Posts Tagged ‘talks’

Today, we’re proud to launch our latest project, Worfolk Lectures! The site is an online archive of academic lectures on a variety of ever expanding topics, all available to download or stream in full high definition.

Over the past twelve months we have been rapidly recording and editing together lectures from a variety of talks, conferences and events and after a long and hard slog, we’re finally able to bring this content to the world.

As well as issues with transferring and editing the content together, the final piece fell together in June when Dailymotion offered us a partnership agreement to allow us to host the content, in full HD.

There are already ten lectures available on the site and we will be releasing a new video every Friday in something we’re hoping to coin the Friday lecture. No prizes for guessing how we managed to come up with that name!

Speakers will include Professor A. C. Grayling, Processor Chris French, Dr Gijsbert Stoet, Dr Antony Lempert, Dr Terrence Kee and many others. You can follow us on Twitter to keep up with all the latest updates.

We’re pleased to announce that online video site Dailymotion has accepted us into their content partner programme!

Over the past twelve months, we have been building up an archive of the academic lectures and events that we and our follow groups have been staging and we will now be able to bring this collection to the world – all in full 1080 HD.

Look out for more exciting news on this topic in the upcoming weeks and months, but for now you can browse our newly opened Dailymotion channel. The first lecture we have posted is Dr Terrence Kee delivering the 2010 Worfolk Lecture on “did life on Earth originate on Earth?” and we are adding new talks on a regular basis.

It could almost be Transhumanist Week between my talk the day before and Michael and John’s talk on Transhumanism and The Singularity at Atheist Society on Tuesday.

I recently headed over to Hull to present a talk to Hull & East Riding Humanists.

The journey was reasonable, I was pretty starving by the time I got there but the only place I could find to eat was a Little Chef so I ended up going hungry 😉 . Having arrived with an hour to spare, I decided to have a look round Hull. Turns out some parts of it are quite nice.

The talk was fairly well received, there was a good mix of skeptics and believers though I perhaps didn’t answer the critics well enough – there was nothing suggested that wasn’t pre-answered by Kurzweil or De Gray and that perhaps prevented us from discussing the criticisms which actually do stand up in more depth. Still I found it a very much enjoyable talk to give.

The venue was the Plotting Room of Ye Olde White Hearte which is apparently where the English Civil War was started. It’s a hard act to follow to be honest, I feel a bit of a let down after I found that out.

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 Thursday I went up to Durham to speak to the Durham University Humanist and Secularist Society based there.

I delivered a talk on “Debating the Theists”, going through the common arguments and counter arguments that you often encounter when talking to believers. It was a talk I had given a few times to LAS in the past, though having lost all the notes and slides it was essentially a fresh talk with a similar theme running through it.

After a few technical problems at the start we finally got up and running and the talk went reasonably smoothly, though I missed out quite a few points I ended up kicking myself for during the question and answers afterward. Nether the less it was an enjoyable evening and I would like to thank DUHSS for inviting me up to speak.

On Tuesday Simon Singh came to the University of Leeds to talk about liable reform. Obviously as a free thinking group the Atheist Society was particularly concerned with such lawsuits for speaking out against obvious nonsense we asked Liberty@Leeds to be involved and had Sophie and Norm deliver a quick introduction on why it was important to us.

The talk itself was very good, it was both amusing and very informative. It is hard to believe how biased the legal system is (actually have studied law I don’t find it that unbelievable but that certainly isn’t a good thing) and how easy it is to bring a liable suit forward – makes me wonder what would happen if the thousands of people who have seen Simon speak and are behind him brought a frivolous suit against the BCA.

On Monday evening I headed over to York to speak at a meeting of the North Yorkshire Humanists a rather nice invite sat in between Ariane Sherine in December and Andrew Copson in February.

The talk went fairly well, I could really tell that it had been a while since I had done much public speaking and was somewhat out of practice but everyone I spoke to said they found it quite interesting and there were plenty of questions so the feedback was positive. Having run through it the night before I was a little taken aback at how much stuff I had so it’s probably for the best I kept things moving at a good speed.

Interestingly the street we were on, Priority Street, apparently has seven churches on it – five separate church buildings and two other church groups which meet in the same community centre as the Humanist group hold their meetings – most exciting of all was the Rock Church next door :D.

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.

On Tuesday I delivered a short series of talks to Atheist Society on evolution. It focused on some of the fun facts of evolution and strange twists which don’t seem to make sense at first but then, when you actually find out the answer, it makes perfect sense. The enemy of the god of gaps if you will.