Archive for the ‘Humanism’ Category

On Saturday, Mark Edon delivered a talk to Leeds Skeptics on the subject of Creationism. Mark is on the committee for the British Centre for Science Education which is a religiously-neutral organisation which aims to combat creationism and you can tell they do great work because the creationists have even built an “exposed” website about them 😀 .

If you are interested in learning more about the BCSE, you can find their website here and even join for free too.

On Tuesday, we celebrated Galileo Day. The day started with Michael delivering the Galileo Day Lecture on the life and works of the man himself. Unfortunately I ended up missing most of the talk as I had to take some phone calls. Luckily I’m fairly familiar with the subject anyway having contributed to the recently published Galileo Day pack.

Afterwards, we headed down to Red Hot World Buffet for some all you can eat goodness. I ended up setting a new personal record, getting through seven plates, so I’m fairly sure that isn’t something to be proud of lol. I was actually ready to give up after five but then when I found out that Elina was on her sixth, I had to up my game.

The Humanist Society of West Yorkshire is a society with considerable history, having been around for over forty years now. One thing it hasn’t had, at least in the past decade anyway however, was a logo. Which has proved somewhat annoying when launching the group onto social media platforms.

Wanting to rectify this, I asked Emma Bryce, currently serving as the president of Durham University Humanist and Secularist Society and press secretary of the AHS, to use her graphic design skills to come up with something for us. We’re pretty impressed with the result!

You can check out some more of her amazing work here.

Last Friday saw the second session of Leeds Atheist Society‘s 2011 Perspective. Unfortunately the speaker, who was going to be speaking on Hinduism, was unable to do the Friday, so Norm kindly stepped in at the last minute to save the event and talk about Humanism.

Last Sunday was the February meeting of the Humanist Community of Leeds. Discussions were lively indeed – to the point that by the time the discussions first quietened down, most of the meeting was gone and we only just managed to squeeze the news in!

On Friday, the first session of Perspective 2011 took place with Robin Fishwick talking to us about the Quakers.

On Tuesday, James delivered the first Leeds Atheist Society talk of 2011, on alternative medicine.

Last Sunday I spent five and a half hours in meetings. I think that has to be somewhere near a new record for a Sunday.

The day started with a Reason Week planning brunch, which was productive, though didn’t actually include any food which was disappointing. Things are starting to fall into place for the week, which is promising given how close we are to it lol.

The second meeting was a Foundation trustee meeting which produced some interesting results – more on that will be announced soon, I’m sure.

On Monday, we headed down to Sheffield Skeptics to see a talk by Richard Wiseman. Despite struggling to see the screen, which is a little annoying in a talk mostly about optical illusions lol, it was a really enjoyable evening and managing to get a quick chat with Richard I can see it was well worth going down for.

On Tuesday, Atheist Society began it’s regular Tuesday night meetings (See You Next Tuesday 😉 ) with a screening of the Chris Morris film, Four Lions. It’s an awesome film and well worth a watch. Though it did take us ages to get the film working despite bringing it on four different formats! So you can’t say we didn’t have a backup plan lol.

On Wednesday, I headed up to York for a York Brights meeting. It has been a while since I last saw them and could be a while again with Perspective Citywide starting so it was good to see everyone, and interesting conversation was provided aplenty as always.

Finally, on Thursday I was at a Humanist Society of West Yorkshire committee meeting which was great because the meeting was both efficient and productive – which tends to make a change from most committee meetings I’m in lol.

At last Saturday’s meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub we discussed the idea of “designed for the dump” as presented by Annie Leonard and her band as part of The Story of Electronics.

The premise is that manufacturers design for the dump – they build products which are designed to be thrown away after a year so that we have to buy new products and therefore generate more money for the corporations.

There could well be a lot of truth behind this, but as Tim Minchin’s The Fence says, “it’s not quite as simple as that.”

Products don’t just have an 18-month life cycle. If you’re anything like me you won’t have binned those old phones, you’ll have passed them down to friends or colleagues who just wanted an old phone because they’re not bothered about having the latest gadget. I can personally testify that the CWF office is fully kitted out with hand me down electronics.

The idea of the evil corporations is always a contentious one too. Corporations are by their very nature amoral – neither moral nor immoral, because they’re not living creatures and don’t think for themselves.

It’s somewhat naive to think that electronics used to be modular and replaceable and aren’t anymore. Desktop computers are a great example of this – you still upgrade and swap in and out components, and indeed can do with laptops too (less adding stuff, but certainly replacing specific broken components). But the fact is that back in the day computers had valves in that you would just swap out, these days the transistors on your computer’s CPU are too small for the human eye to see.

Luckily though we are already moving towards greener electronics. Compared to a decade ago there are all kinds of greener ways of doing things – all your components go to sleep when they’re inactive for example, cutting power consumption and therefore saving energy. In part, some of this innovation has been driven by designed for the dump – when you replace your electronics every 18 months, it means the companies have to come up with something smaller, lighter, more powerful and more green in a year and a half.