Today started with a panel on Why Did You Build it That Way? or questionable engineering choices in fiction. The chat devolved into a lot of non-fictional issues the panel had experienced in their day jobs. I liked the definitions: safety is about random breaking, security is about targetted attacks. Also, safety is never the number one priority, after all, "a stationary train is perfectly safe" (I assume they mean, provided it's not sharing a track with a moving train!)
Next was the panel Wanted Undead or Alive, about necromancers, ghosts and the undead. There was some interesting categorisation. Undead were once alive, have dies, then have come back, but not "fully". There is also the issue of whether they have come back willingly, or by force. There is a story (I didn't catch the title) with two halves of an undead: the zombie body and the ghost "spirit" asking a necromancer to kill that body.
Next, GoH Kari Sperring was interviewed by Juliet McKenna. We discovered that she learned to write through Trek fanfic, and that she writes technical works under her academic name, Kari Maunde.
Danna Staaf then gave a talk about her new book The Lady And The Octopus, about the amazing life of Jeanne Villepreux-Power, who lived in the 18th century, started in relative poverty, and became a marine biologist and invented the modern aquarium. (I ordered the book.)
The annual Hay Lecture this year was delivered by Colin Carlson, on the effect of climate change on our health. This is all interlinked with foodwebs, parasites, food production, and more: "it's complicated". There were lots of little bits woven together to make an overall story of how feedbacks interact in non-obvious ways. For example, reducing beef production to reduce greenhouse gases would increase the number of pigs and chickens raised, which would increase the probability of more pandemics...
Imagining Reproductive Futures was delivered by the team working on a research project about human reproduction in space, both in reality and in fiction. Badly Written Disease had a panel discussing terrible descriptions of medical issues in fiction. To end the day, the Multiverse Magic panel discussed Many Worlds in fiction, including the recent brilliant film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.
And so to bed.
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