I actually took some time off the other week, and besides attending NADWCon I spent a bit of time at the National Aquarium while hanging out in Baltimore. One of the more interesting exhibits was the Jellyfish section, which had quite a selection of types. As I remembered from swimming in the ocean, Jellyfish are not real good at orienting to the local up and down, which should be a bit of a plus for surviving in space (or any other zero G environment).
It has been quite the expedition this week, with all kinds of amazing and exciting events, but it has also been exhausting, and at this point even The Luggage is ready to go home and take a break. We will all be resting up and thinking about everything we want to make sure we can attend next year, but for now a gaping Luggage yawn followed by the fluffy sound of impacting face first into the pillows is the best thing for us. See you all again soon!
Hope everyone is having a great 4th, including all those folks for whom it isn’t a holiday. I spent a lot of years working for Zambelli Bros. every 4th doing fireworks displays at various places, which was very exciting. Something I never would have expected before doing the shows; even when you are lighting off the launch charges on the firing line, you can still hear it when a few thousand people all go “Ooohhh” and “Aaahhh” at the same time. In the interest of retaining what little hearing I have left I no longer do fireworks from ground zero, but enjoy watching the results of other peoples pyrotechnic expertise. I also like virtual fireworks, and thought I would share a nice one I picked up from the Free Flash Animations web site. If you are interested in creating your own, watch the Flash fireworks tutorial, one of a huge collection of animation, coding, and scripting tutorials put together by Adam Khoury. He covers HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, Flash, PHP, and a lot of other really useful languages and server environments.
The original model used in filming the Star Trek series was donated to the Smithsonian, and now they have produced and published an X-Ray Analysis of the Starship Enterprise for everyone to enjoy. You can also see pictures there of where it now hangs in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. If you are in the neighborhood you can attend the Star Trek’s Continuing Relevance symposium at 1PM on Thursday May 16th at the Moving Beyond Earth exhibit in Gallery 113. I should probably also mention that they will not be showing Star Trek Into Darkness at the IMAX theater at the Air and Space Museum on the mall, but they will be showing it at the Udvar-Hazy Center Airbus IMAX Theater in Chantilly, VA. That is the Air and Space annex out by Dulles Airport, you should time your attendance to be able to wander through the Udvar-Hazy Center Museum and see their incredible collection of exhibits, which includes the Space Shuttle Discovery.
If you want to attend the Smithsonian’s Star Trek #SIBeamUp! on May 16th you probably want to get your applications in now, as attendance will be very limited. They will give the ten social media users who gain entry a closer look at the Star Trek goodies in the Air and Space Museum collection (including the Tribbles and the original Enterprise model), and the winners will be able to talk with the curators about the collection. If you want to attend you need to go to the #SIBeamUp! page and fill out and submit the form before noon tomorrow (Monday, May 6th). Winners will be informed by email on May 7th. The event will be held the morning of May 16th at the Air and Space Museum on the mall in DC, and even if you don’t win into the up-close-and-personal event, you can still attend the Star Trek’s Continuing Relevance symposium at 1PM at the Moving Beyond Earth exhibit in Gallery 113.
Coming up on Thursday the 28th at the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at Kansas University, Cory Doctorow will be doing a lecture entitled The Coming War on General Purpose Computing: Every single political issue will end up rehashing the stupid Internet copyright fight. I wish I was anywhere near there so I could attend and hear one of the most innovative and insightful thinkers of the last dozen years give this presentation. If you are nearby, don’t miss it; seating is free, but limited, so you want to get there early. If someone records it and puts in on TED or YouTube, I will post it here, which will at least be better than missing it entirely.
In the meantime, here is a very related presentation he gave back in 2011 that should give you an idea of the subject matter. The Copyright and Intellectual Property questions are very complex, because the solutions to protect one group’s rights would often wipe out every other group’s rights, and what we need is a system that will protect everyone’s rights at once. There is a solution to be found, but not without a lot of work to find common ground and implement a best practices list that actually works for all of us. I appreciate the fact that Doctorow looks at the problem from lots of angles and is not shy about expressing his opinions about all of the components involved with the process.
This stuff is important; it deserves your attention and understanding. Yeah, it may take a bit of time and effort to comprehend but the rewards of getting it right will be amazing for the entire human race. Don’t let the future be determined without taking a moment to find out about the arguments and making your voice heard in favor of the aspects you consider worth fighting for.