Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

On Tuesday I delivered a short series of talks to Atheist Society on evolution. It focused on some of the fun facts of evolution and strange twists which don’t seem to make sense at first but then, when you actually find out the answer, it makes perfect sense. The enemy of the god of gaps if you will.

Last Sunday we headed down to The Mill to celebrate my dad’s birthday. It being full though we decided to leave. True story. We ended up at the Brown Cow, now known as the Brown Cow & Dragon for some Thai food. Not that I got Thai food of course but it was nice to know I had the option.

Afterwards I headed down to grab a quick drink at The Mill with friends from work before heading for an early night, of starting work 🙁 . I ended up getting to bed just before 4am but caught up on most of my work. Fun times.

Well that’s it kids, Rationalist Week 2009.

What a week. If nothing else it has been incredibly tiring, I arrived on site at around noon on Sunday and didn’t leave until 2am Wednesday! Not to mention it ended in a 22 hour shift on the Friday. I haven’t had time to catch up on sleep yet and given it’s now 1:30am and I have to be up for work in six hours and still have loads of work to do first it doesn’t look like that will be happening any time soon.

In terms of attendance we probably hit the same numbers as last year, the weather was great which was really nice in terms of keeping us warm and be able to setup and take down in nice sunny conditions but probably didn’t do us any favours in terms of attendance.

Unfortunately the week was tinged with an ugly side as members of Leeds Islamic Society mounted a campaign of hate, violence and attacks against us but beyond that the week passed by with no major problems.

I will probably blog more about the various events we ran throughout the week but for the moment I would just like to say a huge thank you to everyone who helped out during the week to make it just a fantastic week!

I was heading down to the April meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub when I came across the Sikh new year celebrations on Millenium Square. Having got down there quite early I decided to hang around and snap a few photos. It seemed quite well organised and attended though I did like the fact their PowerPoint presentation on the big screen used the generic ocean theme we use for everything at A-Soc 😀 .

Heading over to the April meetup of the York Brights group I was finally able to get there while it was daylight. Therefore I took the opportunity to get a few photos in as I walked past the Minster.

The group meetup itself was excellent as usual and rather well attended this month so it made for plenty of interesting conversation. Plus it was a chance to talk about Rationalist Week to a whole new group of people 😀 .

It’s hard to believe that it’s only 17 days until Rationalist Week 2009! I don’t really think it has fully sunk in yet just how soon it is, especially given the planning started over 6 months ago now.

This year’s events timetable is more packed than ever and the event is going to be unprecendeted not only with using previous weeks as benchmarks but measured against every other awareness week on campus too!

You can find a second by second countdown as well as a full events timetable on the Rationalist Week information page on the A-Soc website.

Today saw the March edition of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub. Norm had decided to pull out last week so Daryl bravely stepped up at the last minute to present his talk. There were quite a few new faces down there which was good to see, hopefully the word is starting to spread.

Daryl’s talk was amazing, it was about the power of exponentials and the technological singularity which obviously was of great interest to me as a computer scientist. It was interesting because we also carried out usual hat of skeptism but nobody could really pick any major wholes in the latest thoughts outlined by Ray Kurzweil in his book “the singularity is near.”

In the book he outlines that the technological singularity is both achievable and near given that technological growth is exponential. It really is a facinating area and one that I will be keeping a much closer eye on in future.

On Thursday myself and Rich headed out once again, this time joined by Nicola, to do our bit. We were going to do a bit of cooking beforehand but Rich was unfortunately detained at work and so we ended up doing soup again, not that it is overly a bad choice.

There seems to be a fair bit of interest in the group now which hopefully will continue to grow and we can expand our activities.

Wednesday saw me head over to York for the Brights meetup over there. Nick kindly lent me his GPS which resulted in it being rather easier to get there but when I took the suggestion to follow it’s directions on foot things went a little worse. After some serious walking and a quick phone call I eventually found my way to Stonegate though and met everyone else.

The conversations made for some very interesting discussions, while there is usually this in most of the events I go to, the night’s discussions were especially interesting. As ever it also provided me with a good excuse to do some name dropping which is always fun.

Tuesday evening started off with the usual A-Soc committee meeting which brought up some interesting discussions, followed by the usual A-Soc meeting which this week was Michael’s talk which by all accounts was excellent.

Unfortunately I missed the talk as I was down at the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire attending their event on Ashley Montagu as a critic of Darwin which was also very interesting. Too many choices on Tuesday!

This was followed by hitting The Terrace for a few drinks at which we bashed out some great ideas (or as a titled the sheet at the time, ideas that seemed great when we were in the pub 😉 ) for Rationalist Week so hopefully some of them will actually be useful!