Last year me and Alaric took part in Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate women in technology and the sciences. We did various blog posts on inspiring women.
This year the event is back! March 24th will once again see me blogging away, come and join us - why is this important - why should women have a specific day? Because unfortunately their contributions are not always acknowledged to the degrees they should be and young girls need to see that there are other females in these areas and that it isn't just the realm of men.
It's about showing them people like themselves - I suppose positive role models 
I'm 'live-blogging' the process of produce my next piece of Palaeo-Art on Salaric Craft.
I found about four hours before the deadline that there was a 100 stories for Haiti book project asking for submissions to help raise money for the earthquake victims.
So I hurriedly altered one of my stories and sent it too them last night - I was first stuck with a feeling that I wouldn't have anything to give them as they didn't want anything with Death, violence etc... it was the death one that stumped me - all the stories I have with the nice happy endings are ghost stories which were obviously out.
Anyway I found something and sent it off!
I had actually already mentioned something like this project as a possible money raiser after an argument about writing stories about the crisis itself.
Now I would encourage writing about suck heavy subjects as I feel they all to often get swept aside but I also feel you have to be careful and think before you fictionalise such a thing. Why? Becuase it would be easy to trivualise it.
How can you fictionalise a crisis why it is still going on? Unless you have actually been being there helping and are fictionalising your own experience - you need to research it or you will just get it all wrong. And I feel uneasy about writing about it whilst it is still a crisis - Apparently people felt helpless and wanted to show they cared - my reaction to this was simply - make an ebook of other stories and sell it to raise money then.
I'm not sure why I had such a strong reaction to this but Alaric thinks the same way too - he thinks you can't really fictionalise something like this until a yr or so afterwards.
Anyway they have now extended the deadline so if you have a story under 1000 words you might want to donate it
Recently I found this intresting guy on twitter called the Flying Trilobite who is an artist inspired by science - I really liked his drawings so followed him.
Anyway he then tweeted about submissions for palaeo-environment pictures and lo! I found Art Evolved and their time capsules full of palaeo-art!
Anyway it turned out the next time capsule was palaeo-environments and they wanted pictures along that theme. Unfortunatly it was very close to the deadline and I wasn't sure how to entire or if I could - even though on a later inspection of the site I saw all the instructions in plan sight!
Anyway I basically only manage to get a quick biro sketch done which wasn't composed properly or anything!
My topic was an Upper Ordovician benthonic community - yep you got it - basically it was another of my seascapes
Anyway its here if you want to see it I'm in the middle bit of the time capsule.
Of course being me the first thing I did was sit down and read a few chapters of various palaeo books I just happen to have lurking about
Anyway I am really excited about this as I've been searching for art and science cross overs The next time capsule is on the Therizinosaurs which I think are like beaked dinosaurs I think! I need to do a bit of reading up on these - at the moment the only book I have that mentions them is my Vertebrate Palaeontology book :/
I have applied to paint an elephant!
Yep you heard me an elephant! Of the statue variety - think the multi-coloured cows that were around London or the Pigs that were in Bath.
They don't have many left and I only just scraped in on the deadline - so I probably wont get it but I had to try!
The elephants will be paraded in London to help awareness of the plight of the Asian elephant. You can find out more about the event here.
I love conservation stuff and again this is for me at least a cross over of science and art - so for my design I went for the whole ecology feel - so yeah you guessed it I plan to paint one of my seascapes Well to me the epitamise a bio-community in balance and in danger - they are also basically one of the oldest habitates on earth!
One of the things that doing this application has taught me though is that I need to get some sort of portfolio site up and running :/
Events and Outings, Sci/Tech, Society, Writing | sarah | 
Wed 10th Mar 2010 12:31 pm | 
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