At TAM I am!

Here I am at The Amazing Meeting – TAM2013.

After a full day of travelling (Newcastle –> Sydney–> Los Angeles–> Las Vegas), I finally made it to the Southpoint Hotel and Casino, here in smoky Las Vegas (where there’s a huge fire burning in the mountains not far away – the column of smoke was most impressive as we drove into the city from the airport).

I’ve already registered for the convention, got lost a couple of times wandering around the enormous hotel complex, and experienced the delights of the famous Del Mar bar. I’ve met a whole bunch of people, among them several colleagues from the SIN network (here’s a shout-out to Ed Clint, Caleb Lack, and Jacques Rousseau!), plus Miranda Hale, Ryan Grant Long, and lots of others. There’s an amazingly friendly atmosphere here, as everyone had told me; I have a good feeling about this convention.

I managed to get to bed early and to sleep pretty well for about three hours. But my body has now decided it really is not in this new time zone, so here I am wide awake at 3 am. Sproing!!! Hopefully I might get a little more sleep before I front up to my first presentation, as part of a workshop on Blogging Skepticism at 8 am. Hmmm, I don’t like my chances of this right now. Never mind, I expect that I might still be wide awake all the way through from now to the end of the workshop… and then we’ll see what happens.

Later in the convention, on Saturday morning, I’ll be on a panel about skepticism and philosophy, and my own talk, “We have the extraordinary evidence: Science, skepticism, and denialism”, is happening on Sunday afternoon. I’m looking forward to that and to meeting even more old and new friends.