We told you! You didn’t believe us but we told you!

Here, at long last, is proof sufficient to most systems of jurisprudence that I am not PZ’s alter ego.

It’s the video from the #FtBCON panel Science, Skepticism, and Environmental Activism, held Saturday evening California time, also featuring Madhu Katti and Jennifer Campbell-Smith, my colleagues from the Coyot.es Network. The panel also featured Piasa the European starling.

FtBCon Final Schedule

This should be the one place you can go to to follow the con. All the events are linked to there, by date and time (NOTE: all times are given in the Central time zone, UTC -5 — calibrate accordingly.) For instance, the welcoming introduction starts at 5pm Central tonight. Click on the “Welcome” link, it will take you to the Google+ event page, where I should have the youtube video set up ready to go.

And look, we’ve got stuff going on solidly from 5pm to midnight tonight. Then we start up again at 8am Saturday and don’t shut up until 11pm. Sunday you get to sleep in until 10am before we fill up the screen until 9pm. We’ve even got some hours where we’re running parallel sessions and you’ll have to choose (actually, I hope you choose anyway — you’d be nuts to stare at the screen all those hours. Even we moderators have juggled the schedule to make sure we have one hour breaks between our sessions.)

But it’s not the FINAL final schedule! We’re still adding stuff! Would you believe Roy Zimmerman will be joining the atheist music panel? We don’t care if you believe or not, because we deal with evidence and facts, and ROY ZIMMERMAN WILL BE ON THE MUSIC PANEL.

FtBCON starts today!

In just a few hours, we’re all going to go stark raving mad trying to pull together this new FtBCon thing. Brace yourself for glitches (we are) as we try to hammer out all the details.

If you’re looking for the schedule, it’s on FtBCON.org and also on Lanyrd. You can search Google+ for FtBCON and it’ll list us all; we’re also going to be posting youtube links to the ongoing discussions on the Google+ events, so I think you’ll even be able to watch everything just from that one page. You can join in the chat room to talk and ask questions; we’ll be watching that as we moderate the panels. You can also get there via irc.synirc.org and #pharyngula, if you’re using an IRC client.

If you’re participating in a panel or talk, please pay attention to these suggestions:

Advice to participants in FtBCon

What you’ll need:
A reasonably fast internet connection (WiFi works)
A webcam
A Google+ account
Headphones or earbuds
Good lighting

The last two are often neglected and regarded as optional. They’re not. If you just use your computer speakers to listen while you talk, you will generate annoying echoes that will reverberate between all the participants. Any kind of audio gear other than broadcasting sound that will be picked up by your microphone is necessary — but simple earbuds are adequate to prevent the problem.

Lighting isn’t difficult, either. You should be illuminated from the front: the worst case is to have a bright light source behind you, in which case you will be a dark silhouette against a light background, and no one will be able to see your face. Ideally, you’ll set up three point lighting, with two sources of light, one to your front left and the other to your front right, and a third softer light illuminating the background. But putting a lamp or two in front of you and avoiding bright sun or other bright illumination behind you will be adequate. (If you’re at all vain, though, the best thing you can do to make yourself look good is to have good lighting.)

Before the event

You will be given contact information for your facilitator, and you will have given them your Google+ ID. Get on Google+ 15 minutes before your talk/panel; your facilitator should be sending out invitations to join a hangout around that time. If you don’t get one, don’t hesitate to send urgent alerts to your facilitator!

When you’re in the hangout, you are encouraged to use the Hangout Toolbox on the left sidebar. Select Lower Third and fill it out with your name and (optionally) affiliation, and turn it on. This will put a bar on the bottom of the screen with your identifying information for anyone tuning in.

If you are using a PowerPoint presentation, set it up in the background, and switch back to the hangout.

During the event

Your facilitator will give a brief introduction, and then the time is yours or your panel’s. Allot 45 minutes or less for your talk, please — we would like to have a little time for Q&A, but if you use the full hour, that’s OK, discussions can be had in the FtbCon chat room.

If you are using PowerPoint or similar presentation software, you can display your slides instead of your face. Click on Screenshare in the hangout (it should be in the left toolbar), and when it asks which window to use, select the desktop. Then go to your presentation software, and start up the slideshow. Everyone else will see your slides and hear your voiceover.

During your session, the facilitator will be watching the chatroom and Google+ and Youtube channels for relevant and intelligent questions and comments, and will address the good subset to you during any Q&A. They will also compile those good comments/questions and email them to you, if you’d like.

Your facilitator will be present in a small window at the bottom of your screen during the entire presentation. They will work out any signals you’d like to get (for instance, waving wildly when you’ve only got 5 minutes left). If you’re using Screenshare, you won’t see them; you’ll have to get audio cues. The session will have to end promptly on the hour, since we’ll have other talks starting at that time.

I can’t emphasize enough how important using headphones or earbuds is — without them, we get echoes all over the place, which are really annoying…and the moderators will start muting you. Some kind of decent lighting is also important, because you’ll look bad if you’re all grainy and dark gray against a black background, or worse, a black silhouette against a bright white background. It’s easy to fix, too — I bought a couple of clamp lights and presto, I can illuminate myself adequately, just by sticking them up in a few places.

I don’t ♥ Texas

Texas legislators are doing it again, abusing the law to force-feed religious ideology on the public and specifically, to opress women. They’re pushing a ridiculous new law, following a lead set by North Dakota (seriously, if you’re looking for model legislation, don’t look to North Dakota).

On Thursday, three Texas Republicans filed a measure that would criminalize abortion services after a fetal heartbeat can be detected — which typically occurs around six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they’re pregnant.

I ask, what’s so special about a heart beat? I have killed cats in the lab by slicing out the bulk of their brain, and their hearts still beat. I have seen the beating hearts of monkeys, goats, dogs, cats, rabbits, rats, mice, grasshoppers, fish, daphnia, cockroaches — I’ve held the larger ones in my hand and felt them throb. You can take them apart, dissociate the cells, and put them in a dish, and they still beat.

They’re wonderful and beautiful, but no more so than any muscle, or any cell for that matter. A myocardial twitch is not the magic marker for ensoulment that you’re looking for, it’s simply a mechanical property of certain kinds of cells, a consequence of an entirely natural appearance of specific ion channels on the cell membrane and an orderly array of molecules in the cytoplasm. This is an arbitrary, emotional decision based entirely on folk wisdom that the heart is the center of life.

But you might just as well pick any arbitrary differentiation decision. Hey, stupid Texans, did you know that gastrulation is probably the most important embryonic decision in development? Maybe you should start testing for the expression of Brachyury in the embryo before allowing an abortion. That would let you set the cutoff point for an abortion at two weeks after fertilization! (I probably shouldn’t give them ideas, should I…)

But lets make no mistake and assume they’re looking for scientific, legitimate reasons to limit abortion. They really want to ban it altogether with no consideration for evidence or reality, for that matter, and in particular they don’t give a damn about the women they’re forcing their tribal wisdom upon.

So-called “heartbeat” bills are so radical that they divide the anti-choice community. In addition to criminalizing the vast majority of abortions, they also mandate invasive ultrasound procedures for women seeking abortions. In order to detect a fetal heartbeat so early in a pregnancy, doctors typically have to use a transvaginal probe.

That’s the bottom line: it’s Texas conservatives exercising their god-given right to decide what gets put into women’s vaginas.

Reddit kills free speech again

Reddit finally took action and shut down an incredibly racist forum. How racist? It was called “r/niggers”.

As the offensive name implies, r/niggers was a place for users to bond over their disdain for black people. While Reddit itself boasts 69.9 million monthly users, r/niggers had only 6,000 members. On the other hand, on a percentage basis, it was one of Reddit’s fastest growing online communities this year.

Visiting r/niggers was a mental chore. Emblazoned with icons like watermelons and fried chicken legs, the site maintained a rotating roster of photographs of whites who have presumably been the victims of violence by blacks, as if no white person has ever committed a violent crime. Most of the community’s content was about what you’d expect: news stories about crimes committed by blacks, pseudoscience about black inferiority, and personal anecdotes about troublesome interactions with black people.

But it wasn’t just some dead eddy, a backwater full of inbred ignorant haters slapping each other on the back and telling each other how smart they were to hate black people — no, they proudly intruded on other groups, especially groups frequented by people of the color they hated, to spew out slurs and ignorance. They remind me of a certain other group that will be doing their damnedest to intrude on FtBCON this weekend (and are already dumping crap on the twitter feed).

They also remind me of that group by another attribute: the fetishization of free speech.

Much like posters on r/creepshots and r/jailbait before it, r/niggers subscribers maintain that theirs is firmly a free speech issue; they see themselves as “the last bastion of free speech on Reddit.” They argue that despite their calls for racialized violence and liberal use of slurs, r/niggers is a legitimate “venue for discussing racial relations without censorship or political correctness.”

r/niggers users even see their shadow-bans as “dying” for the cause of free speech. When their accounts are banned, the community’s moderators add their names to r/RedditMartyrs, a kind of online graveyard that honors former r/niggers subscribers with names like CatchANiggerByTheToe and CoonShine. Its sidebar proclaims that they died for their cause, noting, “In 2013, Reddit declared war on freethinking subscribers of an uncensored community known as r/niggers. These martyrs were shadow-banned by reddit admins and turned into ghosts. Gone but not forgotten, we honor their memory and their sacrifice.”

Right — every word plopped out of the mouths of bigots is precious and must be protected.

No, that’s wrong: you get to say it, no one should have any power to reach out and stitch your mouth closed or break your typing fingers, but no one is under any obligation to host bigotry, and free speech shouldn’t mean you are completely free of responsibility for what you say. I’d be more sympathetic to the cause of their free speech if they actually owned their hatred instead of hiding behind demeaning pseudonyms, the internet equivalent of white sheets and hoods, and actually had something intelligent to say.

Here’s one of the milder racist whines posted in that article.

Here’s what anti-whites need to understand. It’s not the skin color that we hate. I mean we hate that too because it looks like the color of shit. But really what we care about is the genetics underneath. Unless you show me a study showing black labs are more likely to murder and rape than golden labs. I’m going to assume they’re the same. That’s the difference between you and us. We look at facts. You think the demise of civilization is something to laugh about.

I really care about the mind underneath. And even if your skin is the same lovely pale shade as mine, the density of your melanocytes says nothing about the quality of your thoughts.

(By the way, a certain word used with high frequency in the linked article — guess which one? — is also on the blocked word list here. Take that into account in your comments.)

Spontaneous abortion explosion

Now that we’re regularly getting small numbers of eggs and embryos every day, we thought we’d test out all the other gear by making an extended timelapse video, letting it run overnight. Unfortunately, in the wee hours of the morning, God apparently struck and slaughtered the little baby fish in its chorion, and embryo went splat. We’ll show it anyway.

This happens spontaneously a few percent of the time, a bit more frequently in embryos we’ve poked and jostled and plopped into a stressful environment, so don’t be alarmed. Nature is not kind to embryos.