As part of appeasing my mum as is the tradition on Mothering Sunday I joined my family for a visit up to Hartlepool to visit my sister who is at university up there and had offered to host the day’s celebratings by cooking a meal. As predicted it was quite boring. But they do have a nice church.
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.
Sunday saw us forego our usual restaurant trip in favour of staying in and getting takeaway. Myself and Craig went for Chinese which I feel was a very solid choice. If nothing else it provided me with some salted pork and chicken to eat the next day which is always a winning combination!
I can now also highly recommend the mini spring rolls from Canton Flavour, not that I have ever really had something from there I wasn’t impressed with. It turned out being not much cheaper than our usual night out though definitely worth it.
Saturday was our long awaited awesome house party. Well, I say “awesome”, I wasn’t actually there because it had finished and everyone was asleep by the time I got there. What a rager.
Last Friday saw our GIAG event of the semester, an interfaith panel. There was a good turn out of religious speakers though notably lacking a Humanist one and so just before we got started I was asked to speak for the side of Humanism and so stepped in.
We got some really good questions in the end and ones which generally everyone could answer on. The Humanist view seemed fairly in line with the Pagan view (Pagans, much like Sikhs, are basically just Humanists) though the Islamic view isn’t quite as in line.
I tried to answer a lot of the questions with the best bits of Humanism – for example the large amounts of pre-martial sex and I caught the Islamic speaker (who ironically was sat right next to me) turn away in digust a few times. Still I’m sure I would have done the same if he was as frank about the Islamic teachings as he could have been.
