Saturday was the second ever Vancouver Skepticamp – an “unconference” where the content is provided by the attendees themselves.
Mel & I not only attended Vancouver Skepticamp on Saturday, but presented! Mel started everything off with an icebreaker game using M&Ms that got everyone to introduce themselves.
I wasn’t sure what to expect and was skeptical (of course) of what it could accomplish but the presentations were almost all excellent!
A few that stuck out to me were
- Wynde’s presentations about materialism and consciousness. Her talk was a pretty straightforward introction to the subject but the discussion afterwards was very interesting. We got into determinism and free-will and a Doctoral physics candidate summed up my thoughts on it much better than I could.
- Glowing electrocuted pickle!
- Rick first gave a short talk about the upcoming BC-STV referendum, and to me this is a no-brainer. It’s obvious that our current voting methods aren’t as good as they can be, and the STV method, while not perfect, seems far better at representing the population in government. Everyone please go vote Yes to Single Transferrable Voting on May 12th!
- After that, Rick talked about the obesity epidemnic in North America. This is the one that blew my mind. As you all know, I lost a lot of weight a few years ago, and have been trying to keep it off by eating healthy. It hasn’t been working, and I’ve been craving carbs and it’s been difficult.
The overall point of Rick’s presentation was that the obesity epidemic started at the exact time everyone started selling “low-fat diets”. The more food was offered in “low-fat” formats, the more and more people in the population were obese. He then explained an experiment where the people in it were fed traditional native diets, high in fat and low in carbs, and they lost an average of 15 pounds each!
He also described that low-fat and high-carb diets can trick your body into thinking you’re starving and make you desire more carbs to feed that!
This all makes tremendous sense to me, explains a lot of my problems with weight lately, and I’m switching off of all my low-fat food. Bacon, here I come!
- Gary did a presentation on the Shroud of Turin from an artist’s perspective. It was a brilliant angle to debunk the subject and I encouraged him to get it online, possibly as a youtube video!
There were others, but those were the ones that resonated the most with me.
I did my presentation last and it was about my area of expertise — the Internet and blogging. I’ve posted my presentation about blogging skeptically online, along with more information on specifically how to set up a blog of your own. I’ve decided I’m going to expand that information with more posts on the same site.
After Skepticamp most of us went out to All India for some excellent vegetarian Indian food and then I offered to host the afterparty at our place. We had about a dozen people show up for that, played some Scene-It on the 360 (which Blogosaurus and her hubby won!) and then simply talked and drank until the wee hours. Thanks to everyone who came, it was really fun and we should do it again some time!
Actually we had two other team members – John and Fred. Which is good because me and my sweetie were utterly useless at the anagram portion!
I think the problem with the “low-fat” thing is partly physical, and partly psychological. People see “low-fat” and think that something is healthy and/or low calorie, which is not necessarily true.
“Sure, I can eat this whole bag of Oreos. They’re low-fat!”
Lara — that’s probably very true!
But what really got me was when he pointed out the mechanism (I forget the details) for a diet of “lots of carbs, very little fat” actually making your body think it was starving and make you craving *more* food, which of course was carbs and low-fat because that’s what you’re buying to “eat healthy”.