P1020443 The team puts on gloves

Rubber gloves are, of course, an essential accouterment of a cartoon scientist. :-) Left to right: a guy who identified only as Christian, Gregory Benford, Michael Braun, and Amy Sisson on the "Science: fact or crap?" game.

The game was played by a team of pros against a team of fans... I think. The most prominent pro on the team was Gregory Benford, a physics professor, science fiction writer, and Fencon guest of honor. The purpose of the game was to score points by answering science-related questions. Each question had two parts: a fact-or-crap, i.e. yes-or-no part (but you could not answer "no", you had to say "crap"! :-)), and a follow up freeform" question. The questions drew from many different sciences: anatomy, anthropology, archeology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, physics. For the most part they were not very hard. See examples of questions here. Sometimes the participants' confidence in their knowledge lead to comical situations.

Read all about the game in my blog post.Here are more of my blog posts from Fencon 2008:

Slushpile Live panel -- how anthologies are made.

Writers' workshop.

Fencon opening ceremonies: somber and cheeky.

Fencon costumers.

Guest of Honor, science fiction writer and physicist Gregory Benford on problems facing the world.

Or you can view all my Fencon 2008 posts in one page.