Posts Tagged ‘Leeds Skeptics’

This month at Leeds Skeptics, Dr Jim Wild made the trip over to talk about weathering solar storms – how coronial mass ejection from The Sun has a significant impact on The Earth and given it has the power to knock out our electricity grid, is something we need to be taking seriously.

It was one of the best talks we have had a in recent times with great feedback coming from those who attended. Big thanks to Jim for making the trip over, you can find out more about him on his website.

Last Tuesday, I headed down to Nottingham to present a talk to Nottingham Skeptics in the Pub.

Nottingham seems to be a lot like Leeds – a reasonable sized city with a confusing one-way system running through the middle and a few gems hidden away inside it, such as our venue, Fellows Morton and Clayton, a traditional Victorian pub, with a traditional Victorian fruit machine by the door.

I got down there in plenty of time to grab some food beforehand (and because you never know with the M1) and found the place easily enough. The food was OK, the grilled chicken was excellent though the ribs were somewhat disappointing. However, given the last time I had ribs was at Cattle Grid, my standards are probably simply still tuned too high.

I also met Andy, who runs the group and is an absolutely lovely guy. He also works with computers so we managed to squeeze in a few minutes of geek talk before the event!

The talk itself went pretty well, at least from my perspective lol, and I hope the audience enjoyed it too. I think the questions and discussions afterwards lasted until nearly 10pm, which from a 7:30pm start is quite a lot of discussion.

In general, I think the talk was well received by the audience. They certainly weren’t as critical as when I spoke to Hull Humanists – not that I didn’t very much enjoy the tough questions I took there!

In general, a really enjoyable evening and a big thanks to Andy for inviting me down.

A week later than normal, we welcomed Anthony Green to Leeds Skeptics. Anthony is loosely affiliated to We Are Change, though with it being a group which doesn’t have strict hierarchy or leadership structure, it’s probably a misconception to say he was speaking on behalf of them.

Anthony presented a talk entitled “An Introduction To Psychological Operations and False Flag Attacks” discussing the armed forces use of propaganda. It was an interesting talk although as one member pointed out – none of us actually disagree that this kind of stuff goes on – we’re just not sure it’s that much of a problem.

There was some strong willed debate though it all kept very civil, both sides were quick to apologise when they thought they had offended the other, and ultimately we all agreed that the important thing was that we all worked for a better, more open society. A great meeting in my books.

Last week, we welcomed Dan Dewsnap to Skeptics in the Pub, to talk about the Zeitgeist Movement.

This was a movement launched off the bank of a film called Zeitgeist Addendum which claims that the major world problems are inherent to the capitalist money based system which our society currently runs on. It then goes on to propose a solution to these problems by putting forward the idea of a resource based economy. This is one without money or ownership, where people are provided with access instead and everything would be in abundance.

While the movement seems to suffer from many of the problems of utopian visions do (how do you motivate people to work, what do you do about things we can’t reduce scarcity, how do you stop people ceasing power, how do you coordinate everything), it was certainly interesting to hear about a movement which was expelling the virtues of technology and science and it was great to have a strong debate going at the meeting with people speaking for both sides.

Last Saturday saw the April meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub. There was no speaker this month but never the less it was a very involved meeting with an hour of news and discussion kicking things off.

Indeed, it was almost a feature length meeting given the in depth discussion we had about the future energy needs of the world and whether nuclear was a safe option or not.

Interestingly, one of the points brought up was that one of the most dangerous ways in which power can be generated is actually hydroelectricity. While it’s a very green way of generating power, a dam failure can lead to 100,000’s of people dying¹.

For the March meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub we welcomed Pauline Neale, who is a speaker for Oxfam, to talk about climate change. The talk was enjoyable though I think I should be made it clearer to Pauline before the event that we all accept climate change as I think she was initially expecting a far less friendly reception!

Thanks to Rob for the photos.

On Saturday, Mark Edon delivered a talk to Leeds Skeptics on the subject of Creationism. Mark is on the committee for the British Centre for Science Education which is a religiously-neutral organisation which aims to combat creationism and you can tell they do great work because the creationists have even built an “exposed” website about them 😀 .

If you are interested in learning more about the BCSE, you can find their website here and even join for free too.

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 Saturday, Leeds Skeptics in the Pub hosted Jeremy Taylor, author of “Not a Chimp: The Hunt to find the Genes that Make Us Human” as well as a popular science television producer for many years.

Jeremy delivered a fascinating talk arguing that actually there was a good case for claiming humans really are special. He made the points that chimps are not as clever as we often think they are – tool usage for example is something that can also be observed in crows so it not on it’s own a sign of higher intelligence and went on to say that crows demonstrate signs of problem solving and abstraction that chimps to do.

He suggested that many people, Richard Dawkins being a good example, may be worried that if we don’t push the view that humans and chimps are almost identical and very close together in the spectrum it could open the door for the religious – something which none of us want but to avoid it at the expense of the truth is surely unacceptable.

Finally he put forward the case that it makes no sense to grant chimps human rights because they are incapable of understanding it or nor does it have any real meaning – even if you sign them onto the declaration of human rights that doesn’t mean anything because you still have to protect them. Much like we don’t grant a child rights until it has reached maturity and can understand those rights, it makes far more sense to take the view that we must decide to protect them because they are unable to assert any rights we could award them.

It was a fascinating talk and one that I really enjoyed. I think the real gem of this month’s topic was that many people at the meeting probably didn’t subscribe to Jeremy’s side of the argument, at least beforehand. It is easy for us to preach to the converted on clearly nonsense topics such as homeopathy but I think there is far more to be gained from talks such as this which really challenge our thinking.

Last Saturday I presented a talk to Leeds Skeptics on the subject of “Beating the Bookies: Can you make money from gambling?”

The talk looked at various ways it might be possible to get an edge over the bookmakers or casinos though unfortunately with a conclusion that it was fairly unlikely that you would be able to achieve this.

Never the less there were some interesting discussions after the event with people who had made a somewhat profitable attempt at it and come out with quite a lot to show for it over the years. What it comes down to though is that it is possible, but you really have to grind it out – and that’s just like having a job, so isn’t really a get rich quick scheme.