Blogs / Bad Astronomy

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.

I just got back from Dragon*Con, and I plan on writing up some thoughts on it when I get a chance. Until then, the folks at D*C just posted an interview I did with them last year. It’s really long but full of brilliance and wisdom. Or mostly me talking up the end of the world, the JREF, and skepticism. You know the drill.

I made it! 20,000 Twitter followers!

Thanks to everyone who joined up and/or decided they needed to hear even more of me, if only in 140 character form. I will endeavor to be even more banal and describe my breakfast more often.

And of course — as promised — I have donated $200 to the James Randi Educational Foundation. If you want to join me and give money to this worthy organization (full disclosure: I’m the President, but it is a good cause) then go to the JREF donation page, or if you’re on Twitter and have a PayPal account you can use Twitpay. Just sign up for the service (it only takes a couple of minutes) and send a Tweet that says @JREF twitpay $50 (you can add a note to the end like "because Phil made 20k tweeps") and the process will start up automatically.

Thanks to everyone who followed and to those who donated. It’s much appreciated, and you can know your money is going to help fight the forces of nonsense that are forever storming our gates.

As of this moment, I have 19,910 people following me on Twitter. I expect that’ll top 20,000 today or tomorrow.

First, Holy Haleakala! Wow.

Second, as you may know I am the President of the James Randi Educational Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to spreading the word about skepticism and critical thinking. You can follow the JREF on Twitter, too.

As it happens, JREF has almost 2000 followers, so the synchronicity is too much to resist. So, when my BadAstronomer account reaches 20,000 tweeps, I will donate $200 to the JREF. It just seems like the right thing to do, since the JREF gets most of its operating costs through donations. When I donate the money I’ll do it through the JREF donation page. I also set up Twitpay for the JREF, so anyone on Twitter can follow suit quickly and easily if you’re signed up for it.

I’m just sayin’.

[Update: I received an email by Matt Thurling, the founder of Science.tv. I didn't realize originally that he created the video, and poking around that site is something I highly recommend!]

If you’re a UK skeptic, you know Ben Goldacre: he writes for The Guardian and runs the Bad Science website where he debunks all kinds of quackery and nonsense. He spoke at TAM 6 last year, and will be one of our speakers at TAM London, too.

And now he’s a movie star! Well, a video star. Here he is, concentrating (haha! Get it? Man, I kill me) on homeopathy.

My friend and very funny skeptic Christian Walters wrote what I think is a fairly tidy summary of his TAM 7 experience.

Some quick notes on it:

1) I was in on one of his van rides, doubled over due to the van’s low roof while sitting on the lap of some woman whose name I didn’t catch. I think she works for one of my staff. Anyway, he’s right about Vegas night air.

2) He’s also correct about the people in his audience, or lack thereof. He was gallant enough not to mention me, but in fact I was not there, as I missed half the paper presentations due to incessantly being run around by various JREF needs. The irony of now being part of the JREF is that I can no longer experience the whole TAM, um, experience. I was present for my own talk, however. At least, I remember being there.

3) Christian makes me laugh a lot.

4) If you were at TAM you’ll laugh a lot too. No guarantees for non-TAMmers. YMMV.

Also, awesome skeptic and podcaster D.J. Grothe just posted his own glowing review of TAM. It makes me think we should do this every year.

Jennifer Ouellette is a science writer, blogger, smart chick, and head of the Science and Entertainment Exchange (SEE), a high-level effort to get more science into movies. She also spoke at TAM 7 last week, where we threw her on a panel with Penn & Teller, My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™, and Bill Prady (co-executive producer of "The Big Bang Theory").

She was concerned about her impact in such a high-powered panel, but I think she was awesome. She has an ability to take personal anecdotes and extrapolate them to the bigger picture, and do it in a charming and meaningful way. And, just to prove it in meta fashion, she took that panel experience and wrote an excellent blog post about significance and insignificance in the Universe. It’s a great piece, as usual for her.

I’ll be seeing her again at Comic Con when I moderate the Science in Science Fiction panel, supported in part by SEE. That’ll be great; one of my favorite things in the whole world is to hang out with smart and interesting people, and she ranks very high on both Column A and Column B.