Category: Travel
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Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, Day 2
The first day of the Interstellar Workshop featured the Starship Century and Breakthrough StarShot groups. On Thursday the Tau Zero Foundation took center stage. The Tau Zero group aren't as wedded to a single goal or mission profile. Instead they've put a lot of effort into identifying key technologies which will benefit any interstellar exploration, and…
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Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, Day 1
Why "Tennessee Valley" for a conference in Alabama? Look at a map. The mighty Tennessee River meanders into northern Alabama on its way west. What with Knoxville, Huntsville, and Oak Ridge, the upper Tennessee River valley is quite the high-tech corridor. Just the place to plan how to send a probe to Alpha Centauri some…
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What I Saw At The Eclipse, Part 4
Once the main event was over, we spent another couple of days on vacation in Charleston before the long drive back up the East Coast to Mole Hill. There's a lot to see and do in the Low Country, and we could easily have spent another week. The day after the eclipse we spent at…
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What I Saw At The Eclipse, Part 3
Finally, the whole reason for our trip to Charleston arrived: the great eclipse of 2017! And it was . . . cloudy that morning. The forecast called for overcast skies and a chance of thunderstorms. Uh-oh. We had picked our rental cottage precisely because it was in the path of totality, so we didn't have…
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What I Saw At The Eclipse, Part 2
Charleston is a fascinating city to visit, but in August its most insistently noticeable feature is the heat. I have ancestors who lived in Charleston before relocating to New Orleans, and now I understand they were looking for a place that wasn't quite so hot and muggy. The high temperatures really weren't all that hot:…
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What I Saw At The Eclipse, Part 1
Until last week I had only ever seen one eclipse before: the annular eclipse of June 1984, which had a path of totality which passed just north of New Orleans, my hometown. That one was pretty neat, so a few years ago when my wife and I learned about the coast-to-coast 2017 eclipse, we started…
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Convention Report: Albacon 2017
(". . . Featuring ME!") I drove west through sleet, rain, and fog — but no snow, which was a huge relief as I was in a car without snow tires — to Albany, which looks as if someone decided to drop the 1960s capital city of a large post-colonial nation into the middle of…
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The Ultimate Game World
For more than a year now I've been running a Pathfinder roleplaying game campaign at my local game shop. The players seem to enjoy it, and so do I. Though I use the Pathfinder rules pretty much as published, one thing I do not use is the "official" Paizo Publishing game world, Golarion. I don't…
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PhilCon 2016, Featuring ME!
This weekend I'll be attending the venerable PhilCon science fiction convention, at the Crowne Plaza hotel in scenic Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Here's my schedule of events: Friday, November 18, 8:00 p.m., Plaza III: Utopias That Make Us Cringe — I'll be moderating a panel on utopian societies in science fiction that don't actually seem very…
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MidAmeriCon II, Day 4!
Sunday was a light day for me, and for everyone else as the con wound down. Lots of people standing in hotel lobbies having conversations while holding suitcases. My only event on the 21st was a panel on "How To Start A Writing Group" which went extremely well. I was the moderator, and my panelists…
The Cambias Digression 