Rebecca leads a team of skeptical female activists at Skepchick.org and appears on the weekly Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast. She travels around the world delivering entertaining talks on science, atheism, feminism, and skepticism. There is currently an asteroid orbiting the sun with her name on it. You can follow her every fascinating move on Twitter: @rebeccawatson.
I’ve mostly taken the past month or so off from traveling in order to spend more quality time with my cats, but yesterday, as I was cutting out paper glasses to stick to Fry’s face, I realized that I should probably head back out on the road. Here’s my upcoming schedule!
This is huge news, you guys. Huge! It was announced back in September but somehow I completely missed it. You see, one scientist by the name of fernieboy100, published his research in the venerable journal YouTube, showing without a doubt that the Bible is true and science is false because the Earth is most definitely not rotating.
The Religious Right’s war on women continues apace in state legislatures like New Hampshire, where congress is chock full of idiots. Here’s some recent footage of Rep. Jeanine Notter arguing that the government shouldn’t concern themselves with making birth control pills affordable because they (the pills, not the government) cause prostate cancer:
What do fireflies have to do with the search for alien life? Siouxsie Wiles, everyone’s favorite bioluminescence expert, explains it all in another great video!
Two weeks ago on SGU I talked about the strange sounds in the sky that started appearing on YouTube in droves. It’s a fun topic and so I wrote it up for an article on CSI’s site. They’ve kindly hosted the sound files so you can hear them and decide for yourself whether or not to repent, for the end is nigh.
Sooo I’m involved with this new podcast and I debated whether or not to mention it here because it’s not skeptical per se, but it is done entirely by Brian Thompson (of the Amateur Scientist podcast), Adam Isaak (producer of Point of Inquiry), and me (you know me), all of us skeptics and atheists and pro-science types. It’s called the Independent Podcaster’s Network, which is an organization that provides free studio space and bandwidth to small podcasters who wouldn’t otherwise be able to keep up a high quality weekly show.
A lot of atheists who were once religious talk about their de-conversion as a metaphorical opening of their own eyes. Of course, those who find religion often feel the same way: “I once was blind but now I see.” This is an obvious way of describing what happens when you have a sudden realization that changes your entire outlook on life.
It would be wonderful if those who experience that change took as a lesson the fact that there may always be something big and obvious about the way the world works, that we may be missing. But instead it seems as though it’s more common that once someone has their particular realization, they assume that now they’ve got it all figured out.
Smashley, a contributor to our sister site Mad Art Lab, just posted an awesome interview with Quiet Company, a band that provided a lot of great music for our old podcast, Curiosity Aroused. Here’s a taste:
Taylor: I like to think that if you look at all of our albums chronologically, you can see a progression. Because in Shine Honesty, I’m still very much Christian. I write about heaven as a person who actually believes he’ll go there. But then by our second record, Everyone You Love Will Be Happy Soon — my buddy Cameron calls that the “writing on the wall” record. There are elements of someone going “What if this is all bullshit?” you know? And so by the time we made this record, it was very much a “Okay, this is all bullshit” type record. So I like to think that it’s not necessarily new, but it’s the first time we’ve come out and said anything about it. Every time before, it was kind of dripped in metaphor.
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