LTUE 2012 - Day 2

Day 2 of Life, The Universe, and Everything was again wonderful!  It might take several blog posts to share what I heard and learned there.  At least I'll have subject material to work with for a while.  So here's a few highlights from yesterday.

James A. Owen's life is quite inspirational.  He was the event's keynote speaker and he refused to give up on his dreams.  He wanted to be a comic book artist and story teller.  By age 6 he was self published and selling his comic "Goldilocks And The Three Bears And Santa Clause" from his little red wagon to his neighbors.  He and his friend were the youngest independent comic company to set up a booth at Sandiego Comic-Con at ages 14-15, right alongside giants like DC and Marvel.  He worked for Don Bluth studios as a story board artist for all of 6 hours before being let go when the company downsized (he was hired on the same day they cut their staff by 75%, shortest job he ever had).  He had big dreams and many setbacks but the biggest point he made was not to give up on your dream, especially when the entire rest of the world tells you to give it up.

The panel on Science Fiction and Computers was great also.  Right before the panel began, I was thinking that I should mention the 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" by Will F. Jenkins.  At the beginning, they mentioned it too.  It is an amazingly accurate peak at what computers would become.  This story predicted things like Skype, MapQuest, Google, and Youtube in a time when the word "computer" didn't exist yet (at least as describing electronic calculating machines as we know them today).  I highly recommend you look that story up on Baen.com (it's a free ebook download) and be wowed about how he predicted these things in a time when the first computers like Colossus and ENIAC were still largely unknown and nothing like the Logic in Jenkin's story.  Isn't it great when science fiction becomes science fact?

Stay tuned for more posts about LTUE 2012!