'ORIGINS' CONFERENCE: PRELUDE

I recently attended the 'Origins' conference at Cal Tech sponsored by Michael Shermer and the Skeptics Society, along with a little seed money from the Templeton Foundation. PZ has opined that their participation taints the affair some what, and I have to admit that there was a profound difference in the character and utility of the 'debates' sponsored by the latter in the afternoon session as compared to the morning's scientific lectures. It was a weird and unsettling experience, which I will post about soon enough. There were kooks present in the afternoon on both sides of the science-religion divide, as well as a need for better fact-checking.

Anyway, I thought it would be helpful to blog about the various parts of the conference, and I'm hoping to get some of the great minds involved to forward stuff about their presentations which I can then link to in my posts. I had originally intended to attend with a skeptical friend of mine, one of the officers of CVAAS* , but this became impossible for my friend due to other commitments, among them attending and supporting James Randi's lecture at CSU Fresno on Thursday, October 2nd. I had the good fortune to join members of CVAAS in having breakfast with the magician and founder of JREF at the Marie Callender's across the street from CSUF on Thursday morning, and a good time was had by all. Randi was a colorful and engaging personality, and he had a lot of good stories to share about past and present friends and foes of skeptical thinking. A fellow CVAAS member snapped a picture with both of us in it, and I present (in the interest of complete disclosure) a slightly-tweaked version of that below: **



*If you live in the Central Valley of California, why not click on this link and consider checking the organization out?

** It was originally a lot bigger image, Randi was more in the foreground, and I had a flower coming out of my head courtesy of the print on the wall.