The Atheist Blogger

So this months book is “The Demon Haunted World” by Carl Sagan, and the discussion will be held on Saturday 30th, at 23:00 UTC. Again, if you need to work out your time follow these steps:

1. Visit the website http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/
2. Scroll down past the first table of countries and you will see another box that has the words “Current UTC (or GMT/Zulu)-time used: “
3. With the time/date shown in that box, you can work how how far ahead or behind you are of UTC.

Everything will be confirmed nearer the time.

Now for the vote for Septembers book.

Do not vote unless you wish to read the book or take part in the discussion!

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Voting lasts 7 days.

The forum discussion for Daniel Dennett’s book “Freedom Evolves” is up. Apologies to anyone who went to the live discussion, which I had put an hour later so that Aussie readers could get out of bed. It seems people still thought it was the same time, so I showed up an hour “late” and nobody was there.

Just so everyone knows for future reference, the book club live discussion is now taking place at midnight (UTC+1). So if you go to this world clock website and scroll down, you will see the time written in UTC. When that time is 23:00, it’s time for the discussion!

Voting for Septembers book will take place tomorrow.

This month’s book club discussion will take place tomorrow (Sunday 27th July) at Midnight UTC+1. For people who want to figure out what time that is where you live, use the handy world clock. UTC+1 corresponds to the current time of London on the site, so simply work out the differences with your nearest city.

As always, use our guide to the IRC server to get connected to the chat, and I hope to see some of you there!

With 2 votes ahead of the other books, Carl Sagan’s book “The Demon Haunted World” is the chosen book for August’s book club. Just to make sure everyone is up to date on the new book club voting system:

This book is for August. It will be discussed at the end of August, probably on the 30th. This new system gives you the rest of July to order the book online or buy it, and then you get the full alocated time (August) to read it. The book is available in paperback from Amazon.

The next vote will take place on August 1st for September’s book. Please submit book suggestions to the forums.

The problem with running an online book club is that we don’t do a vote on the day of discussion, instead saving it till a later date and having 7 days of voting so everyone has a chance to choose the book they want. This leads to some problems with getting the book, and then reading it, all before the month “deadline”. This month Oliver managed to get through the entire book, but I only made it to the final chapters. So essentially Oliver could talk about Hemant’s conclusions whilst I had no idea.

I have hence devised a more complicated system which should make things easier. Instead of having a 7 day vote starting on the 23rd of month 1 to choose the book for month 2, we will have a 7 day vote starting on the 1st of month 1 to choose the book for month 2.

The book for July has been chosen already, and although it was a narrow vote (3:2), Daniel Dennett’s book “Freedom Evolves” has been chosen. I usually try to keep the discussions on the weekend, so that might mean a slightly early date of 26th/27th July. I am also thinking of putting the time forward slightly so that people in the USA can get home from work, and (more importantly) our Aussie members can get out of bed!

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