Thursday, October 30, 2008

IKEA expert!

This post is just some rambling, IKEA-related thoughts.

I still haven't visited IKEA in Canada. People ask me things: "So, do you actually have IKEA in Sweden, or is it just something you are exporting?" or "Do those names on the things really mean something? What is "Poang" for example?" (Yes, no, yes, and "point" -- it's Poäng, actually.)

People also assure me that IKEA has "all kinds of Swedish food". I wonder. Will they carry kaviar (the pink cod roe bread spread) or tunnbröd (really thin, flat, white bread)? At some point I will have to go and investigate. Now that I actually have a driver's license it will probably be easier.

Anyway, I found the study mentioned here (end of the post) interesting: it says that people tend to like things more if they invest some effort in them. Like assembling the furniture after taking it home from the store. I'm not surprised, but it's interesting to get a confirmation that this is how humans work. If it's too easy to get, it's not worth as much to you.

It reminds me of the first science fiction story I ever tried to write (I was about 14), where there was a youth sub culture where it was high status to wear and use only things you had made yourself. Lots of time invested, and definitely unique -- more cred than anything mass produced. It's actually a little bit like that in many LARP circles. Of course, assembling IKEA furniture does not take any craft skills whatsoever, and you don't show off the results to brag, but it's interesting to see that people value their own possessions not only after how much money they put in them, but also how much work (even if it's as little as assembling an IKEA bed).

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

How to make convention panels work

I have been to two sf conventions in Canada. At one of them, I was a programme participant. At both, I was thinking about what it is that makes the panels run smoothly. One common problem seems to be that panelists don't show up for their panels. Someone told me that this is because they might have been signed up for the panel six months ago, and by now they have forgotten about it. This can easily be avoided by some planning.

There are many other things I have learned over the years, involved in planning and arranging cons myself. Here are my thoughts on how to make the panel part of the convention program work well. I should say that my experience is from small(ish) conventions, but I think most of this will apply also for conventions with several hundred members.

Topics. Brainstorm, look at other conventions for inspiration, use the special interests of the guests. Test the topics by discussing them yourself. If you cannot keep it going for more than a few minutes, it might not work for a panel. If it's something you know nothing about this might be difficult -- then try instead to come up with interesting questions. If you can write down ten or so, then it might be a good topic for a panel.

Participants. Don't just wait for people to sign up, also actively ask people you know with some knowledge of the topic in question. Try to put together a panel of people who are not only interested in the topic, but will also work well as a panel. Usually you might not know everyone on the panel, but try as best you can to balance the participants. A very loud and talkative person needs to be balanced by a strong moderator, especially if there are some more quiet or shy people on the same panel.

Information to moderators. Don't assume that everyone knows what they are supposed to do. Make sure that the moderators know what their task is: keep the panel on topic, and let everyone get to speak. Provide them with the panel description in the green room just before the panel, in case they forgot their notes. Add some help questions to that, it can never hurt. You owe it to the members to make sure that the panel is really about what it says in the programme that it's going to be about. Interesting sidetracks can be noted and pursued later in the bar (or whatever meeting place your con has).

Information for all participants. Send out an email about a week before the con, containing at least the following information. Don't assume that everyone knows it all! Even experienced panelists might need some reminders.


  • A list with the panels this person is signed up for, as a reminder.

  • Instructions to check on arrival to make sure that when and where your panels are. Check also during the con, for changes.

  • Instructions to meet with the others on the panel in the Green Room just before the panel starts. It will give them time to say hello and make sure that they all agree on what it is they are going to discuss.

  • A description of the compensation panelists are offered, whether it is free things from the bar or discount on the membership. Just so that everyone is aware of this in advance.



Leave some space for the panelists to breathe. If possible, don't put the same person on two panels after eachother. In any case, make sure that there is 10 minutes between panels, to let panelists and audience find the next thing they are going to.

Include all information in the printed programme. Yes, the members need to understand what the panels are about. Don't give just a fun title, make sure to provide at least one sentence of description. A nice thing is to also include a very short presentation of the panelists in the programme book, especially if the convention is so large that not everyone will meet everyone. (At Swedish conventions this might be interesting mostly for new fans, since everyone else usually knows everyone already, but nevertheless.)

That was all, at least all I can think of right now. Any thoughts or comments? Anything I should add or remove?

Addendum: someone just reminded me that it can be a good idea to prepare a little guide for each panelist (or other programme participants), just a printed list of items with time and location for each. It's good if it's small enough to fit in the badge holder, so you can easily have it ready at all times. Very helpful!

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Listening to dark matter

This appears to have been significant enough for a press release!

A team of researchers in Canada have made a bold stride in the struggle to detect dark matter. The PICASSO collaboration has documented the discovery of a significant difference between the acoustic signals induced by neutrons and alpha particles in a detector based on superheated liquids.


The PICASSO collaboration has a new paper out in New Journal of Physics. Of course the press release text is a bit easier to digest. Recommended.

(Lots of things going on now, so this corner of the blogosphere has been a bit quiet lately. I won't promise anything.)

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Stan Robinson is a "Hero of the Environment"

My favourite author (if I can still call him that, I haven't read anything by him since Sixty Days and Counting showed up in the bookstores) is among the "Heroes of the Environment 2008" in Time.

In a genre full of environmental warnings, Robinson's gift is a vision that uses the environment and its complexity as the focus of all that happens, rather than merely as grim set dressing or allegorical overlay. And that vision is optimistic about what could, with sufficient will, be brought about. He sees creating utopias as a technical challenge to his craft — they're hard to do convincingly and interestingly. But he also sees them as an empty ecological niche in the imagination; if only to maximise cultural biodiversity, he wants that niche filled.


It's a good short introduction to Kim Stanley Robinson and his books.

I think I will have to reread the Mars-books soon.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Cherenkov blue

I have been digging around in all the "draft" posts, things that I have written for this blog and never actually posted. The following was written in spring. I think I refrained from posting it because I thought it was silly to pick apart one little thing from a story, in this way. Now that I have read it again I think it's kind of OK anyway -- I just take the story as a starting point for discussing some physics which has nothing much to do with the story itself. Take it as it is-




I have read a good story with a not-so-catchy title ("The Sky that Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue and Into the Black") by Jay Lake, in Clarkesworld Magazine.

I really liked this story. I'm not going to write a review, just use it as a starting point for some thoughts (as I often do). But first, I want to quote one line that I just love:

A billion billion years from now, even General Relativity might have been demoted to a mere Captain.


Go read the story. And then, come back here again if you want to talk about details and physics.

You see, I'm going to show my geeky side again. I have nothing against taking some poetical liberties in fiction, but some things just make me itch to tell someone how it really is. Anyone. It's not that I think it has to be straightened out, it's just that I get enthusiastic when I notice that I have some expert knowledge. Therefore: Cherenkov light. But first the paragraph that got me started:

I've been told the specks of light are the excitation trails of neutrinos passing through the aqueous humor of the human eye. They used to bury water tanks in Antarctic caves to see those things, back before orbit got cheap enough to push astronomy and physics into space where those sciences belong. These days, all you have to do is go for a walk outside the planet's magnetosphere and be patient.


Can you see blue flashes from neutrinos in your eyes, if you go outside the magnetosphere? Well, hmm, almost. Neutrinos themselves are not ionizing -- they don't leave "excitation trails" -- but if they happen to interact with matter (a rare event, most neutrinos just pass through without caring the slightest about any matter around it) an electrically charged particle can be created. This particle will kick the electrons in the atoms it passes and disturb them: the atoms might be excited or ionized.

The flash of blue the author is talking about is Cherenkov light. A charged particle is a source of an electric field, and when it's moving through matter it will will be like a ripple in the electric potential the electrons experience. The atomic electrons will wobble a little as the particle passes by, and that electon motion will create a little electromagnetic wave -- light. Every wobbling electron is like a tiny antenna emitting a wave front. If the material is transparent to light, and if the particle happens to move faster than the electromagnetic wavefronts from all of the disturbed electrons, the crests of all the little waves will coincide and build up to a stronger wave. This wave is the visible Cherenkov light, the spooky radiation glow that you might have seen from the water around nuclear reactors or storage of radioactive materials. (As people like to point out Cherenkov radiation is analogous to a sonic boom, but I suspect most people don't think enough about sonic booms for this to be very helpful.)

That thing about water tanks in Antarctic caves is not entirely true either, but almost. Neutrino detectors are located underground to sheild them from cosmic rays. The thing about Antarctica is not the caves, but the ice -- so a neutrino detector in Antarctica is of course using the natural ice as a detector medium. And shielding. Why not use it, when it's three kilometers thick?

The interesting question is now: if all humans close their eyes and watch for blue flashes, could we detect neutrinos? Yes, it's not theoretically impossible, but we would detect far more cosmic rays than anything else so we would never be able to tell the neutrino induced flashes from everything else.

Because we do have cosmic rays (particles moving fast) inside atmosphere, even though the magnetic field is protecting the earth from part of the flux. Among them we have lots and lots of muons, a particle which is like a heavy electron. The muons are very penetrating, and it's mainly because of them we have to hide the neutrino detectors (and dark matter detectors) underground. The muons are actually created in the atmosphere, when cosmic rays in the form of for example protons collide with atoms in the air. They have a short life, which actually demonstrates time dilation in special relativity -- if this effect did not exist, they would decay before reaching the ground.

So, as you can understand, if we could take all human eyes and take note of all the flashes we can see, almost all of them would be caused by muons from cosmic rays.

Another inconvenient aspect of the human eye as a neutrino detector is of course that with 6.7 billion separately operated detectors it would be hard work to interpret the data!