– Date – July 31, 2012
– Send your cool 'SCIENCE!' shout-outs to
.
– Theme song by Steve Seamans of the Daisy Dillman Band. Get the song HERE.
– Thank you to everyone who has been purchasing books, Skepticality stuff, or using our Amazon link to help us out!

– Dragon*Con where Derek will be running the Skeptrack is coming in about a month!

Skepticism, Past and Future

– The Mayan Calendar starts on or about August 11, 3114 BCE but does not end this year.
– The Harmonic Convergence was supposed to occur August 16 – 17, 1987.
– George Hrab's epic musical introduction to TAM2012 is included in Geologic podcast #273.
– Pamela Gay told skeptics to Make the World Better in her talk on Saturday.
– Tim similarly told the audience You Are the Future of Skepticism on the Internet on Sunday.
– Lanyrd coverage of TAM2012 contains 125 links to blogs, podcasts, videos, photo albums and more.
– Skeptic History facts are posted daily on social media find out where on this page at Tim's blog.

Unnatural Virtue

– Success Gurus like Jim Collins, Stephen Covey, and Malcolm Gladwell bank on the illusion of understanding and the illusion of justice to appeal to a vast market of uncritical thinkers.
– Their approach is driven by confirmation bias, selection bias, and the halo effect, ignoreing the elusiveness of luck and the inevitability of regression, explained in Thinking, Fast and Slow.
– Gladwell's appeal in Blink was to the illusion of understanding intuition.
– The appeal in Outliers was to the illusion of understanding success. (Spoiler alert: You haven't really helped us much by advising us to be in the right place at the right time.)
– His appeal in The Tipping Point was to the illusion of understanding how things happen.
– Some Antidotes to the Success Gurus are:
     The Halo Effect: … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers by Phil Rosenzweig
     Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, and ch 4.
     Management Pseudoscience (pdf) in Ethics, Management, and Mythology: Rational Decision Making for Health Service Professionals by Michael Loughlin.
A paperback edition of Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed! is now available from Lulu.com. For more info, click here. The eBook is still available. .

The Odds Must Be Crazy

– This week's featured story is "TV – or Not TV"
– Story was submitted by reader, Jason Pope.
– Please visit the story link for a more detailed analysis and to add your comments
– Additional thoughts and considerations provided by Barbara Drescher
– To donate to help the TOMBC team attend Dragon*Con visit our Donate page
– Our producer and audio engineer is Brian Hart
– Our theme music comes to us courtesy of Brian Keith Dalton, AKA Mr. Deity
– Please visit The Independent Investigations Group Los Angeles
– The Odds Must Be Crazy can be found on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+
– Wendy Hughes is on Twitter
– Jarrett Kaufman is on Twitter
– Barbara Drescher is on Twitter
– Brian Hart is on Twitter
– Brian Keith Dalton is on Twitter

Mathew Gross – Author of 'The Last Myth'

– Mathew was a drummer in the band, 'June' who signed with Beggars Banquet.
– Was in charge of the internet media strategy for the 2004 Howard Dean campaign.
– Politicians now all seem to embrace social media and the internet.
– Derek was on the Internet before it was called the Internet back in the BBS and Arpanet days.
– Mathew was also a Colorado River boating nature guide and has wittern a book on the subject.
– Glen Canyon is known as the 'place no one knew' by the Sierra Club.
– Mathew was amazed at the amount of influence the Evangelicals had on getting George W. Bush elected.
– The Evangelical circles seem highly pre-occupied with the 'End Times'.
– Even though many believe that society has always had 'end times' and Apocalypse facinations.
– Oddly, almost all facets of society, religious and secular, seem preoccupied with the end of the world.
– The Myan people still exist and think the idea that their calendar will somehow signal the end of the world is odd.
– They had views of the world like many of the cultures of their time, that renewal would continue in cycles forever.
– Perfect examples of our current preoccupation with the end of the world can be seen in end of the world cults.
– The Hopi didn't predict the rise of Hippies.
– First religion, or group of people, to focus on end times were the Jewish People around 500-600BC due to the Babylonians.
– Isreal was put on a map to continue the fascination with the end of times and history.
– The influence of Persian beliefs gave us the idea of end times prophecies.
– Puritans that came to America rejected the Anglican and Protestant compromise and believed that they were founding the new Israel.
– When the Founders of the United States came on the scene, they rejected the Puritan view.
– The rise of scientific thinking lead to Deism, rejecting the idea that God has control and humans and man determines its fate.
– In modern times the rise of seemingly endless outlets for news and media to get their story out has lent itself to exaggeration to get noticed.
– Falling into a trap of Apocalyptic thinking can prevent us from having the needed outlook to improve society moving into the future.
– With all of this doomsday thinking, Mathew has a grand optimistic outlook on society and the world.
– Even the recent past of the 80's were much different than what current culture remembers it as.
– If we don't allow the obsession with the end of the world to engulf our culture, we can move forward and make the world a much better place.