Windycon

Nov 15, 2008 17:48

mia_mcdavid and I are at Windycon. We attended this convention for 20 years when we lived in Chicagoland and it, with some help from Capricon, defined our sense of what a science fiction convention should be. We are having a great time. I have not been to a Windycon since 1997, but it feels just like old times. We have reconnected with a lot of old friends from our Chicago days.

This is also a belated 30th anniversary trip for us. We were married in 1978 and the Windycon that year was our first con together. Last night we went to dinner at the local (Lombard - western suburb) branch of Greek Islands. Our first date, back in the spring of 1977, was at a restaurant in Chicago's Greektown. We have not found a Minnesota Greek restaurant that is comparable to what Chicago has.

Today I have been to two excellent talks by beamjockey. The first was on Antimatter's Science Fiction Debut. He started with the physics of Einstein, Dirac, and Anderson, and then went on to how it worked its way into science fiction, appearing clearly in the work of Jack Williamson.

The second talk was about the New Horizons Pluto space probe. He also talked about the "is Pluto a planet?" controversy. One key point he made was that this was not the first time astronomers have struggled with this kind of issue. Ceres, Vesta, etc. were originally considered planets, before the discovery of so many similar objects in what we now call the asteroid belt forced a reclassification. We are now seeing a similar process with Pluto and the other Kuiper belt objects.

food, chicago, science fiction, mia, fandom, cons, physics, astronomy

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