DragonCon Day Two

Today went a lot more according to plan. We woke up around 7:30, ate a quick breakfast (apples and bagles), and were off. About an hour later we were waiting for the parade to start on Peachtree Road outside of Peachtree Center. I posted over 80 pictures to flickr, which you can look at here.

I have comments in my pictures, but I'll mention this one point here, as well. If you're going to shop for a digital camera, buy one that has the fastest possible processing rate. My dinky 2 Mpixel HP takes forever, because it's old, and because it insists on converting every image to JPG format. As a result I missed a lot of great shots.

Anyway, after the parade I went to Podcasting in the Classroom, where I talked to Michael Stackpole. I still need to email him. He seems very nice. The podcasting panel kind of walked a narrow line between unbridled enthusiasm and cautious pessimism. Most everyone agreed that it's a cool technology, but also everyone agreed that technology is expensive (podcasting not so much), difficult to learn (not everyone is a computer junky), takes time (oh, you had something else planned for your weekend?), and sometimes even interferes with the real business of learning (replacing the old film strip with a podcast kind of misses the point).

Tomorrow is my gaming day. I haven't played Living Greyhawk for about a year or more, and none of my characters have really been upgraded to 3.5. So I spent the next little while grabbing a bite to eat and creating a new character. Glossol Inter Alia, a fast talking halforc barbarian who shouts things like "Do not suffer the descenderation of swinebeasts to erodify you!" I figure he has Asperger's Syndrome.

I was going to the panel "The Hydrogen Myth," but that was standing room only when I got there. After that I wanted to go to "Contour Drawing," another art workshop. I decided to just go there and sit and wait. I did some reading and watched a couple of kids drive their parents to distraction. The panel itself was OK. The artist teaching the workshop kind of didn't plan her time well, and didn't realize that she could only use 60 minutes of the 90 minute slot. When you have to slog from the Hyatt to the Hilton, 30 minutes are barely enough.

Anyway, that's what I had to do next. Luckily getting to the drawing workshop meant that I discovered that the adjoining room where the next panel I wanted to attend was scheduled was no longer the correct room. That had been moved to the Hilton. (No one had noted that on the board, so I wrote it there myself.) At the Hilton I found that the panel had been moved to yet another room. All the same, I got there in plenty of time to get a front row seat for what turned out to be one hell of a great panel: "Smackdown! Skeptics vs True Believers."

On the panel were Patrick Burns (an investigator of paranormal claims and founder of the Ghosthounds Paranormal Investigators Network), some guy from the Rhine Institute who was not actually in the program or I'd be able to tell you more about him, Dr Michael Shermer (founder of The Skeptics Society), and Alison Smith (a private investigator who works for the James Randi challenge thing). Both of the "true believers" described themselves as skeptics...

The whole business started out kind of tame, and I decided to mix things up. I asked them to define exactly what it was they were doing: looking for naturalistic explanations of phenomena, or looking for supernatural explanations. I pointed out that science doesn't accept the proposition that there are supernatural explanations: that's a fundamental postulate of science. If a scientist cannot explain something in terms of natural causes, she just keeps looking.

That worked only for a very short while before the true believers tried to twist out of the discussion by saying they weren't investigating the paranormal or supernatural, but "unusual phenomena."

A little later a young man got up and tried holding their feet to the fire again. If the true believers were in dualists (believers in something other than naturalistic explanations), why cloak their work in the paradigm of science (which does not allow a non-naturalistic explanation)? If they were materialists then what was their paradigm of investigation? What were they looking for?

Yes, the crowd was definitely hostile to the true believers. There was a fellow wearing a kippah who wanted to know what the religion of the skeptics was. Alison Smith said she was not an atheist, but she also said she did not hold her personal religion to the same standard of evidence that she expected of science. She acknowledged that was hypocritical of her. Michael Shermer pointed out that the copy of Skeptical Inquirer he had before him had a picture of Richard Dawkins on the cover. It wasn't a direct answer, I guess, but he went on to point out that faith, belief, or religion were what made people feel good. Science is not about making people feel good.

Someone else asked why the skeptics didn't admit the use of statistics when considering the evidence for the paranormal. Both Smith and Shermer pointed out that statistics were at the very heart of science, and very much the reason why skeptics do not agree that there is anything to claims for the paranormal.

But that's pretty much all the challenges they got. The crowd was cheering and hooting through the entire thing, and the two true believers eventually got so frustrated that one resorted to calling James Randi a fraud and the moderator had to calm things down a bit.

I had a great time! If professional wrestling were this exciting I'd be a fan.

Well, after that I had to get back to the Hyatt to join Elysa for the awards banquet. I rushed out into the street, trotted up to Peachtree Center, stormed up the stairs to the food court, ran through the connecting tunnel, through the lobby, down the escalator, and realized I'd run into the wrong hotel. Back up the escalator, through the lobby, connecting tunnel, food court, and now for the correct connecting tunnel (to the Hyatt, not the Marriott) and down to the Ballroom level. I'd got the map turned around so at first I looked for the Regency ballroom at the wrong side. I swear, I can get lost in my own house.

Finally I was trotting down the line of people waiting to get in to the banquet. No Elysa. I get out my cell phone. Good, a signal. Call Elysa, and she's waving at me from the head of the line.

The banquet was OK. A small jazz band (horn, electric fiddle, electric bass, and drum set) entertained us. Peter David was the MC. He's funny. Nichel Nichols presented a little music video from a movie they're screening here. The food was forgettable. The main course was ziti pasta and cheese ravioli and mixed vegetables. The veggies were OK, but heavy on the onions. Two pasta dishes? What's with that? It was served family style, with the food brought out on large platters which we had to pass around to help ourselves. Dessert was a very nice chocolate cake. The entire thing cost $50 $35 per person. Not something I'd do again if it was just for the food.

OK, enough blathering. I have to be at the con tomorrow by 8:30 so I can get lost before finding the gaming area.