Our traditional final round of planning meetings for Rationalist Week which take place over the Easter holidays kicked off last Tuesday. We managed to keep the meeting under two and a half hours which isn’t bad going for this time of year.
Zoltan’s train had been delayed but he finally arrived back from his jailbreak and joined us in The Terrace around 10:45 for a well earned drink. He managed 150 miles in the end though by road that is actually 260 miles travelled which is pretty damn impressive.
This morning (well probably yesterday morning now) at the ungodly time of 6:15am myself and Sophie turned up to see Zoltan off on his way for his jailbreak to raise money for Rationalist Week. Armed with only £10 and his wits he had to get as far away from Leeds as possible, the more miles he got, the more money he earns.
Afterwards I headed over to Kirstall to get some breakfast and found myself outside of work by 6:45. Knowing Gaz wouldn’t be there until 8:20ish to open up I decided to stretch out along the back seat and grab some much needed kip. I can confirm that the back seat of a 2001 Astra LS is rather comfortable 😉 .
Having arrived home on Sunday I headed straight back out the door again to meet everyone at Colton Mill for a few drinks. Our Sunday night activities seem to be getting later and later, it is something that we really should work on even if I do really need the time to get more work done.
Today saw the March edition of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub. Norm had decided to pull out last week so Daryl bravely stepped up at the last minute to present his talk. There were quite a few new faces down there which was good to see, hopefully the word is starting to spread.
Daryl’s talk was amazing, it was about the power of exponentials and the technological singularity which obviously was of great interest to me as a computer scientist. It was interesting because we also carried out usual hat of skeptism but nobody could really pick any major wholes in the latest thoughts outlined by Ray Kurzweil in his book “the singularity is near.”
In the book he outlines that the technological singularity is both achievable and near given that technological growth is exponential. It really is a facinating area and one that I will be keeping a much closer eye on in future.
Norm having asked the BHA to provide a speaker for the Humanism session of Perspective he seen got an email from the BHA asking him if we would be able to speak at an A-Soc event at the university. He stepped up to the plate and agreed, so there was our Humanist speaker sorted.
While it was of course BHA brand Humanism it was never the less an interesting session and we got to test the catering urn so given how bad attendance could have been given it was the last day of term, I was quite impressed with how it went.
On Thursday myself and Rich headed out once again, this time joined by Nicola, to do our bit. We were going to do a bit of cooking beforehand but Rich was unfortunately detained at work and so we ended up doing soup again, not that it is overly a bad choice.
There seems to be a fair bit of interest in the group now which hopefully will continue to grow and we can expand our activities.
Wednesday saw me head over to York for the Brights meetup over there. Nick kindly lent me his GPS which resulted in it being rather easier to get there but when I took the suggestion to follow it’s directions on foot things went a little worse. After some serious walking and a quick phone call I eventually found my way to Stonegate though and met everyone else.
The conversations made for some very interesting discussions, while there is usually this in most of the events I go to, the night’s discussions were especially interesting. As ever it also provided me with a good excuse to do some name dropping which is always fun.
Tuesday we were scheduled to watch Morgan Spurlock’s Where on Earth is Osama Bin Laden but Norm hadn’t ordered the DVD on time so we had to switch to plan B. Luckily I had a feeling it was all going to go wrong and so had copied over Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days onto my laptop as a backup.
It ended up going down really well and we got some good discussion afterwards including plenty of discussion in meeting room 3 as we wanted to avoid the carnage of St. Patrick’s Day going on in the bars below.
In the end we ended up sitting outside on The Terrace which altough a little on the chilly side provided a good arena for group conversation in that for once we could actually here each other. And I managed to solve my current Rationalist Week scheduling issue so it worked out well all round.
On Monday we headed up to Durham for the Humanist Society’s Reason Week. We were a bit lacking in numbers with only myself and Sophie going up in the end but it was a great chance to have a good chat with Sophie, especially given I don’t currently have a working stereo after last week.
Ellis delivered an excellent talk over lunch and it was reasonably well attended – around 20 people showed up for it which is better than we normally do on the first day of Rationalist Week. The evening screen attracted only half that but was never the less a good event, who can say no to Life of Brian?
Ellis also delivered me a tour of Durham which is a beautiful city and includes lots of cool bars too so it made for a very interesting day. I was very impressed with however together they are in Durham and I’m sure they will have a very successful future.
