Chris Worfolk's Blog

We held off until the Friday to hold out Halloween party, being proper adults with jobs and all. It was of course fancy dress.

In October, we launched Sunday Assembly Leeds with the help of London-founder Sandison Jones. 120 people turned out for the event as well as BBC Look North, BBC Radio 4 and plenty of other media too. We held it in the beautiful St John the Evangelist’s Church next to the St John’s Centre (surprisingly).

Yes, it’s real.

Farewell to a man who changed the world.

Last month John Fletcher presented a talk entitled “A Skeptical Look at Statistics” at Leeds Skeptics. It was great to see people there who were really interested in stats. It was also the first event we have held at the Hedley Verity and while it isn’t perfect, it is certainly an acceptable backup venue.

Following on from the video I posted yesterday regarding Amazon’s air shipments, Gareth pointed out Waterstones have announced plans to start delivering books by trained owls.

Looks pretty cool. I’m still expecting to find the bit where they say “only joking of course”.

I can’t stop listening to Lady Gaga’s new album. It is excellent.

It is a bit of a departure from her previous albums is that it is almost a rock opera. But that is probably being far too generous as it is nowhere near as polished as say American Idiot. But there is a loose journey that progresses through the album.

It is probably not an album for those that aren’t already Gaga fans. But for those that are, you won’t be disappointed.

It’s difficult to discuss Apple v Android without everyone digging in their heels and becoming self-righteous. Of course we all really know that they have different advantages and disadvantages but it was interesting to see some slides from a recent talk by Benedict Evans talking about the growth of mobile.

When it comes to tablets, iPad make up around 25% of sales. But when it comes to internet traffic, iPad makes up 80%. That is incredible. What it shows is that even though people are buying Android tablets, they aren’t using them.

Based on those figures, you get this breakdown. For every 100 tablets bought:

• 25 are iPads that people use
• 6 are Androids that people use
• 69 are Androids that people do not use

You have to factor in that it doesn’t work exactly like this. iPad users could simply be heavier data users, but even if this is a consistent trend, it doesn’t really change what the above represents – people just don’t use Android tablets. They buy them, then they put them in a drawer and don’t use them. People do use iPads. To me, that suggests the extra cost of buying an iPad is worth the investment.

Leeds based club night The Wendy House basically never change their playlist. It’s comforting. As Hugh points out, you don’t need a watch because you can tell what time it is by which rendition of Sweet Dreams they are currently playing.

The advantage of this is that I’ve been able to make a note of all the songs they played (although we didn’t arrive until 12:30) and published them on a Spotify playlist. It’s shared, you can find it here. Drop me a message with any songs I’ve missed and I’ll add them.