Radio reminder

9am Sunday morning — it's Atheists Talk radio. This week, they're broadcasting from the Minnesota State Fair!

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Once again, Atheists Talk radio will be broadcast from the Minnesota State Fair at 9am Sunday. This week, they're going to explain what humanism is.
NEEERRRRRRRDDDS! They're turning over the radio show to seriously geeky humanists: Scott Lohman, Minnesota's King Trek Fan, will be interviewed on Atheists Talk radio on Sunday, at 9am Central time (keep in mind that tonight is the night we jigger our clocks forward an hour, just to make everything…
It's almost time for Atheists Talk radio, at 9am central. This week, they're interviewing the marvelous Susan Jacoby, author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and The Age of American Unreason(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Don't miss it!
Tune in on Sunday morning at 9am Central time to Atheists Talk radio for an all-science hour, reviewing the top science stories of the past year. It's going to have a bit of a developmental bias, and maybe even some zebrafish bias, as the big man of the hour will be Perry Hackett of the UMTC, a…

Oh cool. Maybe you explain what you do believe & why you believe it.

As Wittgenstein put it, "Doubt comes after belief."

By John Knight (not verified) on 24 Aug 2008 #permalink

Could someone convert 9am minnesota time to GMT for those stupid people living in the UK please?

There's radio, and there's the printed press. PZ, congratulations for appearing in the August issue of the French news magazine Marianne. The article was, of course, about the excessive weight of religion in the current political debate in the USA, and the comments by PZ are, of course, quite good. Too bad they didn't mention the blog's name or URL.

By Christophe Thill (not verified) on 24 Aug 2008 #permalink

Atheist-On-A-Stick?

off topic:
Just un-subscribed at Obama e-mail.
Told them that my voting depended on how well
they treat non-sectarians at the convention

By Lawrence Eisenhart (not verified) on 24 Aug 2008 #permalink

There doesn't seem to be a link to the article in Marianne. The only link is to the possibility of buying an electronic version of the issue (http://www.lekiosque.fr/Marianne-y805.aspx) for 2.50 euros. Sorry!

By Christophe Thill (not verified) on 24 Aug 2008 #permalink

Grrr. The mnatheist webpage no longer offers links to .mp3 versions of the programs.

By George Atkinson (not verified) on 24 Aug 2008 #permalink

George - we have to pick up the CD from the studio and then get it to Bjorn who maintains the mnatheists.org server. He should have a link to the mp3 file later today. Sorry for the delay. It was a good show tooday. We do have links to the past shows.

George, I should explain the site a bit. We did used to have the MIME type flags for the episodes listed on the right, for that feed, however, some episodes are tagged incorrectly by a feed generation software and after much screwing around, was not able to fix, so the MIME type links are missing, but if you click on the name of the show, it should show up, or just ope this feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AtheistsTalk

Listen next week, when we'll be back at the fair to talk about humanism! You can send your questions in advance to radio@mnatheists.org.

Told [the Obama campaign] that my voting depended on how well they treat non-sectarians at the convention

Arrgh! I know it's not really what this thread is about, but this line of thinking drives me crazy. Is Obama acknowledging nonsectarians at the nominating convention really more important to you than turning out the warmongering/war-criminal thugs who currently run this country? More important than protecting the federal judiciary from 4 or 8 years of wingnut appointments? More important than repairing the economy and shoring up the middle class (you know, those of us who make less than $5 million)? More important than rationalizing our foreign policy and rebuilding our international relationships? More important than addressing climate change and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels? More important than making progress toward universal healthcare? More important than protecting reproductive rights and making progress on marriage equality? More important than investing in our decaying public infrastructure? Really?

This isn't even a "lesser of two evils" argument: Obama is actively good on most of those issues, and will lead a government friendly to good work on those issues from a (hopefully) more progressive Congress. Yeah, he's not an atheist; yeah, he's not likely to focus on atheist issues at the convention. Guess what? Most of the electorate isn't atheist, either, and doesn't want to hear about atheist concerns. I actually think Obama is nonsectarian (in his approach to government, if not in his private life); he's just not antisectarian. If you want actively antisectarian candidates and platforms, though, we secularists have some work to do in winning the hearts and minds of the people who vote.

In the meantime, being aggressively antisectarian is electoral suicide, whether you and I like it or not. Is it really a good thing to pressure the best candidates to commit electoral suicide? To what end?

It drives me crazy when people put their own personal, marginal (from a broad popular point of view, I mean) issues ahead of choosing the candidate who will lead the country in the best direction. Personally, I'm a big fan of space exploration (and by "fan," I mean my personal belief is that it's extremely important to humanity's future)... but I wail and rend my garments when I read blogs that recommend choosing one candidate or the other based on space policy: Regardless of my personal enthusiasm, space policy is way down the list of current priorities. Any candidate who put space policy above any of the issues I listed above would (quite properly) lose... and what good would it do me if the losing candidate agreed with me on my pet issue?

C'mon people. We've got the rest of our lives to make U.S. society more secular; unless we get serious about electing more progressive, smarter, saner presidents than we have recently, secularism will continue to be the least of our worries.

By Bill Dauphin (not verified) on 25 Aug 2008 #permalink

I note two problems with the Internet radio site:

  1. It discriminates against non-Minnesotans, by zip code.
  2. It specifies options of "Windows" or "Mac", but neither option seems to be compatible with the standard Linux media handlers.

How irritating.

By Reality Czech (not verified) on 25 Aug 2008 #permalink

Reality,

You should let AM 950 KTNF know about the issues you have. There is a reason why they limit the streaming to just Minnesota Zip Codes. They pay for the bandwidth to provide streaming, and there is no incentive to provide streaming to people outside of the state. The advertisers are mostly local, so wouldn't find any benefit from being available worldwide. Our podcast is created from the radio show, so we keep ads in, because without our sponsors paying us for every weekly show, our organization can't pay for it.

I know people like to listen to things 'live' ... but subscribing to the rss feed and downloading the mp3 a few hours later probably saves a lot on bandwidth, since it reduces peak demand. (It's hard to be sure, since the streaming and the mp3 appear to be hosted by different folks.)

Minnesota Atheists host the mp3 file. So, you're right, listening live pisses AM 950 off, which is stupid, because it's a show on Sunday morning, for crying out loud, and they are increasing their listenership, which I didn't think was a bad thing, but we have received warnings from the station owner about people from out of state taking up the slots to listen live. Last time I checked AM 950 had 440 simultaneous connections at a max for their stream.

Our podcast is created from the radio show, so we keep ads in, because without our sponsors paying us for every weekly show, our organization can't pay for it.

And I, for one, am glad you do: I take unexplainable, irrational delight in hearing the Q-Cumbers ad about searching for the "transitional buffets"... despite the fact that I live thousands of miles away, and will probably never set foot in the place.

More generally, I'm perfectly happy when folks leave commercials in podcasts: Listening to a few ads is a small price to pay for convenient access to my favorite radio content... certainly preferable to paying an actual cash price. In honor of the bit of Heinlein discussion going on in another thread, I'll just remind folks that TANSTAAFL!

By Bill Dauphin (not verified) on 27 Aug 2008 #permalink