Chris Worfolk's Blog

On December 24th, 1995, I was a 9-year-old child. Much younger than the soon to be middle-aged man that now sits writing this. I had already figured out that there was an international conspiracy among adults to perpetrate the hoax that a magical being called Santa existed, but being the materialist child I’m sure most of us once were, it didn’t make it any less magical – who cares who delivers the presents as long as you get them, right?

I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep a wink. Even if I could have, it wouldn’t have been that helpful as even if I had achieved multiple winks, that would still not have been enough time to reach REM sleep, because a wink is such a short period of time.

So, in my excitement, I decided to take out the cover inserts from every single cassette I owned (remember cassettes?) and inside them I wrote “Chris Worfolk. Happy Christmas 1995!” so that I could remember that moment, and how excited I felt, forever.

To this day, I’ve never recaptured such a strong feeling of excitement. Until now. The reason is the impending return of this young woman…

After parting at the end of August, she will be returning to see me in a mere ten days, and I can only describe the feeling as synonymous with how I felt as a child, counting down to Christmas.

The problem is that I have a lot of other things to think about, and laying awake a night feeling excited isn’t helping my already significant sleep problems.

God help you, FinnAir, if that flight doesn’t arrive on time. You simply can’t imagine how disgruntled a letter you would receive should it be significantly delayed…

Currently, car insurance providers offer cheaper premiums to women than they do to men. Purely because of your gender.

That’s discrimination, it’s immoral and thanks to a ruling by the European Court of Justice, it will be illegal from the end of next year. Yet most, if not all, still seem to carry on with the practice.

Having discussed the problem at work today, we decided to put it to the test on a price compassion site. Here were the results. The bottom quote I used the name Mr Chris Worfolk, whereas in the one above, I used the name Miss Chris Worfolk.

As you can see, there is a £60 difference. For Jason, the difference was far bigger – over one hundred pounds, just because of his gender.

Interestingly, just after I had generated the second quote, I received a call from Hastings Direct asking me if they could fill in some further details to complete my quote. I politely explained to the woman that I only generated the quote to prove they immorally, and soon to be illegally discriminate based on gender.

Now, you can argue that males should pay more for their car insurance because they cause more expensive accidents and so it is statically justified.

But, you would be wrong. This is exactly what discrimination law is designed to deal with. After all, just because a small minority of males do drive like boy racers have have some pretty big accidents, doesn’t mean that one individual, such as myself, is any more of a high risk than a female driver – so why should I be punished?

It’s easier to see how wrong it is, when you look at other factors you could discriminate on. Lets use the classic example – you wouldn’t charge someone more for their car insurance because of the colour of their skin, even though we have the same as to what skin colour we are born with as we do over what gender we are born into – none.

You could argue that there won’t be a statistical difference between sin colour, but again this doesn’t hold up because you could look at an area where there is a statistical difference – crime for example.

Non-white minorities are more likely to be convicted of a crime. There are a number of reasons for this, most notably that these minorities tend to be in lower social brackets and lower social brackets produce more crime, so even though for those social brackets minorities have a similar conviction rate to majorities, overall they have a higher conviction rate – but the one thing I think we can all agree on, it isn’t because they are black.

But if you go purely on statistics for an entire group alone, as car insurance companies do, we should be more suspicious of black people in the UK and police should stop and search them more.

We don’t do this, because it would be utterly wrong.

We treat people like individuals and don’t hold them accountable for what people who share arbitrary characteristics with them such as skin colour, ethnic origin, sexual preference or (usually) gender. Because to do so would be wrong. Including if you’re selling car insurance.

While attending the Atheist Society talk this week, I picked up a copy of Leeds Student which had some interesting statistics.

43% of people pulled last week and 23% threw up. That’s to be expected.

However, I was quite shocked that 14% of people said they had had unprotected sex.

I mean, seriously? Lets assume that one third of people had sex in freshers’ week. That is quite a lot I believe, not just because that is generally a lot but because only 43% of people pulled, which would mean that most people who pulled, also went home with someone.

But if we assume that such a high figure is true, that means that half the sex had during freshers’ week was unprotected. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to pretend condoms are a great solution – they’re a massive hassle when you’re in the middle of it, and lets not pretend otherwise, but given the prevalence of STIs and most of these events being one night stands, surely people at one of the best universities at the country are smarter than that?

Yesterday the technology industry was saddened by the passing of Apple founder and chairman, Steve Jobs.

Steve was a visionary who literally changed the world for the better by bringing new and innovative technology to the public in a way which was always intuitive and more importantly, magical. Every time I pick up my iPad, I still feel like I’m living in Star Trek.

Tributes have poured in from politicians, to business leaders, to the many, any Apple fans across the world. In a touching note Bill Gates described working with him as “an insanely great honor.”

He’ll be missed by all of us in the field of technology.

The October issue of our newsletter, Engage is now available to download from our website. This quarter’s issue takes a look at the recent Sunrise Conference, our new Worfolk Lectures website, Atheist Stock and Leeds Transhumanists and has the usual round-up of news and events too.

At the September meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub, Arthur Chappell presented a talk entitled “Brainwashed! A Cult Survivor’s Tale” describing his experiences as part of the The Divine Light Mission, a cult centred around the worship of Guru Maharaj.

Last Friday, I headed out to Tiger Tiger for dinner with Si and Sarann. We were using Sarann’s Gourmet Society card to get ourselves some discount, but on turning up we found out they didn’t actually have our booking down and neither Si or Sarann had realised the restaurant was so integrated into the bar at Tiger Tiger, making it very noisy. So we left in search of somewhere we could hold a conversation.

Sarann was still determined to score some Gourmet Society discount, but the disadvantage is that you have to book in order to get it. No problem we thought, we can just book now. But we didn’t have a list of participating restaurants so we had to go online to find that.

No problem, Si had his iPad with him. Unfortunately, he had the wifi only version, so we needed to find a wifi hotspot. We couldn’t find one in the nearest area, but then he realised he could tether his iPad to his iPhone to get internet. So we sat on a bench on The Headrow googling for Gourmet Society approved restaurants on an iPad routing its internet through an iPhone in order to save ourselves a few pounds – nothing complicated there :D.

Eventually, we settled on Thai Edge, which consistently delivers good food and as luck would have it, they were fairly quiet so we got a table straight away.

The meal was enjoyable though when the time came to pay, the bill came to £43 and not having any change, we gave them £45. This disappeared and never came back with our change. Normally we wouldn’t have minded this, but given service was already included it seemed too much of a liberty for them to assume we didn’t want our £2 back. As it happens, we did, given the effort Sarann had gone to to save £2 using her Gourmet Society card lol.

As part of Atheist Society’s intro meeting activities, Will had organised a bowling trip. Well, organised is probably granting too much credit, but after a significant amount of faffing, we eventually hit the lanes.

I probably haven’t bowled since hitting up Xscape with the McCrew three years ago. As such I was very rusty and only bowled a 98 in my first game, allowing James to smash his way to victory.

I recovered a little in the second game, bowling a 124, but that’s still not exactly an impressive score and I failed to make any strikes in the second game. Still, for the £3 that the evening cost us each, you can’t really go wrong.

We’re pleased to announce the 2011 Worfolk Lecture.

Last year we announced the creation of a fund to support an annual public understanding of science lecture. The first of which took place in November with Dr Terrence Kee presenting a talk on “did life on Earth originate on Earth?” If you missed it, you can watch again in high definition on the Worfolk Lectures website.

This year’s talk will be presented by Professor David Jenkins on “From Rutherford to the Large Hadron Collider.” the event takes place on Tuesday 18 October, starting at 7pm. There will be a £2 on the door charge and all revenue will go to the host society – this year’s event will be hosted by Leeds Atheist Society and more information can be found on their website.

You can register online for the event here.

On Tuesday, Atheist Society held their 2011/2012 intro meeting. It was great to see a lot of new faces there and James is looking to take the society in an exciting direction, so I’m sure they’re in for a great year.

I accidentally squashed the photos in processing, but it doesn’t matter too much because they were rubbish photos anyway.