Archive for October, 2010

Last Friday, Gijsbert Stoet presented the One Life session on Human Needs.

One of the interesting discussions that came up was when Gijsbert got us to imagine we were 30 years old and we had kids. The task was to list everything we thought our kids would need in order to live a happy life.

He also asked us to differentiate the lists between boys and girls, if we felt that there was a difference.

But almost nobody did. Obviously I pointed out that a girl needed a pony to be truly happy, but beyond that people produced pretty much identical lists because ultimately this is 2010 and all things being equal, why would you treat boys and girls differently? That isn’t the say there aren’t differences – of course there are – but it terms of bringing up kids, none of us would take the attitude “oh he is a boy so he’ll want to do x or she is a girl so she will want to do y.” Gives you a nice feeling inside with respect to gender equality.

It is also in stark contrast to some of the discussions we have been having recently – many of us are getting annoyed by the sheer quantity of event invites we get on Facebook from the Islamic Society that we are not allowed to attend because they are “sisters only events.”

Last week I delivered a talk to the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire on the same subject I spoke at the Enquiry Conference on – my experiences with the Christian Union.

The talk itself went well enough and it was great to see that even after the summer break the group was still well attended and indeed had many new, and more importantly younger faces. If the group can sustain more of a mixed demographic, I think it will prove to be of real benefit.

I also got the chance to meet Joel, the new interfaith secretary at the Christian Union, who suggested I check out Hope City Church in Leeds – it’s much better than all the others apparently.

Recently Professor Ian Cram spoke at Atheist Society on freedom of expression with regards to religion in a talk entitled “Freedom of Expression and Protection of Religious Beliefs.” It provided a fascinating insight into the law surrounding the subject and as well worth attending.

Last month at Humanist Community, Gijsbert presented a news story about the number 13 tram in one city which had an exceptionally high accident rate and had therefore been withdrawn from service because with it being the number 13, it was clearly cursed.

While most of my blog’s readership will already have explained to themselves why this is nonsense, I though I would attempt to to clarify the situation for anyone who might actually take such an example as evidence that the number 13 is genuinely unlucky.

Lets start with the probably. I’m going to guess that there are somewhere in the region of 100 cities with tram networks in them. This may or may not be accurate though there is technically no reason why you should limit it to trams, you could also include buses for example and create a much larger sample which works even better for example.

Now lets say that on average there are 20 routes on each network. This could be off again but I’m basing this on the idea that there are probably less tram routes than there are bus routes and this a little on the low side for Leeds bus routes but then we’re not a huge city on a world scale.

With every network, statistically one of those routes must be the most accident prone. With 20 routes, one of them being 13 (maybe some places avoid having a route 13 – but again, Leeds doesn’t, so I’m going to go with that), that means there is a 1/20 chance of the most accident prone route being route 13. That is 5%. 5% of the 100 tram networks in the world means that statistically, you would expect the route 13 to be the most accident prone in 5 different cities in the world, just by chance. Equally in the same amount of cities, the number 7 or the number 3, or any number, will be the most accident prone route.

Add to that the fact that some people are superstitious and even though most of us know that 13 genuinely isn’t unlucky, you may occasionally get say a tram driver that is superstitious and becomes nervous when driving route 13 because he believes it is “cursed.” Thanks to the nocebo effect (the opposite of the placebo effect) the route then becomes a self fulfilling prophesy.

But even if we discount that and say that all such superstitious tram drivers simply refuse to drive the route 13 tram, we are still left with five places in the world which the route 13 tram is the most accident prone simply by chance – of which of course there will be different levels of accidents, most non-exceptional, some will be quite highly though, that’s just how random probably is.

So, we now have a really unlucky tram. It’s one of the five places where route 13 is the most accident prone simply by chance, and it’s the worst one of those. A journalist notices this, presumably working at The Sun, and decides to write a story on it.

But of course, no one thinks to write a story on the city which has the tram network where the route 7tram is the most accident prone simply by chance and happens to the the worst of the five cities in which this is the case – it only makes the news because someone comes along and makes the non-existent connection between this being the city which is one of the five cities in which the route 13 tram has the highest accident rate and this one happens to be the worst and the superstitious belief that the number 13 is unlucky.

When in fact what would be weird is if out of all the tram networks in the world, there wasn’t a single one where the route 13 tram wasn’t in at least one instance the most accident prone route on that tram network.

Oli was in Leeds for a one night special last night so we headed out to the pub, or a few.

I decided it would be good to do some cocktails in the evening so by the time it came to head out to the pub, I was already really drunk. We started at The Library and went through The Dry Dock and Stick or Twist before heading to Fab Cafe. Finally we finished the night at Grosvenor where, despite my inebriated state, still managed to come up even on blackjack before stumbling home.

It’s good to know that even though I’m almost half way through my life, I can still party until the early hours.

On Thursday we headed over to see Stewart Lee in Harrogate.

The show was opened by Simon Munnery who I have heard twice before – he opened for Stewart Lee last time I went to see him and spoke at the Enquiry conference as well. He was good as ever but doing the almost exact same set as twice before I kind of new which jokes were coming.

Stewart’s set was good, there were some classic moments, but he was trying out new material and so it really didn’t build like his previous show did and while there were some very funny parts, I really felt it didn’t match up to the standard set in York.

It did seem quite a networking event though – I ran into Mike from work who had managed to get a ticket at the last minute, David who I used to work with and Professor Ian Cram who is coming to speak to Atheist Society on Tuesday.

In March of this year we launched Atheist Stock, a stock photography website explicitly designed for local free-thinking groups to use.

Now, just seven months later, we’ve pleased to announce that the thousandth image has been added to the site. Indeed with the plethora of images, we accrued during September mean we have shot straight through that landmark and are now looking forward to future ones!

Last Tuesday we decided to hold a bit of an ice breaker at Atheist Society with a Make Your Own God event. The turn out ended up being great and everyone got stuck in sticking, cutting and building. All the photos are available here.

With the new academic year having started, Leeds Atheist Society began it’s full programme of events last week with intro meeting followed by karaoke.

It turned out to be quite a long and drunken night. Songs were sung, heads were rocked and intellectual discussions interspersed with Catholic related child molestation jokes continued long into the night.

Yesterday we headed over to York Rock Church to see their main weekly service, held on a Saturday evening, called Communicating Life.

I first noticed The Rock when I was down giving a talk at North Yorkshire Humanist Group and decided to google it when I got back. The website I found was fascinating – it looked like it was basically an entire church service delivered in the form of rock music (and with some very catchy songs too!).

So we arrived just on time for the main service, which even had a countdown to let you know how was left until the rock began! I would describe the atmosphere as reasonably friendly, someone took us through to the main hall and once we had sat down two other people came over and introduced themselves in the ten minutes or so we were waiting.

The service itself started with about eleven people on stage, most of which were singing in a line at the front which really reminded me of the American evangelical mega-churches. It didn’t feel quite as big as it did on the videos – the place could have held maybe 300 people of which there were about 100 there which is a lot of people but I guess I was expecting it to be more like what Abundant Life looks like from the photos.

Afterward we were taken to the cafe, named Pillars, complete with free wifi internet and branded coffee cups. Here we got chatting to Beth who works on the youth outreach projects for the church. She even invited us back to their house party which apparently follows on from most of the weekly services.

All in all well worth the trip, they have a great community feel and excellent biscuits.