Vericon is a science-fiction, fantasy, gaming, and anime convention featuring many events and distinguished guest speakers. It has been held annually at Harvard University since 2001. The tenth Vericon will take place on Friday-Sunday, March 19-21, 2010. The convention is sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association (HRSFA), an undergraduate student group.

This year’s Guest of Honor is Timothy Zahn. It’s guaranteed to be a great Con, so if you’re in the Boston area–or can get there in the next 24 hours–I highly recommend you check it out!

In addition to all of the wonderful Vericon events, we have two HRSFANS events planned for the weekend: Saturday night Non-Cons, and Sunday lunch. See the hrsfans-announce email list for more information.

I don’t want to say too much more at this time, although many HRSFANS will be able to guess which two people I’m talking about.  I’m certain it’s going to be good.  In the past their cooking has been described as second in Boston only to L’Espalier (in print, no less!).

I encourage all interested parties to follow their blog (feed) and try them out after their expected open in late May 2010.

In brief, lay terms, as I have heard it, there was this brilliant young French mathematician in the 1950s by the name of Alexandre Grothendieck who all but single-handedly revolutionized/created certain fields of Algebraic Geometry. Some 10-15 years later, he gave up academic life, moved to the Pyrrenées, and became a sheep farmer.

Since Grothendieck’s disengagement, his body of work has remained wildly useful and has formed a bedrock for later mathematical generations. The respect accorded to his own writings has gone so far as to inspire its own personal Distributed Proofreaders analogue for creating a TeX version of a long systematic work, “Séminaire de Géométrie Algébrique” (or SGA). The free electronic SGA project has been ongoing for the better part of a decade or more; volumes SGA 1 and SGA 2 are up on the arXiv already.

It seems just possible that might not be true much longer.

Behold the text of the until-recently-current webpage for the SGA 4 project:

Alexandre Grothendieck a malheureusement souhaité que cessent les travaux de réédition de SGA. Les pages qui étaient consacrées sont donc closes.
Dernière actualisation : 2 février 2010.

There is slightly more information, and much discussion, at Scott Morrison’s post on the Secret Blogging Seminar, a group math weblog. Again in brief (and English), Grothendieck apparently resurfaced enough to put out a letter stating that he doesn’t want his work republished or translated.

And he wags his finger at anyone who has done so or wants to.

Which is the really weird part. Assuming the letter is genuine, what legal ramifications does it actually have? Why use a phrase like “unlawful in my eyes,” which sounds to me deliberately obfuscatory? (Legality is not a matter of an individual’s vision.) The comments on the SBSeminar post seem weighted towards arguments as to the moral dimensions of Grothendieck’s stated wishes and a given mathematician’s obligation to respect them (or not). To me, the legal questions are more pressing and pertinent. Whether one has a moral obligation to respect an author’s wishes is a decision one makes for oneself. Whether the mathematical community as a whole has a legal obligation to take Grothendieck at his word has greater ramifications–and probably a single, findable answer (unlike a question of personal morality).

Edixhoven, one of the prior leaders of the TeX SGA project, did research the distribution question through the publishers and was told copyright had in fact reverted to the original authors (as he states on the linked page). This seems to indicate Grothendieck is not out of line to say he withholds his permission. But the questions only start there. …

Some on the SBSeminar comment thread made the “glass half full” suggestion that maybe it’s time SGA got a revamp anyhow. Yet the original is still a precious resource. I’ll be interested to try to follow what decisions are made.

You can hear a bit more about acroyoga in this video (but the demonstrations aren’t as impressive): Jason and Jenny, who you see in the embedded video here, invented the sport about five years ago in Berkeley, CA. I’ve heard of an acroyoga class being offered in Amsterdam, so apparently it’s spread quite quickly.

Fond, frightening, and mixed memories of the 1999 HRSFA-HCS Assassins War. Which reminds me that someone really ought to create a stories page on the HRSFANS wiki. (Yes, I realize that having said that, I am accepting de facto responsibility…)

Yes: jury duty! This was my first summons, and I was very excited. Even throughout the real trial (hearing the evidence) I kept jumping in my seat thinking, “This is really happening!” Deliberations, however, were both much more and much less than I had expected. More time, certainly, but less histrionics; more conversation, and less changing of minds; more philosophy, but less idealism. In essence, these deliberations comprised the greatest game of Mafia I have played since 1998.

It was a civil case, breach of contract. That’s all I’ve been telling people for the past more than two weeks, and somehow I don’t feel like giving more specifics even now that I am allowed to. Let’s just say that we made sure everybody got shafted. To some extent, that includes every member of this jury.

And yet I’m so happy about having had this experience.  And I even can’t wait until the next time I’m eligible to be called (probably after I move away from Boston, as it happens).  I want to do it all again–new facts, new evidence, new people, new chance!  New chance for each of us to keep some more of our ideals.

Today nerves and patience started fraying.  I came in hoping that we could step away from the content of our issues and focus more on the procedures.  That’s something I learned about myself (partially in contrast to some of my juror-colleagues) yesterday: I am process-oriented as opposed to goal-oriented.  My opinion fluxuated over the course of the deliberations.  I voted “yes,” “no,” and several rounds of “maybe.”  And that was how I felt it should be, because the important part to me was the collective ‘wisdom’ of the group, the trends.  I’m not saying I voted majority for the sake of majority, but rather that I trusted that, if we kept our heads as clear and calm as possible and honored the flow of information and interpretation, that we would come up with an answer that was greater (and possibly different) from the simple sum of our individual opinions.  On the final day of deliberations some of the others laid it straight on the table that they knew what they knew and that they were not going to change.  I was disappointed with that concept, though I didn’t put it in those terms to them.  Given what everyone else knew/believed/interpreted, how could I be cetain that what I “knew” was what was?

The verdict we eventually delivered was explicitly (and only half justifiably) a compromise.  We needed 11 of 13 jurors to agree before we could go back to the courtroom, and we got that exactly (i.e. the group minus the people who held firm).  We told each other that this was what the parties to the lawsuit would have expected–and gotten–anyway.  Maybe not that dollar figure, but something less than what the plaintiff asked for, and more than what the defendant wanted to settle for.

So it goes.  And now that I’ve had a night to sleep it over (after an evening of zombie-shuffling about post-courthouse) I can say again it was really cool.  So don’t assume you want to “get out of” jury duty next time you get summonsed!

The classic example of this, for me, is a magnet in your finger which gives you a sense of metal and electricity. I don’t remember hearing anything about it in the years since the WIRED article, though, and the most recent information I could find was in BMEZine about how they needed better sheaths for the magnets before it would really be safe. Does anyone else know how our posthuman future is progressing?

(via Ben Goldacre)