Skepticblog

Speaking at TAM on July 13, 2014

It’s been just over a week since I returned, exhausted but inspired and excited, from The Amaz!ng Meeting 2014 in the South Point Hotel south of Las Vegas. The meeting was a great success, with nearly 1200 attendees, and an excellent slate of speakers including Bill Nye the Science Guy (who talked about his debate with Ken Ham and gave me a nice shout-out for helping him), Genie Scott, Daniel Dennett, Michael Shermer, and many others. This year, the theme was “Skepticism and the Brain,” so the speakers including a lot of the leading lights of psychology and neurophysiology, including Elizabeth Loftus (who  has shown that human memory is highly unreliable, and usually false), Robert Kurzban (talking about the modular mind), Carol Tavris (talking about cognitive dissonance), and many others. My friend and co-author Daniel Loxton gave an amazing talk about skepticism and why it’s important (it got rave reviews and a standing ovation). Many of the participants thought that this was one of the best TAMs ever, because it largely stuck to a consistent theme, rather than giving a scattershot slate of speakers on widely divergent topics. Plus there were the usual wild evening activities, including another installment of Penn Jillette’s inimitable Rock’n’Roll, Doughnut and Bacon party. Continue reading…

The surreal sight of Margaret Downey and Jessica Ahlquist dueling with bananas in the foreground, while evangelist Ray Comfort interviews P.Z. Myers in the background

“Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences”
—Mao Zedong

Last weekend I had the privilege of speaking at the Orange County Freethought Alliance fourth annual conference. Although I’ve spoken at The Amazing Meeting (this coming July will be my third such time), and frequently at the Skeptic Society meetings over the years (my “home base”), and made the big AAI meeting when it was in Burbank in 2009, this was the first of the smaller regional meetings in California that I had ever attended. I’m familiar with big events like TAM, with its lineup of all-star speakers and gigantic ballroom crammed with over 1600 people, so this smaller local meeting with about 300 participants was a nice change of pace. The venue was a smaller convention/ ballroom facility in the Fullerton Howard Johnson’s hotel. We were in the heart of Orange County, long the most conservative place in all of California. Since we were just blocks away from Disneyland, as you walked in that morning there was a continuous flood of tourists (mostly Asian) headed out for The Magic Kingdom. Yet the weather was nice (after a record-breaking heat wave on Thursday and Friday), the sun was out, and the swimming pool beckoned to our speakers who had flown from cold and snowy Minnesota or Philadelphia.

I got there much earlier than necessary (I never take chances on LA traffic, and since I was a morning speaker, I wanted to make sure my talk was working properly). The organizer, Bruce Gleason, had done a remarkable job with his small cadre of volunteers running the registration table and badges, handling the AV, manning the exhibitors’ booths in the back, and assigning one volunteer to be the speakers’ “go-fer” and another to give us warning on how much time we had left. The meeting price included catered lunch and dinner buffet style, which was excellent, and very efficient in feeding a large group and getting them back quickly. Continue reading…

Report from the Front Lines at TAM and Freedom Fest

By “rich” I mean intellectually, of course, because as all skeptics know, the laws of probability are precisely employed by all Las Vegas casinos to insure that if you play long enough the money in your pocket will end up in their coffers. It is not for nothing that it is called Lost Wages.

Actually, there are two ways to win at gambling. You can do it the way I did after the final session at TAM Sunday: play for a brief period of time and quit when you are ahead. I started with $200 at a $5 minimum Blackjack table. For around 20 minutes I bounced around between $150 and $250 in chips artfully stacked in front of me as I pretended to be a big spender. The inevitable losing streak then kicked in and I was suddenly down below $50, then clawed my way back up to $228 when it was time to go, saving myself from the over-confidence bias that would have, in time, left me with nothing but green cloth beneath my empty palms. (The other way to win at gambling in Las Vegas? Be the owner of a casino.) Continue reading…

My wife and I are here in Australia for The Amazing Meeting, and we took an extra day to make a sidetrip to Uluru (aka Ayers Rock), the largest known single piece of rock in the world. It's a giant piece of sandstone that was upthrust and is now tumbling in the alluvium, though it's probably done tumbling. Rock solid, you might say. For your entertainment and amusement, I took a series of 3D pictures of it.

These are the kind where you need to cross your eyes, not the kind where you converge your gaze behind it. In other words, your left eye needs to look at the right picture, and vice versa. Some people have trouble with this method, but it works for me, so that's what I did.   :-)

Click to see the large version of each. Enjoy…

Continue reading…

I just got back from Dragon*Con 2010 in Atlanta, had an amazing time, and came straight here to share my thoughts with you.

It is an interesting conference. Although 99% of it is a celebration of geek culture, fantasy, sci-fi, gaming, entertainment, comics, art, and just about anything else you can think of, its Skeptic Track (under the capable guidance of Skepticality's Derek Colanduno) has grown to be one of the world's largest critical thinking gatherings. Its differentiating factor is that outside the door of the 350-seat Skeptic Track room pass 70,000 other conference attendees, and it's thus uniquely positioned for outreach. And outreach it did: Talks by James Randi and Adam Savage draw such large audiences that they are out in the main halls, where hundreds of non-skeptics hear them. Both discussed The Amazing Meeting and skepticism by name. Both probably piqued a lot of interest, if not converts, and probably put curious butts in the seats of the Skeptic Track room. Continue reading…

The Amazing Meeting (TAM) conference in Las Vegas is always the center of the skeptical universe, and TAM8 was no exception. Bigger and more representative than any previous year (it was co-sponsored by all three national US skeptics groups), TAM8 was an unprecedented summit for North American skepticism.

A lot happened. For a detailed discussion of TAM8, check out my roundtable chat with Tim Farley (What’s the Harm?), Blake Smith (MonsterTalk), and Derek & Swoopy on Skepticality. There’s been a lot to talk about. Continue reading…