Jason’s CFI diaries Day 4
15Apr. 09
Friday: the first full day of conference sessions! Kicking off at 8:30am (WHOA) was Patricia Scott Schroeder, a former U.S. congresswomen. She was a Democratic member of the House of Representatives in Colorado, serving from 1973 to 1997. She was also the first woman elected to Congress from Colorado! She has written a biography titled 24 Years of Housework, and the Place is Still a Mess (1998). Her talk at the conference was called ‘The United States: A Former Global Leader in Science, Apologizes for the 2001 – 2008 Service Outage!’ which basically gave us a run down of the depressing ways in which the previous administration (you all know who I’m talking about) cut science funding and ignored scientific facts. The United States now has a rather serious problem when it comes to the population’s general knowledge of science and maths. Turns out, 1 in 5 Americans believe the Sun revolves around the Earth. President Obama has a lot of catching up to do…
Replacing Christopher Hitchens as one of the key note speakers for the conference (who apparently had to pull out as he was flying to Beirut for Vanity Fair, LAME!), was the always lovely Susan Jacoby. Jacoby is the author of one of my favourite books: Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism and her latest is The Age of American Unreason, to which her presentation at the World Congress was based. She argued that the United States is in serious intellectual trouble, representing a crisis of memory and knowledge. She attributes this resistance to logic as not only the result of the faith-based administration led by Bush, but also because of underlying, systemic problems such as the triumph of video over the culture of print, the deterioration of public education, and the idolatry of the computer as a god-like source of knowledge, rather than a useful tool. Click on the links above to hear her talk about her books on Point of Inquiry (amazing interviews).
After the morning sessions, all of the college students at the conference (leaders of various secular/freethought campus groups across North America, plus one charming young man from Australia) got together for a luncheon and a meet and greet. I met some stirringly awesome people, including Roy N from Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists (California), Tyler Handley from the famous Laurier Freethought Alliance (Canada), and David Mazza from SBU Freethinkers (New York). We shared many stories, ideas, strategies and ate much cheese cake.
Luckily, I had become quite chummy with Sean McCabe (who is a legend — more about him later), who happens to be James “The Amazing” Randi’s assistant. This connection aided me in setting up a once in a life time opportunity to interview The Amazing man himself for The Pseudo Scientists podcast! What an experience! I only had to ask one question to get him talking about his lifetime of experience as the world’s most tireless investigator and demystifier of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Sorry to keep you all hanging, but you’ll have to wait until episode 10 to hear it!
Later that day I sat in on a panel on ‘Science and Public Policy’, which featured talks focusing on the relationship between science and public policy — how the former can (and indeed should) guide the latter, and also on the sometimes-corrosive influence of politics on science, as in the last 8 years of the previous U.S. administration. An overarching theme was present in most of the talks: a desperate call for leadership. Drew Shindell laid out the latest data on climate change, making the case for drastic action on the part of the United States to stop it. Shindell outlined how climate data from the past can teach us what to expect from changes in the future, as well as what we can do to reverse the process and become stewards of the planet and our own future.
Roger Bonnet’s talk was similar in message but more broad in scope: how should we, as a race of humans, expect to survive the next 1000 centuries? According to Bonnet, the earth seems capable of sustaining a maximum human population of 11 billion people, or “terranauts.” Like Shindell, Bonnet argued that the immediacy of the biggest global problems facing mankind — chiefly climate change and overpopulation — call for strong leadership on the part of the United States, the world’s only remaining superpower.
Probably the most interesting talk had almost nothing to do with public policy. John C. Mather, who shares a Nobel prize with physicist George Smoot for their work mapping the Cosmic Microwave Background (the distant echoes of the big bang), gave an absolutely enthralling presentation on the latest science being done on the origins of the universe. From COBE (the Cosmic Background Explorer probe) to WMAP to the James Webb Space Telescope. Our understanding of the big bang and the origins of the universe are being refined with extraordinary accuracy.
This is what science is all about!
James Randi was up next — I’ll write in detail about him tomorrow, he is receiving an award during the Banquet Dinner. Let me just say though, he was clever, witty, and as always, AMAZING.
For dinner tonight though, the students at the conference re-grouped, jumped on the metro and headed downtown to D.C. We split up, my half ending up in China Town! A personal hero of mine, DJ Grothe (Director of CFI On Campus and host of the Point of Inquiry podcast), was going to join us, but unfortunately he was unable to attend the conference due to family issues. We’re all thinking of you, DJ!
After dinner, which was cheap and delicious, Justin, Roy, Tyler, Derek and I caught the metro to check out the White House at night. A crazy homeless man harassed Tyler and dissed his shoes, while asking us for money to visit a strip club. Police sirens sounded every minute or so, apparently D.C. has a very high crime rate? Anyway, having borrowed Jacqui Williams’ camera for the trip, I had no idea how to change the photo settings to capture the White House at night in all its glory. Both Roy and Tyler had a shot at, whose would you say is better?
Roy’s attempt:
Tyler’s attempt:
When we arrived back at the hotel, the rest of the students partied and boozed until the wee hours of the night, but I passed out rather quick as I was still struggling with the time difference…
Remember: more photo’s on my Flickr account
Until tomorrow.
xx
April 15th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
1 in 5 Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth!? This is extremely disturbing and sad.
April 23rd, 2009 at 6:06 pm
There is indeed a problem with the sun/earth orbital question, which was put thus:
As far as you know, does the earth revolve around the sun, or does the sun revolve around the earth?
Try adding a time dimension and you get:
As far as you know, does the earth revolve once every 365 and a quarter days around the sun, or does the sun revolve around the earth every day?
Was this question meant to say something like does the earth rotate once on it axis every day, or does the sun rotate around the earth?
In its original form, there’s no particular reason why you couldn’t believe both. After all from my perspective stuck on the surface of the earth, the sun does revolve around me. Why should an imagined perspective in outer space take precedence?
April 24th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Obviously you are not serious?