Chris Worfolk's Blog

On Tuesday, James delivered the first Leeds Atheist Society talk of 2011, on alternative medicine.

Last Sunday I spent five and a half hours in meetings. I think that has to be somewhere near a new record for a Sunday.

The day started with a Reason Week planning brunch, which was productive, though didn’t actually include any food which was disappointing. Things are starting to fall into place for the week, which is promising given how close we are to it lol.

The second meeting was a Foundation trustee meeting which produced some interesting results – more on that will be announced soon, I’m sure.

Earlier this evening Jonni dragged us out to Eccup so we could have dinner at a pub named the New Inn which he had been raving about for a while.

It was a bit of a mission to find. Having headed up Scott Hall Road I ended up on some windy country lane which was only one car wide and had trees overgrowing, entirely blocking out the sky making it feel like the Forest of Fangorn. Having got through that we eventually found what I can only describe as being similar to Westfall at night with no lights and just the occasional rustic farm signpost.

Never the less we eventually found the place and ordered ourselves up a couple of 16oz t-bone steaks. The photo really doesn’t do them justice, we spend a good 30 minutes going at them and what was left at that point still looked like an entire meal. Ignore the massive onion rings, compare the size of the plate to Kat’s meal behind. Needless to say, I was eventually defeated (which to be honest, I’m quite proud as, as I actually managed to tell myself to stop eating because I was full lol).

On Monday, we headed down to Sheffield Skeptics to see a talk by Richard Wiseman. Despite struggling to see the screen, which is a little annoying in a talk mostly about optical illusions lol, it was a really enjoyable evening and managing to get a quick chat with Richard I can see it was well worth going down for.

On Tuesday, Atheist Society began it’s regular Tuesday night meetings (See You Next Tuesday 😉 ) with a screening of the Chris Morris film, Four Lions. It’s an awesome film and well worth a watch. Though it did take us ages to get the film working despite bringing it on four different formats! So you can’t say we didn’t have a backup plan lol.

On Wednesday, I headed up to York for a York Brights meeting. It has been a while since I last saw them and could be a while again with Perspective Citywide starting so it was good to see everyone, and interesting conversation was provided aplenty as always.

Finally, on Thursday I was at a Humanist Society of West Yorkshire committee meeting which was great because the meeting was both efficient and productive – which tends to make a change from most committee meetings I’m in lol.

Next month, we’re launching Perspective Citywide, here in Leeds.

Perspective has been running on campus at the University of Leeds for several years now, starting it’s third run at the end of this month. It’s proved exceedingly popular and led us to us publishing the Perspective Leader’s Guide last year.

However, with it being based on campus it was somewhat limited in the audience we could get and so we really wanted to take it off campus so that everyone could access it.

As a result, we’re launching Perspective Citywide which will be taking place each Wednesday, starting 2 February. Running for 8 weeks, each session will see a different religious speaker joining us to talk about their faith and then open the floor up to a “no question off limits” Q and A with the audience. So if you have a burning question you want to ask, don’t miss out!

You can find out more information on Citywide on the Perspective Course website.

Last night was the first Wendy House of 2011. The turn out was reasonable, we had about ten of us and it being reasonably quiet, we soon settled into a corner of the dance floor and danced the night away through to the end. For a chance, neither myself nor James had dressed up – Jonni was devastated 😉 .

At last Saturday’s meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub we discussed the idea of “designed for the dump” as presented by Annie Leonard and her band as part of The Story of Electronics.

The premise is that manufacturers design for the dump – they build products which are designed to be thrown away after a year so that we have to buy new products and therefore generate more money for the corporations.

There could well be a lot of truth behind this, but as Tim Minchin’s The Fence says, “it’s not quite as simple as that.”

Products don’t just have an 18-month life cycle. If you’re anything like me you won’t have binned those old phones, you’ll have passed them down to friends or colleagues who just wanted an old phone because they’re not bothered about having the latest gadget. I can personally testify that the CWF office is fully kitted out with hand me down electronics.

The idea of the evil corporations is always a contentious one too. Corporations are by their very nature amoral – neither moral nor immoral, because they’re not living creatures and don’t think for themselves.

It’s somewhat naive to think that electronics used to be modular and replaceable and aren’t anymore. Desktop computers are a great example of this – you still upgrade and swap in and out components, and indeed can do with laptops too (less adding stuff, but certainly replacing specific broken components). But the fact is that back in the day computers had valves in that you would just swap out, these days the transistors on your computer’s CPU are too small for the human eye to see.

Luckily though we are already moving towards greener electronics. Compared to a decade ago there are all kinds of greener ways of doing things – all your components go to sleep when they’re inactive for example, cutting power consumption and therefore saving energy. In part, some of this innovation has been driven by designed for the dump – when you replace your electronics every 18 months, it means the companies have to come up with something smaller, lighter, more powerful and more green in a year and a half.

On Friday, we headed over to Thai Edge for Sarah’s leaving do.

Due to last minute technical difficulties at work we ended up being late to sit down to eat which had the unfortunate consequence that by the time the mains were ready, Warren had to jump on a train back to Scarborough – so we had to ask for them to do his as take out!

The meal at Thai Edge was alright. The food was very nice but I have heard amazing things about Thai Edge and to be honest, it didn’t live up to it’s representation; it was a similar standard to what you would expect from a city centre restaurant, not that, that in itself is a bad thing, but it was nothing special either.

Afterward we had a few drinks in Cuthbert Brodrick (minus Simundo and Imran, or “the boring twins” if you will, who headed home despite both their other halves not being around) before Sarah tried to spoil everyone’s fun by dragging Jason home. Never the less we persevered on, heading to Neon Cactus for a few before heading home.

It’s been very busy at work over the past few months as we prepare to expand by launching our own website. This finally happened last week and we’re now live, albeit in beta with our product ZonePlay which is a new kind of sports betting in which you can bet on what will happen next.

If you’re interested in checking it out, we’ll be trading every football game you’ll find on British television so next time you’re watching the match, just head over to the website, click the game and hit “play for fun” to get started.

As part of work’s expansion, I’m pleased to say that I’ll be taking on additional responsibility working on the project management side – so when things go horribly wrong in the future it genuinely might be my fault :S .

On Thursday, the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire hosted a talk by Nicola Swan, one of the directors of Dignity in Dying.

The talk was interesting though I was quite surprised at the attitude the organisation had no chosen to adopt. They now only advocate what is called “assisted dying.” This means that they no longer support similar issues such as assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia, leading to a very strict definition of what they will actually support.

I found this very disappointing as it results in an organisation which is only working towards legislating the situation where you are terminally ill and administer the solution yourself – they wouldn’t support someone who wasn’t terminally ill but in so much main they wanted to die for example, nor would they support any case where the doctor had to administer the solution.

As a result, in all honestly I came out of the talk with less support for the organisation than I went in with. Yes, their work is important but I think there is a much wider outlook needed – we should be able to take control of our own lives and do with our bodies as we wish – not slightly speed up our exit once it has already been determined.