The last ApolloCon 2010 roundup

"Sex, the Young Adult, and the YA novel". Unlike some other panels on sex in science fiction or fantasy that had been known to turn rowdy and funny, this was a rather tame, academic discussion of Young Adult fiction in general. Like 80% of panels, it either didn't have enough material to stay on topic, or the panelists lacked interest for the same. "Twilight" was only referred to as "the series that shall not be named".

Amy Sisson shared this: one of her students thought C. S. Lewis' Narnia books were written for entertainment only, but Harry Potter was written to teach lessons about the world.

Melanie Miller Fletcher, Lee Thomas, K. Hutson Price, Amy Sisson and Rosemary Clement-Moore

"Marked for life: Body Mods in Spec Fic". Like so many other panels, it did not analyze speculative fiction so much as discuss low-hanging fruit such as tramp stamps. The only attempt to extrapolate into the future was a mention of LED tattoos. Also, somebody remembered reading that somebody is developing an ink in small microcapsules that is extremely sensitive to certain wavelengths of light, so those tattoos will be easy to remove. Gabrielle Faust said there's watch being developed that can be implanted in the wrist: the skin would scar around the wrist, and the digits would be visible under the skin. Personally, I would like to know, who are people that still wear wristwatches? With cellphones and all of our gadgets telling time, isn't wristwatch going the way of horse-drawn carriage?

A little more interesting was the idea that more and more people will proudly display their medical devices as body mods. One of the panelists' son has a shunt in his brain, directed into his leg, because his brain doesn't drain properly. The boy thinks it's cool, because it's a body mod.

Gabrielle Faust, Lawrence Person, Amy Sisson, and Cathey Osborne

"Science Fiction Civil Rights Scorecard". Unfortunately, nothing was said on this panel that I had not already heard. Most of the discussion time was spent on lamenting how "brown" characters become white on book covers, or in movie and TV show adaptations. Lee Thomas also pointed out that some writers are so uncomfortable writing about gay characters, that they make them indistinguishable from straight.

"Through a Lens Darkly: Why are so many current Spec Fic movies so darn dark and depressing?". Stina has said more on this panel in her blog (http://stinabat.livejournal.com/236628.html), but I'll add a couple more points that caught my attention.

Lou Antonelli says that the grim future, promised so many times, hasn't come true so far; for example, Japan, a country that was nuked twice in world War 2, came back stronger than ever, and enjoys a higher standard of living than the West. So Antonelli wonders if dystopia trend merely reflects Western concern about the decline of Western civilization. (Stina says "yes".)

David B. Carr thinks post-apocalyptic novels or movies appeal to people mainly because everybody secretly identifies with the survivors. In most of those scenarios only a few selected people survive, and fans of such movies may be unconsciously thinking that (a) that most of the humanity should die, and (b) they would be among the chosen few who would survive. That's not have a very generous opinion of the fans of this genre, but there may be a grain of truth in it.

Bennie Grezlik, David B. Carren, Lou Antonelli, Lawrence Person and Stina Leicht

Pictures from ApolloCon 2010 are in my photo gallery.

ApolloCon 2010: my general con-going quandary

ApolloCon, more than other science fiction cons, stands out for its gourmet-oriented activities. On Friday night there was a wine tasting with 3 white wines and 3 red wines. The hostess Kim Kofmel had us go through the entire ritual of noting the wine's color, smell, swishing in in the glass than in one's mouth, etc. I can't say that it helped me to distinguish more subtle characteristics than "dry" and "sweet", but that's just me. Other participants had no problem detecting oaky notes, various fruits and berries, or whatever it is one's supposed to detect in a wine. Or maybe they just let their imaginations loose.

There were also Scotch tastings, but sign-up sheets for those fill up really quickly; I wasn't fast enough to sign up. And there was a cheese tasting, which I went to; but I was full from lunch, and the cheeses were a rather basic kind. It was like a cheese primer for those who have eaten Velveeta their whole lives and needed to be made aware of brie, gouda, or fresh mozarella

A fun, well-planned, though not-quite-true-to-its-spirit concept was Corner Con -- a room party taking on a format of a mini-convention. A con within a con, if you will. Last year it was a spontaneous group of people hanging out in the corner of the hallway, and this year they had their own room. It had a mini-art show, a mini-writers' workshop, a mini dealers' room, and a few other convention attributes -- at least formally, if not in spirit. It wasn't really any different from any ole' room party, but I still appreciate the effort. And it had cooler decorations than most room parties.

Corner Con "dealers' room" -- an arrangement of figurines on a side table.

Programming was thin on the ground this year. Thin for me, in any case, though I'm sure many people enjoyed debating such topics like futuristic drinks, skulls as a fashion accessory, herbs in fantasy, angels, or hurricane preparedness. I like something more idea-heavy and abstract, but such panels were few (and I managed to miss one I would have really liked to see).

It's a symptom of a general quandary I've been experiencing lately. I don't hear many new and interesting ideas and observations at conventions anymore. It may be party because I only go to Texas conventions; venturing further from the home state would take too much time and money. So naturally, I see all the same people on panels, and there may be a limited amount of what they have to say. They keep saying the same stuff, so every panel becomes a 101 on the particular topic (whatever the topic of the panel is). Kind of like the above-mentioned cheese tasting. But after a few years of convention-going you may no longer be satisfied with the 101 -- especially when you regularly read more in-depth discussions of those topics on the internet.

Unfortunately, even when there have been new developments in a particular field, panelists don't seem to have anything new to say. Hell, a lot of those times I can think of something to add to the topic, and I'm not even a "pro" like they are!

Thus, I've been thinking lately how should I revise my convention-going strategy. Despite the criticism expressed in this post, I will keep going to them nevertheless, because I write science fiction, and as such, I want to know what people think about this genre. But if panel discussions have become so stale, I will have to think how and where to gain new insights.

That said, I have still collected a few ideas and observations from various panels, which I will enter into my super-secret idea database. :-) No, actually, I will share them here, in my blog -- in the next post.

Pictures from ApolloCon 2010 are in my photo gallery.

ApolloCon 2010: Fan flirting

I noticed ApolloCon Friday night panels have a certain rowdy tendency, if the fabulous "101 Uses For A Paperclip" from 3 years ago was any indication. It could be that a Friday night at a convention is some magic time when parties haven't started yet, and the people who would otherwise be partying go to less-than-seriously themed panels, bringing the atmosphere of mischief with them. This year's panel on flirting, "Con Season is in the Air: when a Young Fan's Mind Turns to Flirtation", confirmed the trend.

Every other SF convention I go to has a discussion on love or relationships (or their darker side, such as stalking) from fannish perspective. But unlike the earlier "Finding Love In Fandom", this was not a panel on romantic advice. This time "flirting" was just a shorthand for sultry stories from late nights at cons. I came away with an impression that I go to a very different types of conventions, as I've never witnessed anything like the situations talked about here.

K. Hutson Price, Kathy Thornton, and Cathey Osbourne in the "Con Season is in the Air: when a Young Fan's Mind Turns to Flirtation" panel. Find more pictures from ApolloCon 2010 in my photo gallery.

One panelist told about a party at Soonercon (which, she promised, had stories to beat any other convention stories), where there was a grope box, made out of PVC pipe structure with black tarp placed over it. There were holes cut out in it for people on the outside to grope people who were in the box. At one time, a "lovely young woman of a larger size" got into the box. Unfortunately, she wasn't getting any takers. The panelist felt sorry for the girl, and started asking her male friends to stick their hands into the box. One by one, they refused. An hour later, she found someone who agreed to stick his hand in, only to scream: "there's nobody in there!" Apparently the girl had left long ago. Our compassionate panelist, having missed her exit, was sitting there feeling sorry for the empty box all that time.

Then the panelists attempted to give advice on how to flirt at conventions. Cathey Osbourne suggested an original approach that wouldn't be likely to work anywhere but at a convention.

"Say you are into very specific things, for example, duct tape," she said. "Stand in the hallway and tear a piece of duct tape. It makes a very distinctive noise. See who turns around. That's your marker."

Teddy Harvia and K. Hutson Price in the "Con Season is in the Air: when a Young Fan's Mind Turns to Flirtation" panel. Find more pictures from ApolloCon 2010 in my photo gallery.

Finally, to end the post on a romantic note, here is a story told by Teddy Harvia.

"The best pickup line was used on me at Soonercon," said Teddy Harvia. "I was standing in a group of 8-10 people. An attractive woman looked at my badge, and said "I dreamt your name last night". And then 9 months later we got married."

Pictures from ApolloCon 2010 are in my photo gallery.

Tags: ApolloCon, authors, Cathey Osbourne, conventions, fandom, image, Soonercon, Teddy Harvia, writers

ApolloCon 2010: Scientific Advancement vs. Social Stigma

"For as long as there has been science, there has been the bleeding edge -- progress at odds with social norms. Centuries ago, no one believed the earth rotated around the sun. For years, the concept of 'zero' was a religious heresy. Today society balks at the thought of cloning and artificial intelligence. How do we balance our cultural identity and values with our ingrained curiosity and desire for progress?"

Those are rich questions, but most of this panel was spent lamenting that "nobody" is thinking through the ethics of scientific advancement. As an example of ethically dubious bioengineering, Teddy Harvia brought up the cactus people from China Mieville's "Perdido Street Station". Then again, he admits that "authors often write not to be realistic, but to make a statement". He was also shocked by a relationship between the human protagonist and a bug-like creature in "Perdido Street Station".

"I'm not racial," Teddy Harvia said, "but..."

"But you are prejudiced against cockroaches", said Kimberly Frost.

Kimberly Frost, Teddy Harvia, and Alexis Glynn Latner in the "Scientific Advancement vs. Social Stigma" panel. Find more pictures from ApolloCon 2010 in my photo gallery.

Moderator Kimberly Frost asked: does literature has a role in creating acceptance of the world that science is creating? Unfortunately, this question did not get much traction with the panelists.

It is often not literature but religion that most people expect to help them make sense of scientific and societal changes. In my experience, even in the SF and fantasy fandom many people still don't question the cliche that religion, or, more generally, "spirituality" should provide ethical safeguards for scientific research. So it was encouraging to see that some of the panelists were skeptical of religion's role. Only one panelist, Lou Antonelli, defended Christianity. His observation is that more and more religious people think we shouldn't mess with the planet, because "God gave it to us". That's hopeful news, but I wasn't sure how much I could trust his objectivity, since he said in the same breath that Christians and religious people in general are being mocked in today's "atheistic" environment. Since the purpose of this blog is not politics, I'll just say my view of this is very different.

Some other panelists also disagreed with the notion that Christianity is persecuted in the West. Teddy Harvia pointed out that Christians' claims that "Harry Potter" books attacked religion were wrong, since the books take a completely neutral stance towards religion.

On a marginally related topic, one panelist gave an insightful answer on why many non-Christians don't like when people offer to pray for them. She was in the hospital with her daughter who, like her, was a pagan, and a very nice Catholic chaplain came in and wanted to pray for them. The two of them agreed, but felt the way a Christian would feel if a voodoo priest came in and started waving chicken bones.

Mel. White and Lou Antonelli in the "Scientific Advancement vs. Social Stigma" panel. Find more pictures from ApolloCon 2010 in my photo gallery.

Paris: you can check out, but you can never leave

And I'm not just speaking about nostalgia. I narrowly avoided this literally becoming true.

It may be backward to start my trip report with my last day in Paris, but on my last day I had what in my sheltered life might pass for an adventure.

In Paris, I stayed in an apartment my parents were renting (my dad was there for work). On June 24th they returned to Lithuania, and I headed back to the US. June 24th was also the day French tranportation workers planned to start a strike. The strike was going to reduce public transportation levels to a bare minimum. Charles de Gaulle airport is an hour train ride from my parents' apartment, and it wasn't clear that taxis will be running on the day of the strike, or that they won't be completely packed. Raymon's and my flight was in the morning, so we didn't have a built-in time buffer to figure out a way to get to the airport. Upon my suggestion all of us decided to go to an airport hotel on the eve of the strike, and stay there overnight.

On the 23rd we cleaned the apartment, then waited for the landlord to come and check that it was in order, and return my parents' deposit. By the time all this was done, it was 7 p.m., and we set out to go to the airport. First, we had to take a tram to a RER station (RER is a train system that runs through Paris and its suburbs; one of its lines goes to the airport). Two stops before our destination the tram driver announced he wasn't going any further and everybody had to get off. So we did. We immediately noticed a bunch of National Police in riot gear. Whatever they were here for could not have been good. We walked the rest of the way to the RER station with suitcases in tow; shortly before coming to the Cite Universitaire station, a passerby told us it was blocked. Right before our eyes, a row of National Police vehicles pulled up and lined up along the street.

This was becoming stressful. Leaving Raymon and me to watch the luggage, my mom and dad walked over to the station to find out what was going on. Coming back, they said the station had already reopened and the trains were running. So far, so good. We had no difficulty getting on a train to the airport, except there was an excessive amount of police at the station, and they selectively checked some passengers' bags.

The train was slow, stopping several times in the dark tunnel between stations and sitting there for 5-10 minutes at a time (which didn't improve the mood of a claustrophobic person like me), because there were traffic snarls. Raymon called his sister in the US, asking her to look up any news items on Paris. She found out that there were pro-Israel and pro-Palestine demonstrations earlier that day, so we concluded that those demonstrations resulted in the incident that caused the station to close. That was probably not true, as one of my Facebook friends sent me a French news article saying that Cite Universitaire was closed due to soccer-related violence. Whatever it was, we didn't know it at that time, and were wondering if the strike had started early.

We weren't too far off the mark. Unrelated as it was to the station closure, the strike was indeed going to start early. The drop off in public transportation was starting at 8 p.m. Fortunately, the train engineer did not ditch the train in the dark tunnel to go on strike. :-) It was a good thing I didn't hear those news until we were out of the tunnels and moving at a good speed towards the airport. I don't want to think how I would have felt sitting there in a tunnel with the worst suspicions playing out in my head.

Though our hotel, located directly in the airport, was at least twice as expensive as I would have been comfortable paying, I felt it was worth every penny. I looked into booking a cheaper hotel further from the airport, except that (1) almost all those hotels were full, and (2) we didn't know if we'd be able to get to the airport next morning. For all we knew, hotel shuttles could have gone on strike too. But by the time we got to our hotel, I had never been so glad about grossly overpaying on a purchase.

My birthday: a ghost tour of Vilnius

For my birthday, my family took me on a tour of haunted places of Vilnius. I was entertained by the stories of the famous ghosts of Vilnius, but even more so by the way the tour guide tried to tie them to her personal life.

She told us a story of a fourteen year old boy who was a cemetery attendant. One day, before a rich man's funeral, the relatives of the deceased decided there was no reason the man should be buried with all of his gold, so he told the boy to take the jewelry off of the body and hand it over. Being very pious, the boy at first refused, but the relatives threatened to kill him. Then he tried to comply, but the dead people rose from their graves, and all hell broke loose. This event, despite taking place several centuries ago, had "horrible, horrible" repercussions in our tour guide's life. Back when she was a history student, their class took a tour of the crypt. The next day they heard on the news that a 14-year-old boy committed suicide by hanging. Some years later her class took another tour of the crypt (what, they didn't mind risking another teen's life? :-)), and the next day the custodian of the department building refused to let them in. "So you see, there is something supernatural going on there!" she concluded. Umm. Yes. I nodded and smiled.

	The courtyard in the historical Jewish district of Vilnius, where we met the dybbuk
	The dybbuk

Then she took us into a courtyard in a former Jewish neighborhood of Vilnius, and told us a story about a dybbuk -- a Jewish ghost that, unlike Christian ghosts, did not roam the Earth, but sought to inhabit someone else's body. An especially famous dybbuk of Vilnius was a ghost of a young man who wanted to let his grieving girlfriend know that he was happy in the afterlife. But the only body he found to occupy was a body of another young woman. So the said young woman came to his girlfriend to comfort her. Our tour guide said this legend was turned into an opera, which in turn was made into a Hollywood movie "Ghost". I did a brief research on Wikipedia and imdb.com, but found no confirmation of that.

It was this dybbuk that we got to meet in person, sitting in the corner of a courtyard in the historical Jewish district of Vilnius. He was holding a candle and wearing a decidedly modern outfit, if jeans and white socks are any indication. The tour guide said this was our chance to ask him a question -- anything we wanted to know. He'd answer it in a super-secret language of gestures that she would translate for us, as she studied it for many years. No one wanted to go first, so she ventured a question: "Will I be able to go on a very important trip this year?" The dybbuk made a flying gesture with his hand. "He says I'll go on a plane trip," said the guide. Glad those years of learning didn't go to waste.

The tour was cut short by torrential rain, but by that time we were almost done. All in all, it was not a bad way to get a tour of Vilnius Old Town, as long as one didn't put too high expectations into it.

More pictures from my trip to Lithuania are in my photo gallery.

Inspiring stories from Texas Linux Fest

At the Texas Linux Fest I was particularly intrigued by Amber Graner, who went from a complete Linux newbie, to becoming a Ubuntu User Magazine contributor in one year. She spread a message that everyone, no matter how non-technical they are, can become proficient in Ubuntu. As they progress, they can participate in user forums, educating less advanced users. If I'm not mistaken, she said she recently accepted a position as Ubuntu User Magazine editor, though I haven't been able to find a confirmation of that on the net. Whatever her position is, the magazine is now her day job.

My old acquaintance Janet S., who I first met at the Atheist Community of Austin, was at the Texas Linux Fest too. She is now involved in writing FLOSS manuals -- technical documentation for open source software. And what do you know -- a couple of weeks since TXLF she started a job doing developer documentation for Mozilla.

Amber Graner gives a presentation "A Year NTEU* (pronounced In-to) Ubuntu and the Open Source Community". More pictures from Texas Linux Fest are in my photo gallery.

Those stories are inspiring. While I am not by all means closed off to a possibility of writing proprietary software (if you are a prospective employer Googling me, please be assured of that :-)), I've been thinking there are serious advantages to working in open source. It opens prospects in self-marketing you won't get in closed-source. Quite simply, if you're writing proprietary software, it's very hard to prove to prospective employers that you've done worthwhile, creative things. They have only your word to take for it. And even if you were permitted to show pieces of your code to outsiders (extremely unlikely), they still won't understand the context your applications worked in, the needs they addressed, or technical challenges they conquered.

But if you are writing open source software, depending on how widely used it is, chances are that someone on your prospective employer's team may be familiar with it. Also, its open nature allows you to blog about your work, and answer questions about it in user forums, building your online visibility and reputation.

At the nonprofit I'm currently working for we use Drupal and the LAMP stack -- Linux, PHP, MySQL and Apache -- to build our web application. At the very least this will give me opportunity to openly blog about the problems we are facing, and the ways we are solving them. I'm too busy actually building the application to blog about it yet, especially we as we are trying several approaches and it's not clear which of them will "stick". But I'll have to start blogging about it soon. Drupal is open-sourced, with a huge community seeking answers to their own problems -- thus, lots of social capital to be gained. I'm hoping it may become useful for me one day if, as I suspect, this nonprofit does not secure funding, and I'll have to continue to search for jobs.

Pictures from Texas Linux Fest are in my photo gallery.

What I got out of Texas Linux Fest

This is a bit of old news, but My "official" writeup of Texas Linux Fest was posted on GeekAustin.org, an Austin website that chronicles tech-related events in Austin, and puts geeks in touch with networking and learning resources.

Elze's wrap of Texas Linux Fest

I won't repost it in my blog, since it concerns people and topics that are of little to no interest to whoever might be reading my blog.

Going to events like that isn't exactly educational for me -- presentations are not my learning style. When I want to find out about a new technology, product, methodology, or trend in software development (like agile programming), I google it, and jump around from page to page, fishing out relevant bits of information from each one. Presentations are sequential in their nature, which has the unfortunate effect of causing me to tune out sooner or later. In any presentation there will come a moment when I won't see how a particular tangent the speaker went off is relevant to the topic; sometimes I will need to chew over a new piece of knowledge before I can build on it; yet the presentation does not stop, does not let me mull over what was said, or jump back to connect a new bit of knowledge to a previous one. So sooner or later I get off track. (Presentations where I don't lose the thread of thought are even more of a waste of time, because they mean I know the subject -- at least at the level of complexity the speaker is presenting it at -- so well that I'm not learning anything new.)

The reason I go to conferences like this, then, is to find out about people's career paths in areas that interest me (I'm not just speaking about open source here, but also about science fiction and writing). Even if they don't have paid jobs in my area of interest, I still want to hear how they incorporated their passion for the subject into their working life. Even better if they integrated it into their day job, or carved a space for it apart from their day job.

There were some people like that at the Austin Linux Fest -- more about them in my next post.

Old advice comes true, with complications

One of the truths we are told at job search clubs and interviewing workshops is: find out what problem a company is facing at the moment, and suggest ways to solve it. Getting them to see you as a solution to their problem may be the key to hiring you.

For a long time it sounded presumptuous to me. First of all, how would you know what problems the company is facing? Do they shout about their problems from the rooftops? Do they post them on the front page of their website? (That would do wonders to their stock price! :-)) Or am I supposed to have a high-level buddy in every company I interview with? Someone who would grumble about his work problems at our weekly golf game? Is there any hope for someone who is not in the ole' boys network?

When you are applying to be a junior level, rank-and-file coder at some corporation, as I did 11 years ago, wouldn't it be awfully arrogant of you to suggest that you are a solution to the company's problems? At best you can hope to be considered a peg of the right shape to fit a hole in a corporate board game.

But later I see this advice coming true more and more often, and you don't have to be in the ole' boys network to make use of it. Companies WILL tell you their problems. They might tell you this at a job interview, where they bring a list of features they want to be implemented in their application. Or they may tell you their pain as you stop by their booth at a career fair -- even if you don't necessarily have the skills this company has said it needs. This has been my recent experience. This one company originally said it needed Java developers, but when I started talking with their CEO (who is also a developer -- it's a small startup) -- he said they were considering switching to a different platform, because Java was too much pain. They have not even been able to set up a development environment in Java that would work consistently. (According to the guy, this is because Java is an open-source language, and you have too many different open-source components for it to work; and they are often incompatible, or require different versions of the same library, or some such.)

So yes, there are companies out there who are open about seeking someone to ease their pain. However, the kind of problems I personally heard about seemed big enough that I didn't feel confident to take them on. Working at a job for 10 years, like I did, can shoehorn you into a limited role where you do pretty much the same things over and over -- unless you are very strategic about diversifying the tasks you do. So I don't know. Maybe if I worked a few contract jobs, writing different kinds of software, maybe then I could become the kind of person those companies seek. As it is now, some of those jobs companies are desperately seeking to fill sound like a devil's bargain.

SXSW 2010: Coding for pleasure (or martyrdom?): Developing Killer Spare-Time Apps

The "Coding for pleasure" panel's synopsis, "Every startup origin story is about a couple of developers who abscond to a garage and end up building the Next Big Thing. But money and fame don't need to be your end goal. You can significantly improve your life -- and impact others' lives--by coding for pleasure in your spare time," was rather more optimistic than what the panel was really about. I caught only the second half of it, so perhaps I missed the part where they discussed how you significantly improve your own life by coding for pleasure. Well, there is the obvious -- you hone your programming skills, have something to put on your portfolio, and perhaps attain some visibility in the tech community. But if the audience expected advice how to attain fame or lucre by developing spare-time apps, they would have been disappointed. In fact, most of the panel was spent to caution the wide-eyed would-be garage entrepreneurs NOT to expect worldly goods, or even too much acknowledgement to come from it.

Realistically you can expect that maybe in 6 months someone will mention your application on a popular blog, and its web site will get lots of traffic. So don't build it for money. Instead, build it for yourself -- write an application you will use every day, or one that's useful for your career. Gina Trapani says she developed her application (she didn't say what it was called, or maybe I missed it) for 9 months before it got noticed. Even if your creation starts getting paying users, don't expect that it will ever make more money than what's needed cover web hosting (about $100 / month), says Adam Pash. That's what is considered success in the world of spare-time projects, unlike the world of commercial software that thinks in terms of 100 million dollar projects.

(I would hope that there is a long tail potential in this -- a few lucky and hard-working hobbyists may be able to make a living writing niche software that no big company will bother with, because its revenue won't be even a blip in its budget.)

How do you get users, asked a guy from the audience, who admitted he was the only user of about half a dozen of his apps. Matt Haughey replied that it was a difficult topic, worth an entire panel of its own. "Integrate them into whatever you do to communicate," suggested Haughey somewhat vaguely, and explained: "We made badges for personal blogs." Badges... hmm... I remember there was a time when many website had Flickr or Twitter "badges", but I haven't seen them too many of them lately. Other than that, the panelists didn't have many ideas on attracting users, except to mention your app on Twitter, and pester your friends to use it. I'm guessing, as with all things, for your app to find an audience, it needs to be useful first.

Matt Haughey, Adam Pash, and Gina Trapani at the Coding for pleasure: Developing Killer Spare-Time Apps. More pictures from SXSW 2010 can be found in my photo gallery.

Not only there are no shortcuts to making money or attracting users, but there isn't any panacea to finding time for working on your pet project either. "The first thing that needs to go is television," said Haughey, not leaving much hope to those us who, like me, don't watch any television. Then there is common sense advice that most programmers probably use anyway, like reusing code, e.g. Javascript libraries and plug-ins that exist for all imaginable computing tasks.

Thus, a coder-for-pleasure faces the same dilemmas as any artist who has to work at a day job while finding time for his / her art at night, without any guarantees that anybody will ever be interested in it. So was there any advice specific to coders, and preferrably non-depressing?

Maybe this: programmer, don't try to also be a designer. Because let's face it, you are probably not artistically inclined, and your website design will look awful. (Ahem -- if you are anything like me. Or if you are lucky, it will merely look amateurish. :-))

Since you can't afford to pay a designer, trade work with him or her. That's what Gina Trapani does. In her experience, every web designer wishes he or she could program something. If you do some free coding for your designer, they'll design for you.

Is is a good idea to open-source your application? Surprisingly, even at SXSWi, in a context that preaches all things open and progressive, the answer isn't automatically "yes". Open-sourcing your application requires enormous amount of management. Matt Haughey says he's had horrible problems with open source code management. As everywhere, there will be personality conflicts here too. There will be issues of control over code, and petty disagreements. You may find yourself, like Haughey did, with 15 people arguging about a newspaper photo engine.

Tweets from Coding for pleasure: Developing Killer Spare-Time Apps: #codingforpleasure

SXSW 2010: Clay Shirky on monkeys with internet access

Among notable speakers on internet culture at SXSW, Clay Shirky gave a talk "Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data".

For starters, Clay Shirky made fun of the notion of "decade of the millennials". It's about as valid as designating a year to be a year of the donkey, or rooster, or dog, etc., as in Chinese horoscope. It's as if a particular animal, or particular generation to which a decade "belongs" to, brings something substantial into it, that's supposed to affect you deeply. But in reality human nature changes very very slowly, says Shirky.

Three kinds of sharing

So slowly, perhaps, that the "monkeys" in the title of the talk suggest that Clay Shirky thinks our fundamental mentality hasn't changed much since we were apes. He calls up results from primate behavior studies to explain the types of sharing people do on the internet, which are no different from the ones primates engaged in since time immemorial. There are three types of sharing.

Imagine you're walking down the street, and you see an old woman walking towards you. You would feel different if you thought she was going to ask you for money, than if you thought she was going to ask you to help her cross the street. The former -- a request to share the goods -- triggers a feeling of stinginess, even if you later overcome it; the second -- a request for services -- leaves people more amenable to share, even if the time they invest in providing the service is worth more than money. And if she asked you for directions, you would feel even more inclined to help. Sharing of information -- the third kind -- is the easiest. It comes at little to no cost to you.

In the world where music was always shared as goods or services, says Shirky, all Napster did was made it possible to share music as information. This means music industry was freaking out that we didn't voluntarily withhold something that was at no cost to us. What do you call withholding something that comes at no cost to you? The word for it is spiteful. Music industry was shocked that we weren't acting spiteful!

Humans being social primates, sharing of information is our natural drive. It follows that privacy is not a binary on/off concept (this ties in with to danah boyd's keynote speech of privacy). For example, as much as we are determined to keep our medical information out of the hands of insurance companies, there is an equally strong drive to share relevant details with selected audience -- for example, other sufferers of the same diseases. This can have a greater purpose than just patients' mutual self-education: patients' symptoms are data that researchers may be able to mine to come up with cures faster. This kind of sharing actually changes the environment. It's co-creation of public good.

More pictures from SXSW 2010 can be found in my photo gallery.

Another example of internet collaboration leading to public good can be Facebook groups -- yes, those pesky Facebook groups that promote various causes. Sometimes they do succeed in attaining their goal, as did the group Clay Shirky talked about.

A Hindu fundamentalist organization, known for beating up women who were drinking in bars, issued a threat to attack any woman who was out with a man on Valentine's Day. So Indian women started a Facebook group, Association of Loose, Forward, Pub-going Women. (I recall many of my female Facebook friends joining this group in solidarity.) The women in the Facebook group mailed pink panties to the head of the fundamentalist organization for Valentine's Day. The effect of this on Indian politics was quite remarkable, says Shirky. Once it became clear that women, as a group, were going to stand up to attacks, Indian authorities arrested the members of the fundamentalist organization, and there were no attacks on Valentine's day. The Facebook group demonstrated that there was constituency that cared enough about this issue.

Someone asked Clay Shirky in what domains does public sharing and collaboration have the greatest potential. He answered that the greatest "points of inflection" for sharing or colaboration are ones where no one is looking closely. (I suppose it's trivially true -- if people could predict where the next successful idea will come from, they would be pursuing it already.) But Clay meant it in a more pessimistic way. "The minute everybody understands that something is important to everybody, all progress stops," he said. (Audience applauded). As an example, there is still no single standard interoperable instant messaging platform. Yahoo, AOL and other instant messaging platforms never agreed on a single standard, because each of them wanted to be the one to set a standard.

Anti-search engines: they don't exist, do they?

As I said in my previous post, an idea of an anti-search engine -- one that scrambles your search results, making you unfindable -- made me think of some strange things search engines might do, or why they are not doing them.

Obviously, no matter how much you wish to stay hidden, you can't make someone use an anti-search engine instead of a real one. But what if you could convince search engines to hide you? Companies now pay for higher placement in search results, but what if you could pay to be placed lower? Specifically, if you don't want certain web pages that mention you to appear high in search results -- for example, if they say something unflattering about you, or have ugly pictures of you -- you could pay the search engine to place them so low that most searchers will never get to them simply because they don't have time to wade through a hundred pages of Google results. Most of us probably have something on the internet we don't necessarily want someone important (like a prospective employer or a date) to see. Yet I never heard of search engines engaging in a practice lowering the rank of certain search results. The more I think about it, the more potential issues I see with it -- many more than paying for higher placement in search results. The two concepts are not symmetrical.

There may be a conflict of interest between an individual who wants to lay low, and a website (which does not belong to that individual) that wants to maintain high rank. For example, you, Joe Smith, might want all web forums that say you're an idiot, to appear very low in search results based on "your" keywords (just what exactly are "your" keywords, is another thorny issue). The owners of those forums, however, don't like to rank low. How would a search engine resolve this conflict of interest?

But maybe there is not always a conflict of interest. If a site ranks low based on "your" keywords, it won't necessarily damage the site's rating in general. Unless you are a celebrity, the site has probably achieved its high rank based on other keywords than your name. Your name is not what drives traffic to it.

What if you are a celebrity, and the site has achieved its high ranking precisely because your name is on it? Maybe people flock ot the site to see a paparazzi picture of you with a double chin and no makeup. You don't want the public to see that picture, but if the search engine pushes the site's rank down, it will harm its traffic. How should a search engine resolve this? By auctioning off the relevant keywords (such as your name) to the highest bidder? If you really want it to rank low, you'll pay more than the site can afford to pay to keep it high? If you are a celebrity, you may also be rich, and thus able to afford a betting war or a court battle.

And a court battle may be your only recourse if, despite being neither rich nor famous, you find yourself exploited by a website that contains damaging information. Maybe it's one of those vicious college gossip forums where students speculate about other students' sex lives and openly name names. Posting rumors is entirely the point of such sites' existence, so of course they would not agree to be lowered in search results based on one victim's name -- otherwise all victims would request the same. But if there is a court battle, how does the court decide what the relevant keywords are? Would the victim's name be enough? Or should the keywords also include all the email addresses the victim has ever used, or also his/her profession, and cities he/she has lived in? E.g. "Joe Smith web designer Austin Texas"? That's tricky.

In the days of the dotcom "land grab", people and companies battled over who had a right to a particular domain name. Courts had to decide whether Joe Smith the individual had a higher right to joesmith.com than, say, Joe Smith Trucking Inc. They usually ruled in favor of companies. But complexity of such decisions pales in comparison to complexity of deciding which keywords a person is entitled to.

Considering all this, it's probably a good thing that no search engine, to my knowledge, provides a service of pushing your search results down. Though I have to wonder how many of them have thought about it.

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Hmmm, I could have spun this post off as an April Fool's joke. But no -- my analytical nature would ruin any attempt at humor. So you, dear reader, are safe. :-)

Yet another application contest -- Alcatel-Lucent crowdsourcing at SXSW 2010

Alcatel-Lucent Eleven API lounge at SXSW was a fabulous place to hang out when I didn't have another place to be. Dimly lit, with sleek white couches arranged in a circle resembling a vaguely familiar corporate logo (but not the Alcatel-Lucent logo, so perhaps the similarity was incidental) it had plenty of power outlets to charge laptops and devices. Even better, it had free breakfast and free happy hours with amazing food in the afternoons. At those happy hours Alcatel-Lucent held application pitch contests. People in the room were asked to come up with ideas for software applications that would incorporate content and networking, and describe them in 5-minute pitches.

Such contests are popular at social media events. Last year I wrote about the Half-Baked Game that took place at the Social Media Camp 2008. Most of the ideas proposed at the game were endless, rather uninnovative mashups of existing social networking functionality. Alcatel-Lucent contest was like that too, only more so. Then again, the ideas presented here weren't meant to be taken seriously.

As people pitched, an artist wrote down the application titles on a white board, creating a graph that resembled a game board. It started out blank and fresh, as seen in the picture below, and ended up full (see bottom picture).

Alcatel-Lucent Eleven API lounge (BTW, that's some random person, not me), and the white board that will fill up with application ideas in the course of the weekend.

Here are some of the ideas.

One guy proposed an application that would capture all the educational content that your child is exposed to, as the child progresses from nursery to preschool to higher levels of education.

Another guy pitched a "build-your-perfect-mate" application. He didn't explain how it would work.

A woman pitched getfriended.com, an application that would help you find friends. "How many of you have ever been new to town?" she asked the audience in a cheerful tone of a motivational speaker lobbing a rhetorical question at the audience. "Did you find it hard to meet new friends?" Nods all around. Her application, she said, would let you meet new friends. Nobody asked her what it would do better than Meetup.com or Facebook, reminding me of the famous headline from The Onion: "Classmates.com employees don't have the heart to tell CEO about Facebook".

Then there were not just one but two guys who pitched two different post-apocalyptic survival applications. Those apps would provide instructions on finding food, shelter, etc. in a primitive environment, such as "how to strangle a sable-toothed tiger with your bare hands". They just neglected to mention where the electricity for your iPhone would come from. No, I didn't say this was a serious contest.

Among all this, I remember somebody proposing an application that sounded like it actually made sense -- it was somewhat innovative and useful. Not surprisingly, it did NOT win, possibly because it took more than 30 seconds for the judges to digest the idea. Unfortunately, I didn't write it down either, because, not fitting in 140 characters, it wasn't tweetable. And then I forgot what it was about.

Finally, some guy had an idea for an anti-search engine: instead of showing you in search results, it will scramble them so no one will find you. We all have people in our lives that we wish used just that kind of search engine, but what's to keep them from using a real one?

However, this lead me to further thinking about search engines, which will be explored in my next post.

By the end of the weekend the white board at Alcatel-Lucent Eleven API lounge all filled up with application ideas, rendered by an artist in the likeness of a game board. Clicking on the link, you can get a big version of the picture and see most of those ideas for yourself. There were many more than what I described in this post.

The guy with the educational experiences-capturing application won. I think his idea is not bad, just hard to implement because it's too vague. Educational content is a very eclectic and unstructured notion, hard to capture in a unified format. Also it would put the burden of collecting such content either on various educational institutions your child would go to (but how would you bring all those institutions on board with this idea?) or on the child himself/herself, which is obviously impossible while he/she is a toddler, but may not be practical even when he/she is older. How many children actually pay attention to the teacher? How can they be expected to capture teacher's every word or scribble in a digital medium? This kind of software falls in the general category of lifelogging, which, to me, is a very interesting area, but few practical applications have come out of it so far.

The educational content guy won some kind of domestic appliance or gadget for his idea, though. The box suggested a toaster, but perhaps not. :-)

SXSW 2010: Online dating panel

In the "Seven Years in Online Dating" panel ("Since 2003, online dating has evolved in how web sites, profiles and photos are constructed to attract potential mates. Expectations and resultant relationships have changed as well. In this talk we illustrate how web site design and user savvy have created an alternate universe of intimate social protocols.", Twitter: #7yearsonlinedating), the audience participated in the discussion, setting the room abuzz with sex differences. Men and women have different expectations for dating-related online interaction. Women said they are most likely to respond to well-written emails, especially if the guy mentions, or responds to, to something interesting he saw in her profile. Guys, on the other hand, prefer to send short messages or "winks", and forego writing altogether. Being used to low rates of women's responses, they don't see a point in investing too much time in elaborate emails. (This looks like a vicious circle to me. If they wrote better messages, maybe women would respond more often?) It is also more common among guys to treat back-and-forth messaging as a chat, rather than exchange of letters. In that context, a short "hi, how are you" type of message is not "lazy", but merely an invitation to chat. But women more commonly expect every message to be a complete email.

The panelists and audience briefly touched on new kinds of online dating sites that have sprung up in the last few years. The most notable among them, Gelato, lets members integrate their social media feed -- Twitter, Facebook statuses, Netflix queue, favorite Youtube videos -- into their dating profile. The idea is that this gives other members a clearer idea of what kind of personality you truly are. If you say you love art movies, better make sure your Netflix queue reflects that. :-) (Gelato dating was one of the featured startups at Innotech 2009. I wrote about it in this blog post.)

Erhardt Graeff and Jonathan Beilin in the Seven Years in Online Dating panel. More pictures from SXSW 2010 are in my photo gallery.

Both the panelists and the audience were a bit skeptical how useful social media was in dating. Once people start uploading their entire life on the web, you may start feeling like you are dating a resume, not a person, said a guy in the audience. When you finally meet him or her, you may discover you liked their electronic version better. Erhardt Graeff, the panelist, admitted he broke up with a girl because she wasn't as interesting in real life as online.

Still, online dating isn't going to go away, and new iterations on the concept are always waiting in the wings. Somebody in the audience suggested that BuddyPress (web application from Wordpress that lets you build your own social network) will let everyone to create their own online dating site. I personally am not certain how much good it will do, because any online dating site is only successful once it reaches a critical mass of members. So your homespun dating site would only stand a chance if it could transparently interoperate with the giants, such as match.com or okcupid.com, making their member profiles available to your members. But the giants wouldn't want another site to siphon off their revenues, would they? Off the top of my head I can't think what business model would make such make such interoperation possible.

Job search and religion, or lack thereof

As I said on Facebook, the reason I go to job search clubs at churches is because Texas Workforce Commision requires you to make 5 "job search activities" to receive unemployment benefits, and going to a job search club counts as one activity. (Somebody has informed me that it's easier to meet those requirements than I thought. Thanks, you-know-who-you-are, I'll keep your advice in mind and will revise my job search strategy in the upcoming weeks.)

All three clubs meet in churches, but two of them don't require any religious involvement. The third one, though... time will only show if I can stomach all their god-talk.

However, the third one also has some good stuff going on, such as resume critique sessions or personal statement help sessions. A personal statement is an answer you would give when an interviewer asks you, "tell me about yourself". The most vague and trecherous of all interview questions, it's so ubiquitous it has its own acronym: TMAY. It's also known as elevator pitch. If this club prepares you for interview pitfalls, it may be worth going to. I just don't know how much religious involvement it demands of its members. Some evidence suggests that they ask way more than I could comfortably ignore. For example, it encourages everyone to find their accountability partner -- a person to who you would be accountable for things you've done in your job search on any given week; that would be good except you are supposed to pray for your partner.

I didn't expect that when I went to my first meeting. The club's profile on LinkedIn says they welcome people "without faith background". Yet it was pretty clear at the meeting they assume everyone is a religious person. The Friday of the same week the president of the club called me -- he probably does that for all new members -- and asked about my experience with the club. So I asked him bluntly if have to be religious to be a member. He took my question calmly, and said I didn't have to pray. I was surprised by how he was completely unfazed when I said I was a nonbeliever. Maybe it's the whole "love the sinner, hate the sin" thing. :-) Many Christians may be intolerant of liberal point of view, but some of them show a surprising amount of tolerance when dealing with individual heathens, such as me.

Gender imbalance in American atheism, as discussed by two foreigners

I went to brunch at Hickory Street Bar and Grille with friends from the Atheist Community of Austin and Center for Inquiry last Sunday. One of my table neighbors was from Sweden. He pointed out the glaring gender imbalance in the room. Out of 25 people at brunch, only 3 were women. He asked me if I had thoughts why there are so few women at atheist events in the U.S. In Sweden, he said, the balance was much closer to 50%/50%.

In my opinion -- and this is really just my personal opinion, for which I know I'm going to catch flak -- it has to do with the tone of discourse at atheist meetings. Freethought communities tend to attract people with radical socio-economic views, that are also quite loud about expressing those views. It takes only a few of such personalities to set a confrontational, even combative tone for the discussion. When a meeting turns into one-upmanship between a handful of individuals, most women (though not necessarily men) are put off.

The Swedish guy evidently didn't expect this answer. In his opinion, the reason women are underrepresented in freethought groups in the US is because of "family cult", which demands perfectionism from American mothers. He wonders that maybe most women don't find atheism compatible with the standard of a selfless, devoted mother. In Sweden, he said, the concept of a family is more loose and flexible; Sweden is far less obsessed with the idea of nuclear family. He even went so far as to say -- but maybe I just didn't hear him right across the noisy table -- that Swedish language does not have a word for family, or that it has a different, looser shade of meaning than the English word. An absence of such a word would seem mighty strange to me, so I'll assume, for now, that I misunderstood. I'll have to ask my friend who lives in Sweden, to what extent this is true.

Thus the Swedish guy thought gender imbalance in the US freethought groups merely reflects gender imbalance in the population of nonbelievers. I, however, doubt it. I think there are many more nonbelieving women than come to meetings. My case in point is the Ethical Society. They don't self-identify as atheist, though most of their members probably are. I didn't meet anyone in it who believed in gods. But they built their society not around nonbelief, but around finding a moral way of living based on secular principles. And guess what -- at least two thirds of the society (at least here in Austin) are women. Their discussions revolve not around atheism, but around topics of ethical living, learning, and meaning of life in general. The tone is very different -- cooperative, non-combative, with the whole group making sure all individuals are being heard. It makes a huge difference, though these two groups come from very similar premises.

Revenge of flowcharts

My other gripe regarding automated job search application goes towards Texas Workforce Commission. It makes you fill out an enormously long profile that lists various aspects of a programmer's work, and asks you how much experience, if any, you have in each of them. Then it matches you with jobs based on how much overlap there is between tasks you are experienced in, and ones required by the job.

One minor imperfection of the Texas Workforce Commission job match system is that sometimes it sends you email notifications of job matches, but when you login into the system, it says you have no new matches. It's a bit annoying. Occasionally, though, it's possible to find the missing job posting by searching the TWC site. One time I was able to find a .NET developer job it notified me about, but didn't show in my job matches. When I viewed the posting, it said I wasn't qualified for this job. I was surprised, because on the surface there were no requirements I didn't meet (such as programming languages or business areas I haven't worked in). But there is a button that lets you compare your qualifications to the ones required by the job. Clicking the button revealed that I am not qualified because I checked "none" in the profile box asking for years of experience in... creating flowcharts.

I thought creating flowcharts was something my mom's generation of programmers (hi, mom!) did before they punched holes in the cards to feed to a machine. :-) I haven't had to create a flowchart in my entire 13 years in the industry. Well, this job is at a government agency, but still... If they use .NET there, they can't be complete dinosaurs.

And then flowcharts had their revenge on me. I am volunteering for a nonprofit that want developers to do some coding -- for free, of course, but the developers benefit by having something to put on their resumes, learn new skills, make networking contacts, etc. So far I haven't done any coding yet, because project managers (who seem to be overrepresented among the volunteers) are still setting up the infrastructure for the group communication, collaboration, sharing documents, etc. We have not yet written specifications for the piece of software we will be writing, but one of the project managers has created -- you guessed it -- a flowchart of users' expected actions when they login to the website. So... I don't know. The person who wrote it was half a generation older than me, but maybe flowcharts still have their uses?

Quirks of automated job search

In my job search I've run across not just one, but two big companies that use the same resume-parsing application. The existence of such applications is new to me -- they weren't there when I was looking for a job 9 years ago. This piece of software parses your resume after you upload it to the company's website, extracts relevant information from it, and converts it into its own format. For example, it will recognize your address, phone number, and email address, and put them in appropriate fields. It will also recognize Summary Of Qualifications, Objective, and perhaps some other sections, and put those paragaphs in appropriate boxes.

Further than that, things get tricky. It tries to recognize names of companies you've worked for, and does it with only a varying degree of success. The name of my pre-previous company, i2 Technologies, has the power to throw the parser off. It may be the lowercase i that trips it, but both times it parsed it as "Technologies". Fortunately, the system lets you correct this stuff manually.

And boy, is there lots of tedious manual correcting to be done. The parser doesn't handle bullet points very well -- it lumps them all in a big single-paragraph mess. Cleaning it up once is tedious enough; doing it twice, even more so. Doing it on a netbook, which has little vertical screen space, is even worse. Doing it on a netbook on a web page where the editing window, embedded between an immovable header and footer, is about an inch high... that's just UGH.

If I had known that these parsers were used by more than one company, I would have copy/pasted and saved the formatted text in a file. But, as Murphy's law would have it, I might not come across another company that uses it. :-)

How Web 2.0 services empowered the bookworm in me

For the last couple of years, as an organizer of the Science And Religion In Fiction book club at the Center For Inquiry Austin, I've been continuously faced with a nontrivial task of finding books that match the focus of the club. We discuss books that have promiment science or religion themes in them. They aren't all that easy to find, and it's been getting more difficult as the club is nearing its 4th year of existence. All the low-hanging fruit, such as Mary Doria Russell's "Sparrow", Neil Gaiman's "American Gods", or Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, has been picked. We read mostly fantasy and science fiction, but some mainstream fiction too. Most genre fiction, however, wouldn't qualify for our club's reading list. 98% of science fiction employs science only as "furniture" (e.g. cool gadgets), but we want to read books where science and/or religion is the central theme. It's non-trivial to find them even if you spend hours searching Google or Amazon. I could not think of a right keyword combination to show me just this kind of novels. A simple query like "novels about science" or "fiction about science", would merely return tens of thousands of science fiction titles.

I concluded that my best source for replenishing the list of candidate books for the book club were book reviews. Unfortunately, there is a metric gazillion of book review sites around. You can't limit yourself to just one site, even as distinguished as New York Times book review, because you don't know where you might find one crucial insight that would tell you a particular book would be a good fit for our club. Different reviews focus on different aspects of the book, and they might overlook what's important to us. Then again, a random Amazon.com customer's comment might unintentionally point out a characteristic of the story that makes it a good fit for us.

But there are thousands of book reviews generated every day, and I don't have time to read even a small part of that. So I've been doing it haphazardly, discovering useful reviews by serendipity rather than purposeful search. And then I forget their URLs, and don't know how to get back to them. I tend to remember about them a year or two later, long after they expired from my browser's history. "Oh, haven't I seen a mention of a novel about Einstein? Or a string theorist? What was its title and author?"

This rumination was prompted by a discovery that I had, in fact, saved on my computer an entire New York Times article about a "recent" spat of science-themed novels. It was recent as of 2003, long before the CFI book club was even a glimmer in anybody's eye. I saved it with a vague intention of "reading some of this stuff some day", and then forgot about it. Buried in the hundreds of thousands of other documents on my hard drive, this file was essentially unfindable.

That's why we need lifelogging, I say! But short of complete lifelogging, this particular problem can easily be solved with simple Web 2.0 tools. These days I save such articles, along with all science-themed book reviews I come across, to my del.icio.us bookmarks, and tag it with proper tags. now I have no problem finding them again.

So when people wonder who needs all those millions of online services, I raise my (figurative) hand. del.icio.us, in particular, has been serving as an extension of my brain the way even Google can't.

Book review: Chris Beckett "The Holy Machine"

For our October 2009 meeting, Center For Inquiry Austin book club read "The Holy Machine" by Chris Beckett, a novel that fit perfectly the science and religion in fiction theme of our club. Unfortunately, instead of our usual attendance of 4-5, we had only 2 people, one of which was me. So instead of a usual discussion writeup, I'm posting my own review. (The other guy mostly agreed with my opinion. :-))

"The Holy Machine" portrays a world completely dominated by religious fundamentalism, except for one secular state, Illyria, the only country still pursuing science and technology. Having the best-equipped military in the world allows Illyria to coexist in uneasy peace with militant fundamentalist states. But trouble is brewing within this secular paradise. Having witnessed violent religious uprisings that caused mass murders of scientists and rational-minded people in other countries, Illyria won't tolerate any religion within its borders. Even peaceful expressions of religion are persecuted. It also limits immigration from the outside world, since immigrants bring their faith with them. It grudgingly tolerates low numbers of guest workers, though, because somebody needs to perform menial jobs. Even so, it manufactures trainable androids with the eventual goal of replacing imported labor.

Yet none of this goes smoothly. Immigrants demand a right to peacefully practice their religions, and a growing number of native Illyrians support them, as they become dissilusioned by the lack of freedom of speech in their country. Meanwhile, robot training goes awry. As robots learn to better interact with humans, they quickly go insane. Their designers propose to counteract this with the only way they know how: by wiping robots' brains clean every 6 months, reinstalling the original program. This, however, means that any learning will be lost, making it impossible for robots to ever become ubiquitous, skilled, undemanding servants.

In other words, the premise of the book is a metaphor, though a highly exaggerated one, for the current state of the world. Aging populations in the developed world necessitate import of guest workers for low-skilled labor, and those workers usually come from poor and highly religious countries, bringing religious intolerance with them. Much has been said about threats to democracy posed by the influx of Islamic fundamentalism into Europe. I liked that "The Holy Machine" addresses several hotly debated issues of today, among which I count the unexpected consequences of artificial intelligence. Combine these issues, and you have a kind of novel most people in our club would like to read.

The plot revolves around a shy, socially inhibited 20-year-old named George Simling. To escape his sheltered, lonely life, he gets involved with a robot-prostitute named Lucy, and starts teaching her to become human. He falls in love with her, abducts her and skips the country. As they roam from one small town to another, their lives become increasingly endangered, since androids are considered abominations in religious fundamentalist countries. George tries to pass Lucy off as human, which, paradoxically, becomes harder the closer she comes to developing human-like intelligence and emotions. It suffices to say that of many things that happen to George and Lucy, few are good.

What I liked about this coming-of-age story is that it does not offer any fluffy, heart-warming, predictable lessons. George gets disillusioned in his idealism. Religious people, of who he imagined himself a champion, turn out to be close-minded and terrifying in their dogmatic beliefs; Lucy the sex robot whose stunning beauty, desire to please him all the time, and lack of human complexities caused him to fall in love with her, turns out to be less than ideal companion in the real world. As she can't relate to his shock and inner turmoil, he ends up feeling emotionally alone. He does not handle it well, and ends up in very bad circumstances.

Some of this book's science-fictional plot treads, such as Lucy the robot's first slow, faltering steps towards consciousness, are more convincing than others. A certain transformation at the end that resulted in the birth of the Holy Machine did not seem credible. Maybe because we, as readers, did not get to witness it at the same level of detail as Lucy's awakening, it appeared to be tacked on at the end in a Deus Ex Machina fashion (no pun intended).

Lucy's coming into consciousness is the most engaging plot thread in the book. Her sex-robot programming was directing her behavior in ways that were both comically inappropriate and very creepy, especially as they put the couple in danger. This particular mixture of comedy, horror and suspense kept me turning the pages.

The ending was anticlimactic. It's not clear what happened to Illyria, except that it got into even worse trouble than it already was; it's not clear whether The Holy Machine changed the world even in a minor way. Basically, at the end of the book things are worse than they were, but nothing is really resolved, at least not on a global scale. For George, the main character, his horrifying adventures resulted in hard-earned maturity, so in that sense the book delivers.