Chris Worfolk's Blog

The season is upon us again.

With the general workload being very high this year anyway it’s easy to forget how manic it gets when coursework deadlines start looming. And they have. I found out today that the first AI23 coursework was in fact due in this morning. And it’s formative. So yeah, dropped the ball a bit there. Luckily it’s an easy enough piece of work that I get it done today – after all, I have 19 hours from my lecture finishing till 9am tomorrow :D.

Meanwhile my IS coursework is quickly approaching, GI32 is due in at the end of next week and SY32 is due in the week after along with the software for my final year project. There will be a second piece of AI23 coursework due in some time as well as the final report for my FYP and in between that I have to fit in planning for Rationalist Week, putting on a rocky horror night, a school disco, my TKD grading, writing One Life sessions and a to do list which is still over a page long. You’ve gotta love it :P.

Guess who I’m on the phone to. It’s not hard. It’s the same people I am always on the phone to. UK Online. A somewhat ironic name it would seem. And opening itself up to derogatory word play but someone of any interlect.

Our connection isn’t just dropping, it’s just entirely going away and not coming back. Normally they do a tone test which magically starts it working again but even after that it died again tonight and support have nothing else to try.

After this happened yesterday advanced support refered me to their advanced support team (who don’t work this late) and who were supposed to re-adjust my line this morning. But didn’t. And are now scheduled to do it tomorrow when they arrive at work.

When someone first suggested we hire someone to manually ferry packets from the exchange and back I thought they were joking. Now I’m just wondering…

Seriously, it’s been a long, long time since I’ve had such a headache as this stupid Rocky Horror night. We just can’t get a venue anywhere. We now have 5,000 flyers, subTV adverts and posters telling people a no venue wrong date event and advising them they can buy tickets from CATS despite the fact the tickets haven’t even gone to print yet.

That’s right.

Free lunch no less.

Today’s IS lecture as a workshop hosted by Deloitte. Which included free lunch as well as ex-School of Computing student now Doloitte consultant Dan T. It actually turned out to be really interesting and a rather successful afternoon. Deloitte looks like a great place to work (despite my initial skepticism about consulting companies) and over a free drink on Deloitte in The Fav Dan said he could put me in touch with the right people to speak to about getting some sponsorship for Rationalist Week. Good stuff.

It smooths over the disaster that is Rocky Horror. Having sent the flyers to print yesterday afternoon I found out this morning that our venue has fallen through. So I’m currently desperately trying to find another venue for it. Argh!

:(.

I’ve spent the second half of this week in bed ill. Which was mighty inconvient given I have loads to do (still, went don’t we these days?). It also unfortunately resulted in me having to cancel my presentation at Skeptics Anonymous and my Valentine’s Day date with Chris from the CU. Still thanks to mt housemates, plenty of sleep and an endless string of DVDs I’m now back on my feet, at least provisionally.

A few people recently raised the question “why is A-Soc celebrating Darwin Day? It is just an excuse to have a go at religion?”

Of course, it isn’t. But it could seem to many people that were are advocating the link between Darwinism and atheism which Dawkins seems to suggest.

This I believe is probably a misconception. Dawkins does talk a lot about evolution and atheism for two reasons. Firstly, learning about evolution was the thing that pushed Dawkins into atheism. It was the turning point that he renounced his Anglican upbringing and joined the ranks of the infidels. Secondly he believes that Darwinism allows you construct a coherent world view without a god (which was difficult to do before evolution). This does not mean however that he advocated an inherant link between the two.

But I’m getting off the point. The reason we celebrate Darwin Day is not because of any inherent link between Darwinism and atheism (for which I believe there is none, as I demonstraited in my speech evolution – it’s a fact showing how evolution could be reconciled with modern theology so it seems silly for us to argue over it).

The real reason is that Darwin represents somewhat of an ideal, at least in legend if not in reality, of an open minded free thinker. Despite the fact his work and research was leading him away from his beliefs he remained true to the principles of science and reason and kept his mind open to new possibilities. That, is what being a free thinker is all about.

Play.com has begun selling DRM-free MP3 music downloads! This has to be a big step forward to widespread availabilty of DRM-free downloads which is looking like the only way copyright owners are ever going to prevent (or at least reduce) illegal downloading on their work.

Tracks are available for £0.65 which is competitive to say the least and they claim to have a library of millions of tracks. While there is a lot of stuff in there I haven’t heard of, that may just be because I’m getting old – just looking down the list of top sellers I notice Arctic Moneys, Queen, Phil Collins, Stereophonics and plenty of others so there are plenty of big labels on board with this.

Before I throw the 25 January edition of Leeds Student away, which I have been keeping around for this quote, I should mention the article entitled “wash your hands od extremism” which appears on page 4. The article notes…

The University of Leeds has recently spent £50,000 on the Islamic Centre, more commonly known as the Green Room, a place where Muslims can go to pray, and which has washing facilities.

As Gijsbert has previously pointed out, given the student body is mostly composed of atheists (or at least non-theists) where is the atheist centre?

Yesterday was Darwin Day, the celebration of the anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory (or if you will, inventor of evolution :D). Sarann and Michelle having spent all weekend baking cakes (and a big thanks to them for doing so!) we spent the day outside the union talking to people about Darwin, handing out leaflets and selling our homemade wares.

The talks at lunch time and in the evening were reasonably well attended (by that I mean, some people actually came) and we have Norm’s speech on video which is now awaiting processing for the website. We got quite a few new people interested in the society too which was good.

Watching season 18 of The Simpsons it is rewinding me why I love the show so much. It’s still fresh and original, it’s still laugh out load funny, indeed while I love the old episodes I could see how the kids could easily make a case that it is now better than ever. Well worth a watch.