Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

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!

Friday saw our Perspective session on Paganism with a practicing witch coming into to talk to us. You have to respect the guy’s honestly, he opening said “it’s all made up” and was created about 30-40 years ago. However it is apparently a belief system that works for him and he has seen it working with his coven using the power of their mind to change reality. Fair enough I guess.

Zoltan provided the food this week and did a rather nice vegeterian dish. We also had meeting room 8 rather than meeting room 5 so we actually had enough space for once. All in all, a very nice session if I do say so myself.

Our plans having been thwarted last week we finally made it to Bella Italia this week. And interestingly enough had the restaurant to ourselves with the only other people in there leaving just as we were arriving. Made for very speedy service which was very nice.

I started with the Calamari which was interesting and then moved on to the Pollo Arrosto which is chicken cooked in some kind of herbs or sause that involves garlic and something else. I can’t actually remember what it was but it made for good eatign none the less.

As usual we finished the night with a good bit of KFC for dessert. It’s a winning combination.

In the spirit of promoting secular holidays, there is now an official website for Galileo Day. I use the term official loosely because how do you really have an official site for a holiday? Obviously, the answer is you don’t but it’s as close to some kind of official website as you can really get.

There isn’t much on it at the moment other than a bit of information on the holiday and how to enjoy a traditional Galileo Day Feast but this should expand over time.

Yesterday saw the February meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub. The talk was by Dr. Richard Parker re-working his The Unwoven Rainbow talk into more of a group discussion, introducing several topics and basically seeing where it went from there. It worked suprisingly well.

More importantly this month, Carpe were still serving food by the time I had got things sorted so I could also enjoy a Hunters Chicken (though I couldn’t decide if it should actually be called Hunter’s Chicken). Beer, chicken and good company, what more can a man ask for?

Wednesday saw us head down to London for the launch of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies, better known as the AHS. We managed to get ten of us down there from Leeds – a number unmatched by any other society with the closest competitors only achieving five (not that I’m bragging of course 😀 ).

The day itself went quite well, we eventually managed to get the technical sorted and all of the speeches were very good. We got some good pictures too which will do very nicely for publicity not to mention the endless angles we got video from.

I met Richard Dawkins, I said “what kind of microphone would you like?” and he said “a lecturn will be fine.” That is my Richard Dawkins story 😀 .

The hotel was alright, we had quite a big room for the amount we paid. I think I managed to spend as much money on taxis getting to and from the train station I did as my train tickets which I found quite amusing but the important thing is, I actually made my train (unlike certain other people who had to go via Manchester at 4am to get down there).

All in all if the AHS can continue like this, we’re going to do very well. Congratulations all on a victory well deserved.