Posts Tagged ‘Leeds Skeptics’

Saturday saw the September meetup of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub which this month saw a talk delivered by yours truely on Derren Brown’s recent “How to win the lottery.” It was a fairly short talk to be honest, “basically, the guy is just psychic” pretty much concluded everything I had to say in one sentence.

From here on we explored the various tricks and trimmings presented to us by Derren who may not actually be able to predict the lottery but certainly puts on a good show.

Saturday saw Skeptics in the Pub roll round again with this month’s talk being delivered by Rich on evolution and homosexuality – the talk which he gave on the Thursday of Rationalist Week 2009. As always the talk was excellent and turn out was quite reasonable given it was summer. Good times.

Yesterday saw the July meeting of Skeptics in the Pub with a talk by myself entitled “Swine flu – will anyone survive?”

The basic conclusion of the talk was no, unfortunately not. We are all almost certainly going to die. The good news though is that most of us probably won’t die from swine flu, which is a bit more of a positive outlook.

After a bit of a shakey start were Carpe had forgotten to reserve us the room we got going with quite a few new faces which was good to see.

Yesterday at Skeptics in the Pub, Gijsbert delivered a talk regarding whether Dawkins and Darwin could truely replace the holy Bible – and the conclusion was no.

The theme of it was that as well as the “religious” stuff shall we say, religion also does a great job of catering for people’s emotional needs such as self esteem and gaining respect from your peers. Therefore is the non-beliver movement is going to grow as I’m sure many of us hope it will, we are going to have to have to find some what that people’s basic emotional needs can be catered for rather than just rubbishing their belief system.

The April meeting of Leeds Skeptics saw Dr Antony Lempert from the Secular Medical Forum deliver a talk on what they do and the issues surrounding religion and medicine. It was really interesting to get into some of the details of the issues they are concerned with and indeed we all need to be concerned with including long talks about both female and male circumcision – not for the squeamish!

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.

Yesterday saw the February meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub. The talk was by Dr. Richard Parker re-working his The Unwoven Rainbow talk into more of a group discussion, introducing several topics and basically seeing where it went from there. It worked suprisingly well.

More importantly this month, Carpe were still serving food by the time I had got things sorted so I could also enjoy a Hunters Chicken (though I couldn’t decide if it should actually be called Hunter’s Chicken). Beer, chicken and good company, what more can a man ask for?

Saturday saw the first Leeds Skeptics in the Pub which went rather well at least for an initial meeting. We got around twenty people turning up in total with a mix of ages and backgrounds which is exactly what we were aiming for really.

I kept my actual talk fairly short as I wasn’t too sure what people were expecting for a first meeting, in future they will be a bit more well-rounded talks but for the moment I was more interested in people getting to know each other and having a good drink and a chat.

Hopefully we can build on the success of Saturday and build attenance even more in the future. We’ve booked up speakers as far as May so there is plenty going on.