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.
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.
January 16th, 2011 |
Life
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.
January 16th, 2011 |
Life
One of the problems we were having over at CWF was that we had a lot of lecture footage on DV tape – but nothing to play the DV tapes on! So having spent months trying to find a solution – trying to find a friend who has a high def DV camera, seeing if those “transfer to DVD” companies would just transfer to a computer format, asking local rental companies if they had DV tape decks, I finally gave up and simply rented a camera to play them back on.
Once I tried this however I was informed by the rental company that the very basic camera I had ordered was unavailable, so would I be willing to upgrade to a better camera, for free. Normally this would be a no brainer but I actually wanted the cheaper camera – the more expensive, the more complicated it was going to be and the more there was to potentially break. Never the less I agreed and ended up with this amazing camera – that I was just using as a tape deck!
HCoL was always designed to be a pilot project that we could use to gauge the success of such ventures and as such we were keen to play around with the format and see what worked and what didn’t. As such, last month we moved the meetings to the evening and this month we played around with the format.
Instead of having the traditional group, but never the less front led, discussions, we arranged the room into a boardroom style arrangement and skipped the news, taking us straight into a discussion looking back on 2010 and forward to 2011. This gave everyone a chance to talk a bit about their previous year, as well as going over the major events and news from the Humanist perspective.
Feedback was on the whole positive though whether we will pursue this as a regular format we’ve not yet decided. Interesting to see it in action though.
Because you never know when the last time you will get to say “watch out for what bus?”, I thought I would make a declaration here and now. I don’t want you to respect my wishes after I die!
It is in fact my one wish that you don’t honour my wishes after I die, though feel free to violate that one too.
You see, I won’t care, because I’ll be dead.
It always seems strange to me that people want specific music to be played at their funeral. Why? You won’t be there. I really don’t care what you do at my funeral – it isn’t even for me – it’s for you. It’s to help you move on, I don’t care, once again, I’ll be dead.
So does as you will. Make love to my cold dead corpse if it would make you happy, I’m really not fussed. I would rather you do what makes you happy, than respect the wishes of someone who isn’t alive anymore. You have my permission to do whatever you like.
Not that I’m planning on dying anytime soon, indeed, hopefully the whole Transhumanism thing will kick in within my lifetime and we won’t have to deal with it ever. But until then, I would like to take a bit more of a rational approach to the whole situation. So you can count this as record.
The January issue of our newsletter, Engage, is now available for download. This issue covers the 2010 Worfolk Lecture, the new Perspective Leader’s Guide, the new Humanist Action Group website and it’s holiday food drive and the launch of Intimate Details. It also contains all the regular features and now comes in a more concise two-page format to make it easier to print. You can download it from our website.
