Dr Laura James's writings

A Smart Festival at Mercedes World in Brooklands, Sam and Zoe's wedding, and another Impington sunset.

BarCamp is coming to Cambridge! BarCamb will happen on 24th August. It should be interesting to see how the web2.0ish BarCamp types blend with the science people local to Hinxton. Hopefully there will be some interesting sessions anyway. There's a MiniBar in London tomorrow too, which sounds like a hoot, although I won't be there.

A beautiful picture of "the graceful concentric arcs traced by the stars" as the earth rotates. (Thanks to Amyas for the link!) It's part of the wonderful Astronomy Picture of the Day series.

The plants turned out to be from Michael's grandmother - many thanks! Michael did a good job of planting them out before we went away for the weekend. Whilst away we visited the red squirrels at Formby Point. Much of the weekend we had brilliant sunshine; hard to imagine the floods elsewhere. When we got back to Cambridge, it seemed as if it could have been dry all weekend, and there was a terrific sunset.

This morning, before 8am, the doorbell rang. It was a delivery man with 27 baby plants for Michael. "Must be planted within 24 hours." We have clematis and honeysuckle and pinks, and no idea who sent them. There should be an emergency gardener we could call out to identify homes for them in the garden, bring some pots, and do some urgent planting out.

I'm a fan of Neil Gaiman 's writing, both novels and shorter format work, although I've never managed to get into his comic books. Stardust has now been made into a film, and comes out in the US next month, and the UK sometime in the autumn. There's always a slight worry when magical and beautifully described books appear in film, but the TV spot for Stardust looks promising, and Gaiman seems happy with it too. I'm looking forward to the release.

Today a few dozen bikes rode in formation into Cambridge to mark Bike to Work Day. I was on the back of one of them. The police were there too to tell everyone what to do. The riders got free high visibility jackets with various slogans to encourage people to bike, "Fed up of traffic?", "I'll get there before you" and so on, along with a URL: http://takeyourbiketestnow.com . The bike test is changing, and so if you are thinking of learning, now is the time.

On Sunday we saw the current Harry Potter film, which was quite enjoyable, although perhaps less strong than the storyline of the book; the necessary trimming to fit within a feature length removed some of the subtleties of the plot. There was less showing the strength and potential of Neville than I would have liked, for example; and although the London flight scenes were lovely, whatever happened to stealth? Moody would surely have disapproved of buzzing tourist boats... I'm looking forward to the final book, although I fear my pre-order (from what a friend splendidly calls WarlikeSingleBosomedLadyDotCom) may arrive in a place where I am not, delaying my reading by a day or so. I don't expect stunning writing, but at least a rollicking storyline. Last weekend we went camping on the bike ; we managed to take all the usual stuff, and there was still plenty of space for me on the back. On Thursday we visited the former Millennium Dome, the interior of which is a pedestrian boule...

I spent most of yesterday at a secondary school in central Cambridge, explaining the world of engineering and work to a large group of 14 year olds. We spent most of the day examining bridges - what factors have to be considered, what kinds of structure are strong and why, how you can model a bridge using computer aided design (CAD) tools on a PC, and how you can build a bridge from spaghetti if you try hard enough. I was impressed by the computer suite, which had enough PCs that each teenager had their own. Quite a few of them got the hang of the software quickly and were designing and testing their bridge ideas without help. Others struggled, particularly with starting afresh with a new bridge design. As I explained the process (click to open the File menu, then either Save your current design or click New Design to start again) I realised that in some cases the problem was not unfamiliarity with the Windows paradigm, but that some of the teenagers couldn't read . This startled m...

Last night there was a huge amount of rain, and sun. At one point, looking out of the front door, I could see streaks of light sparkling against the dark sky as huge raindrops fell through a shaft of sunlight. Although my phone does not normally capture unusual lighting conditions at all well, I was quite pleased with this one.

The first Crucible Lab was last weekend. It was very tiring - lots of thinking, talking and drinking - but the awardees are a great crowd (following on from previous stars like Sue ). Michael has put the photos up here . The best speaker was Mark Miodownik , winning hands-down with his Materials Library and artistic collaborations. Best poster was Andrew Byde from HP, a talented artist, and best poster talk the enviable Jon Copley , who spends three months each year at sea (or under sea, for preference). As well as networking, pondering career aims, figuring out science policy structures and learning how to handle the media, I was finally able to thank Lord Oxburgh personally for providing the most excellent sausages on sticks !