ORDER Skeptic magazine vol. 13 no. 1. (detail of cover)
the new issue of Skeptic magazine:
The Legacy of Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan was a man ahead of this time. On the 10th anniversary of his death we celebrate Carl Sagan’s remarkable legacy. In this issue you’ll find:
- An interview with Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s collaborator, co-author, companion, and wife; What Carl Sagan thought about the issue of God and science
- An excerpt from Sagan’s The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God based on his 1985 Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology at the University of Glasgow
- An excerpt from Conversations with Carl Sagan, edited by Tom Head which nicely captures Sagan’s remarkable breadth of intellectual interests
- Tributes to Carl Sagan by Freeman Dyson, David Morrison Tom McDonough by Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” and more…
Also of interest…
Summation of Shermer Lecture at Beyond Belief
I recently found this blog summary of my lecture at the Beyond Belief conference at the Salk Institute November 5–7, 2006. I wanted to call it to your attention because this is the only account I have seen thus far that understood what I was saying about the necessity for compromise between science and religion if we have goals beyond the scope of the realm of these two enterprises (which I do). All of the press accounts of the conference simply quoted the most extremist positions in short sound-bites, missing out entirely on much of the subtle discussions that went on.
An Interview with Mr. Deity
Here, we present a link to Jes Constantine’s interview with Mr. Deity Himself, as well as Mr. Deity’s creator Brian Dalton. This interview first appeared on the Humanist Network News Podcast (made possible by the Institute of Humanist Studies).
5th Annual Science Writing Symposium
(free audio downloads from Caltech Streaming Theater)
On February 20th, 2007, several prominent science writers and scientists participated in a panel discussion at the 5th Annual Science Writing Symposium sponsored by the Words Matter Program at Caltech. This particular panel discussed “the importance and challenges of communicating scientific information to the general public. This year’s panelists included Robert Lee Hotz, Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times science journalist; Richard Murray, Caltech’s Everhart Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems; and Michael Shermer, founding director of the Skeptics Society and regular columnist for Scientific American.”
Included in this panel discussion is conversation around the accuracy of scientific information in Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica. Below we link to an article in Nature magazine that says, “among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great.” Encyclopedia Britannica objects to the findings and says that “Nature’s research was invalid”.
