Category: Highlights

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A few lessons we learned the hard way on our recent trip to Chicago for Worldcon/Chicon 7.

#1: Don’t count on laundry being easy. The hotel we stayed at didn’t have a laundry room, but they did have a laundry service…for $8 a shirt. Fine for the business traveler who needs one outfit cleaned, but a family of three could spend hundreds of dollars on a single load. No problem, you might think: find a laundromat. No such luck: As near as we could find, there are no laundromats in downtown Chicago. I ended up spending $12 each way for a taxi out to the suburbs so we could have clean clothes for the second half of the trip. The most expensive load of laundry I’ve ever done, but an order of magnitude cheaper than the hotel laundry service.

What do people who live in Chicago do if their washing machine breaks down? Or do the high-rise buildings have extra laundry rooms for residents?

#2: Having your toddler’s own car seat on the airplane is great. Lugging it around the airport, hotel, shuttles and taxis? Not so much. J slept through the first ⅔ of the flight out and the first ⅓ of the flight back. Despite the unfamiliar circumstances of the plane, he was in a familiar, comfortable seat, and I’d recommend it for any parent who can afford to buy their toddler his/her own seat. But it’s still a pain to drag it around. Update: We’ve since picked up a tiny folding luggage cart. We can roll the seat all around the airport, then fold up the cart and put it in a carry-on bag. I think it cost about $15-20.

#3: Remember to factor in parking when evaluating the cost of car rental. Since we were bringing the child car seat anyway, we figured we’d rent a car and just snap it in. It worked well enough, but when we got to the hotel we were faced with a $52/night parking charge. Over 9 days, that added up to more than the cost of renting the car! And the first place we drove to, Lincoln Park Zoo, cost $30 for parking – more than cab fare would have been.

It became clear that most of what we wanted to do was going to be within walking distance, and it would be cheaper to return the car early and take taxis to the places farther out. That’s exactly what we did.

#4: How much Internet access do you really need? Our hotel had a nice setup: A) $12.95 for 24 hours for up to three devices for in-room wi-fi. B) Free wi-fi in the lobby. C) Convention areas were paid for by the con. Over 9 days we pulled out the laptop maybe three or four times, and we used the tablet every day.

The thing is, my heaviest online use of the tablet was in the convention, not in the room. In the room, I was mostly checking email/social networks or playing offline games, or one of us was reading (either to ourselves or to J). These are low-bandwidth activities where high latency isn’t a problem, and it would have been fine to fire up the phone’s mobile hotspot for a few minutes or even read email offline & let it sync the next time I was in the lobby. (I caught up on email on the airplane on the way back, then let the changes & replies sync up after when we landed.)

Obviously this will depend on how connected you want or need to be, and what other devices you have. In our case, we paid for 7 or 8 days of internet and probably only needed 3 or 4.

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ShareThis is rolling out a tool for “frictionless sharing.” That’s the term for those apps or widgets that “let” you broadcast everything you do on a site to your social network. I suppose it sounds great for publishers, because your content gets shared more, but…

As someone who reads stuff online, “Frictionless sharing” is a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Undo is nice, but in a world where updates are pushed instantly, you can’t count on it.

As someone who follows social networks, it’s just more noise. I don’t want to know every article you read in your latest wiki walk. I’ll tune it out, or I’ll tune you out. What I want to know is which articles, photos and videos you think are worth sharing.

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Allergies to nuts, grains, vegetables, seafood and milk are common. Allergies to meat? Much less so. But that’s starting to change.

A few months ago I read about adults (author John Grisham in particular) developing an allergy to red meat after being bitten by ticks.* And not just a low-level allergy like your face turning red — we’re talking full-on hives and anaphylactic** shock, the kind of thing that requires you to carry an Epi-Pen to make sure you keep breathing long enough to reach the emergency room.

Researchers have determined that the lone star tick’s bite can cause the body to produce an IgE antibody for a sugar called alphagal, which is found in mammal meat.

The result: from then on, you’re allergic to meat.

CNN calls it mysterious. Allergic Living calls it baffling. It’s certainly weird compared to “usual” allergies, and the fact that the reaction is usually delayed by a few hours makes it hard to diagnose, but we’re ahead of the game in understanding it: Unlike most allergies, we know what causes this one.***

With most allergies, we know the process, but we don’t know what gets the ball rolling to begin with. We know that in people who are allergic to a food, exposure to it causes an IgE antibody reaction that triggers a massive release of histamines that sends the body into some level of shock, but we don’t know why some people have that reaction and others don’t.

There are a lot of ideas being investigated, with varying amounts of supporting evidence, but there’s still nothing we can point to and say: “This caused you to be allergic to nuts” or “That caused you to be allergic to milk.” Advice to parents concerned about keeping their child from developing allergies is all over the map.

That’s why Katie and I are walking in this year’s Walk For Food Allergy. The event raises money for the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network’s mission to support allergy research, spread awareness (you’d be amazed at how many people dismiss allergies as inconsequential or even bogus), provide education and advocacy for people living with food allergies.

Walks are being held across the country over the year. We’ll be walking in the Los Angeles event in October. If you’d like to help, you can donate or join our team here: [Edit: link removed since the event is over.]

Thank you!

*Naturally, this was a few days after I hiked a severely overgrown trail without taking precautions against ticks, so I freaked out a bit, but I also hadn’t found any ticks when I got home from the hike.

**Fun fact: Chrome’s spell-checker doesn’t know “anaphylactic,” and suggested such helpful alternatives as “intergalactic” and “anticlimactic.” Not sure about the former, but I get the impression a lot of viewers suffered “anticlimactic shock” when watching the Lost finale.

***Or at least we know what primes it. There’s still the question of why only some people who are bitten by the lone star tick go on to develop the allergy.

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So, NPR ran a post by an intern who doesn’t get the whole paying-for-music thing — or, rather, realizes now that she ought to, but doesn’t want to pay for physical media of specific songs or albums.

The Trichordist responded with an open letter about the ethics of file sharing, which is a great read from the artist side of the fence, but also mixes up several issues. In particular, it misrepresents a large part of the “other side.” He starts off saying that Emily White seems to have succumbed to “false choices” presented by “Free Culture,” then goes on to present his own false choices, somehow managing to characterize rampant piracy, Creative Commons*, and the tech industry as if they’re all the same thing.

The issue is not simply “pay for everything” vs “take what you want because you can.”

Among other things it’s about recognizing that distribution channels have changed, so business models must as well. It’s about trying to come up with a system that doesn’t put unnecessary roadblocks in place. It’s about enabling those who do want to share their art in different ways to be able to do so easily.

Edit: It’s also about, and here’s where the tech industry comes in, recognizing that technology does change the legal landscape. Remember the debate over whether Google should pay up for thumbnails in image search results? (Kind of like requiring card catalogs to pay to use the title of the books they refer to.) Or Congress trying to decide whether copying a media file or program from disk to RAM constituted a legal “copy” subject to copyright restrictions?

Edit 2: And then there’s the matter of opening up the gray areas, or rather the areas that most of us intuitively see as gray, but that current copyright law treats as black and white, such as fan art and fan fiction. Technically, a six-year-old’s scrawled Mickey Mouse is illegal. Technically, software companies can tell you how many backups you’re allowed to make. Enforcement is spotty (fortunately), but that means if someone wants to get you in trouble for something else, all they have to do is report you.

If you want to make music and I want to listen to it, I’m happy to pay you for it. I have a lot of music on my iPod, and yes, I’ve paid for it. My last MP3 purchase was a week ago. Heck, I’ve bought music from Jonathan Coulton, who gives it away for free (under a Creative Commons licence, I might add).

So yeah, I’m willing to pay for music. But I don’t want to have to pay separately to listen to the same music on my home sound system, on my computer, on my phone, and in my car because your publisher has decided to put DRM in place that makes it difficult for me to move that music around. If you live on the other side of the planet from me, I want to be able to give you money directly and download the song over the internet instead of having to wait for publisher A to make a deal with publisher B and ship physical media around.

Technology has presented us with new ways of distributing art. Something like Pandora or Spotify would have been impossible before broadband internet. So let’s find ways to make it work for everyone instead of characterizing everything that isn’t pay-per-song as no better than looting.

It doesn’t help to complain about one set of false choices and then present your own.

*He cites the Creative Commons’ tax return to indicate the backers of the Free Culture movement, so it seems clear he looks at them as the same thing.

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Community participation pyramid: the 90-9-1 Rule (Jakob Nielsen)Sometimes it seems like more people are talking about Google+ than using it, but it really depends on the community you’re looking at. Comics fans? Not well represented. (But they’re even harder to find on Pinterest.) But “Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait has a thriving following.

It seems like Speed Force’s Google+ Page is starting to attract a bit more participation, and I think that might be in part due to it passing the 100-follower mark. I vaguely recalled something about a 90-9-1 Rule for community involvement, which turned out to be pretty easy to find once I searched for it.

Basically, the rule states that:

  • 90% of community members are “lurkers” who read or observe, but don’t contribute.
  • 9% contribute occasionally (i.e. comment, “Like,” +1, share)
  • 1% contribute frequently, and account for most contributions

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