36 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 3/24/20 A Robot Shall Not Stand Less Than Six Feet From A Human, Nor, Through Inaction, Let One Get That Close”

1. Love the title

   (9) I’ve listened to Gary K. Wolfe’s Great Course “How Great Science Fiction Works” – recommended.

   Don’t let the Hand of Zei touch the Doors of his Face or the Lamps of His Mouth

2. Ahem. Andrew Porter’s ultimately excellent Algol/Starship ran from 1963 to 1984, which is rather more than five years. Starship alone ran roughly five years after the title change.

3. (1) Trying to decide if revealing myself as a potential customer to CBS (and their marketing team) is worth free episodes of Picard. Maybe I should hold out for more like some episodes of Discovery.

   (9) Also Alyson Hannigan’s birthday. Best known as Willow in Buffy and Lily Aldrin in HIMYM. Presently the host of Penn & Teller: Fool Us. Fun fact: In My Stepmother is an Alien, Hannigan’s young character’s crush is played by Seth Green who would later play her boyfriend in Buffy.

   And Kelly LeBrock who was the virtual dream girl in Weird Science and Jim Parsons who was Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory. Parsons also had a role in Hidden Figures.

   The lost Pixel Scroll edit of Cats.

4. If Picard is “free” then why does CBS All access need my credit card? It’s a method of marketing that I find sleazy.

5. The essay on the birth of Asterix has a … vigorous … description of the Roman Empire; I’m not sure I believe all of the LRB review summary as not-at-all-bad either, but there’s quite a contrast.

   @Jack Lint: boyfriend? I don’t remember Willow being bi — but it has been a while since the series.

6. “The Jedi Went Down To Tatooine”–oh, that’s hilarious. 🤣

   (6) Good interview. My copy arrived today, and I’m getting ready to dive into it.

7. Judge Magney: My father was born in your town, just a few years after you were mayor. You probably met.

8. (18) JIM BUTCHER DOUBLE PLAY.

   Listen closely, because I’m only gonna say this once:

   Squeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!

   That is all.

   (A few of you may remember that both my username and avatar originated from my time on the old Butcher boards….)

9. @Chip Hitchcock

   Before Willow dated Tara, she was involved with a werewolf teen named Oz. I don’t remember which season? Second or third.

10. Funk Turkey are a group of really talented pickers. Their PHANTOM MENACE song is 10,000 times more entertaining than anything IN THE PHANTOM MENACE. I rate them and the group that did “The Child Is This” as first-rate musicians.,

11. @Bonnie —

    Before Willow dated Tara, she was involved with a werewolf teen named Oz. I don’t remember which season? Second or third.

    Oz was on for a while — three years, in fact (1997-2000). Yes, I had to look that up. I loved that actor, Seth Green.

12. Houdini also starred in the silent serial The Master Mystery, which had one of the first appearances of a robot/mechanical man on film.

13. [9] William Morris, like Oscar Wilde, was also a socialist (unlike Wilde, both active and prominent in the movement), and like many a SCAdian I’ve known [myself included] saw no contradiction between that and his antiquarian and fantastic interests.

14. 0) I would like to acquire one of those robots.

15. According to a brief (of course) segment I saw on MinuteEarth, part of the problem with the fisheries is the size limits for catches, which are (predictably, in hindsight) breeding smaller fish! And smaller fish tend to lay fewer eggs. The show suggested that we’d be better off doing away with the size restrictions entirely, and, instead, maintain the same total volume of fishy harvest. But the existing rules are so firmly entrenched in maritime law that the chances seem slight at this point.

    So bring on the vatfish! I’m not much of a meat-eater at all these days, but I’m definitely willing to give it a try.

    While my pixel gently scrolls….

16. CoNZealand announces the con will take place online.

17. @Patrick Morris Miller,

    Yeah, just got the email too.

    Rock / Hard Place.

18. Patrick Morris Miller on March 24, 2020 at 11:49 pm said:

    CoNZealand announces the con will take place online.

    Well this should be interesting.
    It will be hard to do but people from many places can help.

19. Well this should be interesting.

    Only one of many new experiences for many of us.
    For those wondering about NZ’s internet infrastructure, fibre is available in all but rural areas. Significant work was done on the backbone to support the Rugby World Cup being primarily available online last year. With a massive increase in working from home this week, we have only just exceeded that peak.
    https://twitter.com/juhasaarinen/status/1242564554027986944

20. It will be an interesting challenge how they can set up to do the business meeting online. I wonder if software for that sort of thing exists already? I don’t think you can practically run a serpentine vote count on Skype.

21. David Shallcross: It will be an interesting challenge how they can set up to do the business meeting online.

    According to Robert’s Rules of Order, which governs anything not otherwise specified in the WSFS Constitution, remote-participation or teleconference meetings are prohibited unless the organization’s rules explicitly permit it. That’s why there is a WSFS committee (Remote But Real) which was appointed to study how the rules for such would be implemented. So no virtual WSFS meeting this year (or any year, until such a provision is passed and ratified into the WSFS Constitution).

22. Section 5.14 says “such other rules as may be published in advance by the current Committee” take precedence after the WSFS Constitution, but before Robert’s Rules.

    So it looks to me like ConZealand could allow for telepresence, as long as they don’t violate section 5.15, “The quorum for the Business Meeting shall be twelve members of the Society physically present.”

    If New Zealand prohibits gatherings of 12 people, definitely no business meeting.

23. Stewart Gordon has died. Amongst other things, he directed a couple of films based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft — Re-Animator and From Beyond.

    https://variety.com/2020/film/news/stuart-gordon-dead-dies-1203544356/

24. David Shallcross: Section 5.14 says “such other rules as may be published in advance by the current Committee” take precedence after the WSFS Constitution, but before Robert’s Rules.

    However, existing WSFS Resolutions and Rulings of Continuing Effect would take precedence over rules published by the current Committee.

    CH-2009-03: In response to a question asking if members could vote in advance or by proxy on an issue, the Chair explained that no proxies or other forms of remote voting are permitted at the Business Meeting. Members must be present in person at the Meeting at the time a motion’s vote is called in order to vote on that issue.

25. The order I see is:
    1) Constitution
    2) Standing Rules
    3) Other rules published by current committee
    4) Customs & Usages of WSFS, including resolutions and rulings of continuing effect
    5) Robert’s Rules

    The only time I’ve seen the current committee put forth their own rules was an outside-the-US Worldcon, where they substituted their own national parliamentary procedure rules for Robert’s Rules. In that case, a ruling that comes down to an interpretation of *Robert’s * wouldn’t necessarily apply.

26. David Shallcross: The order I see is

    I can see the current Worldcon ruling that the WSFS Business Meeting would be video/audiocast live to anyone who wished to tune in.

    I can’t see them making rules about permitting remote participation, especially voting, and here’s why:

    1) when several hundred people are watching and dozens are trying to “raise their hand” and be recognized for speech, there is no way to triage those requests in a fair way — and any Business Meeting chair who agreed to do so would be putting themselves in the position of being massively criticized and piled-on because no matter how they did it, dozens of people would be unhappy, and

    2) unless an absolutely fool-proof method of voting was set up such that everyone could be assured that their vote was counted, members could have no confidence that the vote would be accurate (in-person, everyone there can see the raised hands or the serpentine, and know that the count is accurate).

    I would be very surprised if any Worldcon committee was willing to take on that kind of responsibility based on ad hoc rulings, because the potential for them to be massively criticized and/or have things go very wrong would be so huge.

    This is why the Remote But Real committee was appointed: because the solution is not a trivial one, and there is very much potential for things to go wrong.

27. Question: could the (mostly if not entirely virtual) Business Meeting vote to pass all business on to the following year’s Worldcon? Under these circumstances, that might be seen to be fair, and not require significant argument and speakers for and against the motion.

    Conversely, what happens if it’s not possible to hold an in-person business meeting that satisfies the quorum rules? Yes we’re science fiction fans, but I hope that doesn’t mean we would try to enforce a rule that implied needing to break either local law or the laws of physics.

    (The Hugo voting and counting can be done entirely remotely, and have been mostly remote for decades.)

28. Vicki Rosenzweig on March 25, 2020 at 5:41 am said:

    Could the (mostly if not entirely virtual) Business Meeting vote to pass all business on to the following year’s Worldcon?

    In my opinion, yes. It would require a motion to Suspend the Rules, then:

    = Reject all items pending ratification;
    = Adopt those just-rejected items as new business (thus passing them on to the next Worldcon);
    = Continue all existing committees as currently constituted for another year;
    = Re-elect the incumbent members of the WSFS MPC whose terms were ending (assuming those three people want to serve again).

    Because WSFS rules require that you hold both a Preliminary and Main Business Meeting and that the two meetings must be at least 18 hours apart, you’d have to first hold the PBM and deal with the business normally conducted there (lots of report receiving that doesn’t require votes could be done relatively easily), and probably foreshadowing the motion to Postpone Everything. The following day, the Main Business Meeting could meet and deal with the Motion to Postpone Everything. Of course, this assumes that the necessary two-thirds vote was there along with a general consensus that it’s the right thing to do.

    Please note that I am not in charge of the WSFS Business Meeting this year. I am merely an underling who is likely to have relatively little to do other than make sure that any recording of a WSFS Business Meeting gets online. This post is my opinion and does not reflect any official function of WSFS, including the current Worldcon or the WSFS Mark Protection Committee or the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee.

29. A plain reading of the Constitution says that if there is a Worldcon, any pending amendments that aren’t ratified at its Business Meeting are dropped. No indication of a power to postpone amendments to a later year. I suppose if a Business Meeting wanted to, it could fail to ratify, but re-pass, all pending amendments. You’d have to get 12 members physically present to be able to do that.

    This all seems very difficult.

    Edit: OK, now Kevin was weighed in. He certainly is more familiar with the Rules than I am.

30. @Kevin Standlee: that seems tangled — but also seems like it would undercut any rules lawyers hoping to see the failure of passed-on amendments.

    @JJ: in your view, to what extent is a chair’s ruling-of-continuous-effect not subject to overruling by a subsequent chair? ISTM that WSFS has rather less reverence for precedent than (e.g.) SCOTUS (which has just used its own precedent to overrule a longer-standing precedent from the larger legal world, in the view of some of its members), possibly because being a member for a long time doesn’t prevent anyone else from becoming one; OTOH, there might have to be a formal meeting under the no-remotes rule in order for the chair to overrule. Possibly there would have to be two PBMs, a carefully-spread minimum-size in-person one to overrule and then an online to actually do the preliminaries?

    I’ve been watching NESFA debate this issue online for at least a week, since we have monthly meetings (including an election meeting in May), and not seeing absolute conclusions — although IIRC there isn’t a distinct ruling-against such as WSFS has. I’ve also seen discussion on what software to use; Zoom has proponents and opponents.

31. @Bonnie McDaniel: TFTI — I had remembered the character, but as a musician in their standard hangout rather than Willow’s first interest.

    “The Jedi Went Down to Tattooine” is indeed something; I wonder how long it will be up.

32. Andrew said “(9) I’ve listened to Gary K. Wolfe’s Great Course “How Great Science Fiction Works” – recommended”

    Comcast has the Great Courses (and other stuff) free until April 19. I watched part of “How Great Science Fiction Works” last night. Planning to watch it all when I get the chance. Thanks for mentioning it, I would have never found it on my own.

33. A niggle on Gary Wolfe’s Locus run: He started in late 1991, so he’s in his 29th year of reviewing for the magazine. Also worth checking out: The Coode Street Podcast that he and Locus reviews editor Jonathan Strahan produce–lots of conversations with writers.

34. Meredith Moment: Robert Jackson Bennett’s Mr. Shivers is $2.99.

    As is The Silmarillion, if you’re so inclined.

35. 8) The Shadow was played by Bret Morrison that year (he was the longest running Shadow), and his sidekick/friend The Lovely Margot Lane (hey, that’s how she was almost always introduced) would have been Grace Matthews. The sponsor would have been Blue Coal, America’s Finest Anthracite, died a harmless blue to show its authenticity.

36. @Chip Hitchcock: Oz is a background character for a while before he starts dating Willow and learns about vampires.

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