Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Last week I posted a video interview I did with George Hrab at TAM London, but I was able to snag a couple more with other interesting and cool people.

Ariane Sherine qualifies for both. She is a warm, funny, self-effacing woman, yet organized the famous atheist bus campaign in England, as well as edited the book An Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (to which I contributed an essay on the Star of Bethlehem). I talked with her as things were getting cleaned up after the meeting, so there’s some background noise, but I think you can make out what she’s saying in this brief video interview.

I like her point a lot; atheists tend to be reviled in the U.S., but are just as misunderstood as Christians and Jews and Muslims are to each other, and vice-versa and every which way you want to permute those combinations.

I still have one more TAM London interview to post, and that’ll go up Wednesday morning. Stay tuned!

While at TAM London I grabbed some short interviews with a handful of the speakers. Here’s the first one: me screwing around with podcaster, musician, skeptic, and funny guy George Hrab.

I’ll post the others next week. But if you like this sort of ridiculousness, then you should listen and subscribe to Geo’s podcast, too.

[Note: all the pictures here, and more, are in my TAM London Flickr set.]

TAM London has come and gone, but it’s left quite a wide swath. The Amaz!ng Meetings 1-7 have all been, well, amazing, and so this one, the James Randi Educational Foundation’s first international conference, had a lot to live up to.

I think we did pretty well.

In fact (to use an Americanism), this ball was hit way out of the park. The speakers were incredible: Brian Cox talking about the Large Hadron Collider and the origin of gravity, Simon Singh on his well-publicized libel lawsuit involving craven chiropractors, Ben Goldacre and bad medicine, Ariane Sherine on the atheist bus campaign and her new book, The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (for which I wrote an essay), and so many more. Professor Richard Wiseman emceed the event, and was fantastic at revving the audience up and keeping things moving — it was a tough choice to have him host rather than give a talk, but he did such a tremendous job I may never want to hear him give a talk again.

Um. Yeah. You know what I mean.

It was an anglocentric meeting, with mostly UK speakers by design. The exceptions were me, musician and skeptic George Hrab, and of course My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™. There was a comedy show Saturday night featuring Robin Ince and friends, too.

The highlight for me was Tim Minchin. He is a brilliant musician, and not only skeptical, but incredibly funny. He has critical thinking messages relayed with extreme and laser-focused humor in his songs. I laughed my head off, and when I wasn’t bent over double I checked the room to see everyone else in hysterics as well. He did his extraordinary nine minute beat poem "Storm", about a fictional believer in nonsense he meets at a dinner party. It’s an excrutiatingly funny compendium of woo and how reality stomps it flat. Tim is frakkin’ awesome. He owned that crowd, and deservedly so. He’s a monster of skepticism.

A real delight for the audience was a live video Q&A with Randi via Skype. They were able to directly ask Randi questions, and he pontificated as only he can in response. Although skeptics by nature tend not to follow authority terribly well, Randi is something of a touchstone in the skeptical movement. It is directly through his work that the modern movement, such as it is, exists at all, so getting to talk to him is a treat.

My talk was last. I decided to go with my lecture on asteroid impacts, since it’s timely and does have a lot of skeptical content. I think people enjoyed it — making fun of "Armageddon" is shooting fish in a barrel. When I was reviewing the talk a few days earlier, I realized that I would be giving it in a city hit hard by rocket attacks in World War II. Yet that same technology, just a few decades later, may save the entire human race from destruction by a rock from space. That sort of syzygy was too good not to discuss, so I ended with it.

We closed the meeting with a wrap-up and thanks, and got a standing ovation that went on and on. These folks were applauding the JREF and TAM London, but I get the very strong feeling they were also demonstrating their own emotional support for themselves, for all of us who are active skeptics. We go out and try to make the world a better place, a more real place, and you know what? I think we do deserve a little respect for that. It’s a tough job, but it’s one we love to do, and one we need to do.

We knew in advance that the UK audience would be a good one; there is so much good critical thinking work being done in England and its neighbors. But even knowing that I was overwhelmed with the generosity, support, good nature, and overall enthusiasm of the audience. You may have been applauding us, but you can be sure we applaud you as well.

And will there be a TAM London 2? Well, we can’t promise, of course. But given how big this one was, how much fun it was, and how great the audience was, well, I wouldn’t be too surprised to see another British invasion sometime soon.

[Edited to add: I should never post in a hurry; I inevitably leave off something important! In this case, it was to personally thank Tracy King from February Marketing and Skepchick for being the JREF's event planner for TAM London! Tracy did a fantastic job getting things put together, especially when -- as they always do for big events -- things didn't go according to plan. Despite a postal strike, a balky printer, and a hundred other speed bumps, Tracy and her crew managed to make the meeting run smoothly and efficiently. My hat's off to Tracy and all the people who were behind the scenes at TAM London!]

Other people have been writing about TAM London as well. Here are a few samples:

The BBC

Aardvarkology on TAML Saturday

Aardvarkology on TAML Sunday

Jack of Kent

Sunny Spells and Scattered Showers

Bruce Hood

The Londonist

TAM London is now over, and I’ll write up a longer post about it soon; I’m visiting friends now and trying to decompress after a wonderful, wonderful weekend of concentrated skepticism.

But for now, take a look at a very nice article about the JREF and TAM London over at the BBC website. It’s nice to see someone who actually gets it writing for a major media outlet; we in the critical thinking business rarely get a fair shake.

Of course, not everyone likes the article. A rebuttal, of sorts, has been posted on the Alex Jones website — a well-known haven for, um, some of the more wacky ideas and conspiracy theories out there — which takes a dim view of the BBC write-up. The author, Steve Watson, is unhappy about the idea that 9/11 "truthers" are lumped in with Moon landing deniers and other people whose grasp on reality is tenuous at best, and makes a series of logical fallacy howlers as "evidence". For example, he cherry picks from the TAM London speakers list and then uses hyperbole to make it sound like we had a bunch of lightweights, but somehow he forgot to mention we had folks like Brian Cox, Simon Singh, Ben Goldacre, Ariane Sherine — scientists (including me), journalists, and many other talented and intelligent individuals there.

And that’s just one of many others. Take a look at the article and see if you can collect ‘em all!

But that ridiculous article highlights the exact reason we need more skeptics, more critical thinkers, and more people who are able and willing to examine evidence of claims: we need to let others know when those claims fall short.

In other words, we need more meetings like TAM Vegas and TAM London. And we’ll have ‘em, because the Alex Joneses and Steve Watsons of the world are out there — sometimes, really Out There — and their words need to have the light of reason shine down on them.

Pip pip, ladies and lords! I’m in England, getting ready for TAM London! That starts tomorrow, though there are some festivities tonight (George Hrab in concert!). My hotel charges as much for internet as my last hotel room in the States cost in total, so I’m sitting in a cafe across from my hotel to use their wifi, and drinking so much espresso to make up for it that I might fly home without an airplane.

I have already had a fun adventure or two, and will be blogging about all this and uploading photos as I can. I’ve been told the wireless at the Mermaid Centre (the venue for TAML) is good, so I’ll be live tweeting the whole thing as I can as well.

And if you’re in the UK/London area, there are still tickets available. Go to the TAM London site and come see us!

The good folks at Righteous Indignation have just posted an interview they did with me. Listen as I complain about Moon Landing Deniers, and talk about the JREF! It’s all the same stuff I always say, but this time with 4.3% more jokes, so it’s worth a listen. And you should poke around their website, too, since they have interviews with all kinds of interesting folks.

The Amaz!ng Meeting London is now just a couple of weeks away, and we’re busily working on making it a real extravaganza. I’m very excited about our speaker lineup and all the activities planned!

Tickets sold out rapidly, but we still have a (very) small number held in reserve for special events. One way to score these tickets is through a pair of Ebay auctions… but not for the tickets themselves. Instead, you can bid on a private session with skeptical musician George Hrab, or on a Moon landing DVD and replica newspaper signed by me. The winners of these auctions will then have the chance to buy up to two TAM London tickets. Both auctions close on September 22, so get your bids in quickly!

One big reason we’re having TAM London in the first place is to promote skepticism internationally. To further that cause, we’re opening up the floor to nominations for The James Randi Award for Outstanding Contribution to Skepticism (UK). Do you know someone in the UK who has done an outstanding job spreading the word about critical thinking? A podcaster, blogger, writer, teacher, whatever? Then submit their names online for consideration! Noted skeptic, psychologist, and TAM London MC Richard Wiseman together with the JREF will choose the recipient of the award. Hurry! We’re only taking names until Wednesday, September 23.