On release day, Tuesday, November 19, I did the Artificiality podcast with Dave and Helen Edwards in the afternoon. We spent about an hour chatting. It's a conversational format, strictly audio, but they did have some questions in mind. Dave started by telling me the first question would be what inspired the book, and I told him I knew that because I had listened to part of one of his podcasts and that was the first question. Turns out they don't have a stock final question. I later realized that I missed the chance to give my final summary and comments on the availability of the book. They referred to "your book," and I don't think ever mentioned the title. Shoot. I trust they will do so when the podcast drops. They appreciated that the book covered a lot of ground and tried to tie all the pieces together. They asked about my astronomer's perspective. They were curious about how my students' perspective changed during the course and my change in perspective while writing the book. We talked quite a bit about the significance of exponential change. Two smart, thinking people. They were fun to talk to. The link is not yet released.
That evening, I participated in a live event, effectively my launch party. The event is called Astronomy on Tap, AoTATX. It was started a decade ago by my postdoc at the time, Jeff Silverman, so we also were celebrating the tenth anniversary of the institution. It has floated around Austin in various pubs, this one in the Celis brew pub in north Austin. My son, Rob, came along to drive (took us an hour to get there in 5 o'clock traffic, 20 minutes back in the late evening), help me hand out "Path" business cards, and monitor my performance. I also scattered cards on tables around the area.
All the AoT sessions I have attended before were in closed, packed rooms. This one was in their outdoor beer garden despite the encroaching chill, so the audience was spread in tables and chairs around the grounds. I had not done a venue like this before nor even given any Powerpoint presentation since before I retired five years ago.
There was a stage at one end of the area, and volunteers from the astronomy department, current and past postdocs and graduate students, rigged up a laptop, sound system, projection screen, and video recorder, more sophisticated than when the event started ten years ago. I had prepared the talk over the course of the previous week and got help downloading a couple of movies. I also got help setting up a neat little movie on the exponential growth of Covid so it would show in three stages as the growth proceeded, with the scale of the vertical axis expanding to accommodate the huge growth over about a month. This showed that the doubling time was nearly constant, but that the apparent location of the "knee" of the curve shifted as the vertical scale shifted, illustrating the artificiality of the location of the "knee." It was a great illustration of Chapter 2 of the book.
The mics were on stands, the projection screen nearby on the stage only slightly to the right and behind the speaker, and a light arranged to shine on the speaker, so the audience could see the speaker, but the speaker was blinded and could not see the audience. The mics could be removed from the stands and handheld, but the computer was controlled by a clicker that also had a laser to point at the screen and that already required some attention, so I left the mic on the stand. The notion was that the Covid movie would play a segment then pause. I was to push the clicker to move to the next phase and another pause. Then another click would run it to the end. Worked fine in rehearsal.
What I had not rehearsed was standing at the mic, blinded by the light, and craning to see and point the laser at the screen. Things seemed to go fine at first, but when I got to the Covid movie, I had a major glitch. The first segment ran fine to the pause. Then rather than just running the next two phases, the presentation jumped to the end of my slide deck. The guys monitoring the laptop just off the stage managed to restore the movie and signaled me it was not my fault. Then it happened again, at least twice more. In hindsight one of them guessed I was pressing the clicker too long, causing the skipping of the pauses and the jumping to the end of the talk. Eventually I got past that, sort of saying what I wanted to about the fixed doubling time and the artificial shifting of the location of the "knee," but it was a bit of a mess.
Rob has worked in both video and sound and is especially sensitive to the latter. He has helped me with my mic for my home podcasts. In this case, in our post-talk debrief, he pointed out that, unlike the postdoc speaker who preceded me, I would turn my mouth away from the mic when I turned to look at the screen and point the laser. The trick is to lean to the left so you can face both the mic and the screen on the right. I flubbed it, so the sound was irregular. During the Q&A, I tended to hold my hand in front of my face to block the light so I could see the speaker, but that meant I was also holding my hand between me and the mic, muffling the sound again.
Despite these glitches, I think the talk went basically OK. I got some good questions, and talked to a bunch of people afterward, including one young woman who took my Future of Humanity class in 2017. We handed out a dozen or so "Path" cards and sold at least two books. One young man was keen to know when I would have a book signing so he could get an autographed copy. Good question.
The next day, I attended a lunch for distinguished teachers, handed out a couple more cards, apparently sold two books (my academic friends were especially interested in the Kindle version), then scattered a few cards in the administration building, the student union, and the local credit union where I had business.
We are launched. I have four more podcasts in the next few days. Very curious to see how sales go.