Secret Garden Party 2008 Roundup

July 28th, 2008

After a hedonistic few days flitting around the Science tent at the fine Secret Garden Party I’ve arrived at home and had time to wash the sweat and mud off from my tired bones.  The sun blazed, music played, and most of all a tremendous amount of people showed up to the science tent, eager to hear public lectures on everything from the sounds of the universe to game theory.

I met a multitude of interesting and wonderful people, most of who were involved in the science tent in one way or the other.  Some of the highlights for myself included:

	The Science of Beatboxing:  Dan Stowell, a research student at Queen Mary’s, has published papers on beatboxing and is currently working toward a PhD.  his research involves putting cameras down peoples throats to see what happens during speech; he is alsoone half of Spoonfigh, an electro-keyboard beatboxing mashup.  Spectacular!
	Rough Science: the ever-charming Mike Bullivant spoke about his role in Blast!, the Open University / Rough Science outreach work.  I gave him a hand with his slides, and even though I managed to cut the power thirty seconds into his talk, he still gave me a bottle of wine as a thank-you.  What a gentleman.
	The Evolution of Music: freelance journalist and science writer Zoe Cormier explained some of the fantastic and amazing things that music does to your brain: that its electrical activity pulses in time to a beat, how every part of the brain is involved in processing music, and how every culture on Earth makes music.  She also talked about a condition that renders people unable to ‘hear’ music – in one patient’s words: “it sounds like a lot of banging pots and pans.  I hate it”.  Alarming.
	Professor Chris French and his team of scientists set up a real-life telepathy experiment as part of a project investigating parapsychology.  This is something of a development on the (in)famous ’staring’ experiments by Rupert Sheldrake; although I wouldn’t let that colour your opinion – Professor French also gave an detailed lecture on alien abductions, and described the interesting and very terrestrial patterns that have emerged amongst those who claim to have been ‘visited’.
	Nikolai & Bethan provided hands-on experiments for the masses; people were pushed over, clouds created in bottles, balloons had skewers stabbed through them without popping, and many more fun things.  Guys, I’m sorry I made such a mess on your table with cornstarch and water.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.

….plus so many more that I simply haven’t got time to mention.  A huge shout-out must go to Mia Kukathasan and her team of Science Guerillas, whose tireless work in organising and promoting the event made sure that near every lecture was packed, and that the Science tent was a hub of excitement and learning.  If you need someone to organise an event (especially a science one), you could do no better than to get in touch with her.

Naturally, I gave a few lectures on things close to my heart: how to tackle bad science, and how Mother Nature perfected the art (science?) of making  zombies.  And I also gave a science pub quiz, which far from being a geeky affair, was generally rowdy and shouty and a good deal of fun.  you can see the rest of the science events (and there were dozens!) at the Guerilla Science homepage.  Here’s to next year!

** UPDATE: Mia K wants me to make it clear that the guerillas are a non-hierarchical bunch, and the kudos should be equally shared amongst them.  Way to go, guerillas! **

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