Dr Laura James's writings

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A pleasant consequence of living near a jam factory is that sometimes the village smells of strawberries. If you listen to the Archers , and have read all the Harry Potter books, you are likely to enjoy Lantana2's fantasy . Last year, Michael and I attended an excellent Wine Appreciation course at Impington Village College. It is on again during the autumn term and I would strongly recommend it to anyone who would like to learn more about wine in an informal setting. If they don't get the numbers, the course will be cancelled, so do consider registering and joining us! It was so good, we're taking the course again.

We've had the Wattson at home for a while. Using the Holmes software (subtle naming there!) I can view our household electricity usage over the last few months. Holmes may be in beta, but it makes lovely graphs. We've been glad to find that our "resting" power consumption is quite low, even with the server running. You can see the kettle boiling and so on in the morning, and the washing machine (ouch!) in the evening. Our consumption goes up when Michael stays at home with a cold, boiling the kettle and running extra computers... We can also spot the weekends when we are at home more, and more likely to be running washing machines and so on: It's very interesting to see how our power usage varies over the hours, days and months. I look forward to the winter to see how that changes things! (Aside: I recently read Arthur and George by Julian Barnes - a fascinating book. I'd recommend it to all those who like the naming of Wattson!)

I've put up the photos from last week's Smart Festival . Everyone should watch the fascinating video (" shift happens ") about what the 21st century is probably going to be like - I spotted it here on John's blog .

I was unaware until yesterday that Cambridge had a Fringe festival, which starts this week. This year, the Fringe included a science comedy cabaret last night at Footlights, and all the hip scientists from the region were there. The evening started with Mark Stevenson , who did some traditional standup with a vaguely scientific spin. Lots of sex and a small amount of monkeys. (Photos are the traditionally bad mobile phone camera in bar style, I'm afraid!) Harry Witchel was up next, "you can see me on Big Brother, but you're better off not". He eschewed straight standup in favour of a lecturing style, well-suited to his audience, and presented some scientific analysis of dating and body language. It was a great act, only slightly let down by his audio-visual aids (movies are not best shown on a laptop screen, picked up by a CCTV camera, and relayed to an LCD panel!). Finally, we heard from Ron Laskey , the creator of Songs for Cynical Scientists, and the man who wrote

AlertMe employees apparently do not wash up their mugs. We have therefore been given our own mugs to force us to wash up. They are lovely mugs; although not the easiest to wash.