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QEDCon
Jan 6, 2012

I'm off to Manchester in March to attend QEDCon, a meeting of sceptics and critical thinkers from around the UK and elsewhere. It promises to be good: Robin Ince will be there, as will Steve Jones, Edzard Ernst and a host of other sceptical folks that I have come to know over the past few years. It will be a great chance to meet people who have set up Skeptics in the Pub clubs and to share our experiences.

(No replies)

2011
Jan 2, 2012

2011 came and went for me without much incident. It's not to say 2011 flew by: it didn't. It was a curiously slow year by any standards. The year did not bring too many surprises, and not a small amount of pleasurable moments.

I spent a lot of my free time involved with my newly formed skeptic's club: arranging speakers and coming up with a wide range of introductory presentations. The club has been quite successful, I think, with subjects ranging from ghosts and moving statues to childhood developmental disorders to nuclear power. I have a small number of speakers lined up for 2012, but I badly need to get my act together here. It's been huge fun, made better by the different people I have met throughout the year. Many of the talks are online now. I'm hoping to start expanding our area of interest to more science news next year, as a lot of the focus of the club last year was concentrated on various different type of delusions and charletanism.

I was also very heavily involved in Toastmasters this year. I was the main organiser for my local club, and I was heavily involved in setting up a club at my workplace. I am currently the president of both clubs. It's been a lot of fun. During the year we had competitions, joint meetings and a charity speak-a-thon, so I was kept busy. My terms end in June of this year, so I imagine I will be kept busy until then.

Closer to home, my eldest son finally eclipsed me in height. He's in his final year of primary school and a good bit of energy went into figuring out where he would go for secondary school. It was quite an odyssey. He and his brothers are turning into quite good hockey players. They also picked up a few medals at athletics events throughout the year. My younger two have also acquired a taste for hillwalking.

My girlfriend had a third operation which turned into a nightmare for her. In the course of the op, an incision was made into her intestine, necessitating emergency surgery and the immediate cessation of the intended procedure. It took a long time for her to recover from it, but fortunately no further operations were required.

In the course of the year, I travelled to Germany twice. The first trip involved a visit to Stuttgart's Wilhelma Zoo, and during the second trip we visited the Bodensee and Zugspitze, Germany's highest mountain. The second trip also involved a long car journey between Ireland and Germany, where I nearly drove into a motorway crash barrier, we got completely lost in Brussels and we suffered breakdown in a forest in the middle of nowhere.

We also visited Brow Head (Ireland's most southerly point on the mainland, Spike Island (a prison in Cork Harbour), the Saltee Islands (a noted Irish bird sanctuary) and the Waterford Tall Ships Race. One trip in August involved the inspection of a beached sperm whale in Dungarvan. Other than this, it wasn't a great year for hillwalking.

We also took up cycling, travelling to a few local beauty spots such as the Old Head of Kinsale and Clonakilty. Hopefully we will explore a few more places around Ireland when the weather improves.

So, now onto 2012. As usual I am uncertain as to what this year will bring. I face a good few challenges that I've been putting off for years now, and they're not going away until I deal with them properly. I have an enjoyable trip planned to London in two weeks with my youngest boys (they've never been on a plane before), and I have a few skeptics meetings planned (not half enough), but otherwise it's an open book.

Here's wishing everyone a promising and fulfilling new year.

(6 replies, Latest reply: Jan 2, 2012)

Speakathon
Nov 27, 2011

I participated in a "Speakathon" over the weekend in aid of the local Marymount Hospice. Toastmasters clubs around Cork each got an hour long slot, and each member got a few minutes to speak on any topic they wished to discuss. Because I am president of two Toastmasters clubs, that meant I needed to come up with two speeches.

In the evening session on Friday night, I spoke about how I had entered into a DNA study that will help determine where Irish people originated from. All my great-grandparents come from the same part of Ireland, so I would be an ideal candidate for such a study.

In the morning session the following day, I spoke about how you can improve your presentation skills by applying some very simple techniques. I hate traditional Powerpoint "bullet point" templates. By adding some images and animation you can bring any presentation to life.

In the evening I hosted a Cork Skeptics meeting in Blackrock Castle. We had two talks. Síle Lane, from Sense About Science spoke first, and talked about what her organisation was doing to address misinformation in the media. The efforts here have been admirable. Sense About Science have recently kicked off a campaign called "Ask For Evidence" which seeks to encourage ordinary people to request peer reviewed evidence from companies when presented with extraordinary claims.

The second speaker was Brian Hughes from NUI Galway. He is a lecturer in psychology and a prominent sceptical blogger. He spoke about how normal people are particularly bad at statistical reasoning, and how we tend to consistently overestimate our abilities and ignore data that contradicts our world-views. He discussed some interesting studies that indicate that depressed people can often be more realistic in their estimation of themselves, and suggests that fantasy and misconception might be an evolutionarily necessary condition for humans. Quite fascinating stuff.

So, a busy and thoroughly enjoyable weekend. A lot of time spent on my feet, talking and thinking about things that interest me.

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Tsunami
Mar 12, 2011

The water scares me.

I look out on the river beside my house. Everything is serene and quiet. The inhalations and exhalations of the tides add a beautiful rhythm to even the gloomiest day. The glistening and the ripples, the sparkles and the splashes. It’s calmness personified.

But now, this water scares me.

It frightens me because I saw yesterday what water can do. I have seen the live TV images of huge waves pushing themselves inland, carrying trees, cars, boats and houses as if they were matchsticks. I have seen, as we all have now, the sudden loss of possessions, of dreams, of lives, of everything, in a cancerous upwelling of this self-same liquid that flows silently past me every hour of every day.

Those images will not leave. The cars turning and reversing in panic. The houses crushed to a pulp in an instant. The fishing boats floating drunkenly over roads and streets. The manicured fields: one second ordered and cultivated; the next, crushed under a mass of human detritus and shapeless debris. A vast battlefront, more powerful and destructive than any army ever launched against an enemy. A formless hegemonising goo exerting its dominance over our civilisation. The immediate nullification of decades of patient human labour. Vast swathes of land reclaimed by a master more powerful than the greatest of our technologies.

What makes it scariest of all: its unconsciousness. Its indifference to the vast suffering it inflicts. This monster is nothing but a function of physics and geology. All else is moot. You get in the way, you die; no matter how virtuous or deserving your plight. The greatest cruelty is unleashed when no mind or conscience is involved.

I look out on this expanse of water and I imagine a giant black wave of destruction turning the corner and advancing up the channel towards me. I imagine stone buildings turned to rubble in front of my eyes. I imagine the windows exploding and and an unconscionable mess flowing into every room of the house. I imagine the walls of the house groaning and capitulating under the relentlessness of the planet’s most powerful weapon. Beyond this, my imagination fails me.

So you may babble away, dear water. You may bubble and sigh. You may lap upon the shore and darken under the passing flutters of a playful breeze. But I cannot trust you. Your darkness knows no limit.

http://woodpigeon01.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/tsunami/

(8 replies, Latest reply: Mar 14, 2011)

42
Nov 1, 2010

After 2 score years and 2 reaching this hallowed age, I must say the view is nice from here.

(12 replies, Latest reply: Nov 3, 2010)