There Are Four Lights

Last Wednesday, I spoke at the Center for Inquiry‘s monthly science cafe, Cafe Inquiry. The talk and Q&A afterwards has been uploaded to YouTube in six parts:

Part 1 is my introduction and my explanation of skepticism and why I think it’s important. I also touch on why new age magical thinking and spirituality can be so appealing and easier to promote. My goal is to use storytelling to show skeptical values as virtues.

Part 2 is an overview of manga and why I’ve chosen it as a medium to tell stories that promote skepticism. I also speak about some series that have inspired me in my approach to doing this—-which is also an excuse to talk about Masters of the Universe.

Part 3 is about my series I’m producing, Legend of the Ztarr, and how I hope it will convey messages about critical thinking and humanism.

The Q&A discussion that took place afterwards is also available:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The wind blew me back to California after my week in Long Beach for TED. Now I’m back in LA. It wasn’t planned so I’m without my magic Wacom Cintiq to draw pretty doodles to go along with my posts. The good news is that I’m actually getting REAL work done on my Legend of the Ztarr storyboards.

That’s the update.

I live in a small northern Ontario town and this was the view from our balcony the other day. Snow is nice, as long as you stay indoors looking out at it. We have much more snow now than what is in this picture. November is just the first month of snow, which will continue right on until March/April. Fortunately, in the middle of this northern Ontario winter I will be escaping all the snow for Long Beach, CA; I’ve been invited as a fellowship member to the TED 2009 conference. Lucky!

TED (Technology Entertainment Design) is an annual idea conference in California. Its moto is Ideas worth spreading. They chose 20 individuals to attend as fellowship members and I’m so excited to be one of them. I’ll be heading to LA for the first week in February, which surprisingly seems just around the corner. More info about TED can be found on their website here.

I have a member profile you can check out which includes some of my favourite TED talks. Each week day, a new video of a TED talk is posted and I’m pretty much addicted to it; I can’t wait to see who will be speaking at TED 2009. Here is one of my favourite talks, which is by Michael Shermer from TED 2006.