Podcasts (in alpha order)

• Astronomy Cast – still one of my top favorite listens. Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay have wonderful voices to listen to and their weekly discussion on astronomical or physics topics is a delight. The target audience is your average non-physics graduate, but I still learn things on a regular basis.
• Geologic Podcast – George Hrab is a very non-standard (to me) musician and much of his music is not to my taste. However, I do enjoy his snarky humor and commentary on his weekly podcast, especially the Indestructible Bastards, Ask George, and Religious Morons of the Week. (But, really, can lose the Horrorscopes, Geo!)
• Grammar Girl and Modern Manners Guy are both podcasts from the Quick and Dirty Tips site (along with other themed shows on Math, Money, Health, Pets, etc.). The grammar tips are great and help reinforce things and keep my language skills relatively tidy. The manners show often has episodes on dealing with a variety of awkward situations that I hope I’ll never have to practice. All well-written and spoken.
• inFact with Brian Dunning is  new video podcast from man who brings us the amazing Skeptoid podcast (see below). It has promise! Only bad thing about vodcasts is that I can’t watch them while driving (my standard time to get updated on my ‘casts).
• Memories of the Futurecast – Hey, I like Wil Wheaton (which is in no way the same as liking Wesley Crusher). I’ve enjoyed everything I have seen him in lately (especially a very creepy performance on Criminal Minds and an awesome Evil Wil version on Big Bang Theory). In this podcast, he read excerpts and behind the scenes portions of us new book, Memories of the Future, Volume One, an episode-by-episode recap of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first series. Incredibly entertaining listen! I wish he would do a full audio version of the book because hearing Wil read his stuff is vastly better than having to use my own voice.
• Mr. Deity – A wonderfully-produced vodcast about the every-day life of the creator and everything he must endure to manage his creation. It’s all hilarious, but I think the “Mr. Deity and the Identity Crisis” and “Mr. Deity and the Woman” are my favorite episodes so far.
• The Skeptics’ Guide 5×5 is a 5-minute, classroom-friendly discussion about a single bit of science, pseudoscience or news item by the creators of the SGU (next item). I like the boiled down aspect of it – no chatter, no silly jokes, just straight up, condensed talking points.
• The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe is a 80-minute(ish) podcast filled with current science news, skepticism and discussion of pseudoscience. There are often interviews with prominent scientists as well as other folks (including some on the “other” side of the skeptical fence). Although occasionally encumbered by too much irrelevant chatter (some is fine), including recently an in-depth discussion of quantum mechanics (which is interesting to me, but has no place at all on a Skeptics podcast), I do find the show entertaining and listen-worthy.
• Skeptoid: Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena – My absolute favorite podcast. If I have a new Skeptoid available, I will listen to it even if I am in the middle of another one at the moment. Brian has no fear in tackling any subject in pop culture (paranormal claims, alt meds, pseudoscience, even religion) and he has the hate mail to prove it. Two things strike me most strongly about his work: first, he does a reasonable amount of research (for a 10-minute weekly podcast) to back up his statements; second, he always stresses that you do NOT believe him – he is merely giving you starting points to research if you have doubts as to the facts and opinions as presented. I think his podcasts should be required listening either in-class or as homework assignments for nearly all school ages. (E.g., listen to this week’s podcast, and then do your own research to verify or dispute the statements that Brian made.)

I have a few other podcasts that I get regular downloads for, but those generally sit there unlistened to until I get rid of the backlog of my favorites (with no school and no job currently, my car-time is reduced substantially – in the house, I usually have other things to do). Finally, there are some science news-based shows I only subscribe to when I can keep current, because it isn’t news if I don’t listen to it for 8 months!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVbdGCRUhNY]

Via Splendid Elles, which was via Skepchick, which was via Pharyngula.

Update: The original video got removed/reuploaded or something. New link embedded and provided here.

In any case, his July 3rd podcast #72 was awesome. For some time he had been writing little ditties about various elements but finally took the time to finish the entire periodic table. It’s a very humorous listen and some of the songs are very well done! (Others are just plain silly.)

I have only listened through it a single time so far (more times will happen), so I don’t have a favorite yet, although zinc’s response to an earlier song was funny as were the tunes for silicon and uranium. Generally SFW, although a couple cuss words here and there. Would be great for children if not for those!

Update: As Mike reminded me, Tom Lehrer did a single Elements song, going through all the elemental names within a single, somewhat known tune. Much fun as well!

Speaking of NSFW, below is his video for “Out of My Mind” off his Interrobang album. The song is very good and the video is… technically very interesting. Get over any hangups you have and watch the whole thing.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRwFgZAHDOY]

Back in February, The Atheist Blogger posted a great list of 101 Atheist quotes, including many from such entities as Einstein, Susan B. Anthony, Edison, Gene Roddenberry, Mark Twain, Robert Heinlein, and many other famous (and a few not as famous) folks from the past and present.

First up was John S. Janks, a retired remote sensing scientist from Texaco/Chevron. His talk attempted to demonstrate that “hard scientific data can successfully explain…the Marfa Lights of West Texas.” It was, arguably, the least interesting talk of the entire conference.

Don G. Nyberg, Professor of Analytical Chemistry (SUNY), took the stage next to discuss “What Every Student Needs to Hear from Every Science Teacher.” His fairly hardcore viewpoint says that students with preconceived pseudoscientific beliefs need to be confronted with evidence-based science and the methodology of critical thinking and scientific inquiry. The talk was pretty interesting (if somewhat on the extreme side), but Professor Nyberg was not well-prepared for this audience – he prepared what looked like a 60-minute talk (for a 20-minute slot) and expected only about 15 people (instead of the 300 or so in attendance).

At 9:20(ish), Steve Cuno, the chairman of RESPONSE Prospecting & Loyalty Strategies, talked about “Niche Pseudoscience” and the need to fight pseudoscience in very specific niches, such as his own field of marketing (many examples given). It was an interesting talk, although Mr. Cuno had an odd speaking style.

Next up was Tracy King, Managing Director for February Marketing, assistant to Richard Wiseman, Miss February in the 2008 Skepchick Calendar and TEEK on the JREF Forum. She discussed what she called “The Most Famous Science Video in the World” (the Colour Changing Card Trick) and “How to Make your Message Famous.” In addition to various marketing techniques for creating successful marketing campaigns she also discussed other viral videos such as the Evolution of Dance (love that one), Filipino prisoners, Star Wars Kid and the Gorilla Drum commercial. Informative and entertaining, as I would expect from an associate of Wiseman.

After a short break, Lee Graham, a PhD student at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) took us on a tour of his zoo of 3D virtual creatures in a talk about “Artificial Creatures, Real Evolution” where he discussed his project to use evolution rules to evolve computer-generated creatures. It was a fascinating discussion. My favorite creature shown had to be the end-over-end worm, shown below. More of his work can be seen on his project site. We can even play in his zoo, although his program only operates on Windows and I’m nearly purely Mac-based now.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-qOBi2tAnI&hl=en&fs=1]

Following the 3DVCE presentation was a discussion on the “Psychology of Anomalous Experiences,” by Christopher C. French from the Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths College in London and editor of Skeptics Magazine, U.K. Although somehow he managed to have the wrong version of his presentation on hand, the talk on the “study of extraordinary phenomena of behavior and experience, in an attempt to provide non-paranormal explanations in terms of known psychological and physical factors” went well nonetheless. Interesting, although Sue is more the psychological type than I am.

Tim Farley, creator of “What’s The Harm,” discussed “Building Internet Tools for Skeptics” to help disseminate the information needed to encourage critical thinking. The site seems pretty interesting and I plan to delve more deeply into it.

Finally, Brian Dunning, host of Skeptoid, took the last spot, showing us the making of “The Skeptologists.” At some point during the conference (possibly today), we actually got the watch the entirety of the pilot episode. I think the cast they have chosen is potentially a good one (with an excellent scientific/skeptical background), but the scripting and other technical work could stand to be handled by those with more experience. I do hope the show gets picked up by a network so it gets the chance!

All in all, TAM6 was a fascinating experience. It would have been a bit better if I had gone to it with a friend or two (people who knew me, as opposed to the couple dozen people I knew who have no idea who I am) – I am not gregarious enough to spontaneously generate new friends wherever I go, although I did meet a few folks.

The rest of the day was spent largely in the main bar chatting with various TAM attendees (none of whom seem to have gone home after the convention!).

TAM7 will be held at the new Southpoint Casino in Las Vegas (off the Strip) from July 9th through 12th in 2009. We’ll see if I brave a second trip out to Vegas for it!

Hal Bidlack brought on Michael Shermer by saying “A man who needs no introduction to this audience…” and walking off the stage (to much laughter). Shermer showed us one segment of the Skeptologists pilot before launching into a discussion of his upcoming book, “Why People Believe in Unseen Things.” I took a few notes on Type I Errors (false positives – believing something is real when it is not) and Type II Errors (false negatives – believing something is not real when it is) before fading off. His talk went on a bit longer than I could handle at that hour.

After Shermer, Newsweek senior editor Sharon Begley took the stage with a talk titled “Creationism and Other Weird Beliefs: The Role of the Press (Hint: Don’t get your hopes up.)” It was an interesting talk on how the press has been reacting to various movements (e.g., bringing in opposing views on science stories where there really is no serious science opposition). All in all, interesting although not terribly exciting.

Steven Novella from the SGU (as well as publisher of the Neurologica and Science-Based Medicine blogs) spoke on Dualism and Creationism. He describes dualism (the idea that the mind and brain are separate entities) as neuroscience-denial and creationism as evolution-denial. As always, Steven was entertaining, well-spoken and well-prepared.

Continuing the “war” between Pharyngula and Bad Astronomy, PZ Meyers interrupted Hal’s introduction of Phil Plait with a bribe to give a humorously scathing introduction of Phil. Phil responded by commenting (to a room of atheists) that “PZ’s writing is godlike” before going on to give a tour of the solar systems from Mercury outwards. Poor Pluto got dissed again. When he got to this poor binary planet system, Phil merely said “This is Pluto. Since it’s not a planet, we don’t care” and clicked to the next slide. His final slide stated it all: The universe is cool enough without making up crap about it!

Next up, Mythbuster’s Adam Savage talked about his obsession with recreating rare items (such as a dodo bird skeleton) through sculpture in a hilarious tale about his quest to rebuild the perfect Maltese Falcon. He also discussed the Mythbusters viral videos concept, the “Plane on a Conveyor Belt” advertising debacle and then went on to show us what he and Jamie call “Explosion Porn” to uproarious laughter. Finally, he indicated he had brought 1000 of the ping-pong balls that he and Jamie used to raise a sunken ship and gave them away to anyone who wanted one (along with an autograph). Adam seems a rare celebrity – someone who loves being amongst his fans and willing to just sit and chatter with them all day long (with many, many breaks for snapshots and autographs).

Following Adam was Matthew Chapman, the great-grandson of Charles Darwin, discussing some of his experiences related to evolution (e.g., The Dover Trial) and organizing ScienceDebate2008 (which, sadly, is being ignored by both Republicans and Democrats).

Another quick auction raised a boatload more money for JREF in the form of $800 for Adam Savage’s steel-toed boots (worn an entire season of Mythbusters), $400-$2600 for signed posters from prior TAMs, and $2000 for a nice, useable set of bent silverware (in a gorgeous wooden case) from Banachek.

Richard Wiseman came up next to entertain us, talking about his upcoming 20-part BBC series on psychology, “Change Blindness” (or the psychology of magic misdirection), including outtakes from the wonderful “Color Changing Card Trick” video (it took 62 takes to film!). He brought in a guest spoon-bender – Teller! – to teach us how to do spoon-bending, then regaled us with a tale of spoon bending and an heirloom 12-place dinner setting (moral: Make sure you’re not doing it with an irreplaceable piece of art!). He finished up his talk by filming what he hopes is a world record-breaking bending of 800 spoons simultaneously. You can read about it and see the video at his new site. (I am visible in the video at 0:57, fourth table back on the left, 2nd person in.) Richard is an amazingly-dynamic person. I could listen to him talk for hours.

The day closed with a Q&A panel on the “Limits of Skepticism” consisting of Steven Novella, Ben Radford, Banachek, Adam Savage, Richard Saunders, George Hrab and James Randi. The best quote of the day, from Adam, was “The plural of anecdote is not evidence.”

Not a fun way to begin the day.

Fortunately, it got better! The SGU podcast was informative and amusing as always, talking about such things as the recent psychic claim of child sexual abuse of an autistic girl, running a Q&A session and offering SGU trivia.

Next, Hal Bidlack welcomed us all and officially opened the conference, bringing James “The Amazing” Randi up onto the stage.

Dr. Ben Goldacre gave a talk on homeopathy. Goldacre is an amusing Brit and offered a well-explained definition of just what homeopathy is and the problems associated with it. He also discussed the amazing, still not understood, ability of placebo effect to offset symptoms.

Finally, what many consider the main event of the whole conference, the keynote speech by Neil deGrasse Tyson. My first exposure to Tyson was during a show about Pluto’s demotion from planet to minor planet. I was on the “leave Pluto alone” side and he was in the other camp, so I was not really fond of him. I have changed my mind since then. The man is an amazing speaker. His speech was supposed to last about an hour. We forced him to go 90 minutes and would gladly have sat through a full two hours, even though it would have destroyed the rest of the schedule. He opened up by first establishing his geek cred, having everyone with a laser pointer (mostly everyone – we got one free at registration) to shine their pointer at the far end of the room. Then he whipped out his uber-green laser pointer and outshone every other light in the room even though he had the maximum distance to cover. Nice touch.

Tyson’s talk was an eclectic group of topics he called “Brain Droppings of a Skeptic.” He covered UFOs, alien abduction, inept aliens (you flew trillions of miles just to CRASH at the very end of the trip?), conspiracy theory, astrology, birth rates & full moons (means you got knocked up during a previous full moon), behavior and full moons, surviving terminal cancer (more likely to believe God did it than that you had 3 idiot doctors and a misdiagnosis), swami levitation, the moon landing “hoax,” Mars “virus,” fear of numbers (13th floor!), naming rights (scientists are on currencies worldwide – the Germans even have a Gaussian chart – but not in the U.S.), his experiences with jury duty, math (an educational report was alarmed that half of the schools in the district were below average), George W. Bush, Intelligent Design/Stupid Design (the human body, the universe trying to kill us), religious penetration (80%-90% of Westerners, 60% educated people, 40% scientists, 7% “elite” scientists), the bible in science classrooms and Albert Einstein and God (no, he was not a believer). It was very, very fun, well-paced and informative.

Next up, Alec Jason, the man who, along with Randi, helped expose televangelist Peter Popoff as a fraud, discussed his experiences with crime scene analysis. The information content had the potential to be interesting, but the talk itself was fairly dull (especially coming after Tyson).

After a lame lunch (with good pastry desserts), the fun continued with Penn & Teller. They didn’t do a mini-show or even a talk, but did more of a Q&A session (yes, Teller talks and is of normal height – Penn is just freakin’ huge). Interesting, but not what I anticipated.

George Hrab hit the stage for brief chat (“Good news: We’d like you to perform at TAM6! Bad news: You’re going on after Penn & Teller.”) and performed “God is not Great” (from Christopher Hitchens’ book title). It occurred to me that Hrab reminds me of a bald Weird Al.

Biologist blogger PZ Meyers then came up for a talk on bat embryology. The talk was interesting, but the interplay with Phil Plait, continuing their very friendly blog competition, was the entertaining part.

President of the Australian Skeptics and first-time TAM-goer Richard Saunders (coincidentally a pseudonym of Ben Franklin) was up next, talking about the “TANK Vodcast” and his origami books (Pigasus!) before performing a water divining experiment using educators from the audience. Very entertaining.

Following Richard was an auction for tickets to visit Penn’s house, “The Slammer.” They sold about 15 of these tickets, each for around $1000 (proceeds to JREF).

Finishing up the day was a panel discussion. Randi, Phil Plait, PZ Meyers, Michael Shermer, Hal, Margaret Downing (from AAI) and someone whose name I didn’t catch discussed the main theme of the conference: Identifying as a Skeptic.

That evening was an SGU Meet & Greet at one of Caesar’s restaurants. We filled that restaurant’s available seating (80) and apparently overflowed into a second restaurant to the point where they had to turn folks away as well. Pretty popular. The Italian food was good, my tablemates were excellent (I wish I had written down their names!) and the SGU rogues totally blew us off (outside of a very brief flyby by Jay), apparently preferring to spend their time at tables with copious quantities of alcohol (by chance, our table all stuck with water and lemonade). I do recall that one of the guys may be starting up an econ-based skeptic blog sometime soon, so I will look for that announcement and try to contact him then.

Around 11:30 I headed towards registration to find that it was already up and running full steam. I checked in and got a surprise – I remember thinking that the Banachek and Mathemagic workshops might be interesting when I registered, but I did not sign up for them because there was additional costs involved. However, I had tickets for each show in my registration packet. Bonus! (Or my subconscious checked off the items during registration – some day I’ll check the bill.)

So at 2:30, I sat down to Banachek’s 2-hour workshop with a couple hundred other folks. This was a very interesting workshop on how to aid your memory using a variety of techniques. During it, we memorized the a “grocery” list of items (by memory: chicken, melon, scrubbing pads, shredded wheat, milk, baked beans, shampoo, tangerine, hamburger meat, car polish, evening newspaper, bread, Earl Gray tea bags, soap, eggs) through word linking. He also talked about a variety of other memorization methods such as acronyms, peg system, and the phonetic alphabet. All in all, very enlightening and worth every dollar (if I actually spent any).

After Banachek, I headed to my room to get ready for the reception, which lasted from 6pm until… I dunno when (I left for another show). At the very nice reception, I finally met up with a facebook friend (who lives about 20 miles from me – had to travel 2000 miles to meet him!) and we wandered around together for a bit. I got to meet up with Phil Plait, PZ Meyers, George Hrab and some of the SGU folks. A women picked a fine time to pass out and immediately had 9 MDs (including a neurologist), 2 nurses and a few EMTs at her side – probably better service than she would have received at a hospital!

Next, at 9pm I headed off to Art Benjamin’s Mathemagic workshop. This was an intriguing show where Dr. Benjamin stunned us all by calculating squares of 2-digit, 3-digit, 4-digit and even (43779^2=1,916,600,841) attendees with calculators (geeks!) could perform. The 4- and 5-digit responses were somewhat slowed, but still dead-on accurate. He explained the trick to doing those as well as creating magic boxes (4×4 grids where the numbers add up the same horizontally, vertically, diagonally and a variety of other ways). I was impressed enough to pick up a copy of his book the next day.

After Mathemagic, I spent an hour or so finally eating dinner and doing some brief socializing in the main bar of the Flamingo before collapsing in bed.

Since I am still playing with my new camara and Lightroom, I will not bore anyone with a vast panorama of amateur, unprocessed photos. I’ll just pop up a couple here and there for the highlights.

TAM6 started on Thursday, but I showed up a day early so I could get in some touristy stuff. I checked into the Flamingo and discovered an ugly little advertising gimmick of theirs. They state that their “Flamingo GO” rooms have a wireless internet connection (something not mentioned in other room descriptions), so I went with that slightly more expensive room option. Well, it is true that wireless (and wired) internet is available. However, it is not FREE internet (and the wireless is available throughout the building, so unclear why some rooms do not have that description). Alas, I am too cheap to pay $13/day for internet access so these are back-dated posts.

I found something very ironic about a conference on skepticism and, to a minor extent, atheism being held in a hotel which has no 13th floor (out of 27 floors) and a bible in every room.

After settling in to my room (and whining unsuccessfully at the management about the not-so-free Internet), I took a very, very long walking tour of “nearby” casinos (nothing is truly nearby in Las Vegas). Over the next 4 hours, I stopped by the Mirage, Caesar’s Palace, Paris, Planet Hollywood, MGM Grand and New York New York casinos, as well as a couple less-famous names.

All the casinos are pretty much huge beasts of floor space. The MGM is massive, though. Over the next 4 days, I had the experience of becoming disorientated and needing a few minutes to figure out which way I was going (lack of windows and generally bad signage contributes). In the MGM Grand, however, I actually got lost. The size of that space is just amazing (and, generally, boring). It probably took me 25 minutes or more to find my way back out to the street. My general goal was to ride the roller coaster at NYNY, but by the time I got there, I was way too tired to enjoy it, especially knowing what a long walk I had to get back to my room. Instead, I ate a very good burger while sitting at the bar in NYNY’s America restaurant, snapped some more pictures and hiked back to the Flamingo.

I never did get around to riding any roller coasters.

* It is actually somewhat more than annual – there was a TAM5.5 this past January and there may be a TAM-UK1 sometime in the upcoming year separate from the already-scheduled TAM7 in Vegas.