Posts Tagged ‘york brights’

It’s been a while since I last stopped by York Brights, so I decided it was high time to turn up to a meeting. It was a somewhat intimate affair, with only six of us there (usually there are loads of people these days), but the conversation was never the less it’s usual excellent standard. We also noticed an item on the menu we hadn’t seen before.

The mega mixed grill burger as it is known is just that – a mixed grill in a burger. They start off with a huge burger, was at least half a pound, if not more – I just don’t really know how much a pound is but it was definitely at least as big as two McQuarters. They then put a fried egg, a gammon steak, a chicken fillet, a pineapple ring and a sausage, wrap it all in the world’s largest bread bun and surround it with chips. Amazing.

A few weeks ago, myself and Elina headed up to York for the York Brights monthly meetup.

It was much nicer than last time as we weren’t in the middle of a torrential downpour, so I could actually see the road in front of me. The meetup itself is held at a pub called Ye Olde Starre Inn, which those in York will no doubt be familiar with.

Having missed my mixed grill the day before (all you can eat steak is subtly different), I decided to go for the mixed grill. While it was very enjoyable it was certainly a little unconventional – it was basically a mixed grill, crossed with an all day breakfast with egg and beans. Crazy, buy never the less enjoyable.

Last week, I took Elina to meet my friends at York Brights. It was a rather strange evening as when I walked in I found them sitting in a whole different corner to the usual one, due to the amount of people at the pub. For creatures of habit, like myself, this simply isn’t cool and I spent a good twenty minutes repeating over and over again “this isn’t where we sit…” ;).

There were also lower numbers than usually turn out, perhaps due to so many people taking holidays at this time of year – which also contributed to a slightly lower than expected turn out to Skeptics this month.

Never the less it was a great night all the same, and we tried the food for the first time which turned out to be average.

On the way back, the heavens opened to what I think was the heaviest rainfall I have ever driven through, possibly even heavier than the torrential downpour I went through on my way to appear on Ummah Channel. We’re talking so heavy that I was driving significantly below the speed limit! Nothing wrong with rain, when you’re inside though ;).

Last week I headed down to York Brights for their monthly meeting. It was the second time I had been to the city in a month, having visited North Yorkshire Humanists two weeks prior.

The topic of much of this week’s discussion was Derren Brown. Derren has done amazing things for reviving the art of magic, but it always a divided opinion in the skeptics community because although he says it is all magic, he then goes on to pretend a lot of what he is doing is real.

Take the example, when he correctly predicted the lottery numbers. Of course, he didn’t, it was a simple camera trick. But be started the show by saying “this is all magic” and then took you on an hour long journey about the wisdom of crowds, which is of course nonsense. I spoke about this at Skeptics in the Pub in 2009.

One of the group members, Michael, went on to explain just how much of Derren’s material relies on this. Take for example his TV show Trick of Treat, although he claims to use no actors, they almost certainly did, partly because some have been identified as actors but also because you just can’t morally do a lot of that stuff to unsuspecting members of the public.

You could argue of course that that is part of the show though. When we watch fiction or magic, we suspend our disbelief for the purposes of entertainment (deep down, we all know there probably isn’t a man traveling around space and time in a vehicle disguised as a blue police box but it’s fun to pretend for those 45 minutes), and maybe it’s just part of that.

On Wednesday, after a long absence due to my attendance at Perspective Citywide, I headed over to York for the monthly meet up of York Brights.

Despite organisers’ Ewan and Gill being on holiday, the conversation was lively and engaging and ended up continuing long into the night – well, until gone 11pm, which is quite late when you get to my age and still have to drive back to Leeds that evening 😉 .

Headed down for the monthly meetup of the York Brights on Wednesday which saw a record turnout for the group! That said the pub wasn’t exactly up to scratch – they had run out of lemonade and pint glasses!

In any case the group provided it’s usual good conversation and entertainment as well as a chance to flash my new title and charity. Good times.

I started Wednesday (after work at least) by heading off to the brief staff meeting at Colton Mill before the night out. I wasn’t planning to attend any of it but who could miss the chance to grab a pint with Eric and Felix?

Afterwards I continued on my way over to York for the monthly Brights meetup which is always entertaining if a little sparsely attended and threw arround some very interesting ideas as co-organiser Gilly has some very similar ideas to my own (which is probably a very dangerous thing lol).

Yesterday I headed over to York for the monthly York Brights meetup.

While it wasn’t overly attended the conversation was interesting as always and the real shocker of the evening was that I managed to make it to York and back without GPS and without getting lost! Now that is a successful evening.

Heading over to the April meetup of the York Brights group I was finally able to get there while it was daylight. Therefore I took the opportunity to get a few photos in as I walked past the Minster.

The group meetup itself was excellent as usual and rather well attended this month so it made for plenty of interesting conversation. Plus it was a chance to talk about Rationalist Week to a whole new group of people 😀 .

Yesterday I headed over to York to attend the local Brights meetup. Nick having pointed out that you can drive as fast as you can get the train over, I decided to brave the roads and eventually found myself in York city centre parked up by the river.

The parking machine not taking credit cards or notes I ended up registering with York’s phone parking service which of course is needlessly unuser friendly but eventually I managed to get it sorted and headed out to find Stonegate.

This was an interesting challenge and one I missed by quite a long way but luckily the very helpful Nick Nav service managed to guide me into the road and I had soon located the pub.

The turn out was good, there was about fifteen people in total which is enough to make sure the conversation kept flowing. There was quite a mix of interesting characters including one guy who essentially rejected Einstein’s relativity in exchange for his own acceleration relativity.

All in all though it was nice to be around another group of like minded individuals. York is a beautiful city and quite an active one it would seem as well with this group, North Yorkshire Humanists being based there as well and a Humanist Society at the university, even if they don’t answer anyone’s emails.