Author: Tom
My talk on the Planet Vulcan at Ignite Liverpool
I love Ignite events. As a speaker they are very challenging, you get just 5 minutes and 20 slides to talk about whatever you want, and as a viewer you get to learn about a huge range of topics. I’m very keen on communicating science, and for this reason my last Ignite talk was on … [Read more…]
“I wish to affirm” – my experiences of jury service
Last week, I finished fulfilling one of my civic duties by answering the call of jury service. Now, before I go any further, I need to stress that I’m not allowed by law to talk about any cases I was on, so if you want to hear about any juicy murders or arson attempts you’ve … [Read more…]
Jorge Cham captures the essense of science explaining the Higgs Boson
For anyone who ever asks “What’s the appeal of science?” or “Why bother with science?” I would encourage them to watch this video by Jorge Cham from PhD Comics. In it he illustrates his interview with Daniel Whiteson from CERN. He explains one of the goals of the Large Hadron Collider, which is to look … [Read more…]
Nastiness on Reddit: a result of unlimited free speech?
You may have noticed that Reddit, in particular the “subreddit” r/atheism, has been getting a lot of attention in the skeptical community. That’s not that surprising given that Reddit is one of the most popular sites on the Internet, regularly dealing with around 67 million hits per day with an Alexa rank of 124. The … [Read more…]
QEDCon Retrospective Part 2
Myself, Lee Christie, Tannice Pendegrass, Trish Hann, Alex Gabriel and Rhys Morgan discuss day two of QEDCon 2012, a weekend conference of science and skepticism. Highlights included talks by Edzard Ernst, Ian Ridpath, D.J. Grothe, Maryam Namazie and Joe Nickell. Looking forward to QEDCon 2013! The QEDCon theme is copyright Miltion Mermikides and is used … [Read more…]
QEDCon Retrospective Part 1
Myself, Lee Christie, Tannice Pendegrass, Trish Hann, Alex Gabriel and Rhys Morgan discuss QEDCon 2012, a weekend conference of science and skepticism. Day one highlights included talks by Steve Jones, David Aaronovitch, Ophelia Benson, Sarah Angliss, Massimo Polidoro and Richard Saunders. The evenings entertainment featured the first ever Skeptic Magazine awards, as well as stand … [Read more…]
Delia Smith
For my latest piece for the award-winning Pod Delusion podcast, I recorded my thoughts on Delia Smith’s position on secularism. You can listen to the podcast here, and below is the transcript of my article. Enjoy! As a fan of Norwich City Football Club, this report on Delia Smith’s anti-secular stance is rather troublesome for me. … [Read more…]
A Brief Write Up of QEDCon 2012
The second Question Explore Discover Conference (QEDCon) concluded yesterday. It was a packed and exhilarating two days of skepticism and I had an absolute blast! I’d like to extend my sincerest thanks to all the organisers for their very hard work in putting the conference on, and I’m sure many will agree when I state that it … [Read more…]