Archive for July, 2011

A week later than normal, we welcomed Anthony Green to Leeds Skeptics. Anthony is loosely affiliated to We Are Change, though with it being a group which doesn’t have strict hierarchy or leadership structure, it’s probably a misconception to say he was speaking on behalf of them.

Anthony presented a talk entitled “An Introduction To Psychological Operations and False Flag Attacks” discussing the armed forces use of propaganda. It was an interesting talk although as one member pointed out – none of us actually disagree that this kind of stuff goes on – we’re just not sure it’s that much of a problem.

There was some strong willed debate though it all kept very civil, both sides were quick to apologise when they thought they had offended the other, and ultimately we all agreed that the important thing was that we all worked for a better, more open society. A great meeting in my books.

With the BHA Reception to welcome in new president A. C. Grayling taking place at a very convenient time to converge with mine and Elina’s six month anniversary, I decided to take a trip down to the capitol with her.

We got down there with only a slight delay and met up with Phillip and Linda from West London Humanists who are amazing people who have a lot of great ideas for community projects. They have a great vision for making a difference and I’m hoping I can help them develop their ideas based on what has and hasn’t worked for us in Leeds.

Afterwards, we wandered down to the National Gallery which was fantastic of course though it was a mission to find any paintings not about Jesus or some other religious subject matter. Luckily the Dutch artists finally came to the rescue, and there is currently an excellent exhibit on Swiss and Norwegian artists there too!

In the evening we met up with James and grabbed some dinner at a nice place called Canal 125. The food was good though I don’t think the salad I had turned out to be a light option after all once I had eaten all the dressing, cheese and chicken lol.

The hotel we stayed at was the Thistle City Barbican. It was mediocre, especially for the £150 we paid for it, and despite getting a family room we actually got three single beds and with Norm not having joined us after injuring his ankle, we ended up paying for three beds and only using one of them.

On the Saturday we headed over to the Natural History Museum which is always enjoyable though I’ve done a lot of it now (and yet I still go back even though I’ve never been to the Victoria & Albert Museum lol) and includes exhibits such as rocks and cooking pans that I’ve never seen before.

I would have liked to have had more time there as we didn’t get there until mid-afternoon, having spent out time walking over and stopping for lunch at Las Iguanas on the South Bank. That was very nice but it was directly under the Waterloo bridge rail track, so made for noisy intervals.

All in all we did around 13 miles walking, which is only half that of the Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge! Still a good bit of exercise though.

Last week we headed up to The Library pub for some old fashioned good times.

Having had some dinner we remembered why we hadn’t been to The Library in a while lol, I also missed out on getting dessert because the kitchen closed early, but at least the staff were nice and friendly and we had plenty of space.

Plus, the important thing is, lots and lots of cider got drunk.

We had a very interesting discussion at work today, when I brought up the idea that you should do away with separate competitions for men and women, and just have one unisex league.

Football is a great example of this. Women’s football is not a popular sport by pretty much any measure. Faye White, captain of the England team reportedly earns £16,000 a year. That is just above minimum wage and for the most part, even women in the top flight of their profession cannot earn anything other than what would be considered a semi-professional wage, having to have another job as well.

Women’s football is barely televised, if at all. Not to mention garnering little respect from people like FIFA president Sepp Blatter who suggested that women should “wear tighter shorts and low cut shirts… to create a more female aesthetic” (and you didn’t think it was possible to lose any more respect for Sepp Blatter 😉 ).

There is a simple solution to this problem.

Just combine men’s and women’s football into one unified league structure.

This is much more inline with equal opportunities. At the moment, women are absolutely and unreservedly banned from competing in the top flight of football of earning a professional football’s wage, entirely because of their gender. Even if a woman was the best player in the world, she would be limited to playing in a league which earns less than half what I do and receiving very little exposure.

Allowing both genders to complete in the same league means that everyone gets the chance to complete on a level playing field, based on their ability.

Now, to address some of the concerns.

Firstly, the idea that women aren’t as strong as men. This is somewhat of an issue in football, but far more clear in other sports (boxing or hammer throw for example). But this doesn’t matter. When it comes to equal opportunities, you need to give everyone the same chance, and some people are always going to be better than overs.

You could argue it is better for a woman to compete on the top flight of women’s football than a lower tier of a mixed gender league system, but I disagree. Separating the leagues presents a ceiling to which they cannot rise above, no matter how prestigious people might try to suggest it is.

Secondly, the idea that women aren’t as good as men. It is true that the top flight of women’s football isn’t the same standard as men’s, but that could be down to a number of factors. Women are unable to complete in professional men’s football, so don’t have the opportunity to play week in week out against top competition. Society generally has a bias towards men playing football (not helped by the fact that only men are allowed to play in the top leagues). Statistically, more men play football than women, so statistically you’re also going to get a better standard.

But none of these reasons say that women can’t play football as well as men, it just says that in the current setup in society, they generally don’t. But again, it presents a level playing field it you give everyone the same chance.

I think it is also worth considering that a lot of people simply aren’t going to make it, female or male. You can make the argument that women would never make it into the World Cup squad in a combined league, but then neither would I. I’m not that good at football. I used to play for my school team, I trained, but I was never that good, let alone world standard.

Yet nobody says, “well we should have a separate world cup for geeks, because they can never compete with real men.” Why? Because we’re given the same opportunity. If I had the skill we could be up there. Whereas a woman who did have the skill, couldn’t.

Finally however, you don’t have to have to accept it as a perfect solution. It isn’t. Women would really, really struggle to make it into the top flight of football (though we can’t say for sure because women don’t have the same opportunities to train up through the professional system as men do).

But, all it has to do is be better than the current system.

Even if women only made it into league one or two, they would still earn more than they can at the moment. They would be able to compete in games which were televised more and gain far more exposure, encouraging more girls to participate in sport. Finally, it would make things more equitable because everyone would have the chance to compete, based on ability, in the same competition.

Recently, we headed out to Revolution for a work social. We started with a buffet dinner, which was very nice, but then I really hate buffets because, as a Yorkshireman, I have to eat until I can eat no more to get my value for money, and that is quite frankly, uncomfortable. Never the less it was quite a good night though starting tailing off at around midnight so we headed home.

I’ve recently re-read Ray Kurzweil “The Singularity is Near”, which is nothing else, really enlivens your passion in AI. One of the many interesting points made in the book was the idea that we will eventually be able to grow new body parts in a lab.

This has one great advantage for animal welfare – the idea that we could grow lumps of meat in a lab.

This would essentially end the need for vegetarianism.

For vegetarians like myself, who really, really love meat, this really would be a utopian future. Vegetarianism is based on the idea that it is wrong to kill conscious animals for food (some so called vegetarians say it is because of the taste, but these people aren’t real vegetarians), and this would entirely get round that.

We could eat our lab grown meat, without having the ethical implications that you where causing the death of an animal by doing so.

Of course, people would object that they didn’t want to eat meat grown in a test tube. But then, the fact that people can stomach meat now is mainly thanks to the lack of thought put into the factory farming and slaughter methods already in use.

Other advantages of doing this include:

* It will, at least after the initial development, be much more cost effective that having to rear an entire animal for an extended period of time and use less resources to satisfy our meat needs. Meat is incredibly inefficient, the amount of vegetarian food it takes to feed one animal to produce some meat is huge.

* Given the reduced cost and increased efficiently, there would be more food available for the third world, both vegetarian and meat.

* While we’re doing this, it’s a lot easier to generically engineer (or even using traditional refinement methods) to make the meat higher quality.

As some of you know, despite being very much up on the whole computers thing that is going on these days, my diary remains very much on paper. I prefer it, I can easily add things and scribble things out, it comes in a very nice weekly view and is easy to flick through and I can carry it round easily.

However, with the latest addition to my family of gadgets, I am now carrying around a diary sized device with me anyway.

Having a paper diary also means that I have to transcribe all the events onto paper and there is no way to easily merge my personal diary and work diary. Also, repeating events are just so much easier when it comes to electronic diaries.

So, given the new opportunity, I’ve decided to give an electronic diary a go. Using Google Calendar, integrated into the Calendar app on my iPad, I now have my personal calendar and work calendar all nicely merged into one place and no longer need to carry around my paper diary.

I’m not entirely sold, I think it’s a little more difficult to add events than it is just scribbling them down, and I have some concerns regarding interoperability between Google and my iPad. I’m also not entirely sold on the weekly view I get from my calendar – I like the simplicity of just a list of events in my diary, rather than having a mix of all day events at the top and then actual events in the timeline, not all of which fits on screen.

But I’m going to give it a go and see if it improves my life. Can’t live in the stone age forever – not that they had paper in the stone age ;).

Often, volunteering with the Humanist Action Group is a very rewarding experience. We always receive positive feedback on the homeless outreach work we do. However, sometimes, it’s heartbreaking.

Last week, myself and Katie were out out on the usual run, when we encountered a man sat at the bottom of Briggate. He was very memorable because of the amount of blood covering his eye and nose.

Having sat down to talk to him, we soon discovered that only about fifteen minutes before we arrived, he had been badly assaulted by a group of young men.

After finding an eye witness and taking his details should the police be able to do anything, we walked Matt up to Leeds General Infirmary to get him checked out. Despite having a headache he thankfully seemed still coherent, but you can’t be too careful with blows to the head.

My point is though, who does that?

Who just goes up to someone and starts kicking them in the head? Or tramp whacking was Matt described it.

I’ll be honest, normally I would be a little dubious of such a story, but having had it entirely collaborated by an eye witness you have to wonder to yourself what kind of sick bastard would do such a thing. It degrades your faith in humanity.

Matt was clearly an intelligent guy who had been down on his luck; on the way to the hospital he discussed various programming languages with me, and the various flavours of physics with Katie. If it can happen to Matt, it can happen to anyone.

Yet somehow, some individuals, luckily a very, very small minority of our society, think it is OK to abuse people like Matt.

Luckily, there is something we can do. Getting out there and making a difference not only provides a valuable service but also has an incredibly powerful psychological impact, showing that people do care.

As such, I would like to take this opportunity to says thank you to everyone who has been involved with HAG work over the years. It is times like this that really remind you why it is important.

The July issue of our newsletter, Engage, is now available to download from our website. This quarter’s issue is rather Humanist Action Group heavy, with a number of articles looking at their work we’re doing there, as well as some exciting news on new projects and the regular news round-up.