Thursday the 12th of July saw me at the Grain Barge performing geek poetry, throwing knitting and inflicting my sense of humour on people.
We turned up and there was some classical science equipment set up - which is always 'ooooo do you think there will be fire and explosions and glowing stuff?'.
The show got started with the comedic Steve proclaiming he had super powers - he the guy who organises and entertains between the acts.
The first act was Jim Bell with his spiders which the brave Suze who is very scared of them, managed to hold momentarily with lots of squeaking.
Then it was time for the fire and glowing stuff but alas no explosions 🙁
Then it was on to Sophia with her set on why parents are so annoying.
At some point a red nose appeared just to remind me that Clowns exist shudders
Then we had Joe Wright and a very funny sketch and video about Darwin - including all the mistakes in the video 🙂
Then we had Nicole Slavin and opera about STIs.
We then had a break were instead of talking to the people who had come to see me I was hovering waiting for a laptop to work so that my first power point in 6 yrs could be shown and to make it worse it wasn't actually a power point :/
But then we had the Science of Cocktails and me being me I announced to the room that I like the frothy head :/ Which Suze who was doing the talk gracefully sailed over.
Then there was Sam Phippen with his funny stories of Robots that kids build.
Then there was me - I was so nervous
Here is the video
And yes I corpsed and yes I got flustered and yes someone nicked my knitted bucky ball!
Then we had a talk on Viruses!
And then to finish off we had the halarious nerd rock of Mark Lewney.
This is a visual joke or pun about the Higgs field. It is in no way correct. I drew it last night and already this morning my little girl asks 'What's a Higgs Field?' so it's purpose has been served.
A Higgs Field is not the type of field where fluffy lambs play but it is thought to 'birth' the particles of the Boson family. These are sub-atomical particles but they are some of the ones that make up the sub-atomics you learnt at school. The Higgs-Boson particles are thought to be what gives all the other particles mass. Mass is what makes matter all clump together.
Matter is everything, so that is the atoms that make the stars, the atoms that make the Earth, the atoms that make you and me and Jeany and little baby Mary. All of it.
Without the Higgs everything would be wizzing around at the speed of light - they think. This was the idea they came up with 50 years ago, well specifically Peter Higgs did and he was told he was wrong but he kept going even though it is scary to be told you are wrong.
Now I'm still abit hazy on what is a field in this case and what is the particle so you may have to look that up yourself. (on that note guys are we talking probability fields and planck equations here? I'm a bit confused as the field is supposed to permeate the universe?)
The picture came from a friends facebook status were he gave his life sciences view on what had happened yesterday. I liked the imagery of a field giving birth to a particle and then I thought about the fact that yesterdays discovery had taken fifty years but like 3 of hard slog and that became the labour in my mind. Then I thought about the fact that they have found a Higgs-Boson and not the Higgs-Boson* and how annoyed anyone would be to have spent that long in labour and be told it wasn't over yet!
It is a shameless personification of something that can only really be visualised with mind bending maths and it is done as a joke! Honest guys don't shoot me 🙂
p.s. I am not saying that the theoretical part before the collider wasn't hard slog but more that the physical aspect of the experiments fit better with the idea of labour!
Alan Turing one of the most important people in the history of the computer would have turned 100 today if he had lived. Though the chances of living to 100 are not great Turing didn't even manage to get as far as he should have.
It is occasionally argued about but it is considered that he committed suicide due to being hounded by the powers that be and given chemicals to subdue his sex drive. The reason for this was that he was Gay and in 40's and 50's being homosexual was not just illegal but thought to be a security risk.
Alan was faced with the choices of chemical castration or prison and exclusion from his work. He chose the chemicals. They had nasty side effects but he seems to have taken his treatment mainly in his stride.
Mr Turing wasn't just a mathematical genius he was a war hero having worked at Bletchley Park during the second world war cracking codes and thus saving at least allied lives. He is most often mentioned in association with the enigma machine.
His contributions to modern computing are huge and he is considered one of the founders of the subject Computer Science.
His achievements are great and yet the first time I heard of him was when I picked up one of Alaric's computing books after our move to Gloucestershire. It is strange that like Ada Lovelace he seems to have fallen through the cracks some what. And worse than that his centenary year is plagued by arguments of how to portray him.
Is it good or bad for those on the autism spectrum to know of him and so on. If he had been alive to day he would have probably been diagnosed with Aspergers syndrom but why is this a problem? Yes that was a facet of his personality but that is all. Use him to show others in the same situation as him that they can achieve by all means but that is not what is happening - I think there needs to be a gear shift in society. After all with the modern world lets face it the Geek shall inherit and that is all geeks, the meek, mild, argumentative, know it alls and the distracteds.
His achievements are his and he should be being portrayed as a founder and hero to everyone and I mean everyone. I will twist Alaric's arm into writing a blog post about Alan's achievements.
We made a Turing Machine Cake and drew the shamefully bad picture at the top of the post.
Saturday was a hectic manic day with School Fetes, baby throwing up, art gallery stuff and Science Show Off.
Science Show off was part of the fringe science festival and was organised by Skeptics In The Pub. It appears to be a regular event in London and I have even signed up to do a talk in Bristol though the slots where already full 🙁
Anyway here are the photos I took of the event which had me laughing far too much. It was low light levels so the photos are a bit ropey I'm afraid.
This guy had a rainbow that whizzed round - always a winner with me.
This talk even had live music played on a piano by Rob Wix (I think).
This guy gave a talk on why chillies are spicy hot 🙂 Here he is eating a rather hot chilli after which he could be found re-examining his experiment in a sink shaped test tube.
These guys were Domestic Science and had wine and a slide show of how they used noodles as litmus paper to test the acidity/alkali nature of kitchen products. It was quiet funny.
This talk on a brief history of electronics (cor look at that guys valves!) was really interesting and was one that I lernt some new stuff - stuff that is relavent to a young adult sci-fi book I am writing at the moment.
This was the other half of the pendulum talk but focused more on the fear reaction that Suze had had whilst taking part in the flying trapeze when she is petrified of heights!
This talk was on termites which again was not only entertaining - especially as it involved hissing cockroaches - I had been looking at some earlier on Saturday at the School fete along with pygmy hedgehogs. This talk is another one that is going to provide ideas and material for the fiction writing - oh yes!
I didn't manage to get a photo of everyone 🙁 And I need to get better at photography and maybe even get a nice camera that works and doesn't need shaking.
I really enjoyed the show 🙂 I'm also hoping there are going to be more Skeptics In The Pub stuff as I made it too very little this week due to the fall at the beginning :/
Jean woke me up at 8 o'clock to make Daddy breakfast in bed for Fathers Day. I was already awake thanks to creative insomnia. We made him breakfast and presented it too him (not entirely sure he was initially chuffed to be awoken early on a Sunday!).
The baby instantly stole his yogurt (it's an alpro one so she can actually eat it and she did!).
We had also made some planet/space cupcakes for him which Jean gave him 🙂 I bet you can guess which two the baby decorated!
The we were off to the Cheltenham Science Festival for the day. Above is me and Jean pestering the guy from the Cotswold Astronomical Society.
Jean again spent an age looking through microscopes and prodding things. The main phrase I heard through out the day was, 'I see you have a budding scientist there!'
Alaric found electronics and was happy 🙂 He also found a picture of Alan Turin and thus told a very interested (and I mean it) Jean about the origins of computing.
Mary entertained herself for a huge chunk of time with reading the science festival programme 🙂
I found pretty lighting to take photos of!
Jean found an entity called Keji. She got to generate her own little creature who's bounciness was based on her heart rate. Meaning she got to bounce on a trampoline 🙂
She then helped the Sustainable Chemists with their experiments 🙂 Though she did inform one Chemist that she didn't want to make a rubber ball because she wanted to explode more things!
Oh yes! She also wanted to start a fire with the telescope once I explained we mustn't look directly at the sun.
We then went to The Aviator at Staverton airport for dinner which everyone loved 🙂
Art and Craft, Events and Outings, Knitting, Poems, Sarah, Sci/Tech, Video | sarah | 
Fri 13th Jul 2012 7:24 pm | 
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