Intermittency

Can I scream?

I completed one of my teenage dreams by seeing New Noise live on Monday. It was absolutely mind-blowingly epic. Refused may have sold out, but they still fucking rock.

The closing of that chapter – after Refused’s 14-year hiatus – is a happy one for me, unlike this one:

Which breaks my heart a bit. Tony Sly, aged only 41 and with a young family, passed away. I managed to catch him at an acoustic show in 2010. That night, I shared a dorm room with a Japanese fan of Tony’s, who saw him at 4 shows on a Japanese tour, then had deliberately planned his backpacking trip to Australia so he would be able to see another 3. I imagine the poor guy is devastated right now.

Anyway, I’ve kind of been enjoying a break from regular blogging – there’s still writing going on, behind the scenes, but I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking-y stuff at work and elsewhere lately and I’m enjoying using my spare time for other things. Those things include slacklining, Wing Chun and blues bars, among others. I’ve also been struggling for inspiration with my camera to boot, which doesn’t help the blog flow. A few ideas are bubbling around though, it won’t be long…

A few sparks in the dark.

And perhaps, as if there isn’t enough inspiration out there in the world already, I could look back two years and find my thoughtful 23 year old self struggling with the concept of science in society.

Not much has changed?

2012

Sorry about the lack of activity. I’m indulging myself in a sporting binge, largely due to the fact that every sport at the Olympics is available on demand this year, which is a total first. Suddenly my interest in everything from volleyball to canoe slalom can be fully realised.
Here’s a sport NOT at the Olympics:

Competitive bodyboarding is good and all, but you can’t beat randoms at your local going crazy.

Zombielab

I haven’t talked much about my work on this blog, except maybe to mention how busy it gets. The last two weeks have been an excellent example of the sheer craziness it can reach. Anna Starkey and I, with help from some of the other Lottolab team, put on an event for the Science Museum Lates which outstripped anything I’ve done before in terms of organisation, planning and production value. The next day, though, I was little more than a walking corpse – quite a come down after 15 solid hours of fast-tempo work, followed by celebrations!

We had musicians, a cocktail bar, a mass experiment incorporating real-time updating photographs, projectors and computer-based testing, and had a graffiti artist paint a fantastic mural onto a wall of canvas bags, which was then dismantled and taken home by visitors. The organisation encompassed ordering, designing and making signage, testing the various concepts (the indoor graffiti was particularly tricky due to aerosols indoors), assessing risks, arguing out details of the science experiments, organising volunteers, assembling the gallery space in the right way, promotion, negotiation, A/V, lighting, the list goes on.

It was a lot of different threads to keep an eye on, but we got enough of them right to deliver what worked out to be a great fun night. I wasn’t exactly able to relax and take it all in, because I was doing my best to ensure things were running to plan, and scrambling to fix problems as they arose. It was also the first event I’ve actually been responsible for in an official capacity, which taught me a lot about the importance of compartmentalising the event, delegating responsibility and leaving plenty of time in case things go wrong! Below are some pictures Anna took on the night:

Milo Tchais creating his amazing artwork. I should leave it to the pros. See his work by clicking on the image.

Anna Meredith, a top young composer, absolutely rocked the place. Click on the photo to go to her website, and check out her music for free.

The Brain Bar

We managed to get almost 500 people to take part in our experiment about donation and attractiveness, and we’ve now go to crunch the data and see what came out of it. But more importantly we hope that lots of people were able to come in and get thinking about science; simply by making people take part in an experiment, they were primed to ask questions, to wonder what they might do differently, or to consider if they’ve got an answer for the question we’re asking.

And we had a rad cocktail bar.

Oh yeah. Follow Lottolab on Twitter!

Oops, I lied

Here’s another picture of Battersea Bridge.

It’s because I have a cold. Honest. It’s impairing my ability to write lengthy, gripping, prose.

A bus, on a bridge, going to Battersea. Click for full size image!

Something they can’t take down

Since my last two posts have been about videos that were unceremoniously yanked from public view, I’ve decided to put up something they can’t take down!

It's a tree. I find the shallow focal distance slightly odd, yet appealing for this scene.

Life continues to bubble along… I promise there will be some content-packed posts soon, I just need to unpack and get my groove back!