Chris Worfolk's Blog

Last month at Humanist Community, Gijsbert presented a news story about the number 13 tram in one city which had an exceptionally high accident rate and had therefore been withdrawn from service because with it being the number 13, it was clearly cursed.

While most of my blog’s readership will already have explained to themselves why this is nonsense, I though I would attempt to to clarify the situation for anyone who might actually take such an example as evidence that the number 13 is genuinely unlucky.

Lets start with the probably. I’m going to guess that there are somewhere in the region of 100 cities with tram networks in them. This may or may not be accurate though there is technically no reason why you should limit it to trams, you could also include buses for example and create a much larger sample which works even better for example.

Now lets say that on average there are 20 routes on each network. This could be off again but I’m basing this on the idea that there are probably less tram routes than there are bus routes and this a little on the low side for Leeds bus routes but then we’re not a huge city on a world scale.

With every network, statistically one of those routes must be the most accident prone. With 20 routes, one of them being 13 (maybe some places avoid having a route 13 – but again, Leeds doesn’t, so I’m going to go with that), that means there is a 1/20 chance of the most accident prone route being route 13. That is 5%. 5% of the 100 tram networks in the world means that statistically, you would expect the route 13 to be the most accident prone in 5 different cities in the world, just by chance. Equally in the same amount of cities, the number 7 or the number 3, or any number, will be the most accident prone route.

Add to that the fact that some people are superstitious and even though most of us know that 13 genuinely isn’t unlucky, you may occasionally get say a tram driver that is superstitious and becomes nervous when driving route 13 because he believes it is “cursed.” Thanks to the nocebo effect (the opposite of the placebo effect) the route then becomes a self fulfilling prophesy.

But even if we discount that and say that all such superstitious tram drivers simply refuse to drive the route 13 tram, we are still left with five places in the world which the route 13 tram is the most accident prone simply by chance – of which of course there will be different levels of accidents, most non-exceptional, some will be quite highly though, that’s just how random probably is.

So, we now have a really unlucky tram. It’s one of the five places where route 13 is the most accident prone simply by chance, and it’s the worst one of those. A journalist notices this, presumably working at The Sun, and decides to write a story on it.

But of course, no one thinks to write a story on the city which has the tram network where the route 7tram is the most accident prone simply by chance and happens to the the worst of the five cities in which this is the case – it only makes the news because someone comes along and makes the non-existent connection between this being the city which is one of the five cities in which the route 13 tram has the highest accident rate and this one happens to be the worst and the superstitious belief that the number 13 is unlucky.

When in fact what would be weird is if out of all the tram networks in the world, there wasn’t a single one where the route 13 tram wasn’t in at least one instance the most accident prone route on that tram network.

Oli was in Leeds for a one night special last night so we headed out to the pub, or a few.

I decided it would be good to do some cocktails in the evening so by the time it came to head out to the pub, I was already really drunk. We started at The Library and went through The Dry Dock and Stick or Twist before heading to Fab Cafe. Finally we finished the night at Grosvenor where, despite my inebriated state, still managed to come up even on blackjack before stumbling home.

It’s good to know that even though I’m almost half way through my life, I can still party until the early hours.

On Thursday we headed over to see Stewart Lee in Harrogate.

The show was opened by Simon Munnery who I have heard twice before – he opened for Stewart Lee last time I went to see him and spoke at the Enquiry conference as well. He was good as ever but doing the almost exact same set as twice before I kind of new which jokes were coming.

Stewart’s set was good, there were some classic moments, but he was trying out new material and so it really didn’t build like his previous show did and while there were some very funny parts, I really felt it didn’t match up to the standard set in York.

It did seem quite a networking event though – I ran into Mike from work who had managed to get a ticket at the last minute, David who I used to work with and Professor Ian Cram who is coming to speak to Atheist Society on Tuesday.

In March of this year we launched Atheist Stock, a stock photography website explicitly designed for local free-thinking groups to use.

Now, just seven months later, we’ve pleased to announce that the thousandth image has been added to the site. Indeed with the plethora of images, we accrued during September mean we have shot straight through that landmark and are now looking forward to future ones!

Last Tuesday we decided to hold a bit of an ice breaker at Atheist Society with a Make Your Own God event. The turn out ended up being great and everyone got stuck in sticking, cutting and building. All the photos are available here.

With the new academic year having started, Leeds Atheist Society began it’s full programme of events last week with intro meeting followed by karaoke.

It turned out to be quite a long and drunken night. Songs were sung, heads were rocked and intellectual discussions interspersed with Catholic related child molestation jokes continued long into the night.

Yesterday we headed over to York Rock Church to see their main weekly service, held on a Saturday evening, called Communicating Life.

I first noticed The Rock when I was down giving a talk at North Yorkshire Humanist Group and decided to google it when I got back. The website I found was fascinating – it looked like it was basically an entire church service delivered in the form of rock music (and with some very catchy songs too!).

So we arrived just on time for the main service, which even had a countdown to let you know how was left until the rock began! I would describe the atmosphere as reasonably friendly, someone took us through to the main hall and once we had sat down two other people came over and introduced themselves in the ten minutes or so we were waiting.

The service itself started with about eleven people on stage, most of which were singing in a line at the front which really reminded me of the American evangelical mega-churches. It didn’t feel quite as big as it did on the videos – the place could have held maybe 300 people of which there were about 100 there which is a lot of people but I guess I was expecting it to be more like what Abundant Life looks like from the photos.

Afterward we were taken to the cafe, named Pillars, complete with free wifi internet and branded coffee cups. Here we got chatting to Beth who works on the youth outreach projects for the church. She even invited us back to their house party which apparently follows on from most of the weekly services.

All in all well worth the trip, they have a great community feel and excellent biscuits.

For so long we talked about Pub Week. The critics said we couldn’t do it. They told us we were crazy; that it was impossible. But thanks to the vision and dreams of two Dynamic Young Go-Getters, we made the dream a reality.

Pub Lunch Friday was struggling a bit when myself and Jason arrived at Buzz, but a bit of elbow grease and we had it firmly up and running again. Soon we introduced Box Mondays as well, given the food at The Box is excellent and with it being half priced on Mondays means it’s actually reasonably priced too. So all it took was a sly trip to the pub on a certain Wednesday when we realised we could probably just eliminate non-pub lunches altogether.

After an enjoyable start with Box Mondays, we decided to return to the pub the next day of Taps Tuesdays. On Wednesday where else would we go but West End House for West End House Wednesdays (in a West End House in a dead end world – Kirkstall, east end boys…) and finished off the week with Arcadia Thursdays (who had run out of pretty much everything on their menu – poor show) and Pub Lunch Fridays at The Skyrack as usual.

Good times.

I would also like to thank my fellow Buzz social committee chair Jason for making it a reality.

The October issue of Engage, the foundation’s newsletter is now available for download. This issue covers the recent Sunrise Conference, Secular Portal Resource Library, Humanist Chaplaincy Network and much more. You can download it from our website.

Because the Islamic Society at Leeds University Union generally refuse to talk to us, we were left wondering how we could get an Islamic debate for this year’s Reason Week 2010 held in April.

In the end the solution we went with was to contact Ahlul Bayt, which is a different sect of Islam – they are basically to Islamic Society what the Catholic Society is to the Christian Union. They’re treasurer had spoken at an interfaith panel discussion we had held before so we were on fairly good terms with them.

The debate itself took place to a packed out tent, as people crowded in to hear Norman Ralph speak for our side on the subject of whether Islam provides everything you need to live a good life.

The debate itself went very well so we thought. With a formal debate there is always a little toing and throwing – or as you would normally call it, debate, but everything seemed to remain friendly.

We had also gone out of our way to accommodate the members of their society, providing a specifically vegetarian dinner with no meat option at all so that we could avoid any issues surrounding non-Halal meat.

One rather amusing incident was when the present of AbSoc, who was sitting in the audience, raised her hand to make a point and explained that she wore the headscarf because it empowered her to hide her looks. Norman countered by pointing out that with or without her headscarf, she was clearly a rather attractive woman.

The debate continued and afterwards several of their society members hung around to continued the debate is a less formal environment until eventually everyone dissipated and we thought job well done.

However a week later we received an email from Ab Soc saying that our attitude had ruined the debate. They accused us of not being impartial, of them not being given chance to respond to points and it generally being an attack on Islam.

They also said it was highly inappropriate for people to have been drinking in the tent and that there were people in the corner shouting and jeering which isn’t “the sort of behaviour that we expect at a formal debate.”

Further more, when they’re speaker spoke about the constitution of Islam, an audience member apparently replied “that’s shit” and Ab Soc went on to demand that there was “action taken against this person” as it was “at least offensive and at greatest illegal!”

To address these points…

The debate was chaired by a representative of Debate Society. I personally felt they were impartial, but even if you didn’t, I don’t see how you can throw a criticism at Atheist Society for that.

The people shouting and jeering in the corner of the tent where not members of the Atheist Society. But even if they were – that actually is the kind o attitude you expect at a debate. It isn’t a real debate unless there is at least some fist banging and shouts of “here, here!”

These were the same people who were drinking. We have a no alcohol policy in the tent, but we don’t control these people and drinking is part of the real world – they wouldn’t tolerate alcohol in a mosque nor would we take alcohol in out of respect, and yet when they come to our venue they do not respect our free choice to consume alcohol.

Finally, it certainly isn’t illegal to criticise an idea. I’m not exactly sure what is referred to by the “constitution of Islam” but I’m fairly sure it is a pile of shit and I have every right to voice that opinion under British law.

Obviously the first reaction of the committee was a very offended one but we soon calmed down and suggested we just ignore it. Our president at the time Sophie, felt that it needed a response though and decided that rather than cause an argument she would send an apology.

We presumed this would be the end of it but apparently not – we received another angry email back from Ab Soc, in response to our apology, saying that Norman had repeatedly attacked Islamic and this should have been totally off the cards is a debate about Islam.

Meanwhile, when Sophie had pointed out that they had laid into homosexuals during the debate this was only apparently because someone had asked about it and the question was answered “representing Islam” which as you will probably know, is intolerant of homosexuality.

They then want on to state that saying “that’s shit” was a violation of the Public Order Act because several members of the audience felt “distressed” by the comment. They went on to say that they would never make such a comment (presumably about the atheist constitution if there was such a thing) and put this down to their respect for diversity – even though they’ve already said that they don’t tolerate the gays.

At this point we made a decision as a committee that Ab Soc were just looking for an argument and the best thing to do would be to simply turn the other cheek and ignore the email so as to not aggravate the situation any further. Again, we presumed this would be the end of it.

However a week later we received another email from Ab Soc demanding an answer to their previous email.

So eventually Sophie emailed him back saying she hadn’t responded because she didn’t want to cause more of an argument, but while we’re on the subject we didn’t appreciate being compared to football hooligans, that she didn’t appreciate the threatening emails he had been sending her and that if they wanted to go the police and ask for a criminal investigation, we would welcome it.

Personally I would have added that if we were to be held accountable for the behaviour of people who weren’t members of our society but were never the less self describing as atheists, whether Ab Soc would be answering for those individuals self describing as Muslims who carried out 7-7 and 9-11. But Sophie is more diplomatic than I am.

Ab Soc shortly emailed back saying they would discuss their next move in their next committee meeting but encouraged us to take their emails to the police if we wanted, showing how meaningless their initial threats against Sophie had been.

Sophie still wanted to repair relationships however and so set up a meeting with Kay, our development coordinator for faith and cultural societies at the union. The meeting with Kay went well – Sophie presented her case and Kay agreed that the emails were threatening and offered to set up a meeting with Ab Soc so we could talk it out.

Unfortunately, on the day the meeting was schedule to take place, Kay was off sick. It was rescheduled to a week later but again, when the say came Kay was off sick again so once again the meeting didn’t take place. So by this point we decided to give up and wait to see if anyone else forced the issue. And that was the end of our exciting adventure with Ab Soc.