Tuesday Newsday will resume next week.

Saturday, I managed to get to more panels, but not nearly as many as I wanted. Why? That is a little complicated, but in a word : sleepiness.

I made the mistake of taking two Quetiapine when I went to bed at around 2 am, after leaving Kathleen’s excellent room party. It seemed like a smart idea at the time. I figured I would get to sleep and sleep for a long while then wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to attend a zillion panels. I would mostly be asleep during a time when there was no programming, and hence, my waking time would be synced up with the time when there was stuff to do. Perfect.

But no. I forgot that it takes between an hour and an hour and a half for the pills to kick in, and that ideally I should be active in that period for full effectiveness. Instead, I took the pills and went straight to bed without even doing any reading first, and that just does not work for me. The change is too abrupt from active to dormant, and I was in a strange bed and a strange place to boot.

The result was that it took a very long time for me to fall asleep at all, and when I did, it was not very good quality sleep. and overall, it was a pretty lousy night.

And when I finally managed to drag myself out of bed, get showered and get out to the con, I was so sleepy that I could barely remain upright, even after scoring a can of Diet Coke from a vending machine^[1].

So when at 11 am I managed to get to the So You Want To Be A Writer panel, I was a wreck. I had to rest my head against the (empty) chair in front of me just to keep from passing out. At the time I was paranoid that the panelist would think that I was being a total dick by pretending to be extremely bored, but that was just the sleepiness talking. They are experienced panelists, and have probably had some attendees in their audiences who were worse off than I was considering that I don’t even drink. They probably assumed I was hung over, if they noticed me at all. They certainly would not take it personally.

So, phew there.

It was a fun panel, or at least what little I remember of it was fun. Frankly, I was not exactly in the most retentive of frames of mind.

And so, despite my plans, I had to go back to our hotel room and get more sleep. This still pisses me off when I think about it. I will get over it eventually, I imagine. But for now, I am sort of angry at the universe for making me miss a big chunk of the day’s activities.

So I slept for two and a half hours, then went to Hospitality for more food, and then went to a hella fun panel called Justify The Science Flaw. The basic idea was that the panel brought up a lot of bad science from bad (and good) science fiction stories, and with the help of we the audience, tried to come up with some kind of way to explain them away. ^[2]

It turned out to be even more fun than that sounds, because we were all keenly aware of the absurdity of the exercise and especially of our explanations, so we were pretty much laughing the whole way through.

Sadly, I was not yet fully awake, so I do not remember most of the specifics. I remember us talking about an obscure moment from an obscure show, namely 20,00 Leagues Under The Sea : The Series.

The gist of it was that at one point, the Nautilus was under the Arctic ice when huge pieces of said ice began to fall down on it.

Um, ice floats, folks. Look in your cocktail glass. Life on Earth could not exist if solid water, namely ice, was not less dense than liquid water.

I forget our solution, but it involved a massive magnetic field magnetizing the ice, so it was not exactly plausible. Funny, though.

Then, sadly, I needed more naptime, so the next panel was at 6 pm, and it was another red hot science injection, in this case, it was The Discovery Of The Accelerating Universe.

Regular readers will know that astrophysics is one of my favorite drugs, and learning how they figured out that the expansion of the universe is accelerating involved a lot of it. So while I would rather have talked about the implications of the discovery rather than its history, it was still a crash course in astrophysics and I was once more left with a pleasantly glowing brain.

After that, a bunch of us nerds went to a sushi place called Tengeku, and I discovered that years of only eating Japanese food at all you can eat places had completely wrecked my ability to decide what I want from a standard menu.

Eventually I just got two orders of Kappa maki and a teriyaki donburi. The donburi was particularly good. A lot of places think that all you need to do to make a donburi is put the main ingredient on rice, but a proper donburi has layers of veggies and such as well. And the Tengeku people know this.

All that for around $15, too. Not bad!

After that, we went back to the hotel and went to bed.

Had a blast at V-con 37 over the last weekend.

Joe and I got to the hotel (the Vancouver Guildford Sheraton). We got checked in ^[1] and went through registration. My badge was a very plain and functional one because I am apparently the scum of the Earth for not pre-registering. The pre-registered people got a very pretty badge. Same font tho, which is something, I guess.

Then I took a little while to rest in our room and acclimate before heading into the convention itself. Our room was fine, but not as fancy as some we have had in previous years. I particularly missed the full kitchen that our room had last year. That was marvelous. We brought a bunch of food from home, and were able to make our own toast and such. Made it feel a lot more like home. The room we had this year did not even have a microwave, and even more shocking, didn’t even have a minibar.

I have not seen a room without a minibar in at least a decade. Why would a hotel give up that opportunity to soak people who are too lazy to leave their room and are willing to pay $14 for a Tobelerone.

In fact, when you think of it, the minibar is just an extension of the same sort of thinking that lets hotel restaurants charge about $4 per item more than anywhere else. Sure, you could pay less… but then you would have to leave the comfy confines of the hotel. You would have to get your outside clothes on, and venture out into an unfamiliar place, and who knows what kind of food you will end up getting?

So you pay the extra money. And presumably, the minibar was invented by some genius who thought “Wait, if they will pay that much not to leave the hotel, imagine what crazy prices they will pay to not have to leave their hotel room!”.

Seems he was right! I mean, I have never taken anything out of a minibar because I am constitutionally incapable of paying that kind of markup. But a lot of people, especially those on expense accounts so it is not their money, probably clean that sucker out.

And speaking of hotel restaurants, Joe and I and a few other people had a meal there on Friday night. At first, we thought the place was way too expensive for us and that my theory that these place usually have a few reasonably priced low end items for the likes of us would prove not to be true.

But then the waitress, with admirable diplomacy, asked us if we would prefer something “lighter” and gave us the “bar menu”, where things that were merely ludicrously priced could be found.

I pulled a full gauche and got the burger and fries. And the burger, I must admit, was damned good. The fries were good too, but not exceptionally so. But the burger was almost as good as Boston Pizza’s very excellent prime rib burgers. So, pretty high marks.

After dinner, I took another little siesta in our hotel room, then I headed over 8 doors down to a room party that the inestimable Kathleen Moore was hosting, and I was having fun so ended up staying there for the rest of the evening. That’s the main reason I could never be much of a social butteryfly : when I am happy, I stay put. I only explore when I grow bored or unhappy. At parties, I usually just find a comfortable spot and stay there.

Not exactly power schmoozing.

I only ended up going to one panel on Friday, but it was an awesome one. It was entitled Thorium Reactors On Mars, and while it had very little to do with Mars, I didn’t care. I want Thorium reactors right here on Earth, right now!

And the talk was completely kickass. The presenter was funny and very knowledgeable about the subject, and basically gave us a light speed crash course on all the science and technology of nuclear reactors from the very first ones to the awesomeness of the Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors ^[2] that are the blazing new hotness in the science of energy production today.

I really enjoyed the talk, although afterward I kind of felt like my brain was glowing red hot from all the knowledge. I am sure I did not truly absorb most of it. But it was a hell of a ride anyhow.

And I am totally stoked about the possibilities inherent in Thorium reactors. The efficiency alone would be spectacular. It would be a self-regulating reaction, Thorium is almost as abundant in the Earth’s crust as lead, it has only one isotope so there is no isotope separation process needed like there is with traditional nuclear reactors, the process does not make the kind of fuel needed for nuclear bombs, and the energy yield is enormous.

And those are just the benefits I can list off the top of my head. Hmmm, I guess I do retain some of it. Maybe not all the nuclear physics, but at least I recall the pitch reel.

Still, I wish I had the talk recorded to video. I would love to learn it all! But what I am most interested in now that I am totally sold on the idea is just exactly how much it would take to build one of these LFTR reactors, or better yet, to set up a factory that can produce them en masse.

This revolution can’t happen fast enough for me!