Tuesday, June 24, 2008

TAM 6

I've waited a few days to blog about TAM 6 because I was just too excited to think clearly about it. I've calmed down a little now so I'm going to try to get a few thoughts down before the Blogger outage that is coming up.

I'll admit that leading up the the conference I wondered if two days of lectures were really going to be worth the time and the money I was spending to be there. Then, on Thursday morning on our way up Herb and I passed Jay and Steve Novella from the Skeptics Guide to the Universe in the mens room. I got all giddy and star struck and I knew I was going to have a blast.

Herb and I had bought books by most of the speakers, and our goal was to get autographs and as many photographs as possible. All the celebrity scientist and entertainers (Penn & Teller, Adam Savage, Neil deGrasse Tyson, PZ Myers and of course the host The Amazing James Randi) were so accessible and willing to interact with the fans is was great. Herb and I were even in the right place at the right time for Randi to include us in a mentalism demonstration which was very cool. He didn't clue us in on the trick though.

The next day the lectures started and I was just blown away. I took two notepads full of notes so I might discuss some of the content later. All I can say is that they were all excellent, entertaining, educational, funny. Richard Wiseman showed us the talked about is quirkology videos and had Teller come up and teach the 900 member audience how to do spoon bending. We did a mass spoon bending demonstration that should end up on YouTube sometime.

It was a great time. Now I better go before blogger eats my post.

1 comment:

Amicus said...

You're damn right! TAM 6 rocked! I can hardly wait until TAM 7.