Ben, I enjoyed the bit about the nocebo effect tremendously – never heard anyone talk so fast in my life! Wish you’d had more time, which leads me neatly too…

Did that bastard All Murray totally overrun his time or what? We had to leave before the end to catch our train, and since I hated the steaming guts out of his skit, if that was in any way his fault I’m gonna get on the phone and start ordering hundreds of pizzas to his house or something. Stupid misogynist piece of wank. Who thought it was a good idea to get him onto an atheist show to tell fart jokes and harrass women and children in the audience?

However, I must – really must – have a rant about Johnny Ball, and not about his take on global warming (which apparently did not go down well yesterday – it wasn’t repeated today).

Now this might be like kicking everybody’s favourite uncle, but frankly this guy had no place in front of that audience. But I’d go further than that – the guy is a positive danger to science education in this country. He has not got a clue.

About fifteen years ago, I saw him spewing out a line about Isaac Newton having contributed nothing more than a slightly warmed over version of what Galileo and Kepler had already discovered. He is still repeating this rubbish. What he has absolutely no concept is that far from “discovering” gravity (which is what he described Newton as being famous for – of course the ancients had described gravity), what Newton actually did, for the first time, was invent a theory of gravity, along with laws of motions, that allowed a beautifully elegant way of describing how the force of gravity kept planets in the orbit, how cannonballs would describe a parabolic arc, allowed the mass of the moon to be estimated and much, much else. That was the true revolution he brought – the first true unifying theory in physics, along with mathematical precision of prediction, which held good until almost the 20th century. Against that, Kepler and Gallileo merely described what they saw.

He also had the cheek to refer to estimaes of how far you would fall in one second without even a nod to Newton’s laws of motions which allows this to be calculated.

So what on earth was Robin Ince thinking of inviting this children’s clown along for? Some form of yearning for his past childhood? He had no place there, and in my view he has no place talking such rot in front of children either. The man demonstrated no sense whatsoever of the deeper, underlying meaning of physics.

I can’t remember a single musical act that I actually enjoyed, sorry if that sounds harsh, but all the people I went with were visibly squirming and wishing we were at the end of a row through most of them.

I think the problem is that while being a reader of this site, for example, is a pretty good predictor that you’ll enjoy the other speakers, it’s a pretty terrible predictor of musical taste. Because that’s an (almost entirely) independent variable.

Don’t worry mj76 — you can pick up plenty of tips on this from watching non-atheists such as Cormac Murpy O’Connor, Jonathan Sacks, Melanie Philips etc. Sadly you’ll learn nothing from disappointingly non-belligerent atheists such as Claire Rayner, Linda Smith, Ronnie Barker & Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.

Don’t worry mj, whatever level of that qualities you deem to be necessary to achieve your ambition, you have clearly long ago surpassed it by a very considerable margin.

If you’re done complaining about Dawkins’ tone, perhaps you’d like to make a criticism of substance?

I’ll wait…

Can’t wait until next year…

Did you see the bit on the poster where it says ‘All Bloomsbury Shows Sold Out’?

Projecting, much?

But brilliant nonetheless.

Not that it at all relevent to the above article.

Merry end of the year to all