Con Report Fantasticon 2018 in Copenhagen

My Dutch friend Jarsto and I had decided to go to the Fantasticon, so we both had week end tickets, and went to register Friday evening.
The theme for this years Fantasticon was Steam Punk, and it was quite fun to see people dressing up.
It was good to meet many old scifi friends, and get to meet a few new ones.

Saturday :
I went to the con, arriving about 1230.
More chatting with other fans, and then attending two program points :
Author interview with Lavie Tidhar, who was quite interesting and amusing to listen to. I just might find some of his books to read.
The second was Edmund Schluessel who talked a bit about cosmology, and told the story of two Danish astronomers :
Tycho Brahe who made as accurate measurements of the stars and planet’s positions and movements as is possible without telescopes. Yes, he did that before the invention of telescopes. He provided a massive amont of data, but did not d9o too much with it, but Johannes Kepler could use the data to form his theory and formulas for the movements of tha planets.
Then the talk went into measring the speed of light. Old measurements made with distances on Earth yielded no measurable delay, and light speed was deemed to be infinite, or in any case, not measurable. That was about to change.
Ole Römer who did use a telescope, among others to watch the moons of Jupiter. He noticed a discrepancy in the timing of eclipses of Jupiter’s Galilean moons, and by seeing the difference in timing when Jupiter was near conjunction with the sun, and in opposition to the sun, he measured the offset in timing and arrived at the conclusion that light does indeed have a finite speed. His result, made with the instrumentation and math of 1676.
He arrived at a speed of 200 000km/sec, which is excellent, considering the instuments used, and within a margin of about 30%.
I live a few km from the remains of Römer’s old observatory, and the Kroppedal museum nearby with some of the instruments used in the observatory, and asked if he knew about it. He did not, and I offered to bring him there for a visit, if he should visit Denmark again. He liked the idea, so we exchanged contact information.
After the talk we had an interesting conversation about science fiction and science in general, so I had an excellent Saturday at the con.

Sunday :
I was arriving a bit earlier than on Saturday, and, as usual having some talks with other fans.
In the afternoon there was a recording of a podcast by two groups. The Danish “Hva’ Fan” podcast and the Swedish “Fandompodden” , making a single podcast, spoken mostly in English. I took some pictures of the recording session.
Finally there war an interview with and a reading by the Danish writer Marie Ladefoged.
I came home with 3 books from the convention, two by Marie Ladefoged (in Danish), and one by Justina Robson.
I had a fun time, and I am looking forward to going to more conventions next year.

Photo a Week #4 Jonathan Frakes at Fedcon 2012

This week’s photo was taken at the Fedcon in Düsseldorf, Germany in May this year.

A very entertaining actor, he suddenly left the stage and walked among the audience.
When he passed right by me I was quick enough with the camera to catch this picture :

Frakes walking by

Jonathan Frakes walking among the audience.

The colours come from the stage lighting, I like the mood of the picture.

As an experiment it may be worth trying to convert this picture to black/white.

DanCon 2010

Today I went to a small scifi convention in Copenhagen.

The DanCon is a one day convention with a single thread, all going on i one room. It is organised by one of the Danish Science fiction societies, Science Fiction Cirklen. Everything was going on in Danish.

The con opened with a very nice panel discussion on “Tendencies English language short stories”, with a few examples of authors old and new.

After lunch we had a very nice presentation on medical science of the future, seen in the light of Star Trek technology, quite entertaining with a few examples illustrating how far we have already come and where we are behind the ST tech. An interesting fact is that the “hypospray” of ST had already been invented and tested some years before the original series aired.

The rest of the afternoon we had a presentation of the older British comic strip “Dan Dare”, a presentation of Anime

The afternoon ended with a presentation of the classic scifi magazine Astounding (before Campbell), an interesting insight into the scifi of the 30’s.

I found that I might have a subject for a presentation on a following con, so I am afraid I may have some work to do until then.

All in all a very enjoyable day meeting scifi friends in Denmark.

Update, and visit to DK

Just back from holidays in DK

Got the blog software updated to the latest version.

I went to the small Danish convention “Fantasticon” (organised by the Danish Scifi association Fantastik)

Nice little con with about 150 people, Guests of Honour were British authors Charles Stross and Gwyneth Jones. Thinking of going to the Easetercon in London next year, and possibly the Eurocon in Stockholm 2011.

“When the Power goes …. Chaos Reigns” (J.C. Hutchins)

– or at least the Internet connection disappears.

This evening I have been powerless for a few hours. I was just taking a break and should be starting my daily post when the lights first faded for a few seconds – then went out. DSL-Modem, computers radio and TV etc – the whole house was dead.

Now what ? since this is quite unusual for this area I first looked out of my windows, and the flats in the next street had lights on – looked to the other corner – more lights. Went to the other side of the flat : a dark area for some miles/km – where there would normally be a sea of lights.

I found myself in one corner of a dark area, with light on two sides. Hmmm. I do not know exactly what happened, but my guess is that a transformer station went up in smoke – likely due to an overload – it can happen if someone digs into a cable (seen that before).

Find a flashlight – I have one or two LED flashlights around , talk to neighbours, one had a non working flashlight – fortunately it just needed new batteries, and she had spares.

No lights, no reading, no tv , no computers, and certainly no internet.

Actually, I don’t mind the dark, then the stars become visible. Unfortunately the stars are blocked by “The Great Northern European Nebula” , aka clouds, so no luck there. Well – I was a little tired, so had an excuse to take a rest.

It took a few hours for the power to return here, so no real harm done.

Funny how much we depend on electricity for our daily activities nowadays. Make me think that I should have some backup power system. Not easy in the flat, but at my house “back home” – that is another matter. I should plan to make some kind of renewable energy generation there, so it is ready when I return to my home country.