(no subject)
It's been a strange day today- I'm basically completely wiped from the Rainbow's fifth birthday party yesterday and I ache EVERYWHERE (One Finger, One Thumb is a really brutal song when you're no longer 7 years old...) but I'm mostly getting things done. Just moving anywhere has become rather slow :-P
ANYWAY
What this post is actually about is Festival of the Spoken Nerd who are brilliant and who I saw on Monday with solittleshame & seiyaharris. I'm going to stick a bunch of links to awesome stuff after this review because there were MANY things I thought you guys would enjoy :D
Festival of the Spoken Nerd (Computer Says Yes) @ Cockpit Theatre
So if you haven't come across FOTSN before they've got some great stuff on their website but basically it's maths/science/nerdiness + comedy with the sort of audience who heckle in binary and who can come up with half a dozen different stupid pieces of code in less than 140 characters during the interval of a show ♥
The theme was computers on Monday and Helen Arney started their introductions by asking AQA who the main three were plus then adding a google image search. Apparently Stephen Mould is the prettiest... or the most photogenic... or just the one with the most pictures! Matt Parker shares a name with an Archbishop of Canterbury which doesn't help and Helen's page had multiple gravestones!
Then we went straight into Matt Parker's Domino Computer which... okay so it sounds RIDICULOUS but it's actually amazing AND I think it actually genuinely helped me learn a bit more about how computers worked. He started with a line of dominoes (same input and output) and then made an OR gate (two lines of dominoes that merged) and then rather impressively an AND gate (which I can't describe properly but involved one path removing an obstacle) and then it got more complicated. It was really fun to watch, even if the dominoes in the theatre didn't play nicely. They're building a HUGE version which should be able to add 3 digit numbers together in Manchester this weekend and I can't wait to see the video. And I genuinely mean that.
Incidentally I tweeted during the show that it was an awesome way to teach computing and Simon Singh retweeted it and then Helen Arney replied "If by "awesome" you mean "inducing fear+awe" ;)" ♥
What else? Helen Keen came out and talked about robots which was very funny until she started reading out bits of Terminator fanfiction and then it was just disturbing (though not as disturbing as Roxxxie the sexbot :-|)
And Simon Singh brought an ACTUAL Enigma machine! I knew quite a lot of what he was talking about but it was still interesting especially to hear some of the numbers about how uncrackable the code should be (along with the always fabulous story of the German operator who just sent strings of wwwwwwwwww and so that day's code was broken *g*) What I hadn't realised was that the reason the Enigma being cracked was kept secret after the war wasn't just in case some countries were STILL using it but also because our government was selling off the machines they'd captured and wanted to be able to read the messages the countries they sold them to were sending! Sneaky.
Helen did a history of the internet using a dial up connection (ie. which didn't work) though it's really strange hearing that dialling tone these days!
OH and the third guest was Seb Ly who's a Digital Artist and has done some amazing projects with motion sensitive technology & using lots of mobile phone screens & watching the patterns made as people play games on his website. He showed us how to make fireworks in javascript and I understood maybe the first half dozen steps? In the end he even made them shimmer <3
... I feel like I'm forgetting things here!
WAIT! Matt also showed us how all .bmp files are really just spreadsheets and is apparently developing a tool which will turn picture files into excel spreadsheets which is more or less pointless but really fun *g*
And right at the end they were going to run the Turing test between Matt & Cleverbot
(interlude- we also had a bunch of cleverbot transcripts read out at one point which made me laugh the hardest of anything that evening- song lyrics and the bot tangling itself in knots and a rather terrifying example of someone basically sexting cleverbot... idek)
only the internet connection wasn't great (HELPFUL) and then Matt was getting a really confused and worried look and eventually he admitted that some of the messages weren't him OR cleverbot and he'd suddenly realised his admin assistant might be logged on to his work computer and replying so that didn't work AT ALL but it was hilarious.
FOTSN are on tour at the moment and if they come near you then you should try and get tickets! But if you can't here are some links:
So firstly the completely amazing (and awesome) Domino Computer is going to be (hopefully) in action at the Manchester Science Festival this weekend and anyone nearby should go and see it and report back (please!)
Finding Ada is a great website about women in technology and browsing the heroines or stories pages could lose me LOTS of time. I'm only slightly ashamed this is the first I've seen of it and that I basically missed Ada Lovelace day this year :-/
Seb.Ly's website is full of his projects (including some of the digital firework stuff he showed us) but even more importantly it has the Kitten Conveyorbelt app on it ♥
Oh and speaking of kittens- my new favourite LOLcat
Also they didn't give us the link but there are SEVERAL Enigma machine simulators out there which could be quite a lot of fun as a teaching aide (or for any Guiders/Scout Leaders out there) PLUS instructions on how to make an Enigma machine from a Pringles tube... :D
ANYWAY
What this post is actually about is Festival of the Spoken Nerd who are brilliant and who I saw on Monday with solittleshame & seiyaharris. I'm going to stick a bunch of links to awesome stuff after this review because there were MANY things I thought you guys would enjoy :D
Festival of the Spoken Nerd (Computer Says Yes) @ Cockpit Theatre
So if you haven't come across FOTSN before they've got some great stuff on their website but basically it's maths/science/nerdiness + comedy with the sort of audience who heckle in binary and who can come up with half a dozen different stupid pieces of code in less than 140 characters during the interval of a show ♥
The theme was computers on Monday and Helen Arney started their introductions by asking AQA who the main three were plus then adding a google image search. Apparently Stephen Mould is the prettiest... or the most photogenic... or just the one with the most pictures! Matt Parker shares a name with an Archbishop of Canterbury which doesn't help and Helen's page had multiple gravestones!
Then we went straight into Matt Parker's Domino Computer which... okay so it sounds RIDICULOUS but it's actually amazing AND I think it actually genuinely helped me learn a bit more about how computers worked. He started with a line of dominoes (same input and output) and then made an OR gate (two lines of dominoes that merged) and then rather impressively an AND gate (which I can't describe properly but involved one path removing an obstacle) and then it got more complicated. It was really fun to watch, even if the dominoes in the theatre didn't play nicely. They're building a HUGE version which should be able to add 3 digit numbers together in Manchester this weekend and I can't wait to see the video. And I genuinely mean that.
Incidentally I tweeted during the show that it was an awesome way to teach computing and Simon Singh retweeted it and then Helen Arney replied "If by "awesome" you mean "inducing fear+awe" ;)" ♥
What else? Helen Keen came out and talked about robots which was very funny until she started reading out bits of Terminator fanfiction and then it was just disturbing (though not as disturbing as Roxxxie the sexbot :-|)
And Simon Singh brought an ACTUAL Enigma machine! I knew quite a lot of what he was talking about but it was still interesting especially to hear some of the numbers about how uncrackable the code should be (along with the always fabulous story of the German operator who just sent strings of wwwwwwwwww and so that day's code was broken *g*) What I hadn't realised was that the reason the Enigma being cracked was kept secret after the war wasn't just in case some countries were STILL using it but also because our government was selling off the machines they'd captured and wanted to be able to read the messages the countries they sold them to were sending! Sneaky.
Helen did a history of the internet using a dial up connection (ie. which didn't work) though it's really strange hearing that dialling tone these days!
OH and the third guest was Seb Ly who's a Digital Artist and has done some amazing projects with motion sensitive technology & using lots of mobile phone screens & watching the patterns made as people play games on his website. He showed us how to make fireworks in javascript and I understood maybe the first half dozen steps? In the end he even made them shimmer <3
... I feel like I'm forgetting things here!
WAIT! Matt also showed us how all .bmp files are really just spreadsheets and is apparently developing a tool which will turn picture files into excel spreadsheets which is more or less pointless but really fun *g*
And right at the end they were going to run the Turing test between Matt & Cleverbot
(interlude- we also had a bunch of cleverbot transcripts read out at one point which made me laugh the hardest of anything that evening- song lyrics and the bot tangling itself in knots and a rather terrifying example of someone basically sexting cleverbot... idek)
only the internet connection wasn't great (HELPFUL) and then Matt was getting a really confused and worried look and eventually he admitted that some of the messages weren't him OR cleverbot and he'd suddenly realised his admin assistant might be logged on to his work computer and replying so that didn't work AT ALL but it was hilarious.
FOTSN are on tour at the moment and if they come near you then you should try and get tickets! But if you can't here are some links:
So firstly the completely amazing (and awesome) Domino Computer is going to be (hopefully) in action at the Manchester Science Festival this weekend and anyone nearby should go and see it and report back (please!)
Finding Ada is a great website about women in technology and browsing the heroines or stories pages could lose me LOTS of time. I'm only slightly ashamed this is the first I've seen of it and that I basically missed Ada Lovelace day this year :-/
Seb.Ly's website is full of his projects (including some of the digital firework stuff he showed us) but even more importantly it has the Kitten Conveyorbelt app on it ♥
Oh and speaking of kittens- my new favourite LOLcat
Also they didn't give us the link but there are SEVERAL Enigma machine simulators out there which could be quite a lot of fun as a teaching aide (or for any Guiders/Scout Leaders out there) PLUS instructions on how to make an Enigma machine from a Pringles tube... :D