HRSFANS.org

Daniel Rabuzzi (’80) has a retrospective about the recent Toronto Spec Fic Colloquium on Modern Mythologies up on his speculative fiction blog at http://lobsterandcanary.blogspot.com/2011/10/toronto-specfic-colloquium-modern.html. The colloquium webpage itself is at http://www.specfic-colloquium.com/. I guess it’s too late to recommend the colloquium for this year, but perhaps locals and approximate locals might consider attending next year?

I just ran across this description of the Daniel Bartlett Memorial Mathematics Lectures. Hosted at the University of Arizona, they honor Dan Bartlett ’03, a HRSFAlum who passed away in 2006.

This isn’t particularly timely, I realize, but I thought others might be interested to know about it regardless. While news of Dan’s death did percolate through the alumni community, I at least had not heard any specifics in connection with it. The linked page includes a very nice section about Dan.

The lectures themselves are apparently designed to inform a general audience about higher mathematics, and are held annually at the University of Arizona (Dan was studying Algebraic Geometry at the UA math department at the time of his death). The next one will apparently be held this fall, and information about it can be found here.

By the way, if you’d ever like to post something here, but you don’t want to get your own posting account, email your post to me and I’ll put it up.

If you’d like to post often enough that this sounds like a hassle, email Emily and she’ll set you up with an account of your own.

The following post was written by Tony, and is posted here at his behest:

In anticipation of vericon TWELVE, in 2012, which is TWELVE months from now, I wrote a song: The Twelve Days of VeriCon:

On the twelfth day of Vericon my hrsfa gave to me…
Twelve	Friends a greeting
Eleven	Creatures Tapping
Ten	Boards of Gaming
Nine	Authors Signing
Eight	Alums Carousing
Seven	Movie mockers
Six	Larps late-running
Five	Viral Memes
Four	Cosplay teams
Three	Common rooms
Two	Burdicks runs
One	And a ConChair in a Tizzy

Dennis Clark has made a new social networking tool. At his request, I reproduce his introduction to it, below:

Hey all,

I’ve just finished making something I really want to show you all.

Since leaving college, I’ve missed HRSFA-Social pretty hard. It was just totally great when you were feeling bored to be able to send one email and summon a bunch of people to come hang out while not feeling like you were spamming the entire world with your lack of cool. In this spirit, I present:

http://www.borednow.biz

Named after everyone’s favorite Vamp Willow utterance, BoredNow is a cross between a realtime HRSFA-Social and the WoW dungeon finder — it’s an attempt to solve the ludicrious problem that it’s easier to organize a group of your friends to do something in a video game than it is in real life. I’m hoping that fellow HRSFANS at Vericon will find it useful for organizing pickup games and going out to eat and maybe for some things I haven’t thought of yet.

Right now, I have a realtime chat feature working along with the ability to join a pickup group and a randomized activity picker that will choose a game for you based on the number of people in your group and the amount of time you all have available. There’s much more to come, but I wanted to see if anybody liked the idea in general before building things that nobody wants.

I’m trying to spend the time between now and Friday developing a mobile website in addition to the desktop one (and maybe just one more feature), along with making sure that my server doesn’t fall over. If you’d like to help me out, I’d love it if:

1) You just came by the site. I’m new at this whole webhosting thing and for various reasons I’m running on a server I configured myself. I’d love to get some load so I can fix anything I can pre-Vericon.

2) You added some more activity ideas. Right now I have about six games in the database, which is essentially enough to make sure that the feature works but nothing more. I have a submission form up for anything you suggest, and after you do I’ll give the additions a cursory review and toss them right in the mix.

3) You told me what you think. Is this the worst idea ever ever ever? Please let me know before I waste any more time! Bug reports, feature requests, love notes, hate notes, whatever. There’s a comment form up (and you all have my email) so it’s easy to inform me about the depths of your fury.

4) Last, of course, I’m pretty much trundling around boston until vericon with nothing to do but work on this. I’m up for anything people want to do as long as I can stay within wifi range in case the server blows up. You know how to get in contact

So thanks for listening, sorry for the spam, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you all think.

I just ran across Law and the Multiverse, a blog which tackles legal issues raised in superhero comics. I’m not a comics enthusiast or a lawyer myself, so I have little expertise with which to judge its quality, but I’d be curious to hear the opinions of those who know more about either of these things than I do.

Kevin Gold has got two very thought-provoking articles on the jeopardy match-up between human jeopardy champions and IBM’s AI “Watson”, up on Tor’s website. Check them out here and here.

This Washington Post article discusses the story of a Tolkien scholar whose strategy of producing podcasts about Tolkien’s novels for public consumption seems to have won him some success in academia, not to mention a large online following.

The hub of his online activities is a website called The Tolkien Professor, which includes the aforementioned podcast lectures, links to both primary sources and criticism, and information about skype-in office hours.

Aside from the content of his work, Corey Olsen’s career trajectory strikes me as interesting in several respects. It reflects a more-or-less successful bid to make a career of studying genre literature in the academy. It reflects what I view as a commendable effort to reach out of the academy and engage a popular audience with academic research–I would love to see this happen more often, and to be rewarded rather than (at best) tolerated. Finally, of course, it raises the question of college classes being made available free and online–a trend which is extremely exciting, but which is not uncomplicated by questions about the future of academic institutions in a world where higher education costs are skyrocketing. Are universities going to go the way of the newspaper? How should we feel about that if they do?

While we’re talking about innovative solutions to space constraints…

This Hong Kong architect has packed twenty four rooms into his tiny but very versatile apartment, through the magic of movable walls and fold-out facilities.  Apparently, this is environmentally friendly in addition to being awesomely futuristic.

Apparently my father’s friend has a website that contains a large assortment of interesting abstract boardgames (including descriptions and links to the rules) and java applets that allow you to play them online against a computer or another player.  I didn’t recognize most of them, but gipf and its fellows were there and seemed pretty representative.  For those of us who enjoy this sort of game, this could be an awesome way to waste time and meet likeminded people. Hey– if a bunch of us sign up, we might find each other. We could even use it to follow up on the longstanding notion of an online gaming SIG (presumably alongside other similar sites that support other games)…