Hoaxes as lessons

During Joe Nickell’s talk at TAM 7, the concept of hoaxes came up. Sometimes skeptics will, for example, take pictures of an alleged Bigfoot and post them online. They’ll let it go for a few weeks/months, letting the Bigfoot people ponder over it before finally revealing “AHA! It was all a scam!” I don’t know how I feel about these little demonstrations. 

Sexism at TAM?

Ok so this is old news but there was some debate about Bill Prady‘s comments during his keynote address at TAM 7. Most notably were 1) his comment about picking up women and 2) his comments about his show The Big Bang Theory. I’ll briefly (oops) address both.

Beware the Sanitized Spinal Trap

I agree with Orac on this one. Thus, I am reprinting the relevant parts of the non-sanitized version of Simon Singh’s infamous chiropractic article (the entirety can be seen via the link to Orac’s site or here — the cached original version). However, I live in Canada so this might get sketchy, but I’ll give it a try for now anyway. I’ll also make clear, even though Orac mentions it, that the sanitized sentences are on the BCA’s own website, so it’s not like people can’t go somewhere to see them anyway.

Hemant Fail

We have to be careful when we’re talking about crimes committed because of alleged demons, gods, fairies, etc.

Chuck Norris is made of fail

That’s right. I said it. Bring it on.

Seriously though, Chuck Norris apparently thinks that not wanting god on government buildings is 1) anti-constitutional and 2) promoting atheism. Since when is not having something on a building a promotion of something. So I guess the Rio promotes hot dogs because they don’t have pictures of hamburgers lining the Penn & Teller billboard. This over-promotion of hot dogs in a hamburger nation will not stand, sirs!

Not that I give a shit what Chuck Norris has to say, but this represents a common “argument” regarding religious phrases, symbols, and scripture on government property. We have the inherent false dichotomy, us vs. them bullshit that is precicely the reason that god and christianity should NOT be on government buildings. The world is made up of more than theists and Christians and the constitution protects the people who are not in those groups from being accosted with those beliefs etched into a government building. It also protects theists and Christians’ rights to believe whatever the hell they want — just not on government property. Methinks Mr. Norris had better become a little more familiar with that little ol’ constitution he’s parading around.

TAM 7

Avert your eyes, if need be. I’m going to describe my experiences (i.e., so I’m not going to describe everything everyone said in their talk, I’m going to mainly describe what I was thinking) at TAM7. I knew I was going to be away for a week so I took notes during TAM so I could remember what I wanted to say, and it’s a good thing I did because there were a few details I would have forgotten about. Which is actually kind of sad, because I wonder what I forgot about that I didn’t bother to write down. Stupid human brain.

Home

Finally back from vacation. We did some crazy travelling, like so:

Literally coast to coast. And then coast to coast again. And then up the coast. Stop saying coast!

So now that we’re back we have a bunch of boring stuff to do like groceries, laundry, etc. and once all of that’s done I’ll post about TAM7 (and some specific topics I thought of while there) now that’s it’s a week later and no one fucking cares anymore. I’m doing it anyway. Suck it, internet.