Cool People I Hang With

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One of the perks of being a science fiction writer is the cool people you get to hang out with.  Physicist-writers, for example.

I was hanging with David Hartwell yesterday when Greg Benford called.  He said he'd just been at DARPA's Hundred Year Starship Symposium, and that so far as he could tell he was the only one there who'd blogged about it. 

Then I was hanging with John and Pauline Cramer and John said that he'd recently had the pleasant experience of being on an airplane sandwiched between two Benfords -- Greg and Jim.  That must have been lively conversation!

John also told me that he'd been en route to the Symposium when news broke about the supposed faster-than-light tachyons.  So he immediately logged onto the Web and read the articles about it, and then the original paper.  After running a few calculations, he contacted the symposium organizers and asked if they'd like him to do a presentation on that morning's news.  They said yes, so he quickly wrote a science article on the topic for Analog. 

I was just chatting, so I can't synopsize Cramer's argument with any accuracy.  Essentialy, he said that the numbers didn't come out consistent with the claims.

You can read Greg's blog here.  You can read John's article in Analog in the not-too-distant future.

Above:  My shadow visiting Lester Park in New York State.  Those rock formations are 490-million-year-old fossil stromatolites.  That just made my month.

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