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The Natural History Museum (NHM) has been running their late night ‘After Hours’ event for longer than most similar events. So it seems complacent that I have not yet attended one of these events and provided you with my unsolicited opinion. I could look at my toes, shuffle my feet and mumble something about stamp-collectors, but that would be churlish and beside the point. The truth is that I had been lazy about dragging my feet to ‘After Hours’ and they stopped doing them a year ago. Linked to the European Researchers’ night, the NHM resurrected ‘After Hours’ as part of the pan-European science love-in. Running since 2005 the Researchers’ nights aim to engage the public directly with European researchers in a massive PR exercise. 2010 marks the first year that the NHM has engaged with the event.

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Over the many, seminars, lectures, panel discussions and other such events that I have been to, it has become patently clear to me that asides from an interesting topic and expert contributors, what an event really needs for success, is a good chairperson. Quite often events with a wonderful premise are let down by poor execution. On Monday I re-visited the eclectically and verbosely named Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) and witnessed a great example of how to chair an event.

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Communicating abstract subtleties is difficult. When you are communicating science, abstract subtleties can often tend towards the intangible and obtuse. Most scientists have a brain that is capacious enough that you would expect them to be able to make a reasonable effort in communicating their ideas beyond a specialist audience. Football can also be littered with abstract subtleties. Why on earth are 90, 000 people sat in a circle, watching 22 men kick a ball around, while two other men are hopelessly screaming? Why do people argue about the ball crossing the line when video technology exists? Is the offside rule really that difficult to understand? Who is going to play on the left for England? Vuvu-what-now? Sadly these questions and their answers will always be beyond the sub-GCSE eloquence of the average football professional. These weighty topics often lead to footballers responding to journalists’ questions using an arbitrary combination of their emergency lexicon: err, game, well, halves, two, you, me, know, positive, fans, class, manager, head, down, up, quality, opposition, respect, better, next, match and err. So when the Dana centre announced that they were going to air the England vs. Algeria group game with their own panel of scientific pundits, the nerdy football fan in me hoped to get a better insight into the subtleties of football beyond the inane punditry provided by ITV.

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The Grant Museum of Zoology is part of a small group of museums and collections that are formed under the auspices of University College London (UCL). In my endeavour to better characterise the capital’s scientific-culture, this obscure little museum seemed worthy of scrutiny; even more so when I found that they had an active events schedule, with notable speakers such as Mark Cawardine (that fella recently seen standing next to Stephen Fry explaining conservation and that). Mark was due to speak about the ‘Last Chance to See’ series that aired on the BBC, which he filmed with Stephen.

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On Tuesday 11^th I decided to visit the Grandaddy of them all, the original institution dedicated to free public lectures, Gresham College. Founded in 1597 the college has 413 years of public lecture history. In a meeting at the college – after a lecture given by Christopher Wren – the Royal Society was founded. Given the links between the two learned institutions, the college is also holding events in commemoration of the Royal Society’s 350^th year. As such, I thought it appropriate to attend a talk entitled, ‘Wren, Hooke and Willis: Divine geometry and natural design’.

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This Monday, after months of waiting for an interesting topic or a gap in my schedule I finally managed to get myself to a “Skeptics in the Pub” meeting. Running since 1999 the meetings have quickly achieved notoriety. Sadly I found more reasons to consider the meetings notorious in the disreputable sense of the word.

The speaker for Monday’s talk was Ariane Sherine, who was due to talk about the “Atheist Bus Campaign” that she spearheaded

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Today sees the recording of the second in Radio 4’s new science series – The Infinite Monkey Cage (TIMC). Catching the show was a rather serendipitous affair; I’d missed the numerous trailers that my post show research uncovered in the blog-o-sphere. I’m glad I caught the show and even more glad that I had checked out the blogs afterwards.

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Theory is an odd thing, often significantly subjective and constantly morphing with new evidence. As the winter months draw in I decided that there was an ever increasing pertinence in providing all you guys and girls with a review of a couple of ways that you can amuse yourselves on those more inclement of nights. The two series that caught my attention were BBC 1’s “Bang Goes the Theory” and “It’s Only a Theory” on BBC 4.

Art Meets Science?

The Victoria and Albert museum (V&A) is not the first place that you might think of to engage in a little bit of cultural science activity. I don’t want to lead you down the garden path – hinting at scientific gems before cynically dashing your hopes. The V&A is not a place to regularly get a scientific fix, however when a blurb for an exhibition says it will showcase work to “…explore the potential of low-energy lighting and alternative energy sources”, you can see how a science lover might be interested. When the same exhibition “…aims to spur debate, exploring new thinking… about lighting and energy use” you certainly can see how science is directly relevant. If you still weren’t convinced of the scientific relevance of a V&A exhibition then the claim that exhibits are concerned with “…how we interact with light and its psychological and physiological effects” clinches the argument that the exhibition has a serious scientific vein.

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As ever summer has brought with it a diffusion of scientific activity. Academics take time off, go to conferences and then get caught up in the machinations and logisitcs of a new teaching semester. As such, events seem be a little thin on the ground. So while we wait for all the über-brains to return I shall leave you with a website that asks a very important question and an amusing yet not wholey trivial answer.