Brighton Science Festival

 When I first got here, I heard about the Brighton Science Festival from some of the orientation events I attended, so I signed up to get emails about it, and eagerly anticipated attending. It was in February and March. Here's the cover of the brochure:

I went with Ed to several events. The first one we went to was free, and was about Circadian rhythms. We learned some stuff about the little clocks inside the brains of humans and other animals, how important natural light is for our health, and how certain conditions like schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease can affect one's natural rhythms. This could have been a much better event if it had been thought out better. This was one of the talks that took place in a pub, which doesn't seem like the best place for something like this. Even though everyone there at that time was either there to hear the talk, or had come anyway and was listening attentively, you can't help there being disturbances--people ordering drinks, employees serving food and drink at the tables, chairs scraping... This would have been acceptable if someone had thought about it for about half a second and realized that the lecturer would need to have a mic on him. I could hear most of what he said, but it was a struggle, and every time he said something funny, he lowered his voice, and I didn't hear any of the little jokes he inserted into his lecture. Also, many people, including us, had to stand, and I'm short with medical conditions, so that's never a good situation for me. But anyway, it was an interesting subject, so I didn't regret going.

The next event we went to was called Soldering is Easy, and we got to learn how to solder (they pronounce the "l" here, and don't understand me easily when I say "sodder") and make these things called Zombie Apocalypse Badges. Ed took some pictures of me with his phone camera as I was soldering, but they're very fuzzy, sorry.

Here's what the badge looks like. It's pretty cool. The little bit on the upper left there, a) reminds me of Hal 9000, and b) is meant to bend over the little square that says IR1, but something went wrong with the making of the components, so the piece couldn't be put in the right way. Oh, well.

Here's a little movie of the badge when it's turned on. During the workshop, after we made our badges and registered them in a little database, we could turn them on, and bring them close to other badges. Each badge would pick up the signal of the other badge, and record the contact in the database. Then we could go look back and see all the connections we made. There was a little moving graphic with all the badge owners' names, and lines connecting the names of those whose badges had interacted. According the the BSF website, sometimes a badge would transmit a zombie virus, but I never saw any evidence of that. Unfortunately, the badges never got any use beyond learning how to make them and walking around with them at the workshop to get more contacts. It was fun, though.

Speaking of zombies, we also went to a Zombie Science talk, done by this comedian Doctor Austin, working with scientists from the University of Glasgow. This was set up like a university lecture, with some "course notes" provided in a little pamphlet. Doctor Austin gave a humorous lecture on the real science of zombies, discussing how real zombies might come about, how zombieism might be cured, and so on, with participation from the audience. The kids really liked this one. He shure tawked funny.

Another one we went to was on symmetry--symmetry in nature, molecular symmetry, symmetry in the universe (although that was just more about space and stars and stuff than symmetry), etc. Each type of symmetry had its own lecturer, and I think three out of four were quite good. The molecular symmetry was the one that wasn't the best, as I recall, maybe because it wasn't explained very well.

The last event was like a big blowout for the festival, with a whole day of talks. We went to four, I think--they were on the crazy shit scientists do to succeed (like take their own experimental drugs, screw over their partners, etc.), bubbles, music and territory, and numbers. The bubbles one was the best--there were a lot of crazy demos and really interesting things to see. The rest were also quite good, except for the music and territory one. We were both interested to see that one, especially Ed, since he makes and is very into music, but the speaker was poor. He didn't organize or explain his ideas very well, so the whole thing seemed incoherent. Too bad. The rest of the day was suite, though.

Science rulz.