Archive for On the Road

Images, Opera, Israel.

  A bit of a break from the doom’n’gloom; instead of rubbing your noses in real-world apocalypsi, I’ll rub them in my fictional ones instead. Those at least have the advantage of cool cover art.    Air Quotes in Israel First off, though, let me pull a 180 and announce something downright literally Utopian: to […]

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The Lviv International Book Forum: Huge Hearts, Tiny Bods.

The first thing that occurs to me when I arrive— well, the second thing, after wondering about all the little plumes of smoke rising from the surrounding countryside (which nobody in Lviv seems to know anything about)— is Hey, this place really reminds me of Poland. Lviv actually used to be part of Poland, back […]

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Beijing.

Eight thousand kilometers out of Beijing, I already know I’m in China. The intercom welcomes me to CA962 while the plane’s still taxiing out onto the runway in Frankfurt: “I am the head of the security detachment for this flight. I and my staff have been charged with keeping order. You may suffer detention, sanction, […]

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Just So You Know.

Yeah, pretty quiet here lately. Those of you insecure and craven enough to be on Facebook (like, for example, me) might know it’s because I worked for a few weeks on this talk about the evolution of delusional optimism in Homo sapiens, to give at this weekend’s Asia-Pacific SF Con in Beijing. It was originally […]

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A Tale of Two Cities (or, I Think I’ll Wait Another Year)

The first city is Montreal, to which I’ll be returning next week: Concordia once more, this time to deliver a lecture entitled “The Best-Case Apocalypse: Why Reality Is Worse Than Fiction.” (I was going to call it “My Dinner With Daniel”, but I figured the reference might be too obscure.) It’s part of a longer […]

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The 600.

When a pop science symposium takes place in Bulgaria’s premiere, state-of-the-art convention hall— when past speakers include bestselling authors and actual scientists talking about their own cutting-edge research— and when they ask you to give a talk on a profoundly difficult branch of science in which you have no formal expertise whatsoever— it’s reasonable to […]

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Proof of Principle

Dateline Munich. Scribbled in a near-coma while sitting in a chair which has been designed by aliens who obviously never looked at a human body. Which is to say, at an airport… Something slipped under my radar last week. I was nose-deep in “Freeze-Frame Revolution” and the upcoming Ratio talk, and when I looked up […]

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“You Tried So Hard”, The Toilet of Poking, and Other Tales of Adrenaline Week.

Three days in Warsaw.  Three in Poznań. Four days in Berlin. Fifteen hours travel time stapled to either end. It rained the whole time. I’m typing this 15000 meters over the Mid Atlantic Ridge. Behind us, Europe is turning bright and sunny after its long deluge. Ahead of us, Toronto braces to evacuate waterfront homes […]

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Noms and Cons and Metal Alms

Stuff’s been piling up in the wings as a side-effect of my ongoing battle against ego creep— enough now, as it turns out, to warrant a whole catch-all catch-up post in its own right. And since some of the following travel plans might intersect with the occasional fan, I should probably outline where I’m going […]

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Pyrkon, Philosophy, William Shatner

They’ve announced it on Facebook, they’ve put it up on their website, so I guess I can announce it here: after a five-year absence, I seem to be returning to Poland as a “Special Guest” of Pyrkon: a massive Polish con attended by somewhere around forty thousand folks annually. According to the facebook comments attending […]

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