Oh how I want to be there...

Christchurch Skeptics 10:23 overdose.

But apparently we're supposed to be running up Rapaki track on Saturday morning...

I hold out hope that we can go up Rapaki extra early so that we can get to this?

P.Z. Myers is interviewed by Reddit.com

I've been a big fan of reddit since I discovered it. Reddit has done an interview with P.Z Myers, in which he answers questions that the reddit community submitted and voted on, on topics relating to science, atheism and pseudosciences, academia, and such topics. I found it a very good interview; P.Z. is very articulate and very level headed. I must try and read Pharangula in his actual voice!

I crack myself up

I know it's bad form to laugh at your own jokes... but I can't help it. It's a mash-up of some xkcd comics.

http://xkcdsw.com/1812

Haiti

I've been finding the news coming in from Haiti rather harrowing - I struggled with watching the news last night. An entire nation, already very poor, has been utterly decimated. Maybe my memory is faulty, but I don't remember anything worse in my life than this in terms of natural disasters.

If you want to donate towards the aid effort, and you're a committed secularist, you can donate through Non-Believers Giving Aid, which has been set up by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. The money goes to Doctors Without Borders and the International Red Cross. Vote with your credit card and help demonstrate that morality does not consist of following dogmatically asserted rules - it consists of showing simple empathy for other human people because, heck, civilisation would not exist if we were incapable of that.

I was planning to give $20. I got two lotto tickets for my birthday, and I checked them today. Guess what? Haiti won $67 more out of them.

And, if you think I'm a jerk for saying that I donated and how much I donated, perhaps you're right. But if I make one friend of mine give money they were going to spend on themselves, it's worth it. There is no rule saying that charity should be a private affair, and there shouldn't be one. If I'm a jerk for this post, then I'll wear that badge with pride.

Hubble 3D

This looks startlingly awesome. I want!

http://www.apple.com/trailers/imax/hubble3d/

(via the Bad Astronomer, who apparently makes an appearence)

The Lying Professor

This is quite awesome. A finance professor, in order to make his students pay attention, told his students in the first lecture of the year that he would, on purpose, tell a lie in every lecture, to keep the students on their toes...

(thanks to the Bad Astronomer)

A rather good birthday present

Part 1 of Ethan Siegel's The Greatest Story Ever Told was posted on my birthday. I direct you in that direction.