Did you know that YouTube removed all length restrictions on their videos? I didn’t, until after I had spent hours looking for a good free video editor. Then I spent days, days I tell you, trying to upload these giant files and hitting snag after snag after snag. I must have restarted the upload three times after hours and hours of progress.

But it all worked out! Below the fold you will find the videos we captured of two of last year’s offerings: the panel “Skepticism, Critical Thinking, and Pop Culture” and the presentation “Cargo Cult Science.” If for some reason you must have HD, you can watch them in HD on YouTube itself.

Enjoy!

It’s nothing bad, mind you, I’m just not sure I’m allowed to go public with it yet. So good luck, Elyse, and we’re going to miss you here in Indy!

Get crackin’, though; a couple of our events are close to sold out already and the rest are going fast!

Well, in digging through my Gmail, I have located the answers to all of those “w” words. The “who” was Kevin Weiser, the “what” was The Walking Eye Podcast, and the “where” is this link right here. That will take you to the page where you can download the audio from last year’s presentation so you have some idea what you’re getting into in 2011. The talk went really well last year and I hope you like it. Here’s a podcast they did that wraps up their Gen Con experience; I haven’t listened to it, but we’re linked on the page which implies that we were mentioned. Give it a listen.

Thanks for putting this together for us, Kevin! Sorry it took me so long to get you your official kudos.

Back in 2009 we threw our first “Skepticism, Critical Thinking, and Pop Culture” panel and had a great time with our audience. In 2010 we revised the format to allow the audience to choose what topics we covered. In 2011 we’re retaining the “Choose Your Own Adventure” format and switching up the topics a bit.

The format: We present you, the audience, four options. You choose an option. We blather on about it for fifteen or so minutes. We do this six times to total one and a half hours. Then we open up the floor for our patent-pending “Stump the Skeptics” Q&A, where you can ask whatever the hell you desire and we will do our best to give you an answer that is both enlightening and hilarious.

Potential topics this year include but are not limited to:

• Ghosts and ghost hunting
• Cryptozoology
• UFOs and alien abductions
• Crop circles
• Applied kinesiology
• The anti-vaccination movement
• Power Balance
• Dr. Oz
• Oprahwoo
• Paranormal photography
• Astrology (updated for the new zodiac!)
• Psychics
• Bullshit advertising claims
• 2012 apocalypse!
• Pseudoarchaeology (e.g. Atlantis, ancient aliens, etc)
• The curse of Tutankhamen
• The Bermuda Triangle
• Spirit possession
• The Secret
• Nostradamus
• Water woo
• Folk wisdom and suburban legends

“Cargo Cult Science” looks at the phenomenon of people who believe they are doing science but don’t understand the process enough to actually be performing it properly. Instead they act in almost scripted ways based on their flawed understanding of the method, believing that by going through the motions, their results will be useful.

The metaphor is borrowed from Richard Feynman, who first  used it to refer to activities that have only the outer patina of science without the proper guts on the inside. “Cargo cults” refers, in the most well-known sense, to a phenomenon wherein colonialized cultures misunderstand the actions of their colonizers and begin acting out their “rituals” in ways that clearly communicate that misunderstanding. Of course, as with most things in anthropology, things aren’t quite that simple, so the talk will open with a brief introduction to the phenomenon of cargo cults and why it is such a useful metaphor for pseudoscience.

We’ll look at Bigfoot, Nessie, Mothman, and who knows what else. We’ll focus on the methods used in the searches for these creatures and the evidence presented for their existence. We’ll look at some real-life analogues and draw connections between mythical creatures and real ones. We will also, of course, crack lots of jokes.

Finally, I’ll tell the harrowing tale of the Bigfoot hunt I undertook in February 2009 across the entire state of Indiana and share some pictures and videos of that incredibly silly trip.

“Culture and the Paranormal” will be a cross-cultural survey of paranormal beliefs and occurrences in order to examine the hypothesis “If paranormal events and beings exist in reality and not just in the mind, then they should be relatively homogeneous and not differentiated along cultural lines.”

My main thesis, to answer that hypothesis, is “Paranormal explanations for experiences generally draw almost exclusively from prevailing cultural narratives and fill in perceived holes to help explain the anomalous or extraordinary.” I’ll look at different cultures across time and space, and what they view as anomalous or extraordinary circumstances, and the different ways in which they recourse to paranormal or supernatural explanations for those circumstances.

I’ll also look at how different cultures conceive of analogous supernatural beings, from ghosts to werecreatures to nocturnal visitors. Finally, I’ll bring things forward to the present and look at how modern popular culture affects paranormal beliefs and experiences. Modern pop culture has inundated us with flying saucers, alien abductions, ghost orbs, and crop circles, and there’s scientific evidence that our perceptions of such things are heavily influenced by their portrayal and popularity in the mass media.

This talk will be perhaps the most academic of all of our talks. I’ll be drawing on disparate fields, from cultural anthropology to folklore to media studies, and, with some work and some luck, I’ll pull together the different threads into a wide-ranging and thought-provoking presentation.

We have lost a couple of talks from last year, but we like to think of it as cutting the chaff and working to our strengths. We’re experimenting with a couple of new talks which we think will go over very well. We’ve also expanded the annual choose-your-own-adventure panel to three events, and that’s always a blast for presenters and audience alike. We’ll see you there!

Until then, know that we’re reprising all of our popular talks from last year, cutting the chaff, and generally bringing our A-game all over this bitch. More information once I’ve got all our events tackled and submitted to Gen Con. See you in August!

PS. I do have video of many of last year’s talks. No, I have not edited it down yet. Yes, I know that makes me an asshole. I’ll get to it when I get to it.