Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I was going to write up some stuff about TAM 5, but instead tonight I’d rather cut to something cool: on the last day of the conference, I was able to get several people to talk to me on the webcam. I’ll post one every day this week, and to start it off, I present you with Adam Savage of The Myth Busters!

Adam is as warm and friendly and bubbly as he is on the show. We didn’t get as much time to talk as I would have liked– we met at last year’s TAM and got along really well. But we did get a second at the speakers’ dinner to get a picture taken together:

Adam joked we looked alike and dressed alike, so we swapped glasses:

His glasses prescription is a lot more serious than mine. I almost lost my dinner when I turned my head.

Tory Belleci was also there. I met him at Dragon*Con last year, and we got a few seconds to chat at TAM, but that was about it. He seems like he is also a friendly, open guy. I wish we had more time to talk! I found myself thinking that literally dozens of times at the meeting. Anyway, here he is with Adam, as Hal Bidlack introduces them:

Gossip: Adam does a killer Jamie impression; I nearly peed my pants. He also intimated that there will be some shows coming up that I’ll be interested in. Hmmmmmm. More news on that when I get it!

You can see all my TAM 5 pictures at Flickr. I’ll be adding more as time goes on, so check back!

Previous TAM 5 entries: Report #1

But you knew that, right? Sylvia Brown claims to be a psychic, but she is actually a horrifyingly evil person. Think I’m exaggerating?

You’ve heard about the Shawn Hornbeck, the boy who had been kidnapped and then found recently? On the Montel Williams show a few years back, the parents of the boy asked Sylvia Brown about their son. She said the boy was dead, described the kidnapper, and where the boy could be found.

Bzzt. Her claims were all wrong. Worse: she wanted to charge them $700 for a followup 20 minute phone conversation with them.

Evil.

Coming to the rescue are Robert Lancaster and James Randi… and Anderson Cooper. For once, the mainstream media doesn’t kiss the backsides of psychics, and instead hands it to them. Robert and Randi were on Anderson’s show the other day, and were pretty clear about Sylvia.

See for yourself:

Robert runs the Stop Sylvia Brown website, based on his successful Stop Kaz site.

He’s collected a vast amount of info about this disgusting, vile woman. And of course Randi has as well.

I have to add that Robert was at TAM 5 the other day — last year, he gave an excellent presentation about stopping "psychics". See what you miss when you don’t attend? And I also have to note that in the absence of critical thinking, noisome parasites like Brown thrive. If people actually thought about things, vultures like Brown would find themselves out of a job. The world would be a far, far better place.

Update: Skeptico has more on this, as well as Hey Norton! and Skepchicks.

Note: I am still recovering from TAM 5! I will try to sit down tonight and get a good entry written about it. But until then, I have some other things to say.

What with the Grand Canyon stuff still going on, I sometimes find people asking what the big deal is. Why worry so much about a book that says the Grand Canyon is only 6000 years old?

Besides the obvious — the book is dead wrong, it is antiscience, it is in violation of the First Amendment, and the National Park Service has been very dodgy about doing anything about it — young Earth creationism garbage does real damage to people’s ability to discern reality from fantasy.

Lauren Becker, a science interpreter who has taught at museums and parks around the country, says it better than I do: She wrote an essay for CSIPCOP about it that’s wonderful. Read it, think about it, discuss it below.

Tip of the ranger hat to Johnny Five for the link.