Archive for the ‘Humanism’ Category

I’m quite impressed by how light it is in the evenings now. I don’t want to think about the fact that this will only keep itself up for another few months and then it will start getting darker again but then really we probably have five months before it is getting dark at an early time again which is probably long enough.

Rich and I headed out, as usual, on Thursday though with limited success given that Rich hadn’t had much time to prepare anything as he is feeling rather under the weather at the moment and while we were out his flask exploded. Not really the best start to the evening.

Apparently, though we had, had a better evening than Rich’s flatmate Liam who had managed to pick up food poisoning off Burger King. Rich suggested that he make up a formula of water, salt and sugar to rehydrate (apparently there is a special formula which makes it work best) and in a somewhat ironic twist, the only salt they had in was some salt packets from guess which restaurant…

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.

On Thursday myself and Rich headed out to continue our work for the newly formed Humanist Action Group.

Rich had cooked up a chicken strew this week which we were hoping would be a little more popular than soup but apparently not. This was probably due to the fact that there were less people out this week but it didn’t help when one of them turns out to be a vegetarian.

It is good to see some people are really getting somewhere though, one woman who we talk to every week now has a job selling The Big Issue and as such is getting a house from the council too. It’s almost inspiring to think that we have only been doing this a few weeks and we’re already seeing people get back on their feet (not by anything we’ve done or anything, it’s just nice to see).

Having got the wrong month in February, we finally headed down for the long awaited karaoke social at The Eldon. It was in theory a joint Jazz & Blues and Atheist Society social but I’m not sure anyone from J&B actually turned up. Luckily, even with it being the holidays, A-Soc managed to put out a decent turn out and provide most of the musical entertainment too.

I signed up for to sing but ended up leaving before it was my turn so unfortunately everyone missed out on my Cerys Matthews impression to the tune of Catatonia’s Mulder and Skully but we did get Zoltan singing Rick Astley’s timeless Never Going To Give You Up so who can complain?

Our traditional final round of planning meetings for Rationalist Week which take place over the Easter holidays kicked off last Tuesday. We managed to keep the meeting under two and a half hours which isn’t bad going for this time of year.

Zoltan’s train had been delayed but he finally arrived back from his jailbreak and joined us in The Terrace around 10:45 for a well earned drink. He managed 150 miles in the end though by road that is actually 260 miles travelled which is pretty damn impressive.

This morning (well probably yesterday morning now) at the ungodly time of 6:15am myself and Sophie turned up to see Zoltan off on his way for his jailbreak to raise money for Rationalist Week. Armed with only £10 and his wits he had to get as far away from Leeds as possible, the more miles he got, the more money he earns.

Afterwards I headed over to Kirstall to get some breakfast and found myself outside of work by 6:45. Knowing Gaz wouldn’t be there until 8:20ish to open up I decided to stretch out along the back seat and grab some much needed kip. I can confirm that the back seat of a 2001 Astra LS is rather comfortable 😉 .

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.

Norm having asked the BHA to provide a speaker for the Humanism session of Perspective he seen got an email from the BHA asking him if we would be able to speak at an A-Soc event at the university. He stepped up to the plate and agreed, so there was our Humanist speaker sorted.

While it was of course BHA brand Humanism it was never the less an interesting session and we got to test the catering urn so given how bad attendance could have been given it was the last day of term, I was quite impressed with how it went.

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.

Tuesday we were scheduled to watch Morgan Spurlock’s Where on Earth is Osama Bin Laden but Norm hadn’t ordered the DVD on time so we had to switch to plan B. Luckily I had a feeling it was all going to go wrong and so had copied over Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days onto my laptop as a backup.

It ended up going down really well and we got some good discussion afterwards including plenty of discussion in meeting room 3 as we wanted to avoid the carnage of St. Patrick’s Day going on in the bars below.

In the end we ended up sitting outside on The Terrace which altough a little on the chilly side provided a good arena for group conversation in that for once we could actually here each other. And I managed to solve my current Rationalist Week scheduling issue so it worked out well all round.