Archive for October, 2011

Last Thursday, Brian Quinn gave a talk to the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire on superstition. It turned out to be a brilliant talk, both entertaining and informative with Brian pointing out that superstition is actually wider spread than religion even though it’s even more nonsensical.

Last December, tickets for Rihanna’s next tour became available. It was ten months away, but I really wanted to get floor tickets, so I went onto the priority booking site to ensure I got some of the elusive standing tickets.

Ten months I waited.

Then, I was ill :(.

To avoid entirely wasting the £40 ticket I sent George with my camera instead. Still gutted though.

I would just like to congratulate my friends in the various north west humanist groups that were involved in the inaugural North West Humanist Conference which took place last weekend. Unfortunately I missed the event due to illness (gutted, as a Yorkshireman I can’t stand not attending events I’ve already paid for) but it was never the less a big success and I look forward to attending next year.

Last Friday, another series of the One Life course kicked off with a session on the meaning of life which Will had asked me to chair.

I tried to expand the discussion a little further than previously, where it has often stuck to its philosophical roots, to go beyond that and get into questions like, what would be a wasted life and what tenants do you live your life by. All in all, it seemed to go very well.

The biggest problem, however, is that for the first time ever, they didn’t provide a hot meal. I’ll be filing an expense claim for my McDonald’s shortly…

Last Tuesday, Simon Wellings spoke to the Atheist Society on why he isn’t a Christian. He had given a debate speech for the society a number of years ago, facing off against the always delightful Anna Brown and the talk was essentially a re-work of that, with plenty of new material.

Simon had also given a talk on money reform to Leeds Skeptics recently, which was also entertaining.

As I seem to get shouted at every time I take photos now, the photos were taken by Elettra.

Many people used last week as a chance to lay into Apple, describing the iPhone 4S as a disappointing release.

I honestly can’t image why. It really is the iPhone 5 in everything but name, and perhaps a bit of exterior work, but from every other point of view, it’s a whole new phone.

They’ve put the dual-core A5 chip in it, which is the same chip that is inside my iPad 2, it has the dual antenna system, the battery life has been extended, and it’s new 8-megapixel camera not only has a new censor allowing it to capture 73% more light but it also shoots 1080p high definition video as well.

What I am most in love with however, is Siri. Their new voice control system not only allows you to do things just by speaking to your phone, but actually have a conversation with it!

Of course, speech recognition has been around for a long time and nobody really uses it, but this is what Apple do best – they take a niche technology and package it in a way which brings it to the mass market. For example, the first tablet came out decades ago, but it was only when Apple released the iPad did tablets really see the first mass adoption. Hopefully, Siri is the opportunity speech recognition has been waiting for.

On December 24th, 1995, I was a 9-year-old child. Much younger than the soon to be middle-aged man that now sits writing this. I had already figured out that there was an international conspiracy among adults to perpetrate the hoax that a magical being called Santa existed, but being the materialist child I’m sure most of us once were, it didn’t make it any less magical – who cares who delivers the presents as long as you get them, right?

I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep a wink. Even if I could have, it wouldn’t have been that helpful as even if I had achieved multiple winks, that would still not have been enough time to reach REM sleep, because a wink is such a short period of time.

So, in my excitement, I decided to take out the cover inserts from every single cassette I owned (remember cassettes?) and inside them I wrote “Chris Worfolk. Happy Christmas 1995!” so that I could remember that moment, and how excited I felt, forever.

To this day, I’ve never recaptured such a strong feeling of excitement. Until now. The reason is the impending return of this young woman…

After parting at the end of August, she will be returning to see me in a mere ten days, and I can only describe the feeling as synonymous with how I felt as a child, counting down to Christmas.

The problem is that I have a lot of other things to think about, and laying awake a night feeling excited isn’t helping my already significant sleep problems.

God help you, FinnAir, if that flight doesn’t arrive on time. You simply can’t imagine how disgruntled a letter you would receive should it be significantly delayed…

Currently, car insurance providers offer cheaper premiums to women than they do to men. Purely because of your gender.

That’s discrimination, it’s immoral and thanks to a ruling by the European Court of Justice, it will be illegal from the end of next year. Yet most, if not all, still seem to carry on with the practice.

Having discussed the problem at work today, we decided to put it to the test on a price compassion site. Here were the results. The bottom quote I used the name Mr Chris Worfolk, whereas in the one above, I used the name Miss Chris Worfolk.

As you can see, there is a £60 difference. For Jason, the difference was far bigger – over one hundred pounds, just because of his gender.

Interestingly, just after I had generated the second quote, I received a call from Hastings Direct asking me if they could fill in some further details to complete my quote. I politely explained to the woman that I only generated the quote to prove they immorally, and soon to be illegally discriminate based on gender.

Now, you can argue that males should pay more for their car insurance because they cause more expensive accidents and so it is statically justified.

But, you would be wrong. This is exactly what discrimination law is designed to deal with. After all, just because a small minority of males do drive like boy racers have have some pretty big accidents, doesn’t mean that one individual, such as myself, is any more of a high risk than a female driver – so why should I be punished?

It’s easier to see how wrong it is, when you look at other factors you could discriminate on. Lets use the classic example – you wouldn’t charge someone more for their car insurance because of the colour of their skin, even though we have the same as to what skin colour we are born with as we do over what gender we are born into – none.

You could argue that there won’t be a statistical difference between sin colour, but again this doesn’t hold up because you could look at an area where there is a statistical difference – crime for example.

Non-white minorities are more likely to be convicted of a crime. There are a number of reasons for this, most notably that these minorities tend to be in lower social brackets and lower social brackets produce more crime, so even though for those social brackets minorities have a similar conviction rate to majorities, overall they have a higher conviction rate – but the one thing I think we can all agree on, it isn’t because they are black.

But if you go purely on statistics for an entire group alone, as car insurance companies do, we should be more suspicious of black people in the UK and police should stop and search them more.

We don’t do this, because it would be utterly wrong.

We treat people like individuals and don’t hold them accountable for what people who share arbitrary characteristics with them such as skin colour, ethnic origin, sexual preference or (usually) gender. Because to do so would be wrong. Including if you’re selling car insurance.

While attending the Atheist Society talk this week, I picked up a copy of Leeds Student which had some interesting statistics.

43% of people pulled last week and 23% threw up. That’s to be expected.

However, I was quite shocked that 14% of people said they had had unprotected sex.

I mean, seriously? Lets assume that one third of people had sex in freshers’ week. That is quite a lot I believe, not just because that is generally a lot but because only 43% of people pulled, which would mean that most people who pulled, also went home with someone.

But if we assume that such a high figure is true, that means that half the sex had during freshers’ week was unprotected. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to pretend condoms are a great solution – they’re a massive hassle when you’re in the middle of it, and lets not pretend otherwise, but given the prevalence of STIs and most of these events being one night stands, surely people at one of the best universities at the country are smarter than that?

Yesterday the technology industry was saddened by the passing of Apple founder and chairman, Steve Jobs.

Steve was a visionary who literally changed the world for the better by bringing new and innovative technology to the public in a way which was always intuitive and more importantly, magical. Every time I pick up my iPad, I still feel like I’m living in Star Trek.

Tributes have poured in from politicians, to business leaders, to the many, any Apple fans across the world. In a touching note Bill Gates described working with him as “an insanely great honor.”

He’ll be missed by all of us in the field of technology.