Horde meetup at Women in Secularism

partyhouse

An event has been planned for Sunday, May 19, 2013 at 1:00 PM, somewhere in Washington DC. We’re not telling you where, because this is exclusively for the elite, the cream of the crop, the best of the best, good people by invitation only. If you’re interested, you’re going to have to contact the Guardian of the Gate, OnionGirl, and beg for the information. Beg, I tell you! On your knees! Don’t even think about trying to crash the party, because it’s going to be packed with ferocious godless feminists who will emasculate you if you try.

I know where it’s going to be already, but even I am a bit a-skeered.

We don’t know everything, but we know enough

Sean Carroll explains the sufficiency of physics. Magic disproven with Feynman diagrams!

Wait, I saw this talk at Skepticon, and I think it was close to an hour long. They’ve edited down to 10 minutes? And it still makes sense? This bodes ill. I fear they’re going to take my talks now and distill them down to 30 seconds.

By the way, Skepticon 6 has been announced: 15-17 November in lovely Springfield, Missouri. Will I see you all there?

They’ve also created a Skepticon blog in which they promise to reveal the dark, hidden secrets behind running a free conference, and I hope embarrassing stories about JT (maybe they’re waiting for more donations before they unveil the juicy stuff). Everything has a dinosaur theme, too, which is good, because I’d like to go to Skepticon this year and talk about fossils.

End-of-term madness descends

The next few days are going to be horrible. Today, I’ve got Cafe Scientifique (6pm, Common Cup Coffeehouse in Morris), in which I’m giving a talk on junk DNA. In addition, though, I’m also scrambling to get a lot of grading done — I’ve got to be all caught up before we roll into finals week. Just to add to the stress, I’m also going off to give talks at the Orange County Freethought Alliance annual meeting on Saturday, and at the University of California Riverside on Sunday. Why do I do this to myself? I don’t know. Probably because I’ll enjoy myself at these events, meet lots of interesting people, and learn new stuff.

But, aaargh, papers, exams, responsibilities and obligations!

Pre-emptive announcement

I’m going to be at Women in Secularism in a few weeks, which I expect to be great. However, certain nuisances are talking about approaching the people they’ve been harassing online for years, and trying to harass them in real life, getting them to be grist for their podcast mill. Ophelia has made a clear declaration:

Ok this is specifically for Vacula: do not approach me at WiS2. Stay away from me.

That goes for me, too. If you’ve been nattering away on twitter & podcasts & blogs about how evil I am, how useless feminism is, and how much you hate freethoughtblogs in general, we have no grounds for any conversation, so stay the hell away from me. I won’t bother you, you won’t bother me.

I won’t be exchanging a single word with Vacula, or any of his fellow travelers.

I think there’ll be more than enough intelligent, interesting people to have conversations with at this meeting, the dross can just stay away.

A weekend in Romania

The IHEU General Assembly is taking place in Bucharest the weekend of 26th May, and I’ll be going. I have to think about what I’m going to talk about…

Hmmm…here’s some inspiration.

In Romania the theory of evolution was taken out from the biology classes for several years, and it was reintroduced only as a result of strong pressure from the civil society and the international organizations. But the situation is not much better in the present. The creationism is taught at school from the very beginning of school, in each year, through the religion class; in the same time, the evolution of species is first mentioned in the biology class only in the eighth grade. As a result, 74% of the Romanian pupils consider that creationism is right and only 14% have this opinion about evolution.

Given that the theme is “Education, Science and Human Rights”, I might be able to come up with something to say.

If only I were a little more unscrupulous (or gullible) …I’d go to CMBF

I would love to visit China. I’d especially love to be invited to go there and have all my expenses covered. So when I got an official-looking invitation to a conference there a while back, I had a few milliseconds of enthusiasm, until I read a little deeper and my excitement got replaced with bafflement. I just turned away from it, but they keep begging me to attend. Here’s the latest letter from the China Medicinal Biotech Forum:

Dear Dr. Paul Myers,

This is redacted, the program coordinator ofthe 6th CMBF-2013. On behalf of the organizing committee of CMBF-2013, I sent you a formal Invitation Letter several weeks ago, which is regarding inviting you to participate in our forum as the Chair/Speaker of Session 7-2: Genetic and Cell Engineering Technologies for Biological Therapy. But we haven’t received any reply from you. In case of missing this grant event, I am writing again to extend to you our sincere invitation. Since we have learnt that you are making valuable contributions to Paul Myers…, your unique and inspirational message will definitely highlight the forum.

The 6th CMBF will be held on September 25-27, 2013 in Shenzhen, China. And it is hosted by CMBA, which was established in 1993 and consisted by 200 enterprise members and over 2000 professional individuals. It is on attachment to Ministry of Health of the People’s Republic of China, which is an executive agency of the state that plays the role of providing information, raising health awareness and education, ensuring the accessibility of health services, and monitoring the quality of health services provided to citizens and visitors in the mainland of the People’s Republic of China. It also cooperates and keeps in touch with other health ministries and departments, including those of the special administrative regions and the World Health Organization (WHO).

We have hosted CMBF for five times in Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao and Dalian respectively. Each time was in every way extremely successful in spite of the preceding worldwide political and health problems. The strong attendance was a testimony to fact that the CMBF conference is well recognized as the most important international convention on China Medical Biotechnology.

The primary goal of this event is to provide a forum for the exchange of current information about new and emerging scientific knowledge, to discuss implications for future research and the application of new medicinal biotechnology, and to create opportunities for the collaboration and matchmaking between academia and industry. CMBF-2013 will focus on the following topics: Basic Research of Medical Biotechnology, Monoclonal Antibody, Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell, Bone Tissue Bank, Nanomedicine, Biomaterials, Novel Technologies for Biotherapeutics, Clinical Application Medical Biotechnology (Part I)-Biological Diagnostics, Clinical Application Medical Biotechnology ( Part II)-Therapy, Dietary Fiber.

For more information regarding CMBF-2013, please visit our conference website at http://www.medbioforum.org/.

We look forward to your active support and participation.

Sincerely Yours,

Weird. I’m not a biotechnology or biomedicine researcher. I do not do “Genetic and Cell Engineering Technologies for Biological Therapy”, but they’re asking me to chair a session on the topic? I think it’s very nice that they’ve noticed I am “making valuable contributions to Paul Myers…”, which is true, but I think that only qualifies me to chair a session titled “Paul Myers”. Even if I were confident that this were a legitimate research conference, I’d turn them down.

But I did dig around trying to find out more about them. They’ve had quite a few meetings, and they’ve had some prestigious attendees, including Nobelists. Maybe somebody on their administrative team is a master of SEO, because all I could find with a casual search (sorry, I’m not going, so I wasn’t going to dig deeper) were links to the group itself and to Chinese sources. The topics sound reasonable and legit, but far more applied than anything that would interest me.

But now I’m curious. There are a couple of possibilities here.

One is that it’s a great big scam. I’d agree, and then find myself paying for travel expenses that would never be reimbursed. If that’s the case, we should spread the word.

Another is that it’s a real conference for an obscure organization that has a great deal of Chinese government money thrown at it. They’re honestly reaching out to make connections with US researchers, but they don’t really know who’s who.

Another very remote possibility is that somebody there knows who I am, actually thinks I have a “unique and inspirational message”, and is trying to shoehorn me into a session that is unfortunately a poor fit. I can do a general rah-rah biology talk, but I’m not at all qualified to go into the details of stem cell research and biotechnology.

Anyone have prior experience with this group? If nothing else, promoting a little more second-party information about them on the web would be helpful.

A patriotic way to spend the 4th of July this year

convergence2013logo

Battle the British invasion! Come to Bloomington, Minnesota for CONvergence on 4-7 July!

Both Freethoughtblogs and Skepchick have an official presence at this con — we’re not only promoting and attending a science and skepticism track in the programming, but we also host party rooms for wild conversations after hours.

Take a look at the panel schedule for this year (you can also see what I’m doing — I’m slacking off and only sitting on 9 panels this time around).

You really don’t want to miss it. As always, we’re going to have a great time.

Rebecca Watson gives advice to conference speakers

It’s good advice, too, although I think she’s channeling her mother in the last bit, so maybe this should be titled “Rebecca Watson’s Mom gives advice…”

She’s suggesting that speakers should use their influence to increase diversity. I’m all for this, even if my possession of a pair of testicles carrying sperm of Northern European descent* makes me less likely to be invited.

Q. What advice would you give to other pro-women folks who speak at events regularly?

If you’re speaking at the right events, then the organizers care about diversity and reaching out to new audiences. Don’t be shy about asking them to find a good representation of women and minorities, and offer to help if you can. If you’re a man, you could refuse to speak on a panel that doesn’t have a woman on it. The worst that can happen is that you get disinvited, at which point just imagine what your mom would say: “Why would you want to hang out with those jerks anyway?”

And conference organizers should look at it from a conference organizer’s perspective: more diversity means your audience will be drawn from a larger pool of people, which will help your attendance. And it’s not discriminating against the White Man: there’s nothing inherently wrong with white male people, and some of them are smart and interesting and cool, so invite them…just don’t forget that their color and gender isn’t the part that makes them smart and interesting and cool, and that there are lots of other people who share the attributes that are important.

*Even having them in a jar on a shelf in your lab is apparently enough to reduce your popularity at cons.

Fleeing Minnesota for California, briefly

It’s been miserably slushy and cold out here in Minnesota, hardly any spring at all — I have serious concerns that my incoming shipment of fertilized chicken eggs for my development course may not survive the journey. We may still be below freezing up to the last week of the semester! So it’s good news that I’m escaping at the last day of classes to go to Southern California for the Orange County Freethought Alliance Annual Conference on 3-4 May.

They aren’t predicting any blizzards down there, are they? I’ve gone through two in the last two weeks, and I’m ready to have them stop.

Also, I’m scheduled to appear on the Michael Slate Show on KPFK radio at 10am that Friday morning. We’re threatening to pollute the airwaves with talk of unabashed godlessness.