Timothy Ferris
Timothy Ferris was the speaker for Ypsilanti/Ann Arbor Reads author presentation. If you don't know who he is, he's the author of numerous books, including "Seeing in the Dark: How Amateur Astronomers are Discovering the Wonders of the Universe" and numerous PBS series such as "Seeing In The Dark", "Life Beyond Earth", and "Creation of the Universe". I got to attend a special reception with a (quite small) group of people prior to him speaking, since we hosted a large group of public last week at the Astronomy Club @ EMU.
It was very cool to meet him. He's a very nice guy and fun to chat with. It was interesting to hear him speak, as I realize he's quite a liberal person. He spoke about his new book coming out later this year, which is about politics and Liberalism (not in the sense that americans use it). At one point, he mentioned proposal 8 passing in California and how disgusted he was with that. He also mentioned he worked as a volunteer with the Obama campaign for a while now and was at the Inauguration.
He mentioned a joke about debating with a Jesuit recently and the Jesuit saying something about the church and science and him asking why it took a thousand years. I didn't quite catch the joke, but I wondered for a bit if brotherguy was who he debated with!
During the Q&A someone asked him about crowd wisdom and how that'll play out with climate change and he commented that it's interesting to him the public opinion regarding it. He said it was as if you had a pond of fish in which the fish started to die.. and on one end of a pond some guy was pouring black tar into the pond and when the tar was analyzed - sure enough it was killing the fish. However, all of a sudden a group of people with their own TV network appeared and said yes it killed them but lets continue to investigate all these other scenarios while doing nothing at all about the man pouring the tar in.
He truly is an amateur astronomer - he only took 1 astronomy class in college! Anyways, it was great to meet him and chat privately about our observatory at EMU and being an amateur astronomer myself.
BTW, If you own a blu-ray player, the blu-ray version of "Seeing in The Dark" should be coming out soon and will be stunning. I watched it on PBS in HD and that was amazing..
It was very cool to meet him. He's a very nice guy and fun to chat with. It was interesting to hear him speak, as I realize he's quite a liberal person. He spoke about his new book coming out later this year, which is about politics and Liberalism (not in the sense that americans use it). At one point, he mentioned proposal 8 passing in California and how disgusted he was with that. He also mentioned he worked as a volunteer with the Obama campaign for a while now and was at the Inauguration.
He mentioned a joke about debating with a Jesuit recently and the Jesuit saying something about the church and science and him asking why it took a thousand years. I didn't quite catch the joke, but I wondered for a bit if brotherguy was who he debated with!
During the Q&A someone asked him about crowd wisdom and how that'll play out with climate change and he commented that it's interesting to him the public opinion regarding it. He said it was as if you had a pond of fish in which the fish started to die.. and on one end of a pond some guy was pouring black tar into the pond and when the tar was analyzed - sure enough it was killing the fish. However, all of a sudden a group of people with their own TV network appeared and said yes it killed them but lets continue to investigate all these other scenarios while doing nothing at all about the man pouring the tar in.
He truly is an amateur astronomer - he only took 1 astronomy class in college! Anyways, it was great to meet him and chat privately about our observatory at EMU and being an amateur astronomer myself.
BTW, If you own a blu-ray player, the blu-ray version of "Seeing in The Dark" should be coming out soon and will be stunning. I watched it on PBS in HD and that was amazing..