HJHOP Podcast 13--SkepTrack collage!

Howdy. This is a very special HJHOP podcast, where I bring the wacky experience of Dragon*Con's SkepTrack to you, the miserable wretch who does not live in Atlanta. It was a who's who of who's doing what here. In skepticism, that is.

Words are hard sometimes.

There is nothing like this conference. Nothing. Suck it, Trekkies.

Anyway, you will hear me a pop in a few times, occasionally asking questions. It opens at the name tag station, where we got our badges. There are snippets from the first session we attended, "Where do we go from here?" I ask a humanities question and get responses from Eugenie Scott and Phil Plait. There are some bits from before and during the Adam Savage presentation. We hear the opening of the live Skeptoid reading and a brief snippet of his reader response episode that followed. The most interesting thing, and probably the longest section, is the Q&A from Sunday night's session with Joe Nickell and Ben Radford about hunting ghosts. The crowd was about 50/50 pro/con on the topic of ghost hunting. Some people from the TruTV show Haunting Evidence were there, including Patrick Burns. The Q&A starts at about 23:15. He is accompanied by David Schrader, who I never heard of, but Animala has. (We did not figure out who he was until we looked up Patrick's book.) Schrader shouts out that he is angry about Radford's review if his book. The woman who is angry and asserts, "You can't state fact," may be Marley Gibson, but I really don't know.

At the end of the Q&A, I drift over to these folks, and you hear Schrader talk about Jason and Grant of Ghost Hunters, I don't know, proving the existence of radio waves or something and "older appliances," but then I slide over and talk to Patrick Burns, who was really nice. You'll hear him clearly at the 44-minute mark. And then this TV ghost hunter tells me that ghost hunting does not stand up to scientific standards. Listen for yourself!

In all, it was a great conference, and I had a blast. An absolute blast. All of the luminaries of the skeptical movement were there, more or less. Randi even beamed in from his isolation chamber following chemotherapy. (He looks good!) A lot of practitioners of the woo side were there as well, but I did not go over to the X-track. (Next year.) It was certainly the skeptical event of the season, and I had the grandest hat of them all! (A tin foil one!)

HJ