(no subject)

Monday October 4, 2013 Science fiction conventions include one for North America (only in years when the World convention is elsewhere), Eurocon, and the Australian National Convention. How long till the remaining continents have continent-wide sf conventions?

My guesses: Asia and South America by the middle of this century. Africa toward the end of 21st or beginning of the 22nd century.

Antarctica will take longer.

***From Twitter:

Tim Maly ‏@doingitwrong Cassandra makes a killing on the stock market and is indicted for insider trading. #modernmythology

Farhad Manjoo ‏@fmanjoo Every year I'd like someone to do a list of news stories of the past year that seemed really important at the time but turned out not to be
Retweeted by Adam L. Penenberg

FOX 8 New Orleans ‏@FOX8NOLA 15 Jan A dense dog advisory remains in effect until 6 pm tonight.
Retweeted by NaturallyCurlyHair

R.L. Ripples ‏@TweetsofOld Fifteen telephone girls employed by the New England Telephone Co. were discharged for taking dinner in "disgraceful" Chinatown. MA1908

(no subject)

Tuesday October 5, 2013 Ranked Choice Voting was supposed to bewilder Minneapolis voters this year. Not me. I've used versions of what used to be called the Australian Ballot for decades, in two science fiction clubs.

For that matter, this was the second mayoral election using RCV. But in 2009, a popular mayor was running for reelection and had weak opposition. R.T. Rybak got a majority of first place votes.

This time, 35 people ran. Voters were supposed to mark their first, second, and third choices.

The city council race was simpler. My Ward's incumbent (Green Party) is competent. His one opponent belonged to the Socialist Workers Party, and doesn't seem to have campaigned much.

I voted at Van Cleve Park. And answered a survey after I voted.

***As Joseph Lykken, a theorist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and Maria Spiropulu, of the California Institute of Technology, put it in a new paper reviewing the history and future of the Higgs boson:

"Taken at face value, the result implies that eventually (in 10^100 years or so) an unlucky quantum fluctuation will produce a bubble of a different vacuum, which will then expand at the speed of light, destroying everything."

The idea is that the Higgs field could someday twitch and drop to a lower energy state, like water freezing into ice, thereby obliterating the workings of reality as we know it. Naturally, we would have no warning. Just blink and it’s over.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/opecdqz