Ah it's been quiet here, the otterman blog  has been fairly zinging along though.  Yep I compartmentalize my blogging life into sections much in the same way we innately ration out  humour to friends , family, acquantainces and total strangers, theres just some items that are ephemeric I.e  reactions to passing headlines that are on the whole Thoreau away lines based on stories that  barely last a twenty four hour news cycle let alone will be recalled a week from now.   Once you've heard about one train/ plane / or indeed shuttle crash what more's learned from repeated exposure ?  I should have prefaced the prior sentence with unless it's local to you where's the benefit? 

I took a few days off to attend TAM4 ( The amazing meeting) which this year was sub titled "the politics of science and the science of politics", or was it the inverse?  This was my first time in Vegas, first time in a casino and the first time at a convention where the speakers didn't feel the need to be whisked in and out of the room but actually hung around to discuss with mere mortals ( ok in relation to Gell-Mann I humbly accede to his mental prowess, I could still kick his ass at counterstrike.. )

The most shocking thing to me ( apart from how badly the internet access sucked at  what's ostensible a science geek fest ) was just how unskeptical many of the attendees were. Seriously the number of hands raise heaven wards when asked " can you be a skeptic and believe in (a) god" suggests that for about 20% of the audience  that  seemingly  you can. This debate is now raging over on the forums and  I'm surprised by the level of compartmentalisation at people that will openly guffaw at astrologers, dowsers and the like yet "don't feel comfortable" when a Hitchens or Dawkins applies the same standard to their happy fuzzy,It's seriously fuzzy  , their definition of  a deity seems to be deistic , not theistic, and in so amorphous that they may as well just call it Tao and get over it.    20 pages to read through and that's from just one of the near 20 presentations that I saw over the weekend which I am using as an excuse ( oh that, and   hanging around the ER for  last night  it was great  the full socialised medicine experience , 7 hours  to get seen, but paid  for privately :(  )