Last summer turned out to be a bit busier than anticipated. I had a press release, traveled a lot, supervised two excellent summer research students, submitted a paper, taught a class… well, you get the point. Now it’s time for my annual DragonCon recap.
In addition to Live Astronomy (more below), I did a few other things this year. First, I did my own panel on black holes, which was packed to overflow capacity in the Space Track room. It went over fairly well–afterwards one Con goer said it was the best panel he’d ever been to at DragonCon! Later that same day, I was on a panel of guests for a live recording of Astronomy Cast, the excellent podcast by Pamela Gay and Fraser Cain. The topic was “The tough questions in space science”, which boiled down to Fraser asking a series of questions to which the correct answer is “I don’t know”, but which we had to attempt to answer anyway.
On Monday morning, tired and with a burgeoning case of the con crud, I co-hosted a panel with Mika McKinnon, a geophysicist turned science consultant for the entertainment industry who now does excellent science writing for io9. We discussed “The Best News that Wasn’t”, and I was fascinated to learn the way a working journalist sees the phenomenon of science happening in public. Our panel turned into inspiration for Mika’s end of 2014 wrap-up.
Turns out the fall wasn’t much more calm. And now as we prepare for version 3.0 of my sci-fi course, starting in 3 days, it’s time for some updates. For real this time.