Chris Worfolk's Blog

To be fair, he does have a very nice ass.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s final set of stories about Sherlock Holmes is compiled into Case-Book. It has some interesting tales, but at times I could not help but feel that the ideas were running a bit thin. One wasn’t even really a mystery, it was just someone reciting a story. Others were narrated by Holmes himself. It was true to his character, which while being accurate, was a less engaging style of storytelling. I did not get bored though, so these points aside, it was an enjoyable read.

Pretty disappointed by this book. It was a truly heart warming tale about how a rich white family brought a poor black kid into their home and turned his life around. But what I really wanted was an insight into an industry. That is what Flash Boys and The Big Short delivered.

That is not to criticise Michael Lewis as a writer. He is, as ever, poetic in his storytelling. It is a strange and wonderful story. However, it did not create the “I cannot put this down” feeling as much as the books of his that I have previously read.

The May edition of Sunday Assembly Leeds was hosted by Dr Chris Hassall on the theme of “nature”. It was also Towel Day so Chris ensured we got plenty of Douglas Adams in there – always a good addition!

While walking through Trinity I noticed someone had papered over the Abercrombie & Fitch logo using writing paper.

Premier Sports is a television channel that nobody has ever heard of. It’s an add-on to Sky Sports, for an additional monthly fee. Which is really annoying because they have had, for the past two years, exclusive coverage of the Ice Hockey World Championship finals.

Luckily they have now added Premier Player, an online streaming version of the channel. It costs £9.99 per month. Sign up was painless and we were able to watch it straight away. You can use as many devices as you want, but you can only log in with one device at a time, so you need to make sure you actually sign out if you want to switch devices.

Quality was not great. There are only so much you can expect when you stream a web feed onto a 42″ TV. However, I get good results with Sky Go and iPlayer. The results from Premier Sports were noticeably not as good, especially with the graphics and semi-transparent overlays. However it did offer a continuous stream whereas the free HD stream of a Finland channel we found kept cutting out every 3-5 seconds.

Overall, I am fairly satisfied. It would be great to get a higher quality feed. In a decade or so I imagine we will look back and consider how crazy it was that we watched anything in this resolution. But it was watchable and the whole process was pain free.

Earlier this month Professor Liane Benning presented a talk on life in extreme environments at Leeds Skeptics.

This collided with two unfortunate events. Firstly, due to the rare day of hot sunny weather, turn out was down. Second, due to time commitments I had not brought the video camera to record the talk as it takes a long time to process, edit and publish it. These were both big mistakes as Professor Benning presented one of the most interesting talks we have had.

It turns out that she has spent much of the last decade going to Svalbard and testing Mars rovers for NASA and ESA. Officially she is a biogeochemist and moved effortlessly between different scientific disciplines. By the end of the talk I was sitting there feeling like I had wasted my life while GabrielÄ— was trying to sign up to go on the next expedition.

I know Headingley Cafe Scientifique were trying to poach her to speak at their group too. if they do book her and you have not seen the talk, I highly recommend attending!

I found this year’s Eurovision very odd. There was not a huge mix of ridiculous, funny novelty acts. There were just a lot of genuinely enjoyable songs. I am not sure I approve of that.

The winner was of course Conchita Wurst. Her victory was heralded as a great victory for the acceptance of trans in our society. I am a little less convinced. The fact that Wurst could win Eurovision does not tell us that much. Yes, it means she got lots of votes from countries you might not think were that gay-friendly. But it was Eurovision. The campest thing on television. It’s the only thing that did not get more camp by adding Graham Norton. I’m very happy she won, but this is not the end of apartheid.

We finally got the message this year and realised we were going to do a lot better if we had a Swedish person write our song instead. It still did not work that well.

Finland did okay this year. They face the same problem every year though – how do you follow the legend that is Lordi?

I really enjoyed Iceland’s song. Good song; good message.

Being a twenty-first century man I would never be petty enough to revel in French defeats. For a start, who has that much time to commit? But if you are going to take your one black performer and daub him in war paint while your lead singer is wearing a shirt and tie, you probably deserve to come dead last.

No surprise that Ukraine actually gave Russia plenty of points. Even if half the country is rather annoyed at Russia at the moment, they do have a large ethnic Russian population.

I have no idea how The Netherlands got so many votes. It was a good song, but it wasn’t a Eurovision song (we don’t want your deep and meaningful music about here!).

Well done to Hungary too. Not everyone could score so many points by singing about child abuse.

I was quite proud of us when we didn’t give Poland all our points. It was a shit song. We hadn’t voted for Poland just because they got their tits out. But then it turned out the public had.

Of course now is the most depressing time of year, because it is the furthest away you can be from the next Eurovision song contest. But we will struggle on, somehow…

“Hello, welcome to the polling station. Are you voting fraudulently?” “No” “Okay, wonderful. Go right ahead then”.

Sounds ridiculous of course. However, in the UK, that is pretty much what we do. Without bothering to ask the question explicitly. In some parts of the country they were apparently turning EU citizens away saying they had not completed a UC1 form whatever that is.

That certainly was not the case in Leeds. The two non-British EU citizens I spoke to said they had the same experience. No one asked to see their polling card. No one asked to see their ID. They didn’t even need to know their own name.

When Elina went down to the polling station she was armed with her polling card and password. However, she didn’t need either. They just asked for her address. She could have given any. After she did that, they read out her name and asked if that was her. She said it was, and was given a ballot paper.

I’ve never tried electoral fraud, so I am not an expert in it. However, I can see a few ways in which this system would be undermined. For example, I could have given my neighbours address. Very easy when you live in sequentially numbered flats. Even if they had then asked me to confirm my name, I could have just read it upside down while they were looking for the address and given it back to them. And all of that is only based on a scenario where I don’t know the name of my neighbour.

Luckily, because everyone in Britain is totally honest, this isn’t a problem.

The Big Short is a book by Michael Lewis that tells the story of the 2008 financial crises and some of the people who saw it coming. Lewis is a great writer. He takes a subject which is fundamentally rather dull and boring, and tells stories in such an accessible and engaging way that it is difficult to put it down.

It preaches a similar story to that of his later book, Flash Boys. That is that almost nobody in the banking industry really knows what is going on. They churn out new products and new systems so fast that none of them really understand it. Their, and our doom. But at least it makes good reading.