There Are Four Lights

This year was pretty amazing for me! Here’s a roundup of all the events, media, and work that came along in 2012.

• I produced a few silly science videos called The Never Ending Cosmos
with Sciency Sadie
• Typesetting for Digital Manga Publishing (NSFW)
• Q&A session for Canadore College students in Graphic Design.
• Interview on Exploring the Well.
• Interview on The Invisible Sky Monster.
• Interview on Sci-fi Saturday Night podcast.
• Cover and featured article for Skeptical Inquirer magazine.
• The Amazing Meeting 2012 talk “A Life of Art and Skepticism“.
• Speaker at CSICon in Nashville.
• Opened Etsy shop.
• Speaker at Eschaton in Ottawa.
• Special Guest on Virtual Skeptics #18.

Great stuff is coming for 2013, too! Including more Legend of the Ztarr.

If you haven’t watched BBC’s Sherlock series, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, drop everything and do so immediately. Trust me; after finally buying the first season on iTunes and the credits rolled on the end of the first episode I was amazed—and left feeling like my many friends who suggested I would like it didn’t do a good enough job of insisting I watch it. I felt like I had wasted all my time up until that point, not watching Sherlock!

Season three isn’t out until 2013, so we only have online fandom to tide us over.

Here’s a great article about the psychology of sociopaths/psychopaths and explains why Sherlock doesn’t fit the criteria for being labelled as one.

And The Mary Sue has a handy list of things to occupy your time while waiting for more Sherlock.

Apparently, series writer and co-creator, Steven Moffat, is annoyed over a US Sherlock series being made after they were turned down to adapt the successful BBC creation.

Here are some of my favourite recent articles. Two girls may share conscious thoughts because of rare conjoined part of their brain. Is a new designer drug called “bath salts” connected to violent psychosis? New evidence suggests Amelia Earhart may have survived as a castaway weeks or months after her disappearance. An isolated tribe relates the passage of time to terrain, rather than direction.

Enjoy!

Do these conjoined twins share consciousness?

Scans show that the two girls have brains that are interconnected by a never-seen-before “thalamic bridge,” an indication that they might share conscious thoughts.

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This Is Your Brain on Bath Salts: What It’s Like to Do the Scary Drug du Jour

The mass-marketed fear comes complete with anecdotal horror stories of people’s behavior under the drug’s influence, each more disturbing than the last, and the hysteria reached its crescendo this week when bath salts were blamed for a Miami man’s turn as a face-eating cannibal.

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Amelia Earhart May Have Survived Months As Castaway

Amelia Earhart, the legendary pilot who disappeared 73 years ago while flying over the Pacific Ocean in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator, may have survived several weeks, or even months as a castaway on a remote South Pacific island, according to preliminary results of a two-week expedition on the tiny coral atoll believed to be her final resting place.

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For an Isolated Tribe, Time Follows the Terrain, and the Future is Uphill

When we say “I knew him way back when,” or “the best years are still ahead of you,” we’re using space to set up a timeline, with the past trailing behind us and the future stretching forward. Scientists long assumed that all people envisioned time that same way. But more recent studies have shown that’s not the case.