Global Atheist Convention Social Calendar

I've just been fiddling around with this. The Idea is to have a calendar that captures all of the related social events happening in March, so that people have a 'one stop' guide to everything that's going on during and around the Atheist Convention.

It's only a work in progress at the moment, and most of teh peripheral events are Sydney based (because they're the ones I know about) but I'm hoping that others will send me the details of their events and I'll put them up too.

You can view the calendar here: GAC Social Calendar

If you want to get an event listed, email me

Please feel free to pass the calendar around. The more people know about it, the better resource it'll be!
(I'll make a non-Google Calendar version of it too, if need be)

Who's Who at the GAC: The Big Names

It's now less than a month to go before the Global Atheist Convention, and I thought it might be useful to go through the list of speakers and give a bit of a rundown on who's who before we all get there.

There's a good mix of presenters and it looks like it's going to be an amazing weekend (Randi not included), but looking through the list of guests, there are plenty of big names that everyone knows, as well as quite a few lesser known players.

I'm going to see how far through the list I can get at a comfortable pace, providing background info and links to interesting media etc for each of the speakers. My hope is that, by the time the GAC comes around, it may be a bit of a resource for those who want to know a bit more about the people they've paid to see.


For this first post, I'm going to breeze through the big names. These are the people that were probably the draw-cards for most of the attendees.

Richard Dawkins

I'm pretty sure that anyone reading this already has a pretty good idea who  Dicky-D is. With an early career with a strong foot in Biology, Dawkins started to gain public attention with his book The Selfish Gene. Since then, he has written no less than nine books, with a general progression from hard science (The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker), through books combining detailed and complex scientific notions with an almost poetic style, by which the most complicated of theories can fairly easily be understood by the lay-audience (Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow), to his more recent books, which focus on evolutionary theory and those who are working against evolutionary theory and science in general; most notably fundamentalist religious adherents (The God Delusion, The Greatest Show on Earth). 

Dawkins' website, richarddawkins.net, is pretty much essential reading for 'the atheist in the know'. With one of the best 'scientific atheism' forums around, as well as regular updates on what Dawkins is up to, and a news feed that seems to pretty much capture all of the most essential atheistic items across the world. If you haven't been, go and check it out. You'll find yourself with hours upon hours of articles, videos, interviews, news and much much more.

Recently, Dawkins has been producing a steady stream of documentaries (well, he's actually been doing it for quite some time, but he's been doing it much more lately), most notably the Four Horesmen round table discussion with fellow 'New Atheists' Sam harris, Christopher Hitchens and Dan Dennett; The Root of all Evil in which Dawkins takes on religious fundamentalism, The Enemies of Reason where Dawkins dives into the world of alternative medicine, psychics and psuedoscience in general; and The Genius of Charles Darwin which is Dawkins' homage to Darwin and his world changing theory of evolution.

Find out more about Richard Dawkins at richarddawkins.net

PZ Myers

Again, I'd be surprised if people reading this haven't heard of PZ Myers, but just in case...

Paul Zachary Myers is another biologist, who specialised in Evolutionary Development (Evo Devo). He is the author of one of the most popular science blogs (that was carefully worded so as not to upset Phil Plait). His blog is Pharyngula (pronounced: far-eng you-lah), on which he mixes peer reviewed science blogging with his own blend of humorous, caustic, informative and irreverent musings.

PZ is known to be able to crash any online poll by directing his blog readers (pharyngulites) there. One of my favourite PZ moments, was crackergate (see link for a detailed rundown of the full crackergate events), where PZ, in reaction to a story of catholic craziness vowed to abuse eucharist crackers to demonstrate the silliness of believing that a palestinian zombie can manifest in a small piece of bread and be eaten by followers as form of cannibalistic worship.  Lots of religious people reacted with pronounced zeal, and it all ended up rather messy, literally.

To find out more about PZ, visit his blog, Pharyngula at: scienceblogs.com/pharyngula

Peter Singer

Peter Singer is an Australian ethicist and applied philisophy professor. Well known for his book Animal Liberation, as well as the often controversial nature of his work and public appearances.

Singer is a proponent of a utilitarian system of ethics and approaches difficult ethical situations with an objective, rational and careful style, making his positions sometimes uncomfortable or confronting, but very difficult to flaw.

On a personal note, Singer has had quite a profound influence on my life. I received a copy of 'The Ethics of What we Eat' for Newtonmas in 2008 and adopted a Vegan lifestyle in mid January as a result. Since then I have continued to have a strong interest in secular systems of ethics, a subject of continuing interest for me.

You can find out more about Peter Singer by following the various links from his wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer, or checking out his homepage on the Princeton University site. (due to the diverse nature of his work, I find that the wikipedia links lead you to a greater range of his works, from early essays to a video of him cooking Dhal!

Hungry Beast Devours Conroy!

I'm really starting to enjoy the ABC TV show 'Hungry Beast'. It's kind of a 'Chaser's war' without the chaser boys.

On tonight's episode, they had a really good segment about the proposed clean feed internet filter, which plans to filter a range of 'prohibited' content at the ISP level. The main politician behind this ridiculous scheme is Senator Conroy, who was interviewed on the show.

Here's the full interview:



Here's tonight's full episode:




I recommend checking out this show. It's on at 9pm on ABC1 on Wednesdays.

I'm back!

It's been a fracking LONG time since I've done any blogging, but I've decided that I should get back into it, because it seems like there's a lot going on and I've been feeling the need to voice my opinion...

But I should explain...

Since September, things have really started to pick up with a local group I've started up, the Western Sydney Freethinkers, which has been taking a lot of my time to organise. The good news is that now things seem to be running along with a bit of inertia, which gives me a bit of time to get back to doing the more important stuff.

There's been a whole pile of other stuff too, but things are calming down a bit now, so it looks like I'll be back in ur toobs, tellin you what I think about stuff...

Since my last post there's been heaps of stuff happening. I don't think I even mentioned the whole AVN campaign, the mountain of crazy that comes with the holiday season, developments with the Global Atheist Convention, the return of Jesus, big changes to Sydney Atheists' organisational structure, Mercy Ministry's downfall and heaps of other stuff... but then again, plenty of people have done it better that I ever could have, so I guess there's no real loss there...


Anyhoo, thanks for those of you who've hung on over the past few months. I plan to try to put up posts on about a weekly basis.

Till then,here's Ben Goldacre of Bad Science talking about the Placebo effect.

Enjoy