h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Fancy this? http://www.qedcon.org/

Z and I are going, so are a bunch of folks from Embra Skeptics, a friend of Z's who had such a similar childhood you'd think they were conjoined at birth, and maybe a couple of other of my Friends from the North.

D'ya fancy it?

If not, do you fancy a curry on the Saturday. I long for A good Northern Curry....

Let me know

B

Hmm. The list of speakers does not fill me with excitement. But then, so little does. Will consider.

Meanwhile, see you in a couple of weeks. Literally, I suspect...

Oh.... how so? That would be good.

Check your mobile.

It's @ home. Email?

Nah. Leave you in suspense.

Fairy nuff.

Have a good one.

On a different topic, if you on your tod or you and your best friend were to do a 40 minute talk / show / song and dance routine for Edinburgh Skeptics, what would it be about?

We have a venue, an OHP and slides, and some very small off-stage wings, and speaking room for about 70 people on raked benches. Oh, and its in the most haunted pub in Edinburgh....

Let your imagination roll.....

Wow, where to start?

Visual illusions and how we fool ourselves - why we shouldn't necessarily hold it against people that they see weird stuff. I'd need a decent PA and a laptop projector, but I could probably secure those myself. If I had my bestest friend on hand, we'd finish on the cups and balls.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Science lessons: the old h2g2 entry contracted, expanded and exploded years later to cover things like evolution, epidemiology and economics.

Creationism: Fundamental(ist) Errors: again, nicking a title from an old h2g2 entry to run through the funniest and most egregious arguments put forward in favour of creationism. Probably mainly suggesting this one because I like the gag in the title.

Stats for the confused: regression analysis, Bayes theorem and standard deviations are FUN, not to mention actually useful, and now we have spiffy computers, they're EASY. All you need is oodles of data... which is out there, lots of it, for free if you know where to look.

Just some ideas. Dunno if I could fill 40 minutes with it all, though.

Any of those would be awesome. We've had a lot on paradolia, so the others would be half a smidgeon more exciting.

And 40 minutes isn't long..... not long at all.

The PA's reasonable as is the projector. You'd have to provide your own laptop.

Laptop's no problem. I've three in my house right now.

Might consider the psychology of magic. Teller did a lovely presentation talking about how a good routine presents a mystery and invites you to solve it... then just as you're thinking you know how he does it, he does something that shows that you were wrong, and now you have a new mystery... then he breaks that one, too, and so on, changing methods every time you reach a point where you think you know what he's doing. It's only a few minutes, but it could feed into something else on a similar theme.

Richard Wiseman did a little thing about the French Drop in the 'free' Robin Ince show at the fringe...but yes, magic is always a great example of perception. How about something on dowsing and double blind tests which do not work etc.

This is the best Teller presentation about expectation which personally leads into expectations about what placebo is...i.e. we start to experience what we expect.

It is why you can not do magic to young kids as they have no expectations or knowledge of the ingrained rules we have so if a card buried in the middle of a pack of cards immediately appears on the top of the pack they accept it...adults do not just expect it but are surprised as it is not possible for a card to move through half a pack of cards. Hence, placebo is about expectations...hence why homeopathy works...a combination of placebo and time.

This then leads on to ingrained expectations over-riding rationality...great in magic not so great when one has been brain-washed into expectation of religion/pseudo-science which over-rides any rational thought. The simple magic tricks show that we all over-ride rationality when things appear impossible and we accept them...in magic it's not's not so bad if we 'believe' the card has passed through 20 others as it has no bearing on life...but when that over-rides ratioinality to do with 'alternative medicines' and religions it has consequences.

Oops missed link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5x14AwElOk

There's the ideomotor effect as well that I have done a friend...essentially what Derren Brown did in a show...where Twigs went upon stage...really depends on what you want...it's all preaching to the converted but I love all this acceptance of the impossible and the mind itself creating these 'illusions' or physical happenings.

It's really about questioning what one believes as truth and why we(some of us) are happy to accept some lies as truth(magic) but some lies as lies(religion, homeopathy, dowsing, ghosts etc)...ooo now that is it why do rationalists accept some lies as truth but not others...Richard Wiseman when he did the French Drop, though, had afairly unreponsive crowd since we were all rationalists and thought it was a nice illusion the first time but by the 10th time he did it...meh...but his explanation of why we follow such a simpe=le move was excellent.

....the French drop?

Coin magic move.

Slightly more helpful explanation:

The one where a magician shows you a coin, clearly and obviously places it into their other hand, closes that hand, points to the fist, blows on it perhaps, uncoils their fist a finger at a time... and the coin is gone.

That's right...expose magic...hurrumph. What do you think you name is: Teller?

I described the EFFECT. I didn't describe the METHOD.

OK, I'll let you off.