Hi folks – an ultra quick update here to advise you that I’ll be appearing at the Australian National Maritime Museum for the latest Museum Comedy gig, the Mythic Creatures Comedy Tour. It’s an after hours trip through the special Mythic Creatures exhibit, featuring yours truly, Dave Bloustien (Good News Week) and Amanda Buckley (Beaconsfield: The Musical). For more details, hit the Museum Comedy web site!
A Good Month
It’s been a busy month for me, as you might imagine, what with four shows in the Comedy Festival and appearances in others. As well as +1 Sword, Dungeon Crawl and the Museum Comedy programme – all of which are going very well, by the way – this Friday is one of the special ones: the Political Asylum Comedy Caucus, two hours of top-notch topical political stand-up from our regular team, plus Rod Quantock and a special international guest (I’ll give you a hint: he’s from New York). On top of all that, it was my birthday, my Mum’s come for a visit, my beloved opened her smashing new cabaret show (First Against the Wall), and I’m still working three days a week.
Hardly surprising then that I’ve not blogged much; I’ve hardly had time to catch up to my beloved in Dragon Age: Origins (which is better than Mass Effect, I think). I had to break my busy silence though to celebrate, because it’s been a good month for science!
First, the Large Hadron Collider has been turned on. It’s been a long time coming, and the world hasn’t ended; indeed the press didn’t seem to notice until it was all over. Now, of course, we have to look at the data that the various sensors and arrays and detectors have collected, and see what it tells us about the Universe. It’s going to be an exciting few years…
It’s also been a good month for Simon Singh. In 2008, he mentioned in an opinion piece in The Guardian that he felt certain chiropractic treatments promoted by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) were “bogus”. For his trouble, he was sued – successfully, in the first instance – by the BCA under the UK’s harsh libel laws. This week? He won an appeal, and what’s more, the appeal court judges were very critical of the BCA’s behaviour – it looked like it was trying to “silence one of its critics” – and of the original judge, who has “marginalised or underrated the value now placed by the law on public debate”. Read more about it in The Telegraph.
In a similar vein, the University of East Anglia scientists whose emails were stolen and publicised as “Climategate”, which supposedly revealed the “truth” behind the “Anthropogenic Global Warming conspiracy”, were cleared by a parliamentary enquiry. The response recognises that they could have been more open in sharing their data, but most of it was already publicly available and the methods for obtaining and analysing it published. They had a culture of “stonewalling” critics at the university, but then when the majority of requests for your data are from people hoping to undermine your research, that might be forgiven… The main point, though, was that plenty of other institutions have come to the same conclusions from data, so even if they had falsified anything, other research still rejects any notion of a conspiracy.
Those are my reasons for a good month. I’ll talk about them some more, with more jokes in, on Friday night. Maybe I’ll see you there?
Set phasers to “Laugh”…?
So said the Melbourne International Comedy Festival iPhone app. It seems they truly have embraced the way of the geek – if not entirely successfully.
Anyway, the Man in the Lab Coat will be out and about a lot this year, and while a new solo science show is still a little way off – there is one in the making, I promise! – there’s no shortage of opportunities to see me be funny.
The biggest news is that the Melbourne Museum Comedy Tour is back and bigger than ever! For the first time we have international tour guides, not six but nine performances, and no Ben McKenzie. Yes, it’s true, I am producing but not performing this year, but that just means someone else will be writing new dinosaur jokes for your edification! As well as the tour, there’s also Melbourne Museum Lunchtime Comedy, a Saturday lunchtime series science and history based comedy from some of the smartest stars of the Comedy Festival. The whole thing’s so big now that it deserves its own web site – so I’ve given it one. Head over to museumcomedy.com to find out who’s on when and where!
The main reason I won’t be doing jokes about dinosaurs is because I’ll be too busy doing jokes about dragons. Yes, the sell-out, literally underground hit of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, +1 Sword, returns for another season at Caz Reitops Dirty Secrets in Collingwood. If you’ve ever wondered what Dungeons & Dragons is all about, now’s your chance to wield a wand and swing a sword and learn everything you never knew you could know about the world’s first and most popular fantasy role-playing game. And if that’s not enough, for three nights only you can watch some of your favourite comedians from around the festival go on the archetypal monster-killing, treasure collecting adventure in the improvised show, Dungeon Crawl. You can find out lots more about the show over at my production company web site, Shaolin Punk.
Plus, I’ll be doing a few guest spots around the festival, including the comedy festival special edition of Political Asylum and the second Annual General Meeting of my old sketchtastic friends, the Anarchist Guild Social Committee. Details in the new and improved gigs list to the right, and on the [intlink id=”186″ type=”page”]Where and When?[/intlink] page.
So yeah – it’s a big festival for the Man. And there’s more news to come, so stay tuned!
Red rover cross over
It’s official – the Mars Rover, Spirit, is stuck in the mud. Well…sand, but that’s not an amusing cliché. Trapped in the sands of the Martian desert, Spirit has been unable to move for ten months, and has now been declared a “stationary research platform”. The news doesn’t seem to have reached the official NASA Mars Exploration Rover site, but you can find the announcement on their news page.
It seems unlikely we’ll hear much more about Spirit now until it’s covered with enough dust that it cannot recharge via solar power and goes silent forever – or at least until there’s a stiff breeze (as my beloved pointed out, this is not unlike what happens to Wall-E). But it’s striking how the language NASA uses is very…well, very Yes Minister. Spirit isn’t “dead” or “stuck”, it’s “no longer a fully mobile robot”; it’s not “retired”, it’s “entered a new phase”. I kept expecting to hear that it was “very happy with its brave decision” and that we can expect more reports from Spirit “in the fullness of time”. Or even: “Spirit’s close colleague, Opportunity, has not been available for comment.”
But for the definitive last word on the end of Spirit’s active life, I must pass you on to that ever excellent web comic XKCD; their piece on the subject is simply titled “Spirit“.
One more thing…
I’ve seen a bunch of different dinosaur pictures over the years, all of them highly speculative when it comes to colour; the colouration and look of dinosaurs has generally been in the hands of artists, not scientists, because you can’t figure those things out from bones or even skin and feather impressions. But not any more, or at least not for Sinosauropteryx.
Clever, clever scientists at Bristol University, led by Mike Benton and working with Chinese palaeontologists, have used electron microscopes to find imprints of the melanosomes that carry pigment in hair and feather cells, and by doing so have deduced that Sinosauropteryx – a small theropod in the Compsognathis family, and the earliest dinosaur known to have feathers – had a “russet” mohawk. (I’m reminded of our old friend Amargasaurus at Melbourne Museum, though its “mohawk” was made of bony spines, not feathers.) Just as importantly, the presence of melanosomes also puts to bed the debate over whether the structures are really feathers: they are.
I wonder now if modern punks will dye their hair in authentic shades from the Cretaceous, or if cosmetics manufacturers will see fit to release “theropod vermillion” rouge or lip gloss? The possibilities are without number…