Archive for July, 2008
Bill from Greece prompted me to let you all know how my ant farm was going: it’s not. I watched my ants desperately trying to escape for several weeks, and then they began dying for reasons unknown (I suspect that, upon failing to escape the Perspex prison, they instead trained their efforts on escaping the mortal coil, and willed themselves to death).
Anyhow, enough was enough I thought, and decided to set loose my remaining pets. I took the farm to the place I first kidnapped some ants from and shook out all the survivors, all the while singing ‘Born Free’ at the top of my lungs. I imagine they were received by the colony in a midst of shock and happiness, given showers and then whisked off for interviews on primetime ant talk shows.
What next? I plan to get some more determined, less spirited ants for my farm. I washed out the farm so any new ants wouldn’t go apeshit when they smelled the haunting deathly echoes of the previous occupants, and soaked the gel in water so it could soften (one theory being that the previous ants didn’t burrow because the gel had dried out).
I’ll need to find some more ants, perhaps even some flying ones that are about at the moment, which I think are virgin queens or something but to me they’re just impressionable teenager ants who’ve just left home and will be much more appreciative of a new pad, even one filled with blue gel.
So on it goes. Pictures to follow.
July 30th, 2008
Ivy Ballicud at the fine Nerd News blog reports on a straw poll by Ernst & Young showing that 3/5 middle class Americans will outlive their pensions. Doom and gloom indeed. I for one find it entirely plausible this holds of the UK, for three reasons:
1) Life expectancy has been steadily increasing for the last hundred years
2) The retirement age hasn’t
3) We still operate a system whereby the working population pays for the pension of the retired population
It doesn’t take a genius to see we’re running a massive pyramid scheme, and sadly one that will probably collapse in my lifetime. To be honest, I don’t expect there to be anything left in the pot by the time I retire, which is one reason why I don’t bother to have a pension. Am I right to be so cynical? And how are we going to cope with an ageing population?
July 29th, 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:
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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! |
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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. |
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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. |
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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’. |
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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! **
July 28th, 2008
Right now I’m uploading this from a sunny field in Huntingdon, mostly because I can. I’m here at the Secret Garden Party festival to help out with the Science Tent. It’s been a blast so far, I ran a SciencePunk pub quiz, some UCL students have set up a telepathy experiment, and the very awesome Mike Bullivant of Rough Science is here too!
Today I’ll be giving a lecture on how to spot and debunk bad science, which will be fun given that most the other tents are full of salt lamps and other assorted hippy shit. I’ll upload pictures later as I only brought my trusty Holga and Lomo cameras, both of which shoot on film. Unless of course I can get some fuzzy camera phone shots. It’d be worth it, SGP is full of beautiful girls and kicking science - what more can a boy ask for?
July 25th, 2008
The Sceptical Chymist writes about designer Makoto Tokiji, who creats beautiful light sculptures from ribbons of LEDs known as electroluminescent tape. You can buy your own here. Neat!
July 21st, 2008
I spotted this on my bus to work and snapped a pic with my cameraphone. In case you’re wondering, yes, London South Bank University does offer courses in engineering.
I wonder who designed this nonsense?
July 12th, 2008
Thanks to reader Scott Miki, who visited Fort Rodd Hill & Fisgard Lighthouse National Historic Site of Canada, and has sent in photos of the fusen bakudan on diplay there. These are Japanese balloon bombs, used during the Second World War to attack the US mainland. You can read my earlier article about them here. Despite being a resounding failure, the balloon bombs were nevertheless an extraordinary feat of ingenuity, carefully adjusting their altitude by detonating small charges to shed ballast when flying too low, and venting gas when too high. Some fusen bakudan made it as far east as Michigan, although of 6,000 launched in the winter of 1944 only 310 were ever found in the US. The only casualties occurred when a group of six Oregonians on a picnic trip discovered a landed balloon, their disturbance unfortunately set off the bomb.
Scott says:
Fort Rodd Hill is still one of the best deals going - the park is very large, and one can get an annual pass to visit any time for under $10 CDN (about 5 GBP). It would take someone about 4 hours to see everything.
Sweet! Images are thumblinked so you can appreciate the giant sized detail.
Ace!
July 7th, 2008
I’d like to share with you all the joy of a recent email exchange between myself and someone at Draftfcb, a trendy marketing outfit. It all started when the following email dropped into my inbox:
SUBJECT: FUNNY VIDEO
Hi Frank
I have been reading your blog and I noticed that you like science and humor mixed together. We wanted to share with you this video we created. We thought it’s something you and your readers of SciencePunk might find interesting and entertaining. This was an actual pickle test conducted in the (removed) Pickle labs and we thought it was so interesting, we added our own commentary. Take a look and enjoy. We’d love it if you shared it with your readers too.
(link removed)
Sincerely,
Courtney Crowder
So, hey, free material, and I’m not impartial to a little viral, if it’s funny and informative. So I watch the video, and sure enough there’s a man conducting an acoustic pickle test. Who would have thought there was an actual machine to measure how loud the snap of a pickle was? Awesome, right? Well, Draftfcb clearly didn’t think so. They added a voiceover and text at the beginning of the video insisting that it was “REALLY, REALLY BORING”, so much so that they paid a couple of comedians to add their own commentary. Well, Draftfcb call them comedians. I call them ‘douchebags’. I replied:
Hi Courtney
I had no idea there was an actual pickle acoustic test! Neat. Shame about the over-dub though, it’s really un-funny. Any chance of the original video, sans the Beavis and Butthead commentary? If so I’d definitely link it.
Frank
I assume the staff at Draftfcb were too busy getting Geek Pie haircuts and frotting themselves silly over how wonderfully subversive they were, because I didn’t get a reply. However, I did get emailed again, three weeks later:
SUBJECT: food science?
Hey-
I have been a reader of Science Punk for a long time and I really appreciate your take on all forms of science. I cant find anything on your site about food science though and I am really interested in that form of science. I found this video of a REAL guy who is testing the ‘snap’ quality of pickles and I want to know more about it. The people talking over it are funny too. Can you post this and tell me a little bit about either how they really can tell which pickle is snappier or more about the equipment that tests the pickles.
Heres the video…
(same link removed)
Thanks!
Courtney Crowder
I think, mostly because Courtney is now pretending not to be a viral marketer, this constitutes an ‘epic fail’. Especially as I’ve written about food science quite a number of times. How can I reply to such a laughable attempt at subterfuge? Like this:
Hi Courtney
Thanks for getting in touch. I’m glad to hear you’re a long-time reader of my site.
Thanks for the link, sadly I don’t think it’s suitable for sciencepunk.
Best
Frank
PS - it might help in future to dispense with the made-up stories and admit you’re working for the company featured.
PPS - especially as you emailed me this same link three weeks ago saying as much.
PPPS - and even more so as I replied to the first email with my feedback on why I wasn’t going to feature it.
And if that wasn’t funny enough, check out Draftfcb’s ridiculous email footer:
This message is the property of Draftfcb and contains information which may
be privileged or confidential. It is meant only for the intended recipients
and/or their authorized agents. If you believe you have received this
message in error, please notify us immediately by return e-mail and destroy
any printed or electronic copies of the message. Any unauthorized use,
dissemination, disclosure, or copying of this message or the information
contained in it, is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful.
Thank you for your cooperation.
(A)
Your property?? Who are you kidding? It’s resting on my disc space by way of an email service that I pay for, and so long as I’m sent unsolicited invitations to do your job for you, I’ll do whatever I please with the email.
So there you have it. A crash course (and I emphasise the crash) on modern day marketing: take an interesting video, ruin it, ask other people to distribute it, ignore their feedback, then insult their intelligence. Crash and burn, Draftfcb.
July 3rd, 2008
Are you afraid of lightning? Perhaps you’re not afraid of lightning enough. Maybe you simply enjoy putting up gazebos during thunderstorms. All are good reasons for owning your own personal lightning detector. For the low low price of $79.95, you can purchase the StrikeAlert, a handy device that warns you when you’re in range of lightning bolts. Presumably so you can try dodging them.
July 1st, 2008
