Archive for October, 2011

The October issue of our newsletter, Engage is now available to download from our website. This quarter’s issue takes a look at the recent Sunrise Conference, our new Worfolk Lectures website, Atheist Stock and Leeds Transhumanists and has the usual round-up of news and events too.

At the September meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub, Arthur Chappell presented a talk entitled “Brainwashed! A Cult Survivor’s Tale” describing his experiences as part of the The Divine Light Mission, a cult centred around the worship of Guru Maharaj.

Last Friday, I headed out to Tiger Tiger for dinner with Si and Sarann. We were using Sarann’s Gourmet Society card to get ourselves some discount, but on turning up we found out they didn’t actually have our booking down and neither Si or Sarann had realised the restaurant was so integrated into the bar at Tiger Tiger, making it very noisy. So we left in search of somewhere we could hold a conversation.

Sarann was still determined to score some Gourmet Society discount, but the disadvantage is that you have to book in order to get it. No problem we thought, we can just book now. But we didn’t have a list of participating restaurants so we had to go online to find that.

No problem, Si had his iPad with him. Unfortunately, he had the wifi only version, so we needed to find a wifi hotspot. We couldn’t find one in the nearest area, but then he realised he could tether his iPad to his iPhone to get internet. So we sat on a bench on The Headrow googling for Gourmet Society approved restaurants on an iPad routing its internet through an iPhone in order to save ourselves a few pounds – nothing complicated there :D.

Eventually, we settled on Thai Edge, which consistently delivers good food and as luck would have it, they were fairly quiet so we got a table straight away.

The meal was enjoyable though when the time came to pay, the bill came to £43 and not having any change, we gave them £45. This disappeared and never came back with our change. Normally we wouldn’t have minded this, but given service was already included it seemed too much of a liberty for them to assume we didn’t want our £2 back. As it happens, we did, given the effort Sarann had gone to to save £2 using her Gourmet Society card lol.

As part of Atheist Society’s intro meeting activities, Will had organised a bowling trip. Well, organised is probably granting too much credit, but after a significant amount of faffing, we eventually hit the lanes.

I probably haven’t bowled since hitting up Xscape with the McCrew three years ago. As such I was very rusty and only bowled a 98 in my first game, allowing James to smash his way to victory.

I recovered a little in the second game, bowling a 124, but that’s still not exactly an impressive score and I failed to make any strikes in the second game. Still, for the £3 that the evening cost us each, you can’t really go wrong.

We’re pleased to announce the 2011 Worfolk Lecture.

Last year we announced the creation of a fund to support an annual public understanding of science lecture. The first of which took place in November with Dr Terrence Kee presenting a talk on “did life on Earth originate on Earth?” If you missed it, you can watch again in high definition on the Worfolk Lectures website.

This year’s talk will be presented by Professor David Jenkins on “From Rutherford to the Large Hadron Collider.” the event takes place on Tuesday 18 October, starting at 7pm. There will be a £2 on the door charge and all revenue will go to the host society – this year’s event will be hosted by Leeds Atheist Society and more information can be found on their website.

You can register online for the event here.

On Tuesday, Atheist Society held their 2011/2012 intro meeting. It was great to see a lot of new faces there and James is looking to take the society in an exciting direction, so I’m sure they’re in for a great year.

I accidentally squashed the photos in processing, but it doesn’t matter too much because they were rubbish photos anyway.

Last week we headed down to Fab Cafe for the Zombie Prom.