A Busy Social Agenda
UPDATE: Revisionist that I am, I was able to snitch some important URLs and names from Chad Orzel's writeup of the meetup and correct some of my more obvious blunders that will now be lost to Google's archive for a few days before going the way of the dodo.
It seems that I've been working on my social life recently, expanding my contacts in the world with more new acquaintances than I can conceivably remember to blog correctly, but I'll give it a try.
Weekend before this last one, Jill and I the pleasure of meeting Keith Martin at Jaleo in Bethesda. Even when we put our memories together on the subject, we couldn't recall exactly how we started corresponding but both of us agreed that it had to have been from the mid-1990s. It was a great conversation, ranging from collaborative filters to books, beginning and ending with some likely wallet-injuring (note the poor things whimpering on the table in front of us in the photo) music discussion as we both tried to get the other interested in some favorites. I've only had a limited opportunity to try some of the things Keith recommend to me yet, but based on what I've heard so far I'm on the lookout for CDs by Sloan, Jason Falkner, and Bleu.
This past Saturday I drug Jill with me to Blogorama V.5 in Crystal City to meet Chad Orzel. While not quite the scale (either in personnel or amount consumed) of Blogorama V, there was a pretty good showing of folks, as can be seen by these likely mislabeled pictures:
The Instigators: Chad Orzel and Jim Henley
The "Hey We're Talking Here" Duo: Kelly Jane Torrance and Matthew "I can't believe you actually thought Julio would come up in a google search on me" Yglesias
The Buddies: Brendan (?) and Jeremy Lott (of The American Spectator)
The Spectator Interns: you know, I really suck at catching names these daysI'd say that I'll update this list when these people contact me, but they're probably wise to stay anonymous.
Jill got into a big discussion on environmental issues with the Spectator crowd while I hovered on the edge of the conversation to the left of me. We had to leave early again since we had been out all day running around shopping once again for a large screen TV (purchase now delayed until December), but before we left Jim let me in on yet another Blogfest that was happening the next day.
So on Sunday morning I found myself in the Hyatt downtown where I met up with Jim in the company of Mrs. Offerings as well as Eve "Not Clear on the Concept of What an Asgardian God Could Do to Merely Gamma-Irradiated Scientists" Tushnet and Nate "Polytropos" Bruinooge (I missed Jen's URL, which about completes my humiliation as she was sitting directly across the table from me--I told Jim he needed to blog this thing so I wouldn't have to appear like the unprepared blogger that I am). The guests of honor this time were Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, taking a break from the World Fantasy Convention to eat a French brunch with a small DC contingent. I took a photo, but they've been sent off to Teresa's Photoshop Magic Stop where she plans to merge them together in some semblance of order. I'm not sure why I didn't simply just take another picture at the time, now. The discussion was great, albeit centered on comics just to annoy Jim's libertarian readers whenever he gets around to blogging this one.
Now, back to my normal hermitage....
Dish on the convo with the Spectator crowd! ;-)
OK, Medley. The Spectator folks and I were talking about the lack of and the desirability of the valuation of natural resources in our current system of micro and macro economics. They took a theoretical microeconomic view based on value assigned by human individuals. I took the empirical view and recommended an approach based the value of services of natural systems (e.g., water filtration, cleaning the air) and the value of natural capital.
Also mentioned were the tragedy of the commons, individual gain versus common good, the inherent value of a forest, and how GDP is a very poor measure of our economy and assets. I was briefly labeled a libertarian when I expressed the view that we should let the California fires burn (e.g., we balance risk and preferences when selecting a home, assuming sufficient financial resources). But I quickly disposed of the notion of any libertarian personal attributes when I said industry needs regulation if we do not want to regress to the pollutant levels of the late 1800s. We did agree that market forces are effective for environmental control, although we disagreed on the context.
It was a lovely intellectual conversation, which are far too rare.