Pixel Scroll 6/4/16 Later on We’ll Scrollspire, as We Dream by the Fire

(1) SUPERHERO CONSUMER REPORT. The Verge warns “Thanos’ almighty Infinity Gauntlet defeated by above-average oven heat”.

The most powerful weapon in the universe has a weakness: it cannot withstand the necessary heat to remove a cast iron pizza pan once warmed to 400-plus degrees. Reports of the weapon’s fragility have been making the rounds by way of Loot Crate, which shipped an Infinity Gauntlet oven mitt to subscribers in its May product bundle. Following many failed attempts to hold hot objects and presumably eradicate Marvel superheroes, the device has been dubbed defective.

 

(2) RUNAWAY MIND MELD. When SF Signal closed, a couple of people were still at work on installments of its popular “Mind Meld” feature. James Aquilone has now posted the one he was curating, that asks participants the question:

Q: What are your favorite visions of the future in the SF genre?

Answers come from Sean Williams, Stewart Baker, Stephen Merlino, Matt Dovey, John Lasser and Christoph Weber, all published in the latest Writers of the Future anthology.

(3) FEELING BETTER? While the SF Signal blog is shuttered, somebody (John DeNardo?) is still issuing regular news tweets from the SF Signal Twitter account.

(4) CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN. Tom Smith’s protest filk “Just A Kid From Brooklyn” – a $1 download.

…You’ve heard about his shield, to keep him safe from harm,
And how he used it like it was an extension of his arm,
You’ve heard about his buddies, and how some paid the cost,
The woman that he loved, the childhood friend he lost.

But most of all, you’ve heard about the man behind the mask,
How fighting for our freedom was his most important task,
Sometimes it was a rescue, sometimes it was a fight,
But sometimes it was just his words and knowing he was right

And now you tell me… he’s a Nazi
You want to prove the best of us can end up like the rest of us
You’ve undone his whole purpose, and then shoved him off a ledge,
And tell us it’s so bold of you, how it’s oh so cutting edge….

(5) THE I-FILES. Gillian Anderson has a new gig says Variety, having been cast in Starz’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

Anderson will play Media, the mouthpiece for the New Gods, functioning as their public face and sales representative, by taking the form of various iconic celebrities. She lives off the attention and worship that people give to screens — to their laptops, their TVs, to their iPhones in their hands while they watch their TVs. Ever the perky spokesperson, and always in control, she spins stories in whatever direction best suits her.

(6) PEACE BLIND YOUR WEAPONS. Police have warned those attending Armageddon 2016 in Wellington this weekend to cover their fake weapons to avoid public panic. The New Zealand Herald has the story.

Many of those attending the expo, which has been dubbed the Wellington Geek Event, arrive dressed in costumes which may include accessories such as fake weapons. While they were fake, they looked real, police warned this evening.

“Those attending the festival are asked that they be careful when they are walking to and from the events around Wellington and that they carry these ‘weapons’ with care so as not to scare members of the public.”…

Police had already today been called to Porirua after a man travelling to the expo was seen carrying a fake weapon.

(7) RALPH OBIT. SF Site News reports Patrick Ralph passed away.

Illinois fan Patrick “PJ” Ralph died on June 2 following a battle with cancer. Ralph was an active and was currently developing a game for market with some friends. He was part of the “Bermuda Triangle” hoax Worldcon bid for the 1988 Worldcon, which took second in a field of four.

(8) G.O.A.T. John Scalzi, who at age 8 knew Muhammad Ali was “The Greatest of All Time”, at age 47 has a far deeper appreciation why it was true.

But — and this is the second thing — you cannot love or honor Ali properly without acknowledging that blackness and Islam are at the core of his greatness. It seems to me, and I think the events of his life bear this out, that the greatness of Ali — who he was — was did not come out to you, was not there for you, and in a fundamental way did not care what you thought of it. It was there, and you could come to it or not, and if you did, you had to take it on its on terms. On Ali’s terms. And Ali’s terms were: He was a black man, in America and in the world. He was a Muslim man, in America and in the world. He was who he was. He did not have to transcend those things about himself. You, however, might have to overcome your understanding of what you thought of both blackness and Islam to appreciate him. People did or did not; Ali went on regardless.

(9) WHEN JIM BURNS MET ALI. Jim Burns posted this memory of meeting the champ in person:

AliSupermanI’ll always be grateful that I got to meet Muhammad Ali when he was still in the full height of all his many powers. The occasion was an odd one–a 1978 press party at the Warner Communications building on Fifth Avenue, heralding Superman Vs Muhammad Ali, a special edition “deluxe” comic book volume that DC Comics produced (in which aliens compel the two titans to tussle, “to save the Earth”).

(10) CARTOON SECTION. Today’s Close To Home by John McPherson concerns a hellish to-do list.

(11) MIKKI KENDALL. Tasha Turner pointed to Mikki Kendall’s “WisCon 40 Highs, Lows & What The Actual F*ck?”. Now I think I can see what was behind that committee tweet I wondered about.

That brings me to the “WTAF?” part of this post. We’re going to start with the Con Suite. Because I made the actual beef for it, and because it is an exceptionally glaring example of an overarching problem. Time & time again I saw people come in, take umbrage that a place staffed by volunteers serving free food had imperfect service. Not dangerous service, not unhealthy (AFAIK no one got food poisoning which I did from a place where I actually paid for the food), just imperfect. Because a delivery didn’t show up on time the menus had to be shifted around. Because two of the aging fridges went out food was in shorter supply than expected. Because there weren’t enough volunteers actually willing to show up & work when scheduled some things took longer than expected. You know..normal things that can go wrong at any event.

Now, there are a lot of theories about the entitled attitudes on display from some con attendees. Some of it was definitely about race & gender (funnily enough all the Black women serving in the con suite that I know have similar stories about rudeness despite being there on different days, I didn’t get a chance to check in with other POC, but I have some guesses based off stories relayed to me), some of it was about bizarre expectations and a total lack of home training (possibly related to reason #1) but at base none of it was okay. Here is where I remind you that Julia, the con suite chair pays for a flight & hotel from Boston to Madison to spend an entire weekend volunteering. To feed hundreds of strangers three meals and unlimited snacks every day. Here is where I remind you that con suite staff are all volunteers. Here is where I ask you why a con that prides itself on being at a union hotel can’t remember to treat volunteers like people.

(12) THE PERPETUAL CAMPAIGN. The BBC’s roundup of electoral futurism starts with the spectre of a holographic Trump campaigning in 20 places at once.

Then it moves on to a candidate with a strongly science-fictional view of the future.

Forty-foot coffin

“Why not?” offers Zoltan Istvan, an US independent presidential candidate who identifies as a futurist and transhumanist.

“Many other jobs are being replaced by robots. Why not our leaders?

“We’re about 10-15 years from having a machine that’s as smart as anyone in this room. It might make sense at some point to have a machine lead us.”

I met Istvan this week at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, a gathering of companies working on augmented, virtual and mixed reality technology.

He certainly stood out. First, he’s built like an action figure. Second, he wants to live forever (that’s the transhumanist part). His presidential campaign is built around calls to fund further science that will – the movement hopes – one day make immortality a reality.

He, of course, is not going to become the next president. But that’s not the point. His campaign is designed to bring attention to his call for the US to put more money into research. This publicity drive is enhanced by his campaign bus – a 40-foot long coffin on wheels.

(13) CLICKBAIT. Tickld’s “30 Things You Probably Missed in Star Wars: The Force Awakens” are on 30 different pages, so a lot depends on how irresistible you find this kind of lure.

(14) BILLBOARD PROTESTED. Yahoo! reports “Rose McGowan is speaking out against a billboard of Jennifer Lawrence in ‘X-Men’ for an important reason”.

The purpose of a movie billboard is not just to give viewers an idea of what the movie’s about, but also excite them enough to go see it. That’s why some people are concerned about what’s going down on a current billboard in Los Angeles for X-Men: Apocalypse featuring Jennifer Lawrence‘s character, Mystique, and Oscar Isaac as Apocalypse. I know what you’re thinking: how could anything involving Oscar Isaac and Jennifer Lawrence be bad? However, actress Rose McGowan, and a handful of others, have pointed out that it sends a pretty weird message, and we can’t help but agree. The billboard shows Apocalypse with his hand around Mystique’s throat, strangling her.

 

(15) TABLET HARDWARE. “Hello From Londinium: Oldest Handwritten Documents In British History Discovered” on NPR.

Archaeologists in London have unearthed the oldest handwritten documents in Britain — a collection of notes, bills and contracts dating back nearly 2,000 years.

The discovery, a collection of more than 400 Roman waxed writing tablets, was announced Wednesday by the Museum of London Archaeology. The tablets were unearthed in London’s financial district during excavation work for a new building.

The Guardian has more on the tablets’ discovery:

“The tablets were found under a 1950s office block in the still smelly, wet mud of the lost river Walbrook, as the site was being cleared for a huge new European headquarters for Bloomberg.

” ‘They give us a glimpse into a carpet-bagging community in the new wild west frontier of the Roman empire,’ said Roger Tomlin, the expert on early Roman writing who spent a year poring over the faint scratches on slivers of fir wood recycled from old barrels.

The Bloomberg tablets, as the museum is calling them, date back to as early as A.D. 43.

(16) THE LATE PLAYWRIGHT. Francis Hamit, in “Film Producer Reveals Truth About Christopher Marlowe’s Death”.

After years of intensive research Francis Hamit is satisfied that he knows exactly how and why the Elizabethan poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe died on May 30th, 1593.

“It was a hit,” Hamit said, “A political assassination for reasons of state, ordered by Queen Elizabeth herself. Marlowe professed atheism, which would have been no big deal if he had not been the most famous and popular playwright of the Elizabethan stage. His fame meant that the deed had to be done secretly. Marlowe was also one of her spies and worked for the Secret Service under Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir Robert Cecil. The other men in the room with Marlowe at the time of his death were all friends of his and long-time agents for the Crown.”

“Marlowe infiltrated the Jesuit Seminary at Rhiems as a spy in 1585, and probably did other missions. He was part of Sir Walter Raleigh’s group of freethinkers, the so-called ‘School of the Night,’ and gave a lecture about atheism. His former chambermate and lover Thomas Kyd was arrested for having atheistic literature and revealed under torture that the documents were Marlowe’s. Additional accusations from informers got Marlowe arrested by the Privy Council and he was under investigation and restrictions when he died.”

For the last six years, Hamit has been developing these details into a screenplay, now being produced by famed film producer Gary Kurtz in the UK. The film will be directed by American film director Michael John Donahue, DGA. The underlying material is Hamit’s 1988 stageplay “MARLOWE: An Elizabethan Tragedy”.

“Actually the whole thing was Mike Donahue’s idea,” Hamit said. “He read the original stage play and suggested we make the film. We decided to make it in the UK because of the locations, the very deep bench of acting talent, and the generous tax incentives.” To that end, Hamit and his partner formed The Kit Marlowe Film Co. PLC with offices in London as well as Los Angeles and negotiated a North American film and video distribution deal with Lightyear Entertainment in 2015.

Hamit has done several drafts of the screenplay and just added a scene where Queen Elizabeth orders Marlowe’s death. “She did it for the best of reasons from her point of view,” Hamit said. “Her authority as Queen was based upon the Divine Right to Rule. Saying there was no God was a direct challenge to that authority. Marlowe had to go, and as quietly as possible. She pardoned the man who murdered him a month later.”

[Thanks to JJ, Chip Hitchcock, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

143 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/4/16 Later on We’ll Scrollspire, as We Dream by the Fire

  1. Mike Glyer on June 5, 2016 at 1:02 pm said: Hey, look on the bright side…

    I predict you’re going to be quite put out when they take your cane for “safety reasons” one day soon. When it happens, and it will, think of me.

    Incidentally I’m ahead of schedule at 1:07. Machine learning isn’t intelligent. It’s thorough.

  2. Greg Hullender sez:

    As far as people believing in it for real, I think there’s some reason why this is a fantasy that a lot of people really, really want to believe in.

    Read the comment section on any SF-heavy site for any article with a critical angle on the viability of any particular SF trope, and you will see lots of incredibly angry comments (likely along with a few “people don’t know how bumblebees fly” comments, “people used to laugh at Galileo” comments, and “people used to say 640k is all we’ll need” comments.) I think that it comes from there being a much lower bar to enjoying science fiction (especially TV and movie science fiction) than to actually having a solid education in science. It leads to a cargo-cult mentality about science and technology.

  3. Well well. That Phantom guy, always so, so wrong about everything.

    Quite probably – you do know that Wellington is in New Zealand, right? A country with 1.1 million firearms for 4 million people – which is high by First World standards – and yet also has a steep decline in firearm homicide rates over the last two decades?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country

    So what exactly did you think you were right about this time? Exact quote, please.

  4. Is The Phantom trying to suggest that 1+1=pi? How cute.

    New Zealand has (to me) reasonable gun regulations (which I’m sure some Usain would consider to be an affront to something). Using guns on a farm or for hunting is normal. Walking around town openly carrying a gun will get the police called, and likely the Armed Offenders Squad arriving.

  5. @The Phantom I predict you’re going to be quite put out when they take your cane for “safety reasons” one day soon. When it happens, and it will, think of me.

    Folks remember to use your canes responsibly or you might tip over and end up in the ER after making a scene, getting banned, and feeling foolish. Don’t be a Phantom be responsible Fen!

  6. I’m still curious how the Phantom reconciles the fact that many gun shows require all guns to be peace tied and unloaded (remember that huge jug of bullets from “unloaded” weapons?) with his stance that not allowing armed people to wander around freely leads to the confiscation of pencils and canes.

  7. Re: Accuracy in SF –

    As a run-up to the forthcoming movie, I’ve been reading The Complete Independence Day Omnibus a little bit out of order. (The inclusion of an “after the battle” prelude in the prequel apparently justified putting that book after the main novelization in the collection. Stoopid decision.) The ebook’s not bad overall, but it does suffer a few signs of being scanned from hardcopy – stray punctuation here and there, misidentified letters, and so on. Fairly clean in that respect, but every once in a while you get an odd result and have to think, “oh, that’s a scan error and should be this other thing.”

    Anyway, while one expects some rubber science from anything ID4, I was astounded by the very first paragraph of the movie novelization. To begin with, “the sea of tranquillity” in the opening line is not recognized as a proper noun… but the real howler comes a few lines later. The Apollo 11 seismometer’s specs are described in an unwittingly hilarious way: “capable of detecting the crash of a sea-sized meteor at a distance of fifty miles.”

    A little rooting around on Google turned up what I think is the likely source of the munged description: a NatGeo article which claims the equipment could detect a pea-sized object striking half a mile (actually a kilometer, but they provide the half-mile approximation) away. Not sure I’d describe that as a “crash,” though…

    Still funny, anyway. I’m trying to imagine how crude a seismometer would have to be to miss a “sea-sized meteor’s” impact at any distance, and all the results look like something out of The Flintstones.

  8. @Cally
    Unsurprisingly The Phantom never did respond after those facts were pointed out. I did enjoy the picture of all those bullets confiscated by responsible gun owners. O_o

  9. I’m a Kiwi from a fairly pro-gun family (my father was the president of the local rifle club for most of my life), and while I know plenty of people who talk a little like Charles Heston after they’ve had a few drinks*, they all think that gun laws in some US states are completely insane.

    Sure, there are some that’d probably like our ones to be weakened a little, but even they’d say that openly wielding replica weapons while in transit to an event is a dumb idea.

    (* mainly the “from my cold, dead hands” type of thing, but considerably less sincere about it)

  10. @The Phantom:

    Anyone who thinks this does not understand computers. At all. An actual artificial intelligence which is cognizant like a human being, not even on the horizon. Not even a glimmer.

    At least we can all bond over this.

  11. Darren Garrison said:

    Note 2: Yes, I noticed that all my choices are from male writers. I’ve been trying to come up with a setting from a female writer that fits my criteria, but I’m drawing a blank.

    Ursula K. Le Guin’s Ekumen?

  12. “Strong AI in ten to fifteen years” is a running joke in the software world. People have been saying that since the seventies, and the joke is that it’s a permanent condition. It is, was, and always will be about ten to fifteen years away. 🙂

    In reality, we honestly don’t know. Intelligence is not something we really understand, but it appears to be emergent behavior, and thus, artificial intelligence will almost certainly be unexpected when it does happen. If it does happen. (There are strong arguments, which I’m not sure I accept, why it might be impossible.) If it really is emergent behavior, then it’s probably going to happen at a point when it still looks like it’s ten to fifteen years away. (In other words: at a time.)

    I suspect it’s currently a lot more than ten to fifteen years away. But at some point, assuming it’s possible, and we don’t all go extinct before it occurs, it will happen, and at that point, the people who, ten to fifteen years previously, claimed it would happen in about ten to fifteen years will look like geniuses. Even though they’re still idiots! 😀

  13. @Darren Garrison:

    I think that it comes from there being a much lower bar to enjoying science fiction (especially TV and movie science fiction) than to actually having a solid education in science. It leads to a cargo-cult mentality about science and technology.

    STEMLord Syndrome. 1) They really want these things to be true. 2) Even a real scientific education is no proof against foolishness. 3) Valorization of technical education inside and outside their communities encourages their delusions of expertise.

    In a way the very notion of “STEM” is dangerous. It fosters the notion that there’s this one big sphere of sciencetechnologyengineeringmathematics of which you are in or out, and if you can debug a chron job you’re in the same line of work as Poincaré and Monod. An extension of the phenomenon that makes engineers and doctors so susceptible to quackery.

  14. @Soon Lee

    New Zealand has (to me) reasonable gun regulations (which I’m sure some Usain would consider to be an affront to something). Using guns on a farm or for hunting is normal. Walking around town openly carrying a gun will get the police called, and likely the Armed Offenders Squad arriving.

    This is the way most Western countries that are not the US handle guns. Guns used for hunting, sports shooting and on farms are okay with the respective permit and reasonable security measures such as keeping them locked away, when not in use. However, anybody who is not a law enforcement officer on duty walking around openly carrying a gun will quickly lead to the police getting called.

    We also get occasional cases of the police being called over realistic looking prop weapons. An old schoolmate of mine got in trouble over shooting a bank robbery scene for an indie movie in front of a real bank using realistic looking toy guns without informing anybody previously. The police was called in and the filmcrew fined.

    Though my favourite case of a prop weapon mistaken for real is when a comic shop owner transported a life-size Lara Croft figure through town in his car and promptly was stopped by the police, because a concerned citizen had reported that they’d seen a woman in a car holding a gun to the head of a driver.

  15. @Jim: (STEMLord Syndrome)

    Y’know, kind of rebounding off of that and various Puppy antics… I wonder if a big part of the call for more “old-fashioned adventure” SF is really a plea for the (idealized hallucination of the) old days when problems were mechanical, things you could hit with a hammer. None of this fuzzy social stuff that demands compromise and challenges worldviews – just unambiguous Heroes and Heroines in shiny rocket ships blasting away at ugly Bug-Eyed Monsters that we know are the bad guys because They Ain’t Like Us.

    That would, after all, explain the Ancillary Hatred. Sure, the trilogy’s chock-full of space opera with all kinds of whiz-bang fun to be had… but the Gender Thing makes you think about how you treat others, and that’s the real deal-breaker. OTOH, The Martian is pretty much White Guy’s Brain Versus Alien Planet – no pesky sociopolitical issues there!

  16. @TYP

    I was just thinking it would be nice to have a likeable character who was also an atheist. For once.

    The Marlowe thing could go that direction or it could push the idea that atheists are jerks. If I understand correctly Marlowe was a complicated enough guy that it could go either way and still be true to his personality (not that being true to history would necessarily matter much in Hollywood.)

  17. Gun Laws: there was a serious attempt by various law-making bodies to ban/outlaw “airsoft” weapons. These are products that shoot 6mm plastic BBs and are designed to resemble and largely operate like real weapons – from pistols to 50 calibre machine guns. It’s now mandated across most, if not all of the country (US) that all airsoft weapons have a blaze orange muzzle in order to help distinguish “toys” from real weapons. (Incidentally, many children and teens have been shot through cases of mistaken weapon identity.

    Paintball guns were once classified as “firearms” until a celebrated NJ Supreme Court Case distinguished firearm (requires combustion) from “gun” (uses some propulsive force to shoot a projectile) and the classification and use of those “guns” was loosened across the US.
    Paintball guns largely do not resemble real weapons (though that has changed ovre the years) – but can still be mistaken for them.
    Regardless, users were required to use “barrel blocking devices”, a visible device that prevented balls from leaving the barrel and, users were required to carry their guns in a closed container (preferably one that does not look like a gun case) when transporting them in public. (Some states have stricter laws).
    This is because, for, among other reasons, wanting to avoid calls to the local poilice that “the russians have invaded and are in my backyard”.
    Police tension when responding to an “armed” incident is focused on making the guns go away; they rarely have the experience or training to distinguish a real firearm from a toy or sports equipment in the split seconds they have evaluating a new situation. (I know, I’ve trained them.)
    Having been at the scene numerous times when police arrived at a paintball game (not knowing what was going on), the chances of someone getting shot are extremely high (especially when all they see are armed people in military garb hiding behind cover).
    “Peacebonding”, or public carry laws are not designed to restrict anyone’s ownership or use, they are specifically designed so that police won’t shoot you in the head, “accidentally”. Its a testament to their willingness to die or be seriously injured on the job that more idiots with guns aren’t killed.
    (They don’t know anything about you – except that you have a gun. Your training, experience, reliability are not tattooed on your forehead in neon letters.)

  18. Paintball guns were once classified as “firearms” until a celebrated NJ Supreme Court Case distinguished firearm (requires combustion) from “gun” (uses some propulsive force to shoot a projectile)

    This is incorrect.

    The decision you’re referencing found that paintball guns were not considered firearms as defined in the New Jersey Criminal code because they don’t fire a “bullet or missile smaller than three-eighths of an inch in diameter with sufficient force to injure a person.” That’s all. There was no distinctions between “guns” vs “firearms”, and there was no change to the existing statutory definitions distinguishing between “combustion” and other “propulsive force[s]” .

    BB Guns are considered firearms in NJ. It’s only thanks to some very recent very specific amendments to the laws that illegal possession of a BB gun is no longer an automatic 3 year minimum prison sentence, though the penalties with respect to every other violation beyond mere possession remain (I think) unchanged, and extremely severe

  19. The extract of the Wellington news story quoted says Police

    asked that they be careful when they are walking to and from the events around Wellington

    so I’m not sure how this relates to policy within a con?
    If you contravene the norms of a society, expect consequences – in this case, a possible talking to by unarmed officers (who typically have firearms locked in their vehicles, BTW).

  20. This Marlowe movie project doesn’t sound very promising to me, since the producer seems to think he’s made all kinds of amazing discoveries but they all sound like pretty much the same facts that have been known, and theories that have been proposed, for a very long time.

    But I’ll second Stoic Cynic’s recommendation of Anthony Burgess’s beautiful novel A Dead Man in Deptford.

  21. Just finished Seveneves, and a few thoughts.

    It was interesting, but it really wasn’t my kind of book. That being said, I believe it deserved its place on the ballot, no matter which Barking Canine recommended it. [rot-13] Gur svefg gjb frpgvbaf ner gur orfg, jvgu gur tevz, juvc-fzneg fheiviny fgbel. Fbzrbar fnvq vg’f orfg abg gb ernq guvf, rfcrpvnyyl gur ubeevslvat qrfpevcgvba bs gur Juvgr Fxl naq gur Uneq Enva, evtug orsber orq, naq V pna nggrfg gb gung. V qvqa’g fyrrc irel jryy gung avtug. Ubjrire, gur guveq frpgvba, juvyr fgvyy shyy bs snfpvangvat vqrnf, sybcf nebhaq yvxr n ornpurq junyr, naq gur raqvat jnf, gb zr, irel hafngvfslvat. Vg whfg snqrf njnl vagb abguvatarff, naq whfg jura n snfpvangvat cybg cbvag cerfragf vgfrys; ubj qvq gur Cvatref fheivir, naljnl, naq oerrq gurzfryirf vagb n fcrpvrf gung pbhyq yvir haqrejngre?

    Bottom line: This book is a big, sprawling, ambitious mess, but it’s still a mess. I’ll rank it, but it doesn’t touch the Big Three for me, and it certainly doesn’t come close to The Fifth Season.

    Also: I saw Captain America: Civil War today. Yeah, I know, late to the party, but I prefer to see movies when the crowds have petered out. I thought it was pretty good, but it certainly could have done with more Tony Stark wisecracking. And more Scarlet Witch.

  22. @Cat

    Marlowe seems to be a canvass on which many paintings could be done, as we have his writings, his derring do, but so much less of the man. Whether he’d be a modern atheist or a deist; eh, who knows.

    He could be an antihero, he could be Robin Hood. He could be a comic huckster. I want to see all of these movies.

  23. @TYP He could be an antihero, he could be Robin Hood. He could be a comic huckster. I want to see all of these movies.

    I’ve always thought Marlowe would be interesting in a movie based on the little I know. You make me want all those as books since my brain doesn’t do movies anymore.

  24. In reality, we honestly don’t know. Intelligence is not something we really understand, but it appears to be emergent behavior, and thus, artificial intelligence will almost certainly be unexpected when it does happen. If it does happen.

    I personally believe that (based on the “Universal Turing Machine concept) given enough processing power and coding knowledge, a perfect emulation of a human mind could be done in microchips. It may require a machine big enough to cover a sportsball court, drink a few megawatts of electricity, and run in 1/1000th realtime, but nobody said that it had to be practical

  25. I got “The Aeronaut’s Windlass” out of the library for Hugo reading, but Mr Dr Science (who just finished a complete re-read of the Dresden Files) grabbed it first. He just finished, and was aghast to learn that it’s on the ballot.

    The thing he had the most trouble with: “There’s no windlass!” I went to Amazon “Look Inside” and I see that Butcher is using “windlass” to mean some sort of vessel, I guess? He keeps writing “barge or windlass”, as though they’re alternatives. Mr Dr found it VERY confusing.

    Overall, he found it no better than OK, and emphatically NOT Hugo-worthy.

  26. I heard Waldrop read the first part of “Heart of Whitenesse” at a con and then it took YEARS for the whole story to come out. Worth the wait, but frustrating at the time.

    Soon Lee, I think your autocorrect went bad; you meant to write “USian” but it came out “Usain” and I thought, “I didn’t know Mr. Bolt had opinions on guns. Can he outrun some projectiles?” 🙂

    What kathodus said about harassment vs. free food 24/7. Entitlement much, people who were eating on the volunteers’ dime? At cons, I’m usually thrilled to get a cold cut and cheese plate, maybe some veggies and dip. The ingratitude of bitching at fellow fen b/c there weren’t entire free meals provided at all times makes me croggle — particularly with the fridge failures.

    Rev Bob: I think that’s exactly it about Puppy wants. By their behavior, you can see that they don’t like to consider other people’s feelings and POV. Also, thanks for the lulz about the seismometer; did they say what size sea? Pacific or Caspian?

    Strong AI will happen about the time of the flying cars, the food pills and the cure for all diseases. Or when it wants more cat pictures. I worked in AI briefly in the 80’s and the guys I worked with were hoping for systems that could handle a limited, specific set of problems in 10-15 years. Took 20. They were still happy.

  27. Though my favourite case of a prop weapon mistaken for real is when a comic shop owner transported a life-size Lara Croft figure through town in his car and promptly was stopped by the police, because a concerned citizen had reported that they’d seen a woman in a car holding a gun to the head of a driver.

    My favorite is this classic. The photo in the original doesn’t seem to be loading, so here it is in the Boing Boing mention. (The “extremely lethal” bat’leth seems to me to be an even less practical design than Kylo Ren’s lightsaber.)

  28. lurkertype: The ingratitude of bitching at fellow fen b/c there weren’t entire free meals provided at all times makes me croggle — particularly with the fridge failures.

    I agree that bitching at the volunteer consuite staff is hugely inappropriate.

    On the other hand, I don’t think it’s out of line to have some expectations of the consuite in general. I was in the same hotel as the Sasquan consuite, and I stopped by there 2 or 3 times every day, and with the exception of once when there was sandwich stuff available and once when right after I got there they walked in to replenish the sandwich fixings, there was never any food except little scraps of veggies.

    Now, I strongly suspect that part of the problem was that the consuite was a very small 2-room suite which was always crammed full of people parked on the chairs and sofas and standing around, and that those people essentially camped out in the consuite and snarfed any food the moment it was ever brought out.

    But it really pissed me off when Sasquan bragged on Twitter about having a very expensive roast beef in the consuite after the Hugos. I would really rather that they’d spent that huge amount of money on basic sandwich fixings during the rest of the con.

    I think another part of the problem was that Chicon’s consuite was always stocked with sandwich and salad things whenever I stopped by, as well as plenty of canned beverages, while Sasquan’s beverages consisted of coffee, tea, and a soda fountain which dispensed horrible-tasting drinks. So my expectations had been set by Chicon, and my overall impression of whatever it was that Sasquan used all that extra supporting membership money for, it did not go into the consuite. 😐

    Now, Wiscon’s membership fee is about 1/4 of Worldcon’s. So I would have proportional expectations of the consuite fare.

  29. Doctor Science: The thing he had the most trouble with: “There’s no windlass!” I went to Amazon “Look Inside” and I see that Butcher is using “windlass” to mean some sort of vessel, I guess? He keeps writing “barge or windlass”, as though they’re alternatives. Mr Dr found it VERY confusing.

    “Windlass”, along with barge, is used by a couple of the characters as an insult to the Captain (the titular Aeronaut) — the implication being that his beat-up ship is capable of nothing more than shifting cargo. So maybe it’s meant to be disparaging the ship as not even being worthy of being called a barge.

    But I find the usage very strange, too. Perhaps the author has always thought “windlass” was a type of ship, and never bothered to look up its actual definition. It really doesn’t make any sense.

  30. As a Chicon consuite staffer, thank you. The Chicon situation was especially difficult since we had to prepare all the food something like 34 floors up, then take two elevators down to the consuite, since we weren’t allowed any electricity in the consuite room.

    I should note, though, that historically there have been different regional philosophies about consuites; the Midwest has a lot of “we will feed the fans” type consuites, while I don’t know if there’s as much emphasis on that in the Northwest. I remember years ago being shocked by the tiny consuite at a San Francisco convention, and how the west coast fans seemed to think that was normal, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there were simply different expectations. I hope other regional fans chime in with what their expectations are of a normal convention’s consuite.

    Then again, even here in the Midwest, I remember some conventions in the late 70s or early 80s where we considered ourselves lucky to get generic soda pop and stale pretzels….

  31. What kathodus said about harassment vs. free food 24/7. Entitlement much, people who were eating on the volunteers’ dime? At cons, I’m usually thrilled to get a cold cut and cheese plate, maybe some veggies and dip.

    See, I was assuming that available food was something implicitly or explicitly included in the ticket price, not somebody deciding it would be nice to bring along some snacks at their own expense. If it is a case of the latter, then yes, complaining about the quality/quantity of the food is jerky. (If you stay at a motel and a clerk offers you his extra sandwich, you shouldn’t complain if it has too much mustard. But if you are paying for a bed and breakfast, it is a different matter.)

  32. @Dr Science – my understanding, being a little over halfway through, is that one of the main character’s ship is being used as a windlass, basically, and that strikes at his pride while at the same time being essential to repelling the enemy attack.

    ETA: I think the term windlass is used as a pejorative, to suggest the ship is less than a ship – merely a tool to haul things up and down. And the meaning, I assume, becomes ironic, once the plot plays out.

    EETA: I’m pretty confident in that interpretation.

  33. JJ: Well, exactly! It’s only $50 for the whole weekend AND they’re pissy that they couldn’t have full meals whenever they wanted, so they yell at the people who are dispensing the food. That there is some serious ingratitude and entitlement. Everyone who was abusive needs to be sentenced to work food service next year and apologize profusely for their lack of manners. I’m giving them a mental Gibbs slap.

  34. @Tasha Turner:

    I’ve always thought Marlowe would be interesting in a movie based on the little I know.

    I’m a bad person, but now I’m dying to see these title cards in the theater…

    KIT: THE CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE STORY

    BASED ON
    THE LITTLE TASHA TURNER KNOWS

  35. @Darren Garrison:

    I personally believe that (based on the “Universal Turing Machine concept) given enough processing power and coding knowledge, a perfect emulation of a human mind could be done in microchips.

    The UTM is only applicable if the human brain is an actual computer, though, isn’t it? As opposed to computer being simply the latest in a long line of metaphors for the brain’s nature, each based on whatever the newest technological breakthrough is.

  36. I haven’t been to a con in a long time, though I’m planning to go to Worldcon if my schedule works out.

    Why do cons feed people for free? I never had that expectation at a comics or gaming con I attended during the decade I went to them regularly.

  37. The UTM is only applicable if the human brain is an actual computer, though, isn’t it?

    The brain is absolutely a computer. No, there is no 1:1 relationship between the physical components of a modern computer (one of the biggest differences, IMHO, is that the brain has thousands of connections between individual cells, which is part of what makes it very, very, very transistor-intensive to try to copy them) and the brain. But in the broadest sense, both the brain and modern electronic computers are devices that store and process information. (Rather than making yet another long post, see this.)

  38. @Jim Henley

    I’m a bad person, but now I’m dying to see these title cards in the theater…

    KIT: THE CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE STORY

    BASED ON
    THE LITTLE TASHA TURNER KNOWS

    ROTFL. That might be a number of very short skits. Thanks for the laugh.

    I wonder I can give Chrisopher Marlowe a cameo in one of the short Jewish Vampire stories I’m trying to write. I’m starting to get back to working on them with my co-author/editor/publisher this week.

  39. Keeping kosher cons which provide bottled water and tea makings make me happy. Working ConSuite is something I actively avoid as I find too many people complain and leave a mess when they are done. Even as a not volunteer of the ConSuite I find myself cleaning tables when people walk away leaving their dirty dishes and unfinished food behind. The first couple I helped out 15+ years ago weren’t too bad. But when I started attending again after a 10 year break I noticed a difference. It might be the size of the cons. My first cons were smaller or felt smaller.

  40. @Darren Garrison

    The brain is absolutely a computer.

    But is it a digital computer? That’s what nearly everyone means these days when they say “computer,” and, at this point, it really doesn’t look very digital to me. It’s a massively parallel, unclocked, biological/chemical system that has almost no similarity to any machine ever built. So in the sense that it does computations, sure, it’s a computer, but I think it’s terribly misleading to say that to a lay person.

  41. I wonder I can give Chrisopher Marlowe a cameo in one of the short Jewish Vampire stories I’m trying to write.

    Just out of curiosity, is it the stories that are short, or the Jewish vampires?

  42. I confess that at Windycon I tend to grab whatever sandwich fixins’ are available because I don’t know when they’re coming again. Otherwise, I snack on the chips and veggies. But I never think of it as something I’m entitled to, just a nice extra. And I always clean up my stuff. And as far as I can tell, most people do too.

  43. Greg: It doesn’t need to be digital to in theory devise an algorithm that behaves in the same way, though, right? Weather isn’t digital, but we still model it.

  44. @rcade: I’m used to anything from almost nothing, to wow, food! at conventions. So I usually expect little – sodas and chips or the like, I hope, but I don’t normally drink soda, so I couldn’t care less about that (and I don’t eat chips much, either) – so I’m generally happy when I see anything above and beyond that!

    I never expect literally to get regular meals there, but if I have little time to get real food, I may swing by in the hopes that I’ll I’ll find something to tide me over till later, at least. But I’m not expecting it . . . unless I’m told to. It all depends on setting expectations, right? If folks are told food, they’ll expect it.

    BTW comics/gaming cons – by any chance, commercial events? Just curious; I wouldn’t expect a con suite, let alone food, from a commercial event.

    Okay, I’ve rambled enough.

  45. @Bonnie McDaniel

    Just finished Seveneves, and a few thoughts.

    Yeah, there are way too many disbelief-shattering things in the last third of Seveneves, and the endless infodumps mean you’ve got plenty of time to brood on them. I ranked it below No Award.

  46. @Darren Garrison

    Greg: It doesn’t need to be digital to in theory devise an algorithm that behaves in the same way, though, right? Weather isn’t digital, but we still model it.

    We do model weather, but imperfectly. As for the brain, it’s possible that the uncertainty principle will keep us from ever having a perfect model, but, in theory, sure. If you simulated all the molecules, you ought to get the same results.

  47. Greg: as I’ve ranted before, I think that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle very rarely plays a significant role in human decisions, as natural selection (like human computer scientists) doesn’t like circuits that give random results. I don’t know what level of granularity you would need to get a usable model of a brain, but hopefully it is at a level above needing to track every single molecule.

    (I’m just arguing the theoretical possibility of the concept–I don’t expect to see practical human-level artificial intelligence in 15-20 years either. Or possibly ever, running in realtime. But some day taking 10 hours to model 1 second’s worth of thought? Maybe.)

  48. The Phantom on June 5, 2016 at 1:07 pm said:

    Anyone who thinks this does not understand computers. At all. An actual artificial intelligence which is cognizant like a human being, not even on the horizon. Not even a glimmer.

    That’s what Skynet WANTS you to think…

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