At this month’s meeting of Leeds Skeptics, Brian Quinn presented his talk “Superstition – The Odd Delusion.” We gave a similar talk at West Yorkshire Humanists in 2011, and I enjoyed it so much I thought it work booking for Skeptics too.
As Brian points out, superstition is actually far more common than religion. Many people touch wood, won’t open umbrellas in doors – or the most common of all – say good luck (though you could argue this could potentially have a psychological benefit).
I also really enjoyed his thoughts on religion, which after all is just a collection of superstitions. So, if you swap the word faith with the word superstition, you get to see just how silly some of the current issues in our society are – imagine talking about superstition schools, superstition communities or even inter-superstition dialogue.
Recently, I watched the film The Master, that was released last year.
Overall, I wasn’t that impressed. While it was interesting, I think there are a number of points that let it down.
It’s loosely based on the life of L Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology. Though it is also based on some other works, I don’t really think it would make any sense unless you were familiar with Scientology and its origins.
This really shows in the fact that the plot line doesn’t make much sense. Again, if you’re familiar with the origins of Scientology, then you can see what they have done. But if you’re not, I imagine you would by simply left wondering what was happening and why, when there doesn’t seem to be any apparent reason behind it.
Secondly, nothing really happens in the film. It doesn’t really feel like it’s the story of a man who gets taken in by a cult – because he just walks in there on day one and signs up to everything. It feels like just a series of things happening, with no interesting storyline behind them.
It is worth noting however that the film received almost universal acclaim from the critics – so what do I know.
What did I do for Valentine’s Day this year you ask? Why, I went to the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire to listen to a talk about death.
To be fair, I then went home for a romantic meal and some quality time with Elina, but the talk itself was well worth attending too – the speaker Matthew Simpson, is a Celebrant and talked us through his take on death and how the Humanist approach differs from that of the religions.
As you will probably know, human beings are getting taller.
I never really put much thought into it – humans are getting taller over time, big deal, it’s evolutionary useful, so it’s just happening. But the other day, it struck me that if it was happening by evolution, it must be doing so using evolution’s trusted method, natural selection.
This states that desirable characteristics, ie, those that help an organism survive, continue to grow because they are more successful at reproducing. This seems to point to one conclusion – being above average height makes you more likely to reproduce than someone below average height.
Could this be true? Do short people really no reason to live?
Thankfully, the answer, is no. As Scientific American explains, the increase in human height is almost certainly nothing to do with evolution, and everything to do with the improvements to our diet that have been made over the past few hundred years.
Malnourished children don’t grow as much as children who have a healthy diet. Given a healthy diet is a relatively new concept (indeed, in many parts of Africa, it still hasn’t reached there yet), that explains why humans have started getting taller over this time period.
If you’ve installed MacPorts’ mysql5-server, you may find that it doesn’t work after a restart.
This can be resolved by running the following commands to make sure you’ve killed off everything MySQL related.
sudo port unload mysql5-server
ps -ax | grep mysql
sudo kill
Once you have done this, load it again.
sudo port load mysql5-server
Not it should be working. This is fine, but quickly gets very annoying every time you restart your computer! A common cause is that you have a MySQL sock file in your tmp directory. Removing this may allow it to start automatically.
cd /tmp
rm -f mysql.sock
Once removed, restart your computer and see if MySQL works first time – hopefully, it will.
Last week, I attended the local Club Officer Training for Toastmasters. Not only did I learn some interesting stuff, but our Area Governor Shelagh also surprised me with one of the newly purchased trophies for winning the area humorous speech contest in September. Lets hope I can win it back this year!
Last month, Paul Hopwood presented his talk “You Know Less Than You Think.” I have already blogged about it, but this time, I’ve got pictures. Also, if you missed the talk, don’t worry as it was the 2012 Worfolk Lecture, so you can watch the Leeds Skeptics event online.
Sometimes you might want to install an MSI on your Windows system, without being logged in as an administrator. Normally, you would just right click and select “Run as Administrator” but this option is not available on MSIs.
Instead, right click on “Command Prompt” in the start menu, then select “Run as Administrator”. Once this is running, use the msiexec command to execute the MSI.
msiexec /i Filename.msi
This will then run the installer using administrative privileges.
