tinyurl.com/d6x4pjc

Thanks to Larry Moran and two of his colleagues, I bought a ticket to yesterday’s screening of The Unbelievers.  Larry, like me, was disappointed about not being able to get tickets to the April 29^th premiere because Dawkins and Krauss would be available for a conversation after the show. However, attending the brunch with Dawkins and Krauss certainly softened our disappointment.

We walked past a long line of people waiting for rush tickets as we entered the theatre and found seats at the very back which gave us a great view of the stage.  The young woman who introduced the film and filmmaker, Gus Holwerda, told the audience there would be a surprise appearance after the film.

I won’t ruin the movie for you by giving you too much information. You have to see The Unbelievers yourself.  However, the movie is a series of segments or vignettes of Krauss and Dawkins alone, interacting with each other or with other people who are either welcoming or or antagonistic. Snippets of Dawkins’ debate with Archbishop George Pell of Sydney, Australia certainly show how loathsome Pell is. You also get tantalizing views of Dawkins’ ties (hand painted for him by his wife, Lalla Ward) and Krauss’s colourful  running shoes/sneakers.

The surprise, of course, was Dawkins and Krauss’s appearance for a Q & A after the film.  Dawkins and Krauss answered the audience questions with their characteristic good humour and bluntness; then, the theatre went dark as they were given the time and space to leave the stage. Most amazing, Dawkins and Krauss, who spent three very busy days in Toronto, were still signing books and shaking hands on the sidewalk outside the TIFF Bell Lightbox 1 theatre while waiting for their cars to arrive to take them to the airport.

“Toronto the Good” is even better for having welcomed these “rock stars of reason”!

Members of Kids for Inquiry, the youth offshoot of the Okanagan Branch of the Centre for Inquiry, at the Okanagan Science Centre to celebrate Charles Darwin’s birthday.

Kid’s love birthday parties; there is always a birthday cake and sometimes, live entertainment.  On February 12, to celebrate the  204^th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday,

the Okanagan Branch of the Centre for Inquiry rang in Charles Darwin’s birthday in style. In a family event hosted by the Okanagan Science Centre, children from five to 12 learned about Darwin’s discovery of evolution, what it means, and why it was such a ground-breaking idea at the time. The presentation given by the centre’s resident “mad scientist” Kevin Aschenmeier was complemented by a number of different fossils for the children to explore, featuring a Triceratops skull almost five feet long and about 65 million years old.

The children had a great time:

Nine-year-old Ben Ryder, one of the founding members of KFI, said the thing he enjoyed learning about the most was “the slideshow of the evolution of people. . . .”

According to Roger the Vernon Morning Star, five-year-old Ashley Quigley preferred to show rather than tell:

when I asked her what she liked best, she showed me the 10,000-year-old mammoth bone that was passed around. Then she grabbed me by the hand, and showed me Darwin’s birthday cake.

Eager young minds celebrated  Darwin’s birthday, and of course, there was cake.

Update: For more information on this CFI Okanagan initiative, see Zena Ryder’s article, “Kids for Inquiry” in Parents Beyond Belief.

Most Canadians are probably at least vaguely aware that woolly mammoths once roamed our country’s desolate expanses, but scientists led by Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature have just published an interesting report on an older and less familiar giant herbivore. Oversized camels, it seems, inhabited the Canadian Arctic some 3.5 million years ago. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that they were equipped with hammers.

The actual publication, freely downloadable from Nature Communications, naturally provides more details. Fragmentary fossils of ancient northern camels have been known since 1913, from a site in the Yukon that is situated more or less on the Arctic Circle. The new find studied by Rybczynski’s team is also fragmentary, basically consisting of part of a shin-bone, but is particularly interesting for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it comes from Ellesmere Island, well to the north of the Arctic Circle. For another, that partial shin-bone contains preserved proteins whose exact structure identifies the Ellesmere Camel as a close relative of the modern dromedary (one-humped) camel, as well as of the fossil camel from the Yukon. In other words, the animal from Ellesmere is a proper camel, not a mere humpless “camelid” like the llama, guanaco, alpaca and vicuña of present-day South America. Channeling Jared Diamond for a moment, it’s tempting to wonder how the history of the New World might have been different if proper camels had survived somewhere in the Americas, as potential mounts and beasts of burden.

From my perspective, the Ellesmere Camel is the kind of discovery that makes science seem scintillating and beautiful, rather than merely useful in the grim, dour sort of way that certain barbiturates are useful when it’s time to put down the family pet. After all, science does rule out a lot of things that would be rather nice to believe in. I don’t feel any particular emotional attachment to myths about Yahweh and Jesus, but I would quite enjoy a genuine conviction that Tarot cards (with their wealth of interesting symbolism) could tell me something meaningful about my future or that Athena was smiling down on me from the heights of Olympus. I’m instinctively happy to see science dissolve Abrahamic monotheism, which seems miserable and uninspired anyway, but not quite so happy to see it dissolve magic and paganism. However, an impeccable licence to believe that giant dromedaries once trod the soil of Ellesmere Island provides a great deal of consolation.

While I’m generally pro-capitalism, and making money, public institutions have a responsibility that goes along with maintaining their reputations. I’m glad the FHS is standing up on this issue. Antivax is crap.

The Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) was surprised to learn that SFU has rented space to the “Vaccine Resistance Movement” for their Summit 2013 at the Harbour Centre Campus. Renting space to outside organizations for events such as these is done without any academic oversight. FHS disavows any support or affiliation with this event which we believe to be anti-science and contrary to good public health practice. We are deeply concerned that the public will perceive the SFU venue as legitimation of the dangerous misinformation that the Vaccine Resistance Movement is known for. Please accept our sincere apologies for the inappropriate use of SFU facilities to promote this event.

Google’s doodle for February 19 marks the 540^th birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus,

the astronomer who transformed our understanding of the solar system and is best known for his theory that the sun and not the Earth is at the centre of the universe.

If I lived in Toronto, I would accept this Facebook invitation from Rufina Kim:

You are cordially invited to the first meeting of a new campus group established to discuss and debate various topics in scientific controversy and the implications of such controversies in the real world.

For our first meeting, we will be presenting our thoughts on how to define “SCIENCE” and strive to arrive at a coherent consensus. This will be an important step for conceptualizing supporting arguments for future debates.

This club will be overseen by myself and a faculty member, Prof. Laurence A. Moran, who is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry at U of T and lecturer for “HMB205H – Scientific Controversies and Misconceptions” (this event is also featured on his blog! See http://sandwalk.blogspot.ca/2013/01/wtf-is-science.html

Future topics of debate may include (but are not limited to):

- evolution versus intelligent design

- ethics of genetic engineering, biotechnology

- human population growth and sustainability

- medical ethics

- genetically modified foods

- abortion

- conservation of biodiversity

- science and religion

Lastly, the official name of this new club will be decided as a group at this meeting! Exciting! Please spread the word. All are welcome, even just to watch for the experience!

Where: University of Toronto, Room 5243, Medical Sciences Building (5th floor)

When: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 @6:00pm

Larry Moran has posted a reminder on his blog and has included some definitions of science from the Oxford English Dictionary.  The definitions themselves should promote some lively discussion.

This is your chance to listen as

Lawrence Krauss joins Justin Trottier at The Star Spot to discuss nothing, and how a universe can arise from it. Covering Krauss’ earlier book “The Physics of Star Trek,” the two discuss warp drives, time travel and transporters, and then reflect on the likelihood of a space exploration future anywhere like that of the Star Trek universe. Arguing that not only matter, space and time, but the laws of physics themselves, can all be ultimately explained, Krauss defends his assertion that the ultimate question “Why is there something rather than nothing” properly belongs to the realm of science, responding to critiques from philosophers and some in the religious communities. The conversation also focuses on quantum gravity, the anthropic principle, and what we it means about our place in the universe that in the very long run, our universe seems to be heading back in the direction of nothingness.

LISTEN NOW OR DOWNLOAD

Professor Lawrence Krauss is Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. He grew up in Toronto and studied at Carleton University, then received a PhD in physics at MIT. He served on President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign science policy committee, and has received awards from the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Institute of Physics. He is the author of a number of books, including Hiding in the Mirror, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe From Nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing.

According to io9, a website I follow on Twitter,

To market the BBC Two series Wonders of Life, hosted by Brian Cox, the BBC got none other than Eric Idle to write and sing new lyrics to “The Galaxy Song” from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. But instead of singing about the massive scale of the universe and humanity’s insignificance in it, this time Idle sings about the miracle—and weirdness—of life on Earth:

Thank you, Eric Idle, for the wonderful line @ 1:35:

Life from a star is far more bizarre than an old bearded bloke they call God.