It's also Cambridge Science Festival week
And, judging by things yesterday on the New Museums Site, one of the busiest Science on Saturdays ever too. We worked out that I've been involved in Science Week since practically the dawn of time; it's not always been jitterbugs, but I was around the first time ExSciTe ever did them, which was Science Week, ooh, many years ago. We must be doing something right though. One family who visited yesterday said it was the fourth year in a row that they had built jitterbugs with us, and that their small son had been planning his for most of the previous year...
My extremely unrepresentative sampling shows that Bottle Your Genes (which when spoken invariably makes one think first of blue denim) was one of the most popular activities, or one of the least well sign-posted; but I think the former, as the queue once you got there was not just out of the door but down the stairs, round the corridor, etc. People were so desperate to find activities which didn't have huge queues that they were even willing to join the denizens of the Engineering Department outreach section who were building submarines, outside in freezing conditions. Impressive dedication, CUED people! The queue for Mark Lewney's lecture didn't all fit into the lecture theatre, and I was extremely jealous of the folk that were there early enough to get in. I've only heard the 3-minute version of his talk, plus bits of his rehearsal earlier in the day yesterday, but he's damn good, and cute Scouse physicists playing rock guitar are few and far between. If the queue for Mark's talk on superstrings was long, I dread to think what the queue for the Science of Harry Potter lecture was like!
(Photo archive of jitterbugs yesterday, for hardcore 'bug addicts.)
My extremely unrepresentative sampling shows that Bottle Your Genes (which when spoken invariably makes one think first of blue denim) was one of the most popular activities, or one of the least well sign-posted; but I think the former, as the queue once you got there was not just out of the door but down the stairs, round the corridor, etc. People were so desperate to find activities which didn't have huge queues that they were even willing to join the denizens of the Engineering Department outreach section who were building submarines, outside in freezing conditions. Impressive dedication, CUED people! The queue for Mark Lewney's lecture didn't all fit into the lecture theatre, and I was extremely jealous of the folk that were there early enough to get in. I've only heard the 3-minute version of his talk, plus bits of his rehearsal earlier in the day yesterday, but he's damn good, and cute Scouse physicists playing rock guitar are few and far between. If the queue for Mark's talk on superstrings was long, I dread to think what the queue for the Science of Harry Potter lecture was like!
(Photo archive of jitterbugs yesterday, for hardcore 'bug addicts.)