Science Tourist: Science Museum in London

Sorry for taking you to yet another museum (next week I’ll take you on a geology-themed hike) but I saw zombies at the Science Museum in London last week so we have to go there first.

Science Museum

There aren’t always zombies in the museum. It was part of a special event. The start of “Zombie Lab” was a room with agricultural dioramas (part of the permanent display, one presumes) between which zombies were being checked by doctors. It felt like we just walked onto the set of a very low budget movie. Where was the science?

Science Museum
Continue reading “Science Tourist: Science Museum in London”

Chris Hadfield and BNL make a new world in orbit

CBC’s video player does not play nicely with WordPress for video embedding. So, click the space station below to play the video from CBC Music. We’ll wait right here for you to come back. Please come back…

I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing?)

On Friday, CBC premiered a song collaboration like no other. Astronaut and future space station commander Chris Hadfield grabbed a guitar while in orbit and played along with the Barenaked Ladies and a choir from Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts. Well, technically, he played along with a recording made earlier, and BNL and the choir played along with him. For a few reasons, I wasn’t expecting to love this. When I heard about the project, and then again when I saw the video on Friday, I didn’t pay too much attention to it. It seemed like a fun idea but one that wasn’t much deeper than Astronaut + beloved Canadian band + youth choir = Awwwww The other reason, is that as a long-time member of child and youth choirs, I’m still recovering from singing such other patriotic tunes as the Ont-ari-ari-ario song*, so there’s something about perfect-for-school-choirs projects like this that makes me a little uneasy. Continue reading “Chris Hadfield and BNL make a new world in orbit”

London scio13 Watch Party

I was not at Science Online last week. I went in 2007 and in 2009 and I keep meaning to go back, but every year something comes up. It’s ironic that work is preventing me from hanging out with the community that got me into the work I do in the first place, but most of all it’s frustrating to not be where the action is. These are my people! Why was I not there?

Luckily, this year there was an opportunity to join in from a distance via locally organised Watch Parties, where people could get together to watch some of the sessions. Since nobody was organising one in the UK yet, I stepped forward, with Erika Cule, to organise one in London.

We managed to book a great space, the Imperial College Union Cinema, where we could project the talks on a cinema screen, and drag around chairs wherever we wanted to sit.

Scio13 London Watch Party

Scio13 London Watch Party
Can you guess which of these people is not on Twitter?
Continue reading “London scio13 Watch Party”

There is grandeur in Lucretius’ view of life

stilllifewithpeachesLast year as I was reading Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, I was struck by how much that book foreshadowed the tremendous cultural force that modern science exerts on our understanding of nature:

“As you read the Voyage, and become absorbed its imagery its grand scope, it is easy to miss what is absent. Darwin, in all of his arguments, inferences, hypotheses, and narratives of natural history, quietly refuses to ever invoke God as an explanation. The geographical distribution of animals, the causes of extinctions, the composition of the rock on mountain ranges, the layout of the vast plains of the South American Pampas, are all explained exclusively in terms of natural processes…Darwin and his fellow scientists infer majestic stories of our origin and that of the world around us, stories that have now largely supplanted the competing stories of other major belief systems in our society.”

2,000 years ago, Lucretius was working at a similar project, except that his refusal to invoke divinity as an explanation was anything but quiet. In book V of The Nature of Things, “Cosmos and Civilization”, Lucretius presents a materialist creation story, which he specifically contrasts with a belief in creation by will of the gods: Continue reading “There is grandeur in Lucretius’ view of life”

The Walking Dead’s Bloody Mess 3

Did you know that there is research showing that being exposed to “spoilers” increases enjoyment of a story? True. Do I think you believe me or the research? No. In fact, I think you will treat this evidence with the same condescension political pundits applied to the predictions of Nate Silver. Furthermore, I think you will completely ignore the object lesson afforded you by the 2012 election forecasting. Is this the most overwrought and evidence-laden spoiler alert ever? Yes. You have been warned.

Let’s get the first major spoiler out of the way. At the end of The Walking Dead season 2, we discover that you do not need to be bitten by a zombie to become a zombie. You merely have to die. This leads to a lot of scenes of survivors sticking pointy objects into the brain cases of their recently deceased or mortally wounded friends in a practical act of mercy.

If you die, you kind of lie there for a little bit – just long enough for a father and son to share a moment – then you rise up and get your zombie on. This means that everyone in The Walking Dead universe has been exposed to the zombie pathogen. All survivors are carriers – zombies in potentia. This also means that the zombie pathogen is even weirder than it already had to be. Continue reading “The Walking Dead’s Bloody Mess 3”