Godless trip

The weekend before Christmas we always try to get down to London to see the Godless shows, as they are affectionately called. More on that later.

Sunday - early train to London, first class, booked in advance so dead cheap. Walk to hotel, stopping for a sandwich lunch on way. Check in, get lovely warm chocolate cookie from reception (a feature of all Doubletree hotels) and set off for a walk. Towards Covent Garden we saw a group of Pearly kings and Queens - first I've ever seen "in the wild".

Covent Garden looked lovely - all decorated for Christmas, and was obviously very busy.

Managed to do a bit of Christmas shopping and buy some presents, and saw the Jack Daniel's Barrel Tree

There was also a giant lego advent calendar, and loads of street theatre and buskers. My favourite  was not actually a busker, but a homeless person I think who was playing Christmas carols through a traffic cone - and doing it very well and collecting loads of money!

From there we walked to Leicester Square and Picadilly Circus through to Trafalgar Square. Saw the Christmas tree and Menorah in the square, and had a quick look in the National Gallery. We both love the National Gallery - so many beautiful paintings in there.  Then a walk back to the hotel to get ready for the show. We ate at a little Italian place  and then walked to the Bloomsbury Theatre, which is owned by UCL.

Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People is put on by Robin Ince, and originated from an arguement he (as an atheist) had with someone from Christian Voice, who said that atheists couldn't have fun at Christmas. So, determined to prove him wrong, Robin puts on this celebration of science and comedy every year, which always sells out.

We love it. Always slightly anarchic, different people appearing every night depending on when they are free, or whether they just happen to turn up. This year we had Robin, obviously, and a variety of other scienctists and comedians.
 It started with the band, and a laser harp! Very impressive. Laser beams played with white gloved hands.

 Alexei Sayle, turned up unexpectedly, he said he was just passing, and read some of his autobiography:

Richard Herring, in a very ironic Christmas jumper,  talked about his book, Talking Cock. Don't need to explain what it was about, needless to say it was hilarious. So funny that I bought a copy from him at the interval for Stuart for Christmas.

Ben Goldacre, (of Bad Science fame) had a good 20 minute rant about pharmaceutical companies refusing to release all of their clinical trails data. Very interesting, especially when you look at how much money the government spent on Tamiflu during the last flu scare, and yet there is no real published evidence that it works.

There was music from Helen Arney, Grace Petrie and others (can't remember them all), and the mathematician Matt Parker showed us his binary scarf:

as well as solving a rubric cube puzzle in under 3 minutes whilst delivering a stand up routine.

Perhaps the most bizarre act was Baconface, who turned out to be Stuart Lee in a wrestling mask with bacon draped over it.

My favourite bit was from Andrea Sella, Professor of Chemistry at UCL who produced ever increasing sizes of explosions on stage:

You can't beat an explosion for pleasing a roomful of nerds and scientists!

The Psychopathic Test

Tonight I've been to a Skeptics in the Pub meeting, listening to Jon Ronson (the guy who wrote The Men who stare at Goats), talking about his latest book, The Psychopath Test.

An investigative journalist, author, and very funny speaker, he was very entertaining - and he made sitting in the Showroom bar on the hottest day of the year with about 150 other bodies bearable. He talked about how his interested in psychopathy started whilst flicking through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders whilst at a friends house, and marveling at the sheer number of them. What used to be the size of a pamphlet is now 886 pages of known mental disorders. His interest led him to talk to Scientologists who famously don't believe in mental disorders and Psychiatry, and they introduced him to "Tony, an inmate of Broadmoor.   Basically Tony had been arested for GBH, and had faked mental illness in order to avoid prison, assuming he'd be sent to some cushy hospital and soon released. Unfortunately he faked it rather too well, and was sent to Broadmoor. Obviously on arriving there he realised his mistake, and had tried to convince the authorities that he was sane - which is a lot harder than convincing people you're insane!

Jon then discovered that the authorities knew he'd faked the mental illness, but had diagnosed him as psychopathic.  His interest in psychopathy now sparked, Jon did a psychopath spotting course with the man who invented the checklist used to diagnose the condition.  Apparently 1 in a 100 of us are psychopaths, and about 4% of CEOs!

As well as reading excerpts about Tony, and telling us how to spot a Psychopath, Jon also recounted some interesting interviews with prominent psychopaths - very entertaining. I'm about to order the book, but there's an extremely good excerpt from it here, including much more of Tony's story.

Voodoo Histories

Good night last night at the Sheffield Skeptics in the Pub - or in the cinema bar, as its now held in the Showroom. Another full house, this time to hear David Aaronovitch talk about Conspiracy Theories, or why clever people believe stupid things. Based on his book, Voodoo Histories, it was an extremely interesting talk about his views of conspiracy theories, and why they are so popular. Topical subject, in the week that Times Square hosts anti-vaccination adverts, the antivaccination movement believing in one of the biggest health related conspiracy theories of recent times  - that Big Pharma, Public Health Authorities and health professionals are somehow in league with each other.

His definition of conspiracy theory is simple - the decision to believe a less probable theory. His interest started when a work colleague told him he believed that the moon landings were a hoax - David believing that it was probably harder to organise a hoax moon landing than a real one.

His story took us from the Protocols of the  Elders of Zion - a story which I'm ashamed to say I had never heard of - and one of the oldest conspiracy theories about a document purporting to reveal a Jewish plot to basically take over the world. Although discredited as a hoax, it continued to be widely believed after the First World War, especially in Germany.

The death of Princess Diana, the murder of JFK and the existence of a bloodline from Christ (best illustrated by the Chronicles series in the mid 80s and the Book Holy Blood, Holy Grail), were all examined by him to illustrate the reasons why people prefer to believe a less probable explanation. Often it is to make order out of chaos, the belief in a plan, that someone must have known what was going to happen. The thought that there is no plan is psychologically more difficult to accept. To complete a story  - particularly important in the Diana case.

Fascinating talk, and I managed to order his book from Amazon during the talk, which should arrive tomorrow, so will enjoy some holiday reading. I've always been fascinated by consipracy theories, and have believed in some of them - at least for a while.  Anyone old enough to remember Eric Von Daniken??

Catch up

Bit of catching up to do on this blog I think!  First, a quick update on the previous story. Lots of complaints about the magnet with miraculous properties if you put it in your knickers. If my reply from Trading Standards is anything to go by, they are going after the manufacturer, not Boots.  Boots have since then removed all claims about the product from their web site, but it's still for sale on-line - even Amazon have it, and make claims about it relieving symptoms of the menopause. People still sending in complaints, so will be fascinating to see what happens next.

Storm in a Fanny Magnet

Quackery in any form annoys me. By that I mean "alternative" medicine practices that purport to cure the patient of symptoms, yet have no scientific basis at all, and have never been proved to work. As Tim Minchin famously said in his wonderful beat poem "Storm" :
You know what they call “alternative medicine”
That’s been proved to work?
Medicine.”

So,  reflexology, chiropratic, aromatherapy, magnets, crystals, etc all fall in this category. Oh, and homeopathy. Especially homeopathy. It's particularly galling that Boots sell these remedies and take money for things that are no better than placebos and contain no active ingredients. So, I'm pleased to be helping Simon Perry in his latest bid to get Trading Standards to do something about it.  Through Pledgebank, for 90 days a different person is going to complain about a particularly interesting product - a fanny magnet. Yep folks, tuck this magnet inside your knickers and it will get rid of menopausal symptoms. As if.

It's my turn to write tomorrow - on Valentine's Day. wonder if I should include a card?

EDIT (Monday) - I've done it. Let's see what happens .

Investigating the Impossible

When I started this blog, I put at the top that you could expect to see, amongst other things, science and skepticism. Not been much of either so far - much more of a what I did on my holidays sort of blog! Will try and rectify.

Tonight I went to a Sheffield Skeptics in the Pub meeting - I try and go whenever I can, and every one I've been to so far has been entertaining. It was packed - 30 mins before the start it was standing room only - everyone coming to see Richard Wiseman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Herfordshire. I've been reading his blog, and following him on Twitter for some time, and a few weeks ago was lucky to see him in the Godless show in London. But, it was great seeing him here in Sheffield, and sitting almost on the front row.

Richard's talk was entitled Investigating the Impossible, and as used to be a magician, started with some magic tricks. He then moved on to visual illusions - all designed to show how our brains make sense of things, sometimes making quite incorrect assumptions. As well as visual perceptions, there's some good audio ones as well - I challenge anyone to listen to Carmina Burana and hear the right lyrics again after listening to this.


Ytmnd -- Carmina Burana, alternate lyrics
Uploaded by Hot564231. - Sitcom, sketch, and standup comedy videos.

He took us through a lot of his research, on the psychology of luck, on perception, on why people believe in the paranormal and how it can be explained. His latest book, Paranormality, starts with the assumption that the paranormal doesn't exist, and then looks at what's interesting about it.

My favourite bit was his story about a Tomorrow's World episode, on firewalking. Richard believes that firewalking can be explained by the poor conductivity of wood, and over the 10 to 15 feet of most firewalks the heat does not get transfered to the feet. Firewalkers believe that they can harness their inner energy to protect their feet. So, Tomorrow's World constructed a 60 foot long firewalk, and as Richard says, the firewalkers will either burn their feet, or disprove the laws of physics. You can see what happened here.

Nine Lessons and Snow

We usually go to Oxford on the Friday before Christmas to see the UCSIA office and officers for a Christmas bash, and this year we decided to combine it with a trip to London. Of course, we had snow to contend with. Good trip to Oxford, bit of Christmas shopping when we got there, including a trip to the market, and a nice meal at the boat house. Up early next morning to find more snow, delayed trains, and a bit of a diversion via Reading to get to London. Got there mid morning, found our hotel near Tottenham Court Road, and laughed at Freddie's Christmas hat. Set off to get to St Paul's an noticed a small flurry o snow as we descended into the tube station. By the time we got out, it was coming down in buckets. St Paul's was pretty, but barely visible

and it just got worse as we crossed Millenium Bridge. And Stuart had no hat on, and the zip had broken on his jacket. 

 Crossing the bridge was cold! It was blowing a gale, horizontally, and there was thunder! Neither end of the bridge was visible from the middle.

Eventually we made it to Tate Modern, and spent several hours in there. The Turbine Hall had the Sunflower Seeds by Ai WeiWei - each one made of ceramic and hand painted.

While we were in there the snow stopped, and we could see from the windows that St Pauls had started to appear again.

We'd actually gone down to see Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, and I was really worried that it would be cancelled, and had been following the twitter stream about it all afternoon - even tweeting the host and organiser to ask that it not been canceled given how far we'd come. Was relived to get a tweet to say it was going ahead, and we started to make our way back to the hotel, being surprised by 3 Elvises  (Elvi?)coming out of a bar - they didn't look too warm but didn't look as if they cared...

Made it back to the hotel in time for a warm, a champagne cocktail and dinner, and then walked through an eerily quiet, snow covered London to the Bloomsbury Theatre. I've been looking forward to this event all year - Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People was conceived by Robin Ince, first performed  in 2008 and organised by the Rationalist Association and New Humanist Magazine. It's a sort of science themed variety show! More info and videos etc here.

It was a great evening - we saw some great comedians including Richard Herring and Mark Thomas

Musicians including Baba Brinkman, Isy Suttie, Robin Hitchcock

and the amazing Frisky and Mannish who I just have to see again.

Scientists included Simon Singh, Richard Wiseman and Ben Goldacre (of Bad Science fame and who's hair I think had got the better of him).

The only disappointment is that when I bought the tickets, Brian Cox was due to appear, but had to pull out as his BBC filming had overrun. Shame.

It was a great night, and hopefully Robin will do it all again next year.

Dara O'Briain, sugar pills and water memory.

Sunday night went to see Dara O'Briain at the City Hall as part of the Grin Up North Comedy Festival. Seeing quite a few acts over the next few weeks - hope they're all as good as Dara was. Very fast speaker, took a bit of getting used to especially with the Irish accent, but so funny. And a lot of improvisation from talking to the audience. Last time he was in Sheffield he found it difficult to get the audience to interact (according to his book Tickling the English), but that didn't happen this time. Lots of good responses, and some random heckling. He's a great supporter of the "skeptic" movement, and I was glad to see stuff like homeopathy and chiropractic getting a good going over.

I love the non science behind homeopathy - been written about too many times for me to go over it again. Suffice to say that its medicines are merely sugar pills or sugar water. Active ingredients diluted down so much that there are no molecules of them left in the solution at all. But, so homeopaths would have us believe, water has memory, so can remember traces of the active ingredient. Well, given what most water that we drink has been in contact with, I hope that's not true!