Mars Curiosity and *the* Space Book for Kids (by sarah)

I spent last week working at the Times Cheltenham Science Festival and as part of it I got to go and see a few of the talks which was brilliant. The first one I selected was Mars Curiosity as I spotted it had my old personal tutor Sanjeev Gupta in it. I also got a ticket for Jeany even though at 7 I thought she might be a bit young but she would never have forgiven me if I had gone to see such a talk with out her!

Sanjeev taught one of my favourite subjects at uni Earth Surface Processes so I was very excited to see how Mars research was going especially after seeing the prototype with Jeany earlier in the week. He looked basically the same but has grey hair! He still moves around far too much for a decent photo but that is what energises his talks (of course he didn't recognise me when I said hello - boo hiss but it has been ten years).

The other talker was Lewis Dartnell who was very engaging and handled the childrens' questions brilliantly at the end including the sad, 'When is it coming home?' Jean has been going on about forever vacations on Mars ever since!

Jean did get a bit confused about the fact the robot is ingesting Mars and yet needed batteries! I explained in whispers that it was eating the rock to see what it was made off and not as food. I was impressed she knew what ingesting ment to be honest. They went through the grissly details of man missions and radiation sickness and stuff Jean is still determined to go to Mars if she can or failing that she asked me if she could build a robot to go and then worked out that the 2030 mission would be a good one for her (she'll be 24).

After the talk I had to head over for a meeting but took Jean to Alaric and Mum and Dad to get the book she wanted signed. My meeting ended really quickly and just as well as I received a phone call from Al saying they couldn't find the book! I asked and was told it had sold out but then I saw a copy on the signing table and ended up talking to a lady who turned out to be the authors wife! It was the last copy!

Jean went and got it signed and I felt an ache of sadness for my impact lithologies and endolithic organisms and a moment of doubt about science communication instead of trying to go back but I missed that boat a long time ago. Jean was instantly obsessed by the book and Alaric and Lewis had a conversation involving lots of hands about space ship design. We had to drag the still reading Jean away from the table so that he could go home!

Jean has had her noise in the book ever since, it is a good childrens' book, informative, fun and easy to read but also it is gamified - the kids get to choose where they go on a stella holiday - Jean has always loved books like You Choose so this is right up her street. The illustrations are lovely and colourful, some simple and some intricate giving it a wide appeal to kids as it has different levels you can appreciate it on. It is one of the best I have seen recently and Jean took it into show and tell at school this week along with her cave man stickers and her t-shirt saying Question Everything. She proudly showed the other kids that it was signed with her name in as well

Jeany was very excited that they had mentioned Liecester as we had spent the previous week going around the space centre there etc... with my friend Becca (still need to process the photos and blog about all of that!)

Here is me and Jeany in our festival t-shirts - I'm hiding it at the end as it isn't that flattering of me! hee hee!

We Love Sugru (by sarah)

We love Sugru which is a putty like stuff that you can form into shapes, sticks to just about everything and is flexible - it is basically a funky silicon rubber from my understanding. When we first heard about it we couldn't get hold of any and so had to wait as they had sold out but the wait was worth it!

Since then we have used it for tonnes of things from embedding electronics in hair pieces, making creatures for the visually impaired, fixing fridges, shoes, adding little feet and buffers to all things electronic, fixing broken mugs and making jewellery. I plan to fix my electric guitar with it though need to see how it reacts to having glitter added to it!

But it is more important to me than it's usefulness. To me Sugru represented something more, when it appeared I was struggling with both scientists and artists telling me that there was no cross over between the two areas. My tag line o twitter is that I am The Artist Scientist or Artistic Scientist and to see this product - the result of something an artist (ok design student) had produced, being so wonderful for science/tech and artistic endevours.

This was the sort of fusion of art and science that I was sure should exist but was being told didn't and my examples of how the modle builders of film dinosaurs had ended up solving the mystery of joints and movement that paleaontologists has been struggling with was falling on deaf ears.

So I turned up at The Cheltenham Science Festival debate on science verses art that year with my sugru bracelet and my ESA t-shirt I'd won for Celestial Montage and found that people didn't seem to really cae on either side of the divide, they have their opinions of the others and that is that. Stuck in the middle as all ways I gritted my teeth and looked for more science-art related things and found it under the title science communication.

Recently Sugru posted their life story so far and asked what inspired others, so I told them - they inspired me! They provided the evidence I needed that science and art can create wonderful productive and helpful things by learning from each other, they are an example of a dream that was followed and they provided the very material I had been trying to work out how to make myself - I was mucking around with resins casting, silicon mould making and fimo in order to get something like sugru and I was failing and could not make the projects I wanted. I hadn't even thought of applications beyond my own ends and there WOP! appeared sugru ready to go and so I went and so did Al and he has even written up one of his repairs/hacks for their website!

The Sound Panel (by sarah)

It a year of fiddly work but there is a sound panel complete with sounds of space, slime moulds and cracking ice to name some of the eight.

It is obviously not a full sound cave but it a proof of concept and a piece of science-craft in its own right. It could not have come about without the aid of ESA, UWE, Ella Matthews and Alaric. Not to mention those who sponsored the project so that we could actually buy the components without them there is no why I could have afforded to make this.

For the next week as part of National Science and Engineering Week it will be on display at Centre Arts in Cheltenham.

Jean’s First Electronics age 5 (by sarah)

Again old photos but this is Jean doing her first ever electronics with Alaric - it was the first Christmas Holiday of Jean starting school - Daddy explained and Jean drew a sort of circuit diagram and then they made it

Shortly after this Jean received two electronics kits as presents.

I need a holiday! (by alaric)

This year, I've been alternating between bleak depression and enthusiastic elation.

Luckily, it's easy to see a pattern - the elation is when I let myself get distracted by interesting things; the depression is when I have to tear my attention back to what needs to be done rather than what I feel like doing!

It's been a funny year. On the one hand we've moved into a much larger house, with much better facilities, that's warmer and easier to keep clean and tidy. My work is great, and I've managed to catch up on some things that have been hanging over me for years - tax paperwork, terminating my limited company (that had become nothing more than a thorn in my side since I stopped freelancing), simplifying and upgrading my server setup, tidying up my home directory and organising my life. On the other hand, I've been so busy that the new home has mainly been a place to eat and sleep rather than something I've had much chance to enjoy, and I'm behind on the (small, reasonable) list of projects I wanted to do this year - with no year left to do them; I've so far spent only a handful of days on my own projects in the entire year.

I spent a whole day sorting out my workshop on my birthday in April, and ended that day with a few little things to finish off - which are still waiting for me. I've not finished the ring casting, which should only take a couple more days, nor rebuilt my furnace, which should take a few days more.

I've done a bit better on computer-based projects as I can do them wherever I have my laptop; I've done some work on my fiction project, and made progress on my organisational infrastructure to convert a huge pile of "things that need investigating to even begin to decide what needs doing about them" into a tractable TODO list, and done some writing for the ARGON project web site.

But, with my ability to concentrate on what I'm supposed to be doing rapidly waning, it's clear that I need some time off. So, I've booked the week before Christmas off of work, and I hope to:

1. Do what I can to fix the roof in the workshop.

   • It leaks. This will be hard to fix properly, as it'll require spending lots of money on materials; and possibly can't be done until there's some warmer, drier, weather to dry the decking out. But I'll see if I can improve on the current bodge somewhat, at least to give the decking a chance to dry properly without regular re-soakings.
   • There's great big gaps in the eaves, all round the walls, varying from a centimetre up to about twenty centimetres, through which an icy wind blows. All the warm air from the heater disappears, and ivy creeps in. I need to seal them up (minus a controllable air vent to let out humid air and fumes from welding - perhaps an air vent plus an extractor fan with a fume hood would be the way to go in the long run). I plan to saw some strips of wood to length so they can go between the rafters, nail them in place, and use judicious amounts of sealant to keep the tenacious ivy at bay and to account for my general inability to cut wood to exact lengths properly.

2. Run Ethernet to the workshop so I have an Internet connection there. This will involve spending some money on outdoor-suitable conduit and fittings, and trunking for the interior runs, then drilling lots of holes in walls and running cables through and sealing the gaps. But the result will be that I can actually do computer work at a desk with a comfy chair, rather than hunched over a laptop on the sofa with children tugging at me.

3. Start building the computer infrastructure in the workshop. I'm looking at a battery-backed low-voltage power system feeding a Raspberry Pi (which I already have, waiting - Sarah got me one for my birthday), bristling with sensors. Because sensors are fun.

4. If the weather and time permit, work on my ring casting and the furnace, although that somewhat requires dry weather. We'll see.

5. Chill out, play computer games, write fiction and ARGON prose.

6. Order the bits to build a chord keyer - I doubt I'll have time to build it by the time they arrive in the post, so I'm saving that for a project I can do at Bristol Hackspace in the new year.

But I need to take care that next year isn't like this one. Taking on so many responsibilities that I struggle to maintain my productivity means I get less stuff done, not more, and makes it hard to prioritise my effort sensibly. I'm going to book three weekend days each month, in advance, for my projects or simple relaxation, rather than just thinking I'll do them "when I get a free day" only to find that all of my weekends are booked up months in advance. I'll be open to rearranging them in order to fit around the days when Sarah or the children need me, or we're visiting people for events - most of the time, it doesn't matter what actual day I do things on. Sometimes this will involve getting a whole weekend, and then just a single day at the other end of a month; that's fine, just as long as it lets me keep making progress on my projects, and giving me a chance to unwind from the stresses of constantly doing what I must do, rather than what I want to do.