Archive for January, 2011

At last Saturday’s meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub we discussed the idea of “designed for the dump” as presented by Annie Leonard and her band as part of The Story of Electronics.

The premise is that manufacturers design for the dump – they build products which are designed to be thrown away after a year so that we have to buy new products and therefore generate more money for the corporations.

There could well be a lot of truth behind this, but as Tim Minchin’s The Fence says, “it’s not quite as simple as that.”

Products don’t just have an 18-month life cycle. If you’re anything like me you won’t have binned those old phones, you’ll have passed them down to friends or colleagues who just wanted an old phone because they’re not bothered about having the latest gadget. I can personally testify that the CWF office is fully kitted out with hand me down electronics.

The idea of the evil corporations is always a contentious one too. Corporations are by their very nature amoral – neither moral nor immoral, because they’re not living creatures and don’t think for themselves.

It’s somewhat naive to think that electronics used to be modular and replaceable and aren’t anymore. Desktop computers are a great example of this – you still upgrade and swap in and out components, and indeed can do with laptops too (less adding stuff, but certainly replacing specific broken components). But the fact is that back in the day computers had valves in that you would just swap out, these days the transistors on your computer’s CPU are too small for the human eye to see.

Luckily though we are already moving towards greener electronics. Compared to a decade ago there are all kinds of greener ways of doing things – all your components go to sleep when they’re inactive for example, cutting power consumption and therefore saving energy. In part, some of this innovation has been driven by designed for the dump – when you replace your electronics every 18 months, it means the companies have to come up with something smaller, lighter, more powerful and more green in a year and a half.

On Friday, we headed over to Thai Edge for Sarah’s leaving do.

Due to last minute technical difficulties at work we ended up being late to sit down to eat which had the unfortunate consequence that by the time the mains were ready, Warren had to jump on a train back to Scarborough – so we had to ask for them to do his as take out!

The meal at Thai Edge was alright. The food was very nice but I have heard amazing things about Thai Edge and to be honest, it didn’t live up to it’s representation; it was a similar standard to what you would expect from a city centre restaurant, not that, that in itself is a bad thing, but it was nothing special either.

Afterward we had a few drinks in Cuthbert Brodrick (minus Simundo and Imran, or “the boring twins” if you will, who headed home despite both their other halves not being around) before Sarah tried to spoil everyone’s fun by dragging Jason home. Never the less we persevered on, heading to Neon Cactus for a few before heading home.

It’s been very busy at work over the past few months as we prepare to expand by launching our own website. This finally happened last week and we’re now live, albeit in beta with our product ZonePlay which is a new kind of sports betting in which you can bet on what will happen next.

If you’re interested in checking it out, we’ll be trading every football game you’ll find on British television so next time you’re watching the match, just head over to the website, click the game and hit “play for fun” to get started.

As part of work’s expansion, I’m pleased to say that I’ll be taking on additional responsibility working on the project management side – so when things go horribly wrong in the future it genuinely might be my fault :S .

On Thursday, the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire hosted a talk by Nicola Swan, one of the directors of Dignity in Dying.

The talk was interesting though I was quite surprised at the attitude the organisation had no chosen to adopt. They now only advocate what is called “assisted dying.” This means that they no longer support similar issues such as assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia, leading to a very strict definition of what they will actually support.

I found this very disappointing as it results in an organisation which is only working towards legislating the situation where you are terminally ill and administer the solution yourself – they wouldn’t support someone who wasn’t terminally ill but in so much main they wanted to die for example, nor would they support any case where the doctor had to administer the solution.

As a result, in all honestly I came out of the talk with less support for the organisation than I went in with. Yes, their work is important but I think there is a much wider outlook needed – we should be able to take control of our own lives and do with our bodies as we wish – not slightly speed up our exit once it has already been determined.

One of the problems we were having over at CWF was that we had a lot of lecture footage on DV tape – but nothing to play the DV tapes on! So having spent months trying to find a solution – trying to find a friend who has a high def DV camera, seeing if those “transfer to DVD” companies would just transfer to a computer format, asking local rental companies if they had DV tape decks, I finally gave up and simply rented a camera to play them back on.

Once I tried this however I was informed by the rental company that the very basic camera I had ordered was unavailable, so would I be willing to upgrade to a better camera, for free. Normally this would be a no brainer but I actually wanted the cheaper camera – the more expensive, the more complicated it was going to be and the more there was to potentially break. Never the less I agreed and ended up with this amazing camera – that I was just using as a tape deck!

HCoL was always designed to be a pilot project that we could use to gauge the success of such ventures and as such we were keen to play around with the format and see what worked and what didn’t. As such, last month we moved the meetings to the evening and this month we played around with the format.

Instead of having the traditional group, but never the less front led, discussions, we arranged the room into a boardroom style arrangement and skipped the news, taking us straight into a discussion looking back on 2010 and forward to 2011. This gave everyone a chance to talk a bit about their previous year, as well as going over the major events and news from the Humanist perspective.

Feedback was on the whole positive though whether we will pursue this as a regular format we’ve not yet decided. Interesting to see it in action though.

Because you never know when the last time you will get to say “watch out for what bus?”, I thought I would make a declaration here and now. I don’t want you to respect my wishes after I die!

It is in fact my one wish that you don’t honour my wishes after I die, though feel free to violate that one too.

You see, I won’t care, because I’ll be dead.

It always seems strange to me that people want specific music to be played at their funeral. Why? You won’t be there. I really don’t care what you do at my funeral – it isn’t even for me – it’s for you. It’s to help you move on, I don’t care, once again, I’ll be dead.

So does as you will. Make love to my cold dead corpse if it would make you happy, I’m really not fussed. I would rather you do what makes you happy, than respect the wishes of someone who isn’t alive anymore. You have my permission to do whatever you like.

Not that I’m planning on dying anytime soon, indeed, hopefully the whole Transhumanism thing will kick in within my lifetime and we won’t have to deal with it ever. But until then, I would like to take a bit more of a rational approach to the whole situation. So you can count this as record.

The January issue of our newsletter, Engage, is now available for download. This issue covers the 2010 Worfolk Lecture, the new Perspective Leader’s Guide, the new Humanist Action Group website and it’s holiday food drive and the launch of Intimate Details. It also contains all the regular features and now comes in a more concise two-page format to make it easier to print. You can download it from our website.

There was a bold start to the year when I announced that 2010 was to be the year of CWF in January. I spoke at North Yorkshire Humanists, Leeds Skeptics celebrated it’s first birthday as well as holding one of the best attended 10:23 protests in the world and HAG set a new record. Meanwhile CWF launched it’s YouTube channel and I set David Cammeron right on the subject of Humanist soup kitchens.

Stewart Lee provided a great introduction to February where we launched the Humanist Community of Leeds as one of CWF’s big projects of the year. Meanwhile Atheist Society was busy raising money for charity and serving curry to Pagans. Down South the AHS convention took place in Oxford where Rich did a great job as CWF promo girl.

It was a busy month for CWF in March with the launch of Atheist Stock and the announcement of Enquiry 2010 in the first week! Ricky D shut down the RD.net forums while HCoL launched its blog. Comedian Robin Ince spoke to Leeds Skeptics while I spoke to Leeds Atheist Society on the subject of animal consciousness as well as on BBC Radio Leeds on the Catholic Care adoption agency.

Media coverage of HCoL was building by April including coverage by the BBC website and BBC radio. At Leeds Atheist Society we had a Scientology speaker for the first time ever. We had an Easter special at HCoL before myself and Gijsbert went down to London to discuss CWF with the BHA. The month ended with Reason Week 2010 kicked off by at Leeds Skeptics and the Atheist Society AGM at which John was elected president.

In May the Answers course returned while the country elected a new government. Chris Morris released Four Lions while we released big news about Enquiry 2010. Finally, in a surprise result, my car actually passed it’s MOT.

The big news in June was the Enquiry 2010 conference which was a huge success and featured speakers including A C Grayling, Chris French, Evan Harris, Andrew Copson and many others. Gijsbert was elected onto the University of Leeds Equality & Diversity Committee, I got new housemates and Humanist Week took place.

Much like March, the first week of July was one of launches with the first CWF newsletter being released and the Secular Portal Resource Library being launched as well as us opening the CWF office in Leeds city centre. Leeds Skeptics moved to Mr Foley’s and world cup fever even infiltrated HCoL. Meanwhile Leeds Atheist Society partied hard at their End of Year Ball and we hit Bristol for the AHS AGM.

I started August with two radio appearances, the first on UFOs and the second on psychics. HCoL launched their new branding and we partied down at Leeds Pride. CWF became a registered charity and held it’s first AGM as well as launching the Humanist Chaplaincy Network as well as announcing Sunrise 2010. At work we suited up, something the rest of the world would soon copy in the form of International Suite Up day.

I was out of the country for most of September as I toured Europe with my good friends, Norm, George and Kieran. We made our way through Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Munich, Salzburg, Venice, Verona, Milan, Monaco and La Rochelle. But before we headed off I squeezed in a quick radio interview following Stephen Hawking officially declaring there is no god, represent the University of Leeds Humanist Chaplaincy at the staff fair and oversee CWF’s Sunrise Conference and on return managed to finally achieve Pub Week too.

York Rock Church provided a great start to October while Leeds Atheist Society build on freshers’ week with a classic Make Your Own God event. CWF announced Atheist Stock now had over a thousand images, I saw Stewart Lee in Harrogate, turned 24 and spoke at the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire while Gijsbert spoke at the One Life course and joined me in London to meet Greg Epstein, Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University. I also spoke at Leeds Skeptics and Durham University, raised money for WaterAid and launched the new Perspective website while we finally realised our dream of having a wench and had our first poker night.

If October started well, November was full on cracking as we watched Linkin Park from the sky, followed by Paramore a week later and finished off that week with Gorillaz, curtesy of o2, all expenses paid. I was keeping busy with talks at Leeds Atheist Society and Bradford University, meanwhile my sister graduated. LAS held their interfaith panel and I spoke at their debate on the burqa while HAG launched their new website. We saw the first annual Worfolk Lecture and myself speaking at Durham Union alongside BHA vice-president Richard Norman on the motion “this house has no faith in atheism.” Finally we finished off the month with the LAS Weekend in Edinburgh.

Sex was the subject of December with Intimiate Details launching. HCoL moved to the evening and HAG ran their first holiday food drive. We returned to Manchester on two occasions to watch Meat Loaf from the o2 corporate box and to see the amazing Tim Minchin and CWF launched the Humanist Library Project. Finally we rang in the new year with our traditional New Year’s Eve house party.

On Friday, we held a cocktail party to ring in the new year. Having had a lot of fun making spreadsheets of the various cocktails we could make, compiling it into an ingredients matrix and calculating which cocktails we could make with the most efficient subset of ingredients we eventually came up with a menu of twenty different cocktails.

We then made little menus so that people could cross them off as they drank them, which ended up turning into a competition – perhaps a mistake when the average cocktail contained three shots! Congratulations to Oli for winning, drinking his way through nine of them.

Unfortunately my camera ran out of battery half way through the night so I didn’t get chance to see all the photos Sarann took with it – until I opened them all up this morning and found it full of pictures of Kat’s shoes :S.

All in all, I’m going to label this as “best new year’s ever” because everything worked out so well. Of course the real challenge starts here – I’ve drunk 5 of the 2,800 cocktail recipes I have in my book, which means 2,795 to go…