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Philcon

Philcon

[lj-cut]10:27:35 <lost1> are you busy today? I’ll take you to philcon if you need to get out/away
10:27:56 <pleia2> hmm, that’s very tempting, what time are you going?

I hadn’t really put any thought into going. On Wednesday waltman and mentioned it, but I mostly filtered it out because my hobby focus lately has been more on spirituality and computers than scifi and gaming. In fact, I’ve put the latter two on the back burner and turned that burner off, so much time lately has been consumed with the former.

So I headed over to ‘s place and then she drove us down to Philly for Philcon 2005.

And now I have a confession to make: I’d never been to a Scifi Convention.

So today was my first experience. was my guide through the booths and rooms where all the stuff was going on, but we pretty much split up when it came to the panels/talks we wanted to hear.

First I went to Imagine No Religion, which was described as “Will we ever live in a truly post-religious future or will people continually come up with something new?” That sounded interesting, and one of tne of the panelists was David Silverman of NoGodBlog.com. The talk seemed to be more an evaluation of current belief systems and disagreements between the various panelists than a discussion of the future. Slightly disappointing since I’ve already gone through the “journey to find god” or whatever and I’m quite familiar with everything they talked about. On the bright side it was nice to see David Silverman.

Next I went to Attack of the Superbugs, which was described as “No, not the six-legged or even eight-legged kind, but the even nastier ones you can’t see: viruses, megapathogens, flesh-eating bacteria… We feel we’ve stomped out many of the old, terrible plagues, but could they be back in a new and improved form? Is the overuse of antibiotics just leading to our own eventual downfall?” This sounded interesting too. Unfortunately it turns out I knew too much about this too! The talk was not at all enlightening, simply confirming stuff I already knew. I enjoyed it though.

Then I went down to SETI on the Web: Two Alternative Strategies, which is described as “Paul “Dr. SETI” Shuch will update us on the latest developments and possibilities in the ongoing Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” – Neat! This was fun! Dr. H. Paul Shuch is the Executive Director of SETI, and his talk outlined the history of SETI (some of which I actually didn’t know). Then he discussed Invitation to ETI and told some amusing stories about that. He even got out his guitar and played some songs about SETI (more info about songs here). Ah, good times. The audience was pretty small and I got to meet him briefly after the talk *glee*

After this I met up with in a wrap up meeting for the con, then we went to dinner.

I had a great day %D[/lj-cut]

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2005 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.