We’re very much a gamer family. We play games at home.  We play games on holiday.  We play games at our friends’ houses. Video.  Board. Card. Yournameit weplayit. It an obsession, to a point and we’ll play pretty much anything. (Although, I will readily admit that my patience for repeated sessions of Candyland (TM) with The Girl is wearing thinner with each passing week.)
Of course, my current state of self-employ means I’ve needed to be a little more frugal on new acquisitions.  But just recently, I was particularly excited: an …

This is about live-bloggy as I get: As I write this, a great collective of local skeptics have gathered at the University of Alberta for our first skepticamp (more). I’ll update this post over the day with links and notes on what sessions (concurrent sessions are running) I’m attending (and presenting.)
If your here, say hi…
1100 AM – Twyla of www.stopjenny.com is presenting on the anti-anti-vaccination movement, the science of immunity and vaccines, and vaccine fallacies.
1130 AM – Panel on civility and skepticism, staring @skepticsean, Brent, Marc-Julien and Ryan. How not …

My assertion, boy scout that I once was, stood firmly grounded in some quasi-idealistic notion of shivering in the deep woods, wrapped in a blanket eating a poorly cooked meal from a tin plate around a low fire and nursing a collection of bug bites and sore muscles acquired on the day-long trek from where we left the car and where we eventually pitched our tent. This, of course, was contrasted with current so-called camping experience of playing card games in a heated trailer, drinking microwaved beverages, and occasionally updating our Facebook status on our cell phone…

Let’s start by saying its been a tough year.
I returned home from The Amazing Meeting 2009 a year ago today with a new perspective on why I was doing this, on why I was hanging out my thoughts as the skepdad blogger. I had clarity, purpose, and a new, motivation to not only do this right, but to do it as right as I could. I was brimming with all sorts of fancy ideas about what that meant, and how to pursue it with a higher ideal. But …

I could likely give readers a whole ton of excuses for why my promised relaunch of the site has been so delayed. I know I said I’d be dropping a whole collection of new content every couple of months (hence the “bimonthly” name) but… y’know… life. The truth is that despite life — despite all the hang-ups of maintaining a job and a house and all that fun stuff — I will be launching the new format on February first — next week — with four great articles based on my first theme: “Stating the Obvious.”

“So, how do you explain Santa?” I’ve been asked. And until recently my humble reply has been along the lines that — thankfully — I hadn’t needed to yet, but I was adamantly against lying to children. Fair enough, right? Sure. That is until the Girl, now good-and-properly two years old, happily a toddler, and (thanks to the saturation of the Kris Kringle story from a laundry list of sources) became fully convinced that in a couple more “sleeps” Santa is going to squeeze through the chimney of our gas fireplace, eat the cookies she helped her mom bake, and leave behind a new jigsaw puzzle under the tree.

I wanted to explain what exactly goes through the mind of this particular skeptical parent as a fairly acute and ostentatious illness appears in one’s kid. I wanted to explain about the irrational fear response that shoots through one’s brain in the hour approaching midnight, a panicked and percussive toddler in one’s arms, and how easily that fear can take hold. Because there really is nothing fearless in the wilderness of fresh experience.

Think of this issue of the skepdad blog as an editorial on definitions. If I was to write, for example, that the meaning one might derive from a collection of words on a page is deeply dependent on the way in which one chooses to define those words, one might argue counter to that premise and state that, well, no actually; Definition is secondary. Presumably meaning is more than the sum of the parts. We’ve agreed on definitions for the words, but the way that they are strung together into ideas is what matters. Who cares what the definitions might be; that’s the obvious part. Get a dictionary if you want to ponder definitions. Ideas are built around definitions, but are emergent within context and purpose.