For a while now I’ve always had a soft spot for animals with the same Genus and species name in their Linnaen classification. For those who had no idea about half the words in that last sentence meant, there was a Swedish bloke called Carl Linnaeus who looked a bit like this:
He lived in the Eighteenth century and is today known as the father of modern taxonomy. that is probably the least cool thing to be “the father of” considering people like Robert Oppenheimer who is the father of atomic bombs or Charles Townes who invented lasers
I suffer from insomnia. It’s something I deal with by drinking bucketfuls of chamomile tea and occasionally getting up past midnight to watch mind-numbing television, to try to switch my brain off. But last night my brain went into overdrive. It was gorging itself on ideas and information following the first session in a new project I’ve been helping to develop…
RT @Bristol_Culture: A most enjoyable time at @BrightClubBris this evening, from quantum physics to songs about pigeons. Here’s to next time bristolculture.wordpress.c…
We’ve been busy organising Bristol’s first Bright Club, with a little bit of help from friends at University College London and a strategic grant from the British Science Association. With three weeks still to go, we’ve sold most of the tickets in advance… Bristol loves Bright Club already. Hooray!
While I was busy organising a solar-powered stage at Green Man Festival, Sounds of Science affiliate Julianna was making a film about the Festival’s hydrogen-powered Omni-Tent. She did a great job of convincing all of her friends to pose as hydrogen and oxygen atoms for the film. Not only that… they dance too! Here are the results:
The film was supported by an Institute of Physics grant and was shown between every (hydrogen-powered!) performance in the Omni-Tent.
Much of August was spent building up to and recovering from Einstein’s Garden at Green Man Festival. I was managing the Solar Stage there; Jim was broadcasting for Green Man FM, and doing a sterling job plugging all of my acts as well as a bunch of other Geek Pop artists. It was a balmy few days weather-wise, as well as workwise.
I’ve since been experimenting with Storify for aggregating social media content relating to Einstein’s Garden from lots of different sources. It doesn’t work perfectly and takes some considerable fiddling but here are the results. I think it produces a lovely, if not-very-scientific, analysis of the social media response to the project. Though the Storify folks should really think about including some different options for automatically organising content. After a couple of hours of organising everything chronogically I decided I wanted my story to run from first to last post rather than last to first (a la Twitter streams). I then had to spend the rest of the day manually reversing the order of my posts…
Spider bites kill people. No really, they do. But then so do car crashes, heart attacks and narcotics. It’s all a matter of stats, to really get a grip on what to be worried about then mathematics can be pretty useful.
The main trouble with statistics is that most people, myself included, have a very limited grasp on how they work. This is something that Professor David Nutt, head of the UK’s drug advisory body, discovered in 2009 when he quite correctly pointed out that you are as likely to be killed horse riding as you are taking ecstasy. Tabloid outrage ensued.
People die taking ecstasy, about 30 every year in the UK. They also die, riding horses, driving cars and yes, by being bitten by spiders. But how many people actually die from spider bites?
So, we decided to go to the British Tarantula Society‘s Annual Exhibition a couple of weekends ago (what else does one do of a Sunday…?) and what an experience it turned out to be. We were anticipating a small school hall with a few different exhibiters. Instead we found THIS:
As readers of this blog will know, I’m a sucker for anything combining science and the arts, and especially the musical arts. So when I was asked to manage the Solar Stage in Einstein’s Garden at the amazing Green Man Festival, I jumped at the chance. My task, basically: to populate a festival programme with nerds. And mostly singing ones…
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