real physics and plausible technology. i saw two of their talks, both of which included alastair reynolds, a popular SF author and an entertaining speaker. which is, of course, why the loncon concom put them back to back in a small room.
far centaurus: the pros and cons of interstellar travel, sunday 16:00
alastair reynolds held forth on relativistic travel. his stated theme was “the speed of light is the cosmic speed limit. deal with it. And while you're dealing with it, let's look at the history of sub-light interstellar missions in SF”.
i was surprised that the earliest treatment appears to be a 1940 don wilcox story about generation ships, apparently “the voyage that lasted 600 years”, but reynolds' slide was up only briefly, and my notes have only that author and a date of 193[0-9] (I missed the last digit). I want to assume reynolds did his homework, so i'm puzzled.
current sub-light ships often feature transhumanist hand-wavings about uploaded minds. it's not a bad idea, other than the assumption that it could work in the first place. regardless, reynolds recommends greg egan's disaspora and “wang's carpets”, the novelette from which it's derived, as good stories about the idea.
our interstellar future
rachel armstrong, alastair reynolds, stephen baxter, chris welch(?), andreas hein
this was a random q&a panel meant to follow all the I4IS talks, nearly all of which were short (half-hour). my notes say the panelists ended up answering only one question, but they did so at length. they might have talked about other stuff, but if so, i didn't think it was worth recording.
question: why would we send ships to other stars, and where would we go?
baxter: alpha centauri, to explore its planets
hein: we'd explore a reachable but interesting world, for example, a water world
welch: exobiology or astrophysics (both scientific exploration), resource exploitation (assuming there's something worth the cost of shipping home). where is limited only by our technology.
reynolds: he started his answer by saying he was “annoyed by modern astronomy” because he can't write hard SF that either isn't or won't soon be wrong (because we already know some about the planets around a bunch of stars, and the next generation of planet-hunting telescopes will tell us even more). that said, he thinks we'd explore an earthlike world, or (if we can) go visit eta carinae for astrophysical exploration. (η-car is ~8,000 light years away, so getting there isn't easy)
armstrong: we'd settle other planets, but we'd send terraforming ships first (directed panspermia). i was surprised at her answer. while it's physically possible, and certainly a reasonable approach if we did want to settle other worlds, i'm not convinced we'd find a way to make it cheap enough to do, or if we did, that we'd bother.
i found both of the I4IS talks striking. for a science-fiction author, reynolds seemed rather pessimistic both about the possibilities for new physics -- i hold out some hope for alcubierre's math, despite the tiny problems with reduction to practice -- and for human exploration of other stars, even with today's physics. conversely, armstrong's belief in directed panspermia seemed a bit hard to swallow, since it implied a human civilization able to embrace time horizons and pay-offs longer than all of recorded history.
finding the furthest quasar, thursday 18:00
since i didn't get into the talk on jupiter¹, i went to a talk by daniel mortlock on finding the most distant quasar. it was a straightforward astronomy methods talk, which makes sense out of the large astronomical databases i play with. i found it interesting not only because of the subject, but because with a few changes, it would have been an fine non-specialist talk at a general science conference, such as a AAAS meeting. i wasn't expecting to find legitimate science at loncon.
1: one of loncon's persistent problems was trying to do far too much for far too many people in far too little space. loncon seems to be one of the most well-attended worldcons, and the program was the broadest we've yet seen. for a fair number of time-slots, there were 20 parallel tracks running, which put it on par with the largest of scientific conferences. that's simply excessive, since unlike professional conventions, it's not really possible to have somebody report back on what happened at talks one didn't attend, very little is recorded, and there's no published proceedings.
i got into the habit of going to panels very early, sometimes leaving the previous panel early in order to attend ones I really wanted to go to... and it didn't always work. it worked less well for dïe überblönde. with the result that i was irritated and she was frustrated and sometimes angry.
the problem was exacerbated by space limitations in the convention center, and the apparent inability of the concom to guess how well panels would be attended. i overheard other people at the con complaining about this and proposing various solutions (polling, soft registration, etc), suggesting we're not alone in being displeased.
liveship trading: fantasy economics friday 18:00
william hafford, robin hobb (aka megan lindholm aka margaret astrid lindholm ogden), juliet mckenna, max gladstone)
this discussion stuck to the topic, because the panelists had actually discussed it ahead of time, and because the moderator actively worked at keeping it on topic. OTOH, dïe überblönde didn't show up as insanely early as necessary, and couldn't get a seat. (folks from the convention center were actively chasing people away, fearing the fire marshals of doom.) she was somewhere between very distraught and furious, since she'd really wanted to see it.
mckenna said she really emphasizes economic realism in fiction: she'd wanted a blurb describing her writing as keynes meets tolkien, but her publishers wouldn't go for it. she felt writers tended to overestimate trite genre plot drivers in fantasy stories (cf dianna wynne jones' tough guide to fantasy land) and underestimate economic ones, such as resource scarcity.
hobb started by saying she does a lot of practical research, such as how one runs a butcher shop without refrigeration. which seems like an a useful thing to do, but i tried to read one of her fantasy stories under the hobb brand and found the opening (non-economic) conceit so utterly stupid that i wrote off that brand. so i'm not sure how seriously to believe that she takes her own advice. (the stuff she publishes under the lindholm brand is pretty good, and i recommend her wizard of the pigeons.)
my notes for this panel are scattered, as the panelists talked about a wide variety of economic topics, most relating to fantasy one way or another.
hafford opened with a general question: what is money? we all think we know it when we see it, but what we actually mean by it is pretty slippery. sure, it's a tool (method?) for storing and moving value, but what exactly does that mean? and how does that work in practice? we typically think of bits of rare metals as money in fantasy settings, but historically, lots of things have been used as money that aren't metals: salt was used in a number of cultures. mckenna pointed out that in the british isles, butter and lace were sometimes used as currency in rural areas (and were often good ways for women to make money).
these days, we're more aware of the value of information, attention, and access, but none of those are new valuable things. letters of introduction have been valuable things for millennia, and information has been valuable to traders pretty much as far back as we have records which can tell us about it. and yet, rarely are those mentioned as money in fantasy settings. which is odd, because in some settings, wizards spend lots of time chasing after bits of arcane knowledge. with vancian magic – and some traditional magic based on “true names” – knowledge is very real power, but little of it seems to be offered for sale.
fantasy is missing a bunch of economic things, according to the panelists:
mckenna: canals for moving goods, and transportation in general. where are the grain ships and caravans? where do all the metal goods the dwarves make go and how do they get there?
hafford: storage – everything from containers to warehouses – and other logistical infrastructure.
hobb: resources and geography. only exotic resources seem to come from anywhere (mithril from moria, say). geography is often just window dressing, and seems to have no observable effect on how, where, or why people live. cities in alpine mountains make great book cover art, but need a really good economic reason to exist. just hauling all the food they need up the impressive-looking mountains would be a huge drag on their economies, so something's got to pay for that.
(given the volumes of loving detail authors lavish on describing things in their fantasy worlds, i don't think their omission of economics is due to lack of space, but lack of clue. since SF suffers from authors who can't multiply, fantasy can suffer from authors who can't figure out where the groceries come from.)
gladstone mentioned that barter shows up a lot in fantasy, but real barter systems tend not be based on haggling – trading N apples for a hammer – but on classes of goods considered roughly equal. (though i can't remember the example he gave.)
all that said, hobb named a few good examples of real economics in genre fiction: dune, which of course is built around the setting's most valuable commodity and the effects its economics has, and patrick rothfus' name of the wind and the rest of the kingkiller series.
i'll also toss in LotR, though tolkien was working from now known to be embarrassingly wrong scholarship which believed the middle ages endured a complete economic collapse (all the bridges mentioned in middle earth are broken, many formerly-large cities are in ruins, and the only long-distance trade is dwarven peddlers selling metal goods). which is an interesting setting to write about, even if it has nothing to do with reality.
i had a brief chat with hafford after the panel, asking about the odd child of the coinage metals: copper (and its alloys, especially bronze). while it's been used for coinage for a long time, it's also an extremely useful metal. for long stretches of history, copper was not only money² and art, but also tools and weapons. (even up until the modern era, church bells were melted down to make cannon during wartime, and then the cannon were melted down to make new bells during peace.) which means copper's various uses have complex economic effects (like salt's do) and we don't fully understand them.
2: he mentioned that many of the ox-hide copper ingots we've found have the same size and weight, and some collections appear to be cast from the same mold. that suggests that they weren't just a convenient size for moving around, but were in fact currency. if so, they're the oldest currency we know of, pre-dating coinage by about a thousand years.
how space missions happen, monday, 16:30
jordin kare, geoffrey landis, laura burns, gerry web
a bright and cheery talk on the nitty-gritty about getting stuff into orbit or onto other planets. by and large, we don't: the infant morality rate for space projects is pretty grim. that is, most space missions never get beyond proposals, and of those that do, most don't get beyond paper studies. actually building hardware, much less launching it, is rare. working scientists, especially academics, will find this unsurprising.
they'll also be unsurprised that the missions most likely to be launched are military, followed by commercial missions and national prestige projects, and finally scientific missions (other than those that turn into prestige projects, like hubble). nor will they be surprised that what matters for getting a mission off the ground is politics, money, and science (in that order). engineering pretty much doesn't matter: if the government wants it, it'll happen.
geoffrey landis wasn't any more optimistic about CubeSats and other low-cost approaches. sure, they're cheap enough to fail – which helps immensely getting them built in the first place -- but they're parasite cargoes on other people's launches, so there are far more of them designed and built than there are rockets to take them to orbit. most of them sit in boxes or on shelves.
the bottom up: the fantastical world of human waste, sunday 21:00
rachel erickson
erickson is an entertaining speaker on all matters scatological. i didn't take any notes, but she cleverly has her notes online. despite her disclaimer, they're pretty close to the talk she gave.
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Date: Sep. 12th, 2014 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: Sep. 12th, 2014 06:49 pm (UTC)