#QEDCon – Sunday Pictures (Posting 2 of 2 or perhaps 3 … or 4)

#qedconThis is the second of a set of two #QEDCon postings, the first one was yesterday. Well OK, it will actually the second of a set of three because I’d like to do another posting tomorrow to highlight the Ockham awards. In fact, now that I think of it, I also did a skepticamp posting as well, so clearly what you learn today is that I’m not very good at counting. As for the next and perhaps final posting tomorrow, the Ockham winners truly do all deserve the award and so highlighting them is something I feel is important. I’ll get to that tomorrow.

Anyway, on to this posting … what happened at QED on the Sunday 15th Oct 2017?

10:10 – 11:00 Helen Czerski

Coasts, Currents, Conflicts and Kings. The oceans are remote, inaccessible without ships or scuba gear, but they have a huge effect on our everyday life. She looked at how we study the ocean, how our civilisation’s attitude to it could be different and what the future holds for the blue of our planet.

The next one is not exactly my best picture, however I did love one of the suggested names for the buoy … “Pike, because he is a very stupid buoy”. (Only the folks familiar with a specific TV show in the UK from a decade or two ago will get the joke there).

https://twitter.com/pluckabee/status/919564654824886272

https://twitter.com/Dragonblaze/status/919668539350503424

11:10 – 12:00 Simon Singh

The Science of Secrecy. Simon Singh, author of the The Code Book, discusses the history of codes and codebreaking, from Ancient Egypt to the Internet. This talk included a demonstration of genuine Enigma cipher machine. Now that generated a bit of excitement, he was surrounded by a large and very interested crowd after the talk.

13:00 – 13:50 James Ball

Bathing in Bullshit: What’s Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It. Almost everyone agrees we’ve got a problem with fake news, misinformation, pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. This talk dissected what’s gone wrong with our information ecosystem, who’s to blame (spoiler: all of us), and what we can do to fight back.

14:00 – 14:50 David Gorski

Integrative Medicine: The Best of Both Worlds? Academic medical centres have been embracing “integrative medicine,” which rebrands existing medical lifestyle interventions, such as diet and exercise, as “alternative” or “integrative” while integrating quackery into medicine. How did this happen, and can anything be done?

15:00 – 16:00 Tim O’Brien

The Invisible Universe. Tim told us the story of how technology has allowed us to extend our senses to see beyond the visible and reveal a universe stranger than we ever imagined.

16:00 Closing Ceremony

And so that was it. Here are the amazing team who put it all together.

Other Tweets

The fire alarm went off at approx 9:30am on the Sunday so everybody in the hotel had an informal meetup outside. I also got my exercise for the day … I needed to grab my stuff before things began and my room was on the 13th (14th which was really the 13th because there was no floor 13).

Oh and let’s not forget the other stuff that also happened.

… and so let’s finish this posting with a glimpse of a QED tradition … Richard Wiseman’s chickens.

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