Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

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.

Because you never know when the last time you will get to say “watch out for what bus?”, I thought I would make a declaration here and now. I don’t want you to respect my wishes after I die!

It is in fact my one wish that you don’t honour my wishes after I die, though feel free to violate that one too.

You see, I won’t care, because I’ll be dead.

It always seems strange to me that people want specific music to be played at their funeral. Why? You won’t be there. I really don’t care what you do at my funeral – it isn’t even for me – it’s for you. It’s to help you move on, I don’t care, once again, I’ll be dead.

So does as you will. Make love to my cold dead corpse if it would make you happy, I’m really not fussed. I would rather you do what makes you happy, than respect the wishes of someone who isn’t alive anymore. You have my permission to do whatever you like.

Not that I’m planning on dying anytime soon, indeed, hopefully the whole Transhumanism thing will kick in within my lifetime and we won’t have to deal with it ever. But until then, I would like to take a bit more of a rational approach to the whole situation. So you can count this as record.

There was a bold start to the year when I announced that 2010 was to be the year of CWF in January. I spoke at North Yorkshire Humanists, Leeds Skeptics celebrated it’s first birthday as well as holding one of the best attended 10:23 protests in the world and HAG set a new record. Meanwhile CWF launched it’s YouTube channel and I set David Cammeron right on the subject of Humanist soup kitchens.

Stewart Lee provided a great introduction to February where we launched the Humanist Community of Leeds as one of CWF’s big projects of the year. Meanwhile Atheist Society was busy raising money for charity and serving curry to Pagans. Down South the AHS convention took place in Oxford where Rich did a great job as CWF promo girl.

It was a busy month for CWF in March with the launch of Atheist Stock and the announcement of Enquiry 2010 in the first week! Ricky D shut down the RD.net forums while HCoL launched its blog. Comedian Robin Ince spoke to Leeds Skeptics while I spoke to Leeds Atheist Society on the subject of animal consciousness as well as on BBC Radio Leeds on the Catholic Care adoption agency.

Media coverage of HCoL was building by April including coverage by the BBC website and BBC radio. At Leeds Atheist Society we had a Scientology speaker for the first time ever. We had an Easter special at HCoL before myself and Gijsbert went down to London to discuss CWF with the BHA. The month ended with Reason Week 2010 kicked off by at Leeds Skeptics and the Atheist Society AGM at which John was elected president.

In May the Answers course returned while the country elected a new government. Chris Morris released Four Lions while we released big news about Enquiry 2010. Finally, in a surprise result, my car actually passed it’s MOT.

The big news in June was the Enquiry 2010 conference which was a huge success and featured speakers including A C Grayling, Chris French, Evan Harris, Andrew Copson and many others. Gijsbert was elected onto the University of Leeds Equality & Diversity Committee, I got new housemates and Humanist Week took place.

Much like March, the first week of July was one of launches with the first CWF newsletter being released and the Secular Portal Resource Library being launched as well as us opening the CWF office in Leeds city centre. Leeds Skeptics moved to Mr Foley’s and world cup fever even infiltrated HCoL. Meanwhile Leeds Atheist Society partied hard at their End of Year Ball and we hit Bristol for the AHS AGM.

I started August with two radio appearances, the first on UFOs and the second on psychics. HCoL launched their new branding and we partied down at Leeds Pride. CWF became a registered charity and held it’s first AGM as well as launching the Humanist Chaplaincy Network as well as announcing Sunrise 2010. At work we suited up, something the rest of the world would soon copy in the form of International Suite Up day.

I was out of the country for most of September as I toured Europe with my good friends, Norm, George and Kieran. We made our way through Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Munich, Salzburg, Venice, Verona, Milan, Monaco and La Rochelle. But before we headed off I squeezed in a quick radio interview following Stephen Hawking officially declaring there is no god, represent the University of Leeds Humanist Chaplaincy at the staff fair and oversee CWF’s Sunrise Conference and on return managed to finally achieve Pub Week too.

York Rock Church provided a great start to October while Leeds Atheist Society build on freshers’ week with a classic Make Your Own God event. CWF announced Atheist Stock now had over a thousand images, I saw Stewart Lee in Harrogate, turned 24 and spoke at the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire while Gijsbert spoke at the One Life course and joined me in London to meet Greg Epstein, Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University. I also spoke at Leeds Skeptics and Durham University, raised money for WaterAid and launched the new Perspective website while we finally realised our dream of having a wench and had our first poker night.

If October started well, November was full on cracking as we watched Linkin Park from the sky, followed by Paramore a week later and finished off that week with Gorillaz, curtesy of o2, all expenses paid. I was keeping busy with talks at Leeds Atheist Society and Bradford University, meanwhile my sister graduated. LAS held their interfaith panel and I spoke at their debate on the burqa while HAG launched their new website. We saw the first annual Worfolk Lecture and myself speaking at Durham Union alongside BHA vice-president Richard Norman on the motion “this house has no faith in atheism.” Finally we finished off the month with the LAS Weekend in Edinburgh.

Sex was the subject of December with Intimiate Details launching. HCoL moved to the evening and HAG ran their first holiday food drive. We returned to Manchester on two occasions to watch Meat Loaf from the o2 corporate box and to see the amazing Tim Minchin and CWF launched the Humanist Library Project. Finally we rang in the new year with our traditional New Year’s Eve house party.

A week ago the Humanist Action Group did a holiday food drive that I was involved in. Once we had made up the food packs we delivered them to local hostels, dropped them off and went home.

There were no banners, no photo shoots outside the hostels, no informational leaflets carefully concealed inside the packs so that receipts would know which deity had suppository inspired someone to think that helping out your fellow man would be a good thing to do. We just wanted to do a good thing, for goodness’ sake.

Later, a friend of mine brought the issue up.

“A part of me wonders if you can really afford to miss that kind of publicity. You could have been there, during the day, spoke to the manager, got a photo,” he suggested. “Part of me likes the way you guys just do it and disappear back into the night, taking nothing but a warm feeling that will shield you from the next dozens times you refuse to give £2 a month to save a child’s life because you know it’s actually going to pay the salary of the professional fundraiser currently talking to you. But you’re missing such a good opportunity for PR.”

I thought about this for a while. And I think he’s right.

Consider this. The problem with milking such PR opportunities is that it detracts from the moral goodness of the whole situation. It looks like you’re only doing it so you can show everyone you’ve done some good and can feel really good about yourself (of course, if you do good, you should feel good about yourself – that’s how charity works, if people didn’t feel good about themselves for volunteering, nobody would – it’s what we and every other charity depends on!).

Or, for a perhaps clearer analogy, consider corporate giving. Big corporations give, often huge amounts of money away to charity. Ignoring that a lot of this is just a tax dodge there is one big reason why corporations do this – to get their photo taken helping out some kind of good cause, so everyone thinks they are a nice company, so people buy from them and they make more money in the long run. It’s selfishly motivated, they’re only doing it so they can earn more money in the long term.

But lets look again at organisations like the Humanist Action Group. What benefit would we derive from milking publicity out of such situations? Well, profit obviously wouldn’t be one of them. We’re a registered charity and therefore obviously non-profit, we have no shareholders to pay and money is definitely a one way stream away from the trustees pockets than towards them!

So what would we get out of the publicity? Well, we would get publicity in itself. But actually, this isn’t just a good PR shot to help cover up some shady business dealings as it may be for corporations – this is actually our business, we’re getting publicity doing what we do – helping people.

And what would be the consequence of doing this? More people would know about our work, more people would support us, we would generate more volunteers and more revenue – and end up with more resources to help more people!

It turns into a perceptual cycle in which the more good publicity we get from doing good things, the more support we will receive and as it’s a closed system (money doesn’t come out to fund things like shareholders, it’s all invested back into the charity) it just means we can help more people, and get more publicity and help even more people, and so on.

When a charity milks something for publicity, it isn’t helping its own ego (it’s not an evil corporation), it’s not helping it’s shareholders, it’s only helping one cause – the cause it’s trying to help in the first place.

That isn’t to say that from now on it’s all about grabbing as much positive PR as possible at every opportunity. But maybe being open to the idea of making a bit more of a deal about the amazing stuff I see our volunteers doing, wouldn’t be such an evil after all.

Last month at Humanist Community, Gijsbert presented a news story about the number 13 tram in one city which had an exceptionally high accident rate and had therefore been withdrawn from service because with it being the number 13, it was clearly cursed.

While most of my blog’s readership will already have explained to themselves why this is nonsense, I though I would attempt to to clarify the situation for anyone who might actually take such an example as evidence that the number 13 is genuinely unlucky.

Lets start with the probably. I’m going to guess that there are somewhere in the region of 100 cities with tram networks in them. This may or may not be accurate though there is technically no reason why you should limit it to trams, you could also include buses for example and create a much larger sample which works even better for example.

Now lets say that on average there are 20 routes on each network. This could be off again but I’m basing this on the idea that there are probably less tram routes than there are bus routes and this a little on the low side for Leeds bus routes but then we’re not a huge city on a world scale.

With every network, statistically one of those routes must be the most accident prone. With 20 routes, one of them being 13 (maybe some places avoid having a route 13 – but again, Leeds doesn’t, so I’m going to go with that), that means there is a 1/20 chance of the most accident prone route being route 13. That is 5%. 5% of the 100 tram networks in the world means that statistically, you would expect the route 13 to be the most accident prone in 5 different cities in the world, just by chance. Equally in the same amount of cities, the number 7 or the number 3, or any number, will be the most accident prone route.

Add to that the fact that some people are superstitious and even though most of us know that 13 genuinely isn’t unlucky, you may occasionally get say a tram driver that is superstitious and becomes nervous when driving route 13 because he believes it is “cursed.” Thanks to the nocebo effect (the opposite of the placebo effect) the route then becomes a self fulfilling prophesy.

But even if we discount that and say that all such superstitious tram drivers simply refuse to drive the route 13 tram, we are still left with five places in the world which the route 13 tram is the most accident prone simply by chance – of which of course there will be different levels of accidents, most non-exceptional, some will be quite highly though, that’s just how random probably is.

So, we now have a really unlucky tram. It’s one of the five places where route 13 is the most accident prone simply by chance, and it’s the worst one of those. A journalist notices this, presumably working at The Sun, and decides to write a story on it.

But of course, no one thinks to write a story on the city which has the tram network where the route 7tram is the most accident prone simply by chance and happens to the the worst of the five cities in which this is the case – it only makes the news because someone comes along and makes the non-existent connection between this being the city which is one of the five cities in which the route 13 tram has the highest accident rate and this one happens to be the worst and the superstitious belief that the number 13 is unlucky.

When in fact what would be weird is if out of all the tram networks in the world, there wasn’t a single one where the route 13 tram wasn’t in at least one instance the most accident prone route on that tram network.

Another year of record exam results is upon us, and of course, they’ve got easier again.

While this is often refuted by the industry, here are two reasons why exams arguably genuinely are getting easier every year.

1. Teaching standards get better and the exams do not get proportionally harder as a result.

The argument against this is that just because teaching standards are getting better doesn’t mean that the exams should get harder as well. After all, if you can teach a child more stuff in a shorter period of time, that actually means they do actually know more and thus deserve a higher grade than the generation before.

However, to add to this discussion, there isn’t a great deal of evidence that younger generations are actually significantly smarter than previous ones. Teaching standards are getting better, but not necessarily at teaching children useful information, rather they are getting better at teaching kids to do well in exams.

If there was huge leaps of improvement in teaching techniques to make children smarter, surely we would all expect to be significantly smarter than our parents and I don’t think this is the case.

2. The exam board make conscious decision to award higher grades each year.

It’s all very well saying more children reached A grade standard this year, every year, but this is actually a long way from the way that universities work.

At degree level, everyone sits the same paper, they are all marked and then they work out how easy or how hard the paper was and move the grade boundaries according – so if everyone got really high marks they will up the grade boundaries to reduce the amount of people that did well and if everyone did really badly they reduce the grade boundaries to increase the amount of people that passed.

This prevents one year who get a really hard paper being unfairly punished against a year later which may get a much easier paper. This is a system which has been functioning in universities for a long time and seems to work very well.

Arguably this means that fifty years down the line you end up with people who should be achieving far higher grades than people do now, getting the same grades but who really cares? Exam grades are really about employers and universities being able to differentiate between people and once you have a degree or a job nobody really gives a crap about your GCSEs and A-Levels so what does it even matter if that is the case?

I was thinking about the selective attention videos Jonni was showing me earlier and that lead me on to thinking about some videos I saw many years ago that made me jump.

Such videos to something along similar lines of this: they present to you two identical pictures and ask you to “spot the difference.” Of course there isn’t any and as time goes on your eyes move closer and a closer to the screen as your concentration increases to try and spot the differences you are told are there to be spotted.

Suddenly a ghostly image appears and a scream comes hurtling through your speakers and the majority of people will jump. There is a crude example of such a video here.

This got me thinking, it’s actually quite easy to scare someone. How many times have you walked up behind someone concentrating on a computer screen for them to suddenly realise you are there, jump and claim you “scared the life out of them.” Probably many times.

And yet, horror films continually fail to scare us on a regular basis. When was the last time you watched a horror film that was actually scary? I found Silent Hill had a good attempt but that was a few years ago now and most people found that rather tame. Of course it varies from person to person but most people I talk to, at least among my male friends, claim they haven’t seen a scary movie in a long time. Of course they could just be embarrassed to admit they were scared but for the moment lets take them at their word and assume all recent horror films haven’t scared them.

Surely we must be able to put some science behind this?

Take roller coasters for example. There is a lot of research and engineering that goes into making roller coasters and exhilarating experience. The problem is now that they simply can’t make them go any faster, drop any steeper or throw people around any more than they already do without injuring people.

So, as a friend was explaining to me, they’re now working on techniques to make people feel disoriented. The current avenue of research is to attempt to recreate the feeling we all had when we were children and went rolling down hills (I say children, I would imagine in Michelle’s case, it was last week as I presume it still works 😉 ) and that sensation of tumbling over and over. They can do this already but not without people throwing up everywhere, so the research continues.

I would have thought, in the same way, we could apply new techniques to horror movies rather than just adding even more blood, gore and guts to each film. Maybe they already are of course, but I think so far, the general consensus is that it isn’t working.

The World Cup manages to get everywhere – and arguably so it should – though it was surprising to find that it even made it as far as the Humanist Community of Leeds with Gijsbert dressing up in all orange to support his home country, The Netherlands.

One of the aims I always wanted for the foundation, was that we would be an organisation that got out there and did stuff. Not just talked about it, or planned it, but actually got out there and got something going. I’m pleased to say that our work seems to be inspiring other organisations to do the same.

Having just read the latest copy of the BHA News which arrived through my door a few days ago, I noticed they have now formally launched their equivalent to our One Life course, Exploring Humanism, complete with a overtly stock image as I am a sucker for using on our projects too.

Just a week after our Enquiry 2010 conference took place, the BHA have announced the return of their annual residential weekend conference and following our public announcement of the Humanist Chaplaincy Network during the weekend, they have also announced they will soon be launching the Humanist Chaplaincy Working Group too.

I’m really proud that despite only being a year old, the work of the foundation is already inspiring many others in the non-religious community to get out there and make a difference. Long may it continue!

In a sea of everything going wrong at the moment, I got some very pleasant news on Thursday morning when I found out my car passed it’s MOT! I was expecting it to fail to be honest because of the right up it got on it’s last service but apparently everything is in working order enough for it to be road legal so let the good times roll.