Baconmas: The holiday for the sciences
Summary: Sir Francis Bacon’s birthday (Jan. 22) is a holiday devoted to the sciences, with a side order of bacon. Check out the website and share the Baconmas cheer with everyone!
What is Baconmas?
For the past few years, I’ve been celebrating the birthday of Sir Francis Bacon (Jan. 22) as a holiday, hosting parties with both science experiments and bacon dishes. It’s been excellent enough that I want to share it with everyone else, so I made a website devoted to Baconmas and I’d like you to check it out (and share it if you like it).
It goes without saying that holidays devoted to the sciences can be a force for good as well as a lot of fun (if you haven’t, you should see the writeup of the Solstice Celebration for an awesome example). I thought it would be especially powerful to have a holiday that was (1) explicitly about science, (2) fun to celebrate, with a “hook” like bacon, and (3) positive and open to everyone.
The main “tradition” of Baconmas is simply to try something new with each celebration, and to record how it went. Everything else is just a suggestion. I think it’s clear that the Zombie Feynman school of science is a powerful and good meme. Science isn’t only about the things that are shiny and fun, but it should be shiny and fun whenever possible. So I’m linking a bunch of fun, easy experiments (that have actual content for both novices and the scientifically literate).
How can I help Baconmas grow?
Are you as excited about Baconmas as I am? Great! There are some things you can do to really help!
Tell all your friends! Share the website, the Twitter feed, and the Facebook event page. If you’re part of a relevant forum (anything from a subreddit to the XKCD forums), share it there too!
Host a Baconmas party, and then send me (happybaconmas at gmail) pictures/video/testimonials that I can add to the site! These will help Baconmas 2013 grow even faster than 2012.
Create a local Baconmas Meetup group, and send me a link that I can post.
Find or invent any of the following: experiments, recipes, traditions, carols, guest blog posts; then send them to me for the Baconmas site!
One thing that would be totally incredible: a funny video biography of Sir Francis Bacon, done with puppets/costume/animation/whatever works for you! I’d love to do this myself, but may not have the time.
Give me feedback and ideas for the website and everything else!
P.S. Thanks for all the comments on my advice request post! I made a few key additions based on your input.
By the way, I hope everyone’s glad that I didn’t title this “Rational holiday celebration” or something like that. This is something I think LWers will like, and not directly rationality material.
Newtonmas has the advantage of occupying a rather large schelling point.
Baconmas comes with a crispy and delicious menu!
Newtonmas has the disadvantage that a large number of people are otherwise busy on that day.
Also, celebrating Newtonmas does not interfere destructively with celebrating Baconmas.
Are you going to advertise this on reddit, xkcd forums, etc?
I’m not on those forums regularly, so I’d feel like a carpetbagger. If you (or anyone) is on one of those forums and thinks Baconmas is neat, please link it!
Surely you mean to celebrate Roger Bacon, father of empiricism.
Funnily enough, Francis Bacon is also credited by some as the father of empiricism, at least according to his Wikipedia page.
Someone should write a children’s science book entitled Empiricism has two daddies.
It’s the sequel to “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.”
Subtitle: “Science as a B(e)acon in the Dark”