Panel: The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe
Presented by the classic Novellum (Steve, Bob, Jay), Evan Bernstein, and the guest panelist was Banachek. They started at 9:06 and ended at 10:05.
We started with A/V issues, Where it took about 4 minutes for Steve’s slides to appear on the screens for everyone. I’m going to tell the A/V folks to have my slides up the entire time during my talk tomorrow morning. My talk requires people to see my slides, not me. So … hopefully it’ll all work out. We’ll see.
When Randi interrupted the panel at about 9:43, to add some commentary on the news stories. A/V flashed up Steve’s next slides in the middle of the camera following Randi on stage. This is almost morbid entertainment to me at this point, the A/V issues.
Wrap-up: I enjoyed the SGU panel this year more than last year. To be honest, SGU is still in my podcast queue, but I’m several months behind. It’s just not at the top anymore, perhaps because it’s so main-stream now. Or the commercials. But I found the live panel this year fairly interesting, and entertaining, with only the joke about Jay getting permission to use an Indian accent going on about 2x longer than it should’ve.
Talk: Great Moments in Australian Science
This talk was by Karl Kruszelnicki. It started at 10:07. And ended at 10:37.
– “A rat is a creature that if killed in sufficient numbers will lead to a Ph.D.”
Wrap-up: This was a fairly interesting talk in general. I had no idea what it was going to be about. He’s a good speaker. And showed a preview for the movie “Lucy” which looks interesting, but unfortunately is based on the premise of a woman who can start to use >10% of her brain and so gets super powers. Sigh. Anyway, as I said, I found this talk entertaining, interesting, both skeptical, and having to do with the brain. So far, possibly the best talk.
DIE, MICROSOFT, DIE!!!!!
The coffee break was next. It turned into a 45-minute escapade for me and Ray Hall, fighting to get my Keynote presentation made on the Mac to work on PowerPoint on his Windows computer. He apparently didn’t even know that the presentation had movies because they hadn’t worked originally.
I gave him a new version, newly exported as PPTX, all the movies contained in the file. Three played fine, two didn’t, but stuttered a bit at times after not playing for 10 seconds or so.
Tried pasting in the movies again. FYI, all were a few MB, all were a MP4 format. So, I converted one to WMV, and it worked. The other if converted to WMV would be 3GB. But then when Ray re-pasted the MP4, it worked. *insert eye roll here* Then we fought with getting the movies to play on-load.
I had already stripped the idiotic Dissolve transition version of PowerPoint, but then had to go in and fix formatting and fonts throughout the presentation. It now seems like it’s going to work, but I’ll be in the main room at 8:30 tomorrow morning to check, running through the entire 12-minute presentation and all movies to make sure they correctly play from start to end at the correct speed.
We finished just before 11:30, meaning I missed Julia Galef’s “How to Change Your Mind” and the first half (or so) of Paul Offit’s “The 1991 Philadelphia Measles Epidemic: Lessons from the Past.”
Talk: The 1991 Philadelphia Measles Epidemic: Lessons from the Past
Presented by Paul Offit, and it ended at 11:47. What I saw, I thought was interesting and an interesting case study. Key quote: “Your religious beliefs don’t allow you to martyr your children.”
Keynote Talk: The Memory Factory
This was a talk by Elizabeth Loftus, and it started at 11:49, so we were only running 4 minutes late at this point. She ended at 12:41.
It’s hard for me to summarize Elizabeth’s talk. Her last TAM talk was in 2011, so the year before I started to go, which was silly because that was the TAM that was astronomy-themed. Elizabeth talked about A LOT of various studies that she and her group has done into memory. A LOT of studies. I think the real take-home message, though, was that memory of humans is incredibly malleable, and that even people who are 100% certain of something can very, very easily be wrong. VERY.
I’m going to try to get in touch with her to come on the podcast and talk about some of her work with the implications for UFO reports, since the vast majority of modern UFO stuff is simply eyewitness testimony, by “completely trustworthy and trained observers.”
Exposing PseudoAstronomy 