So there’s been a little bit of blogging going on recently following a piece written for the New Statesman by Robin Ince and Brian Cox where they state the importance of not conflating opinion with science, it’s an interesting piece and can be read here. As you can imagine it focuses on the need not to forget why science is important, but with this being the internet someone didn’t like it and wrote a blog post ranting about it…..and it’s to that blog post, or the general nature of it, that I’ll be replying to.
To make it clear though I’m not going to do a point by point response, that’s already been done here by Martin Robbins, he responds paragraph by paragraph and really takes the writer to task and it’s definitely something worth reading. What I want to break down is the guy’s misuse of the geek label, I had a brief twitter exchange with the writer of another blog post about this and Martin in which my gut call was confirmed……they used the term geek as a catch all bucket for anything they didn’t like.
So as promised, here is the fundraiser schedule with links. Don’t forget that we’re raising money for Sense About Science and their Ask for Evidence campaign, they’re also on twitter as is Voice of Young Science. We have a donations page set up at Just Giving and if you are in the UK you can donate by text message to 70070 with the code STVC99 and state the amount in £’s up to £10. We’ll be on twitter, you can tweet us direct on @SkepticTV or by using #12hourcall. The last link you’ll need is where to find us, I’ll post that below…
Continue reading 2012 Schedule – Now with Links! (Updated)
Firstly massive appologies for not doing this on the weekend! Real life has spat a number of things at me right now so I have to juggle them and the fundraiser, however given my overall awesome nature I’m sure I’ll be fine…….so without further messing around lets do this!
On the back of my last blog post I’d like to point you in the direction of another of The True Pooka‘s videos. This one is a little more personal in nature than his normal material as it’s about an issue that affected both him and his good lady. And it’s at this point that I’ll slip in the ‘read more’ line a bit earlier than normal.
Continue reading Why Harrasement is Never a Non-Issue
{Note: I started working on this blog post when I was on a borrowed laptop as mine wasn’t turning on, it wa abandond due to keyboard issues on the loaned laptop. The post below is a combination of what I wrote then, some edits to it and what I’m writing now.}
So the train wreck that is thunderf00ts decent into misogyny is on going, it started with this tweet about a video (I’ll go on in some depth with this in a bit, oh don’t you worry) and then continued with him telling PZMyers to watch the video, which lead to the following replies: 1, 2 and 3. So what is it about is video? Well the woman in it talks about what she refers to as the tyranny of female hypo agency, I’ll put the video below but be warned…..it’s long and its very clear that she’s reading from a script, and she’s fairly monotone!
Continue reading Women That Need To Get Back In The Kitchen (And Make Me Some Pie!)
As those of you following our twitter will know our tech guy (who is amazing) has started to go through our back catalogue of shows and render them suitable for youtube. By rendering suitable he is seperating the audio from the visual of the original recordings as the array of pictures that we show during the live shows arn’t ours…
This is something worth bearing in mind, especially since the UK will now have it’s first state schools with a creationist influence…….don’t believe me? Here’s the Guardian article that reports on it. These schools are meant to not teach creationism in science lessons, something that Michael Gove has apparently insisted on, but it doesn’t say anything about RE lessons and as anyone that’s seen Richard Dawkins series on Faith schools it’s still completely possible to undermine the science you are teaching because they’ll revert to the stance of ‘but we know what our faith says’. The ‘best’ thing about this is that the money
Continue reading Europe has it’s own Creationists too!
So a short while ago, just before my laptop gave out, TWL did a fundraiser for Atheists Helping the Homeless. In the mammoth 12 hours of the show (I wonder where they got that idea from 😉 ) they managed to raise a little over $2000 for this excellent cause. If you missed the main event and want to donate…
So ok, you are still waiting on the post I was going to right yesterday. It will come, I’ve just been busy today and not got the time to do it. Instead I’d like so share something I found on You Tube. It’s a TED talk, and some other vids, about a woman coming out about her mental illness and trying to end the stigma
Ok, this isn’t the blog post I was expecting to write today (although I will still come back to that one when I next get the time), this blog post is an extended reply to a comments discussion on youtube as simply the 500 characters space will not be sufficient for what I wish to say. Hence bringing this hear, I will also (at some point) get the respective yt comments threads and paste them below this entry so that you’ve got the whole context, it’s not something I have the time to do at the moment.
So why this post? Well this stems from the video Bair posted on youtube letting people know he’d written his blog piece about the whole Tf/sexual harrasement who-har that’s kicked off. In the comments section I’ve been responding to a number of people about various things, and the whole late night coffee invite in a lift thing has come back up. And there’s this one guy that I think, quite frankly mind, really does not get it at all. I’m not going to name him in this post but I will be addressing him with it and I’ll make sure he’s aware of this so he can reply here (although a very quick note on new commenters, the first post will need approval but that is to prevent spam posts by bots, all other posts are auto approved from then on).
Continue reading General Safety for the Late Night Bar Scene
