Four days in the South Point Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas for The Amaz!ng Meeting 2014, with a midnight arrival home on Sunday night,  then back to work immediately on Monday hasn’t left me much time to catch my breath. I finally got through all the photos I took and posted them to Facebook and to SmugMug.  I just unpacked today, sorted the dirty laundry and got the first load in the machine. The pantry is bare, so there’s that to do too, but I didn’t want anyone to think I’d abandoned the blog.

The Amaz!ng Meeting – from the web site:

The Amaz!ng Meeting (TAM) is organized by The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Over the last 15 TAMs, this event has become the leading conference in the world focused on scientific skepticism. Well over 1,000 people from around the world come to TAM each year to share learning, laughs, and the skeptical perspective with their friends and a host of distinguished guest speakers, panelists, workshop presenters, and entertainers.

Around 1,100 people attended this year.

Here are some of my favorite photos from Thursday, which was full of workshops. There are eight, but one person can only attend four  workshops each as two run in the same time slot.

Teaching Skepticism for K-12 with Ani Aharonin, Barbara Drescher. and Daniel Loxton.

Barbara  demonstrating the trick  that is behind Power Balance Bands and other such “balance enhancing” items. See this video about Applied Kinesiology (link) in the

Advancing Skepticism in the Media – panelists: Sharon Hill, Jim Underwood, Richard Saunders, and Dr Karl Kruszelnicki (Dr Karl is basically the Bill Nye of Australia – or you could say Bill Nye is the Dr Karl of the United States!) The guy is awesome, and I got to chat with him a bit on Sunday morning at breakfast.

Rhetoric and Argumentation for the Skeptic with Miranda Celeste Hale, Robert Blaskiewicz, and Eve Siebert

Science-Based Medicine – How to Deal with Believers with Drs Harriet Hall, David Gorski, and Steve Novella.