The Atheist Blogger

Friendly Atheist has made me aware of a Christmas event for atheists in London. Comedian Robin Ince is hosting an evening show full of rational talks about science as well as the obvious comedy. The line-up is most impressive:

Rather than talking of Jesus’s birth, acclaimed science author Simon Singh will talk about the birth of the universe. Instead of talking about Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, Bad Science Columnist Ben Goldacre will talk of alternative medicine and charlatans, while Josie Long will talk about the wonder of the stars.

So far the confirmed speakers are Stewart Lee, Phill Jupitus, Mark Thomas (who might be bringing along his grandfather’s travelling harmonium for a carol sing-a-long), Natalie Haynes, Chris Addison, Ben Goldacre, Christina Martin, Simon Singh, Josie Long, Jo Neary and Richard Dawkins.

…

The evening will also include projections of classic archive footage of Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman.

I’m certainly going to go to it, hopefully with my student group, and if any readers are in London or near London, I would love to meet up beforehand for a drink before the show. Best to plan things in advance obviously!

Of course hopefully people will be able to come from all over the country, since this is a first time event.

The book for October’s book club is “50 reasons people give for believing in a god” by Guy P. Harrison. It is available from Amazon and hopefully I will be able to contact the author and invite him into a live discussion like we did with Hemant Mehta.

For this month, the book is “Biblical Nonsense” and we are abandoning the live discussion due to lack of interest. At the end of the month, a forum discussion will be put up where people can post their views. I hope one day to bring back the live discussion, but I think we need more dedicated members for that.

For now, the live discussion will be reserved for books in which I can contact the author.

UPDATE: Guy P. Harrison says he would love to do a live discussion of his book. We will confirm a date nearer the time.

vjack of Atheist Revolution has a great article explaining how to license blog articles to prevent them being simply copy/pasted without credit. This hasn’t really been a problem for me, although I was contacted a few times by people saying that my 101 Atheist Quotes article had been copied a load of times. In this case I don’t think the license would work, seeing as none of the quotes were my own work.

I now have a Creative Commons License which restricts my work to non-commercial and non-derivative use:

The Atheist Blogger by Adrian Hayter is licensed under a Creative Commons NCND License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.

In other news, I might finally finish my review of SPORE today. I’ve been working on it over the last 2 days and it is currently just shy of 2,000 words. Hopefully it’ll be out later, if I can stop playing SPORE for 10 minutes that is.