September 27, 2010
2010 Highlights Reel
Highlights from Guerilla Science’s 2010 summer season at the Secret Garden Party, Lovebox and the Secret Cinema’s homage to Blade Runner. Featuring explosions, flame tubes, mad chemists, flavour feasts, neural maps and tasty experiments.
September 17, 2010
The Sensecam & The Secret Garden Party
We follow neuroscientist Adrian Owen’s gadabouts through the Secret Garden Party in July 2010 – from raves to our secret island hideaway to – with a handy Sensecam, a nifty device that takes a photograph every few seconds to create a continuous record of all his experiences.
“Almost everything you experience is laid down in your brain, somewhere, but for the most part we can’t access it,” he explains. The most interesting part about the Sensecam record, he believes, is what it teaches us about human memory: only the things we might want to remember are actually made available for easy access. “And this shows us how important social interactions are for constructing memories… a large component of ‘memory’ is what you were thinking or feeling at the time you experienced these events.”
September 7, 2010
Normally I don’t bother with umbrellas
A guest post by cosmologist Andrew Pontzen, on his experience with us at the Green Man festival in Wales.
I’d like to begin by thanking a cafe in Cambridge.
It lends, free of charge, umbrellas to its patrons. Not just any umbrellas: these are the kind of ten-feet-wide uber-umbrellas that you don’t want to be stuck walking behind.
Now, it’s true that umbrellas are more-or-less all the cafe has going for it. In fact, I’m not about to take back the umbrella, mainly because I can’t face going back to the cafe. But nonetheless, that cafe made a crucial contribution to my enjoyment of this year’s Green Man Festival in Wales. I just wanted to acknowledge that up-front.
Normally I don’t bother with umbrellas. Unwieldy. A simple coat will do.
But when Wales has rain, it seems, it’s not just any rain: it’s the kind of rain that drenches you in less than a minute. It’s the kind of rain that a raincoat just can’t protect against. It’s the kind of rain, in short, that only a ten-foot uber-umbrella can combat.
And now I have such an umbrella in my car, waiting for the post-apocalyptic day when I’ll revisit ‘cafe underwhelming’ for the last remaining undercooked baked potato in existence. (I will return the umbrella then.)
Talking about science to small groups at a music festival sounds crazy until you consider the possibility of talking to small groups about science at a music festival in the pouring rain, while using an iPad to show pictures and an iPod to play Lewis Dartnell’s ‘Sounds of the Universe’. While walking through the mud next to Mia (in a spacesuit painted in water-soluble shiny paint). After delivering an introductory talk in a yurt tent powered by people pedalling on static bicycles.
I am amazed, amazed, that people put up with it. In fact, they didn’t just put up with it: they were enthusiastic; they wanted to know more; they wanted to discuss the geometry of spacetime; they even wanted to hold my umbrella. Not to steal it, you understand, just to hold it while I fumbled around looking for another picture on my iPad.
So I can honestly say the Green Man Festival was as much of a learning experience for me as for those brave souls who tried to listen.
Mind you: having struggled through 36 hours of pouring rain, we were treated to an appearance of the Sun. Then it turns out that iPad screens are so insanely shiny that no-one can see a thing on them. It’s the first time I’ve been upstaged by anyone (in this case, Lewis Dartnell) bringing a stack of paper with images printed on it. “This might work better”, he said.
But when it started to rain again, he didn’t have an umbrella. I did.
By Andrew Pontzen, a cosmologist who has finally dried out.
September 5, 2010
Green Man: Flavour Feast
This summer I learnt many new skills: how to be a judge, build an island, cook pannacotta. But perhaps the strangest task I got to grips with was the creation of alarmingly-coloured spaghetti and ‘caviar’ out of agar and pureed vegetables.
Making gelatinous green beads and red spaghetti is a messy process involving rubber tubing, pipettes, syringes, and spraying hot red sauce all over your kitchen (or that might just be me) but I think the results were well worth it, as I hope you can see from the pretty pictures below.
So why engage in such culinary oddities, I hear you ask. Well, for the fourth time this summer we dished up a Flavour Feast to the punters at the Green Man festival and my curious creations were on the menu.
Joining us for the feast were the fabulous Becki and Rachel, dressed in matching white smocks and hairnets, while I did my best butler impression.
I won’t go into the details of the science behind the Flavour Feast as I covered it in a previous post, but I think the audience had a good time eating, drinking, talking and painting their tongues blue…
You can see more photos of our Flavour Feast here.
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