New season at the RI

Very crowded in the concourse area of Vauxhall tube station at around 1800 on this Monday evening. Many more seemed to be going down than were coming up which seemed odd, but the tube man said normal for the time of day.

Interested to see that the high value art gallery in Albemarle Street noticed at reference 1 had moved from very low content art to low content art, that is to say art involving triangles and more than one colour. See reference 6.

Goat all present and correct. Not too busy.

Unusual choice of event in that it was in chat-show format, not something I usually go for, and called 'Visions of the future'. One master of ceremonies and four ten-minute speakers. All bar one (Julia Slingo) professional communicators and all bar one (Philip Ball) professional scientists. Question time afterwards fairly much a waste of space as far as I was concerned.

I found the master of ceremonies, Jim Al-Khalili particularly irritating, the science writer Philip Ball slightly less so. The latter was the only one to speak sitting, made sensible remarks about such things as the quest for consciousness (about which I do actually know something), but this last was not enough to blot out the irritation. Fortunately, the three ladies were much better.

Julia Slingo, whom we had heard before she retired, and noticed at reference 7, did well on climate change. She recycled one of her 'nice visuals of clouds swirling around the globe' and gave us a clear statement on the what and why of climate change. I also took away the fact that ice ages happened on a different time scale to global warming and were all to do with small variations in the tilt of the earth's axis relative to the plane of the solar system. Entirely different. Then, as it happens, I was reading in the NYRB just yesterday about the little ice age, perhaps peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries, with one of the contributory factors said to be the eruption of Huaynaputina in Peru in 1600. Maybe Slingo did not have time, on this occasion, for this wrinkle on the tilting orbit story.

Aarathi Prasad gave a quick tour of the state of DNA testing. From which I took away that fact that in fairly short order this testing has become orders of magnitude cheaper and quicker. To the point where there are tools not much bigger than mobile phones, about the size of the tool they use to test my INR level (a warfarin thing) at my GP surgery.

And Anna Ploszajski wound up with a quick tour of materials science. I was very taken with her as a person and she shared some interesting factlets from her field. Some of which we had heard about before, at the talk noticed at reference 8. Some talk of plastic films which could change shape fast enough to behave like the birds' wings needed to make Leonardo's sketches of aeroplanes fly. But no mention of perovskites.

A worthwhile outing, despite the irritations. And when the irritation reached a critical level, I distracted myself by counting the heads in the opposite segment of the (round) lecture theatre. A counting which I found quite difficult, but I was able to be fairly confident about the number being in the high 70's. Perhaps 79. I imagine that with practise one could develop tricks and techniques for doing this sort of thing. Similar in difficulty to counting the floors in a very tall building from (say) twenty five yards away, something else which I try from time to time.

Picked up some sixty year old National Geographic's at Raynes Park, very quaint, to which I shall return in due course.

Passed a couple of unpleasant looking adolescents in the Epsom McDonald's on our way to the Rifleman. White males and unpleasant enough to have left their bicycles sprawled all over the pavement. I did not attempt to do anything about them. Later, from the Riflemen, we saw them leaving the convenience store opposite in a great hurry, pursued by an angry owner with a baton. It did not look as if they had got away with very much. A little later a young lady in party attire stepped out of her partner's car to buy a bottle of something to help the rest of her evening along. No police attendance.

The last such incident was noticed at reference 9. Turned up from the archive after a few false starts by the search key 'railings'.

PS: not much trace left now of the Glazer talk noticed at reference 8. But I did buy his very short book on crystallography and tried to get to grips with symmetry. Time for another go.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/talking-about-physics.html.

Reference 2: https://annaploszajski.com/.

Reference 3: http://www.aarathiprasad.com/.

Reference 4: https://www.philipball.co.uk/.

Reference 5: http://www.jimal-khalili.com/.

Reference 6: http://mazzoleniart.com/.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/albemarle-2.html.

Reference 8: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/bragg-and-son.html.

Reference 9: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/cats-roof.html.