Chris Worfolk's Blog

Recently, Margaret Bramham, a former Religious Education teacher, gave Atheist Society her take on the Gospels. Here are some photos.

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.

Happy Copernicus Day!

I’m drawing a line across the emails that Twitter continue to send me.

For months and months they have continued to send me updates on what is going on, what people have saying, stuff that isn’t even an interaction with me. Every single time I get such an email, I click the unsubscribe found at the bottom of the email, and Twitter.com appears to tell me I will no longer receive that kind of notification.

But I continue to get them.

No matter how many times, no matter how many different notifications I turn off, they find some new category to send me emails. So enough is enough. Any future emails are getting forwarded to MailFoundry’s spam monitor address and flagged as spam in my own email client.

Recently, Sky did a hack day – the idea was that you could take a day to work on any project you wanted, as long as it was vaguely business related. Then at the end of the day, everyone came together to demo what they had done.

It was a cool idea, and most people really enjoyed it, though I was fairly non-plussed. I couldn’t get my project working, on a number of angles, so didn’t really have much to show by the end of it (I had a demo, but as I couldn’t integrate it into the product, I didn’t think it worth showing). I think if I had actually worked for Sky though, I would have been far more motivated by such an event.

You may be familiar with John Sweeney, a war reporter who has also turned his interest onto the Church of Scientology, making the 2007 Panorama documentary, “Scientology & Me.” Since making that, he received a leaked set of communications documenting how he was followed (the Church denies they are genuine) and spoken to some of the people who followed him, but have since left the Church.

Most of this was retold in a follow up documentary he made for Panorama, but he has now written a book about it too, The Church of Fear.

At a rather bargain price of around £3.50 on Kindle, I decided to give it a read. It comes it an 336 pages, which I checked upon before making the claim “it’s reasonable short” – apparently it isn’t, I just assumed it was because I read the entire thing in two sittings – only having purchased it last night. Instead, I think that provides testament to what an interesting read it is.

One thing that did freak me out a little though – as I put the book down so we could head out for dinner, my phone began to ring. I didn’t answer as I recognised the number – it was the Church of Scientology London.