In this week’s eSkeptic:
Medical Nonsense
SKEPTICALITY EPISODE 278
There are a lot of misconceptions about what constitutes effective medicine. In this episode of Skepticality, Derek speaks with emergency room doctor Angie Feazel Mattke who reveals some of the most common (and sometimes funny) treatments that patients say they have tried when they visit doctors’ offices and emergency rooms. Mattke gave a talk at Dragon Con aimed at explaining just how ubiquitous these “unscientific” medical ideas have become.
MonsterTalk Meets The Lovecraft Geek
MONSTERTALK EPISODE 115
A special for the Halloween Season, Robert Price returns to MonsterTalk to give us a raw dripping sample of his podcast The Lovecraft Geek, a kind of secular version of his popular The Bible Geek podcast. Questions from listeners are tossed down into the well of Price’s vast knowledge to see what answers echo back up to drive us mad. Check out our episode notes for lots of links to Lovecraft-inspired books and movies.
MONSTERTALK LIVE STREAM EVENT
Sunday, October 23, 2016 at 8 pm EST
Join us for our first ever MonsterTalk live streaming event. Scheduled guests Eugenie Scott, Brian Regal, Daniel Loxton will join Karen and me to discuss The Yeti. So this will be our first dedicated Yeti talk, and our first live streaming show. I hope you can join us.
How do you attend? A link to the show is pinned at our Facebook page, and will be on our website at monstertalk.org. There’s also this short link that is (hopefully) easy to remember: http://bit.ly/monstertalklive2016
We’ll make the audio of that available in the podcast feed, and the resulting video should be posted to YouTube if it all works according to plan.
SCIENCE SALON #8
Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan in conversation with Dr. Michael Shermer
18
Photo by Gabe Miller
We have 18 seats left for our November 13th Science Salon. Cosmologist and theoretical astrophysicist, Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan, speaks with Dr. Michael Shermer about her latest book, Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal The Cosmos, followed by an intimate conversation with the audience that allows more interaction with the guest than a formal Q&A.
Call 1-626-794-3119 now to reserve your seat(s).
IMPORTANT TICKET INFORMATION: Advance tickets are required. Tickets will not be sold at the door. $50 per individual (includes a reserved seat, autographed copy of the guest’s book, hors d’oeuvres and wine).
MAPPING THE HEAVENS
The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal The Cosmos
Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan is a cosmologist and theoretical astrophysicist from Yale University, specializing in dark matter, dark energy, and black holes. She also holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship of the Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is passionate about sharing science with the general public and in her new book she provides a tour of the “greatest hits” of cosmological discoveries—the ideas that reshaped our universe over the past century. The cosmos, once understood as a stagnant place, filled with the ordinary, is now a universe that is expanding at an accelerating pace, propelled by dark energy and structured by dark matter. Priyamvada Natarajan is at the forefront of this research—an astrophysicist who literally creates maps of invisible matter in the universe. In the book, she not only explains for a wide audience the science behind these essential ideas but also provides an understanding of how radical scientific theories gain acceptance. The formation and growth of black holes, dark matter halos, the accelerating expansion of the universe, the echo of the big bang, the discovery of exoplanets, and the possibility of other universes—these are some of the puzzling cosmological topics of the early twenty-first century. Natarajan discusses why the acceptance of new ideas about the universe and our place in it has never been linear and always contested even within the scientific community. And she affirms that, shifting and incomplete as science always must be, it offers the best path we have toward making sense of our wondrous, mysterious universe.
Order Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal The Cosmos from Amazon.
Call 1-626-794-3119 now to reserve.
