QED Squeeeeee!

Well, QEDCon was as amazing as ever this year. And the pressure was off for me as I wasn't speaking. In fact, the sum total of my involvement - apart from lots of drinking and meeting and greeting old friends etc. - was appearing on the InKredulous podcast panel show with Robert Llewellyn, Andy Zaltzman and Michael 'Marsh' Marshall.

Tremendous fun and hosted brilliantly, as ever, by Andy Wilson and his saxophone. You can listen to the episode by clicking here.

 

The event was hosted excellently by magician Paul Zenon and boasted a gaggle of amazing speakers including Professor Richard Wiseman and the aforementioned Mr Llewellyn. There were also a number of speakers I was less familiar with but they were all universally interesting.

The intro video to QEDCon is always a treat every year and, for 2014, the bar was set very high indeed. But judge for yourself ...



Roll on QEDCon2015!

Photos (c) by Dave Hughes and Rob McDermott. Lots more on the QEDCon2014 Flickr stream here.

Words to live your life by

I liked this a lot. This pretty much says everything about me and how I want to live my life. And how I would love others to as well. The last line in particular struck me as so true.



It was produced by Words Engraved. Visit their site and you can see the same words in a variety of languages and voices. Inspirational and, indeed, aspirational.

What's Luck got to do with it?

I'll be doing another talk for Skeptics in the Pub on Wednesday 28th March at The Bootlegger in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire at 8pm. I'll be telling you all about 2006 - the very odd year in which I set out to see if there is a way to prove or disprove the existence of Luck. It took me the whole year to gather enough results to form any kind of a theory and I found myself doing very strange things in the name of 'science':

If that doesn't draw you in (and, let's face it, it probably won't), then I could mention that The Bootlegger always has a good selection of gravity-fed real ales from the nearby Rebellion Brewery in Marlow and OVER 100 bottled beers from all around the world. Plus, it's right opposite High Wycombe train station (Chiltern Railways) and just 40mins from Marylebone! And there will be a great crowd there from the Wycombe SITP group.

That's it. Sales pitch over.

The Wizard of Waltham Forest ... in a pub in Camden

The Wizard of Waltham Forest and Other Unlikely Stories from Stevyn Colgan on Vimeo.

My talk from 20th February at the Monarch, Camden, for Skeptics in the Pub. Critical thinking and smarter ways to tackle crime and disorder. Audio recorded by James O'Malley of The Pod Delusion. Slides by me.

Running time: Approx. 45 mins.

So THAT'S what happened #2

More delicious nonsense from Fake Science.

The Missing Links

One of the things about creating this new blog that concerns me is that you may miss out on some great stuff over on my old blog. There's nearly five years' worth of waffling and interesting links over there so I thought I'd provide a few pointers to blogposts that you might enjoy.

We'll start with arty links. As you know, I run the occasional art challenge and the results of the very first one - The Angry Art Challenge - can be found here in the form of a short video. You might also enjoy my profiles of artists such as Ren Hathway, David Stansfield, Slinkachu, Irina Werning, Bobby Chiu, Walter Langley, Marc Page, Simon Colgan, Louise Evans (Feltmistress), Dean T Fraser (Springfield Punx), Warwick Johnson Cadwell, David Kemp, Sophie Thompson, Jennifer Maestre, Ptolemy Elrington, Luigi Colani, Holly Hale, Guillermo Vega, Amanda Visell, Marie-Madeleine Gautier, Stephane Halleux, Adrian Teal, Jason Hackenwerth, Theo Janssen and my all-time hero, the late Willie Rushton. There's a post on vinyl art toys here and one on plausible alien art here. Some excellent stuff here too on colour theory and possibly the oddest optical illusion I've seen.

You can see several of my artworks in stage-by-stage progress too. Here are: Dead Astaire, Trick or Treat, But is it Art?  Cobblepot, Stripes are so slimming, Lovesick and seasick (The Owl and the Pussycat), Major Clanger's Last Stand, Svarog and his duck and Apache creation gods,

There's some writing stuff too. There's my extended essay on the possibilities of UFO visits - Goodbye little green men. There's my explanation of why I am an atheist; Goodbye to some of my readers. It garnered comments from the likes of Stephen Fry and Dave Gorman. Then there's my debunkings of fundamentalist belief - Flood of nonsense, Create some evidence, dammit! - and my visits to The Amazing Meeting (TAM) Day 1 and Day 2 and the San Diego Comicon.

In a more light-hearted vein, you can read my deconstructions of shows like Thunderbirds and Camberwick Green or you can read how I ended up making a bone for Dippy, the most famous dinosaur on Earth.

So there you go - plenty to keep you busy.