Archive for May, 2012

I recently attended the Atheist Society‘s AGM. It was good to see a strong turnout and some real enthusiasm. Although perhaps not as high as in previous years and with only one contested position, it was never the less good to see that there are plenty of people in the society who want to make it a great year.

Congratulations to James Gupta who was elected President, Will, the new Vice President, Monique, the new Secretary, Amy, the new Treasurer and Hugh, the new Generic Committee Member.

At the rather delayed meeting of the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire which had to be moved back to accomodate term times at the Swarthmore Centre that took place recently, Gijsbert presented a talk on Pacifism and Humanism.

It’s a tricky subject and one which has been debated before in the group – notably when there was a suggestion that as a society we should lay a wreath on Remembrance Day.

It was a really interesting talk, and I agreed with Gijsbert that going to war simply doesn’t make sense in modern times. However, as I blogged about in December, the real question facing most of us today is are we willing to go along with the state’s brainwashing of the lower working class to convince them go die in Afghanistan on our behalf.

You would assume the answer would be no, but it becomes more tricky when, as a Humanist, I am also an interventionist when it comes to things like genocide. How do we work out whether someone really is going the military voluntarily, knowing what the reality of war is, or simply because of “it’s noble to die for your country” propaganda and economic conscription. Such issues cause me a great struggle in trying to reconcile both my Pacifism and my Interventionism, with my Humanism.

As many of you know, I recently joined a public speaking club and having recently taken on my first role, it came time for me to give my first formal speech – The Ice Breaker.

When you first join Toastmasters you have two programmes to work through – the Component Communicator and the Competent Leader. In the “CC” manual, there are ten speeches you have to give, each improving your speaking in one particular aspect. The first one, The Ice Breaker, is a 4-6 minute speech about yourself.

Despite having done quite a bit of public speaking at A-Soc, I was somewhat nervous before giving the talk. After all, I was speaking to a room of expert public speakers who would be picking up on every “erm” I let out (though the Ah Counter tells me I didn’t let out any, which is great) and every subconscious gesture.

I tend to do a bit too much hand clasping when nervous, so I intentionally decided to keep my hands down by my side. Unfortunately, this didn’t really get me anywhere as it just meant that my hands were hocked into my pockets instead. The ending clearly needed work as well, but as a first speech, I think I did OK and look forward to moving onto my next one.

The latest meeting of Leeds Skeptics saw Dr Bruce Turnbull from the School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds present a talk on “Synthetic Biology – A Brave New World?” It was an incredibly informative talk that offered a peak into one of the most exciting areas of science at the moment. Not one to be missed if you get another opportunity to see it!

If you’re like me, which seems unlikely as statistically you’re probably far more sensible, you’ll get really annoyed when the white spacing or indentation isn’t consistent within a file.

Because of this, I recently wrote a little Ruby script which would automatically clean up my CSS files and make them all nice and pretty. It’s now publicly available on Github if you want a copy.

At some point in the future I’m intending to do similar scripts for other file types – the SocietasPro codebase already has a similar system for PHP, though that only flags inconsistencies, it doesn’t correct them.

If you want to change your SSH port to something a little less obvious, it’s easy to do. It’s debatable how much security it actually gives you, but it will certainly make you feel safer, and that is probably the most important thing.

pico /etc/ssh/sshd_config

I’m using pico in this example, but vim will work just as well. You should find a line which is commented out, specifying that the port is 22. This doesn’t need to be uncommented normally, as it defaults to port 22.

#Port 22

Just uncomment this and put a new port number in.

Port 8473

Now save the file and exit. Finally, restart SSH for it to take affect.

/etc/rc.d/init.d/sshd restart

Don’t forget, next time you SSH in you will need to use the new port number!

ssh -p 8473 hostname

After I had finished explaining all this, he looked at me and said “that may be the case sir. But that’s still no excuse for doing 37 in a 30 zone.”

Worth a try, anyway.

Recently, I undertook my first session of EMDR.

It’s a relatively new form of therapy (albeit, older than Elina), which in it’s full title is named “Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing” originally developed to help trauma victims and has since expanded into other areas.

So far, I’m quite torn about it. On one hand, EMDR is now approved and recommended by The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and has shown to be affective in dozens of randomised controlled trials.

On the other hand, it really, really sounds like Dianetics.

For those not familiar with it, Dianetics is a concept developed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard which divided the mind into two parts – one of which is the reactive mind that stores traumatic memories, and anything associated with those memories, related or not.

This is why Scientologists are very quite around people who have been knocked out – because anything they say will be linked to the memory of being knocked out in the reactive mind. These are stored as negative engrams and the only way to get rid of them is to pay for Audit Counseling.

I’m not a subscriber to Dianetics, and even though EMDR has a lot of key differences (for example, the traumatic memories don’t just pop out of existence in a second), it’s similarities have thrown me somewhat, despite all the evidence to show EMDR genuinely does work. It’s like some kind of reverse-placebo affect, is there a term for that?