Skepticism

Upcoming Skeplit Events

Here are two Skeplit events you won’t want to miss. The dates have not been confirmed yet, so check back for more details…..

The Skepchick blog will be hostint two blog tours in the next couple of months.

1) Biologist Lynn Margulis will be visiting the Skepchick blog on March 19 (unconfirmed date), and answering questions in real-time in the comments to a post, talking about her life and work. (Lynn’s on this tour to promote her imprint of science books for a general readership, called Sciencewriters Books, and her own recent book, Luminous Fish.) Lynn is perhaps best known for her development of the endosymbiotic theory of cellular evolution; she is also co-originator of the Gaia Theory (with James Lovelock) and the Five Kingdoms taxonomy of life (with K. V. Schwartz), recipient of the National Medal of Science, member of the National Academy of Science, a talented writer of fiction and nonfiction alike.

2) Eric Maisel, a top creativity coach in the US, and (to my knowledge) the ONLY person who writes about creativity without talking about woo and new aged nonsense and without claiming that inspiration comes from some supernatural force (God, The Universe, Synchronicity, etc.), has a new book called Ten Zen Seconds. I know the title sounds woo-ish, but Eric’s books are anything but. I’ll be asking Eric some questions about who is audience is, why he thinks the creativity book market is so full of superstitous nonsense, and if he’s afraid to lose readers by squelching common myths and admitting to being an atheist.

Writerdd

Donna Druchunas is a freelance technical writer and editor and a knitwear designer. When she's not working, she blogs, studies Lithuanian, reads science and sci-fi books, mouths off on atheist forums, and checks her email every three minutes. (She does that when she's working, too.) Although she loves to chat, she can't keep an IM program open or she'd never get anything else done.

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5 Comments

  1. P.S. Sorry for the typos. I have a brace on my left hand which is impeding my typing. Plus I'm not supposed to be typing too much right now!

    Donna

  2. Wow, I hadn't heard of Eric or 'Ten Zen Seconds.' Thanks for the tip, and it's now on my amazon.com wishlist.

    Is there a date/time for his appearance?

  3. Thanks for the update, Donna! If anyone is unfamiliar with Lynn Margulis, start Googling…she’s a very interesting character and I hope a number of you have some good questions for her.

  4. No date set for Eric’s appearance yet but I’ll let you know as soon as it’s scheduled.

    Donna

  5. Now here’s something interesting. I hope our medically trained readers will grill Lynn on the topic of HIV/AIDS. Frankly stuff like this pisses me off so much that I can’t discuss it rationally.

    http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2007/03/post_33.php

    I was out yesterday, and as such missed Lynn Margulis’ blog tour stop at Pharyngula. For those who may not be familiar with Margulis, she’s a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and was the one who pushed the (now accepted) idea that chloroplasts and mitochondria in cells came about due to symbiosis. In the post announcing her impending arrival, there were lots of questions about her stance on HIV/AIDS. This is mostly due to a review she co-authored on Amazon of Harvey Bialy’s biography of HIV denier Peter Duesberg. The review ends: “As both Bialy and Duesberg emphasize, let us see the research results of those who show that cancer is ’caused by an oncogene’ and that ‘AIDS is caused by the rapidly mutating HIV virus’. Please point us to the published evidence.”

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