I thought poutine was poutine until I visited Canada and every single person at the restaurant ordered a different kind. Larry Moran and I were caught in the act; also, he reviews my talk.
I staggered home last night at about 2am, fresh from Eschaton 2012. It was a very good conference from my perspective (and probably everyone else’s, too!). There was a familiar mix of good friends from Freethoughtblogs — Natalie Reed, who was given a well-deserved award from CFI for her social justice work, Hank “Beta Culture” Fox, Ian “Zombie Slayer” Cromwell, Ophelia “God Hates Women” Benson, and me, who bored everyone to tears with a primer on some very basic principles in population genetics (why do these people keep inviting me?). Then there were some familiar big names: Larry Moran, Chris DiCarlo, and Eugenie Scott. And then what I really look forward to: meeting new people who either are, ought to be, or will be big names: Veronica Abbass (why haven’t I been following Canadian Atheist before?), Dear Ania, and of course people like Heina, Eric MacDonald, Udo Schuklenk, Vyckie Garrison, and Jeff Shallit. There were others I missed; it was a surprisingly diverse and ambitious conference with two parallel tracks so you couldn’t see everything. That was a cunning ploy, I think, to whet our appetites for more so we’ll come to the next one. I learned stuff and had good conversations and that’s all I really ask of a conference.
Now, unfortunately, while I’m physically back in Morris for a good long while, I have to warn you that this is the last week of the semester and the chronic distractions of a heavy workload are about to flare into acute intensity: this is the week I have to give and grade the last unit exams of the term, grade term papers, advise worried students on their status in my courses, and do a bit of essential committee work, too, so I’m not going to be able to do much blog writing for a bit, despite positively aching to get a bunch of science and atheism stuff hammered down in words. The blog has to wait a bit longer while I deal with my top priority teaching.
But the end is in sight! These demands on my time (really, I’m looking at staying up much of tonight trying to get a stack of exams graded promptly) will begin to ebb around mid-week, and then finals aren’t that bad — they’re like the last paroxysm before the fever breaks. I shall persevere. You’ll have to bear with my boringness for a bit longer.
It’s my last conference of the year: I’ve got a break of over a month after this, in which I get to stay home and write and relax and get prepped for the Spring semester. But before all that, it’s Eschaton 2012, where just to go out with a surge, I’m giving two talks, so that everyone will feel like it really is the end of the world.
It’s not too late to register. You can skip my talks and just go listen to Eugenie Scott, instead, or all those other speakers — this is a big one and there’s no shortage of interesting stuff going on.
Some bozo named @RichSandersen on Twitter asserted that
Skepticon att. dropped 1200 to 700. With @PZMyers and @RebeccaWatson there, no wonder people stayed away.
(It’s worth noting that in the twitter thread, DJ Grothe graciously wrote that he’d heard figures of 1600 attendees, and that it was a “great event.”)
Hmm. I was at both Skepticon IV and Skepticon V. @RichSandersen wasn’t. I can tell you that it was a big crowd at both, and the size was a little hard to judge, because this year it moved to a much larger venue, but I had the impression that it was even bigger this year than last — it’s growing steadily.
So I wrote to the organizers and asked them about the attendance figures. Here’s their reply.
Our estimates are 1400-1600 in meatspace. The reason for the variance is that while we know we got a bump in attendance from foot traffic from Meals a Million [a charity convention that was going on next door], but we didn’t have a good metric for tracking them. That said, the live stream was new exciting. We don’t know how many people signed on to it over the course of the event, but during Greta’s talk we had 1,100 people watching. That’s pretty cool.
So @RichSandersen believed that it must have been smaller, since Rebecca Watson and I are so odious, so he decided it was smaller this year, which means that Rebecca Watson and I really are awful horrible people. What a lovely example of confirmation bias!
Since we were going to be responsible if attendance had plummeted, I insist that we now get full credit for the increase in attendance this year. It would only be fair.
Skepticon got some pleasant, positive press in the Springfield television news. It’s weird how they gave that grey old guy too much air time, though.
(Yes, I’m finally home. Working on tomorrow’s lecture. I suppose I have to go fix dinner soon and other such mundanities.)
I woke up this morning with an awful, miserable head cold: there is a great wobbling blob of snot atop my shoulders today, and there are grisly, bubbly, phlegmy noises coming out of my mouth. It is not good. It is kind of gross.
So I would like you all to pray for me.
Oh, wait, no! That never works! Don’t do that. Instead, there’s only one thing that might give me some psychic assistance: money. Yes, a small pile of money would really help right now.
Only not for me. Send it to Skepticon. Would you believe they got a rude surprise this week? The venue is demanding an unexpected and rather excessive sum of money right away, or they’re going to cancel the whole event. It’s like learning that someone plans to steal Christmas, on top of having a brain that has turned into a flocculent, foamy fluid today.
Skepticon is in urgent need of donations, fast. Those crazy kids…it was suggested that maybe if they charged a nominal admission fee, like $5, that would be enough to cover the shortfall, but noooo…they’re sticking by their principles and insisting that this conference will always be free of charge.
So make a cranky old sludge-brained man mildly less dismal by throwing a few dollars at some idealistic young’uns, OK?
So I just got back from CSICon, which was great fun. I gave a talk on the role of chance in evolution (it’s more important than many think), and I think people recorded it. I also have a rough summary that I’ll polish up and post to Pharyngula. But…
You’ll have to wait a bit. This year I’ve decided I can no longer drive myself into total mental collapse by doing new talks all over the place, so I’m going to be recycling a fair bit. I’m going to use this same talk at Skepticon and Eschaton 2012, so if you’re going to those events too, you might want to skip one of my sessions. Except that at CSICon, I had to compress it down to a half hour, so there will be some additional stuff at those two meetings.
I’m also scheduled to do two talks at Eschaton, so I’m not going to give that same talk twice. It’ll be a talk on science education on Saturday morning, and one on evolutionary theory on Saturday evening.
And then in December I’ll post a written summary of my talk, and try to come up with something new to say for Spring meetings.
I’m just curious — The Paradigm Symposium was held last weekend in Minneapolis, featuring such remarkable stars of the wacky contingent as Erich von Däniken, Giorgio Tsoukalos, and George Noory. This is the conference I was invited to attend, but didn’t bother.
For such a glitzily publicized event and a large collection of weird “stars”, though, there isn’t much appearing on the web about it. Maybe everyone who attended was sworn to secrecy as they left, or the Men in Black showed up and wiped all their memories.
Anyway, if you were there and would care to submit a guest post, I’d probably put it up here.
I’ve been told that Eve Siebert attended, and also tweeted about it. Surprise, surprise, the speakers didn’t understand evolution.
One of the best of the godless skeptic conventions is Skepticon (also one of the cheapest, at a registration price of $0), and it turns out that a huge number of FtB bloggers will be there: me, Aron, Jen, Stephanie, Brianne, Matt, Richard, traitorous ex-FtBer JT, etc. So Ed Brayton has announced that there will be an official FreethoughtBlogs party on Saturday, 10 November, in the Farmers Gastropub, a most excellent venue.
Everyone is invited, even JT (although he will be expected to grovel and beg admission). I should warn you, though, that Skepticon has a sensibility to it: it’s marvelously synthetic, bringing together hard-nosed skepticism, fiercely open atheism, and humanist optimism in one great celebratory mish-mash. Assholes don’t fit in very well, so if you’re one of those, you might have to miss our big party.
I just got back from the Texas Freethought Conference, which was excellent — lots of good speakers, great conversations, and a particularly dense day of brain fodder. In Texas! Maybe stereotypes aren’t universally true.
But I’m an atheist, and you know what that means: I’ve got to carp about my grievances. In the vast assortment of good talks, there were three bad arguments that peeved me, so I’m going to address those right here.
Oops, they got a little long and were so different from one another that I broke them into three separate posts.
Bad argument #1: The Mormon exception
Bad argument #3: Science says what?
Again, let me emphasize that the conference was great, but I’m just one of those obnoxious people who has to pick at the exceptions.
