Month: May 2007

800 people who run science centres and museums, in one conference venue, in Lisbon, for three days. Weird, but fun.

I’ve been hovering around the periphery of the science communication world for years, and it’s rather fun to stand in the middle of this group and watch them as if from outside. I’ve never worked at a centre, and I don’t really understand them, and that’s quite interesting. I’m a storyteller, and while some installations tell stories, they’re using very different techniques. Most of the time I’ve no idea what they’re talking about.

Highlights today were Stephen Foulger of “The Science Of…”, a joint venture between the Science Museum and an investment bank. Stephen described the somewhat radical multidisciplinary approach they take, and I’m impressed that it works. Not because it’s inherently risky, but because creative management is rarely straightforward, and they seem to have a firm grip on what sorts of groups work. ‘Pragmatic’ was a key word.

Also Andrea Bandelli, a freelancer/academic from the Netherlands, who completely pulled the rug out from under my ‘dare I say this?’ talk for Saturday by… er… saying essentially the same thing in the first session this morning. Nobody died. Which gives me something of a problem to solve before my presentation.

Aside from that, I was particularly impressed that his brief discussion of my much-hated phrase ‘user-generated content’ noted that our approach to such stuff should be ‘humble.’ Good word, ‘humble’ – and well-used in the this context.

This afternoon I found myself writing a couple of neat lines about SciCast, spurred by things people said in different contexts, then not learning much about Framework 7, a European Union projects initiative, beyond:

• It exists.
• There’s a shedload of money sloshing around.
• Working with the EU can be frustrating, but it lets one dream of projects on a scale that might otherwise be impossible.
• Meeting of Minds was a really really cool idea, and deeply impressive to have pulled off.
• There seems to be a requirement that all pan-European projects shall suffer under the burden of tragically dreadful graphic design.

I’m actually quite serious about that last one. It’s a worry.

Meanwhile: good to catch up with some chums, and make embarrassing small talk with people I don’t know. In the latter category: the charming woman from Paris who was obviously horrified to think I might be trying to chat her up, when in fact I was trying to ascertain if the jug she held bore coffee or tea. But hey, misunderstandings happen at the European level.

I’m off to the Gala Dinner, probably for some sardines.

Airports exist in some odd netherworld, trapped between where you were and where you’re going, oscillating gently between ground and sky. They can be interminably souless places, devoid of character or locale – Glasgow after 9pm on a Sunday night springs to mind, when the bar shuts and any trace of distinctiveness flickers out along with the light over the Tennant’s pump.

Sometimes that atmosphere is freeing, like staying in an empty room remote from one’s possessions, when the mere act of entry lifts an unsuspected burden of materialism. But sometimes it’s plain bleak. Glasgow, of a Sunday night, is usually bleak.

Other airports take on entirely different characters. I write from Schiphol, for example: a vast and heaving cathedral to travel, piled high with people from all places, going to all places. Perhaps if we all wrote our destinations on a pin-board we’d be able to trade, and all go home instead.

It’s an odd place, Schiphol. Not least that it feels vastly larger than should be warranted by a few canals and a thriving sex industry. Perhaps not. All around, the hubbub of a hundred tongues, punctuated by the gutteral rasp of Dutch… and yet all the signage is in English.

For a time, I sat and watched the ways in and out of the airport. As countless peoples walked this way and that, only a tiny percentage passed in or out. Did they mean to? Perhaps they took the wrong door? Maybe they were heading elsewhere entirely, but recognised their folly and elected instead to stop here?

Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, en route from Glasgow to Lisbon. As Flossie noted, a Netherlands Nether Land.

I’m off. See you next week.

Unless there’s, you know, wireless. And stuff.

Last summer, as I was queuing to get into some random gig in Edinburgh, I took a call from a producer at the BBC. He was making a new science/engineering show for Children’s BBC; might I be interested in helping out? Well, yes. Durr. But – ooh! ooh! – what they really wanted was someone to lead some ideas workshops with teenagers, and Rick Hall was just the man for that. Given that he’d been running NESTA’s Ignite! programme for a while, which was all about fostering creativity and all that.

By the time I got out of the gig, Rick had signed the deal and there was no room for me on the show. Bastard. (it’s OK, he’s bought me beer since so we’re square).

The second weird connection is that the series presenter is newcomer Greg Foot, whose previous major claim to fame was presenting a pilot of a How2 spinoff that had been shot by… er… me. (In a third connection, he’s now working with ex-How2 researcher Amy, who herself used to work with Flossie at Techniquest and got into TV via Screenhouse after I didn’t have room for her on The Big Bang one year, and… etc etc. It’s all terribly incestuous, this science communication lark.)

Anyway, I finally saw the show – Whizz Whizz Bang Bang. Verdict? Bloody hell! It’s Scrap It!

Now, Scrap It! was a show I made for Discovery Kids a couple of years back. It was cheap – and looked it – but had a certain rustic charm. The studio bits of Whizz Whizz Bang Bang are ridiculously similar. Close enough to be a rip-off? Unlikely, to be honest – much more plausible is that it’s a case of convergent editorial decisions.

Did I like the show? Well, ish. As with Scrap It!, the studio elements look rather flat – less excusable in their case, since I suspect they had more than a few angle-poise lamps to light the thing. But just as Will Andrews made Scrap It! work by filling the screen with his amiable lunacy, so Greg mostly carries the show. There are some editorial decisions I wouldn’t have made – notably the Einstein wig and specs, ugh! – but they’ve made the right call about the science. That is, they’re not afraid of having pretty decent explanations.

Where it starts to fall apart for me is, ironically, in the building of the invention. The show’s premise is that a kid has come to them with an invention idea which they then build, with the build forming the backbone narrative for insert content. A 30 minute show is a lot for a single build, and despite Greg’s best efforts it all feels a bit drawn out. But what really hacked me off with this episode specifically was the build itself. It was lazy.

The original idea was a rocket-powered bed, which evolved into a jet-propelled bed. Fine. We didn’t see much of the final jet engine, which was a shame because little jets are rather lovely, even if turbocharger centrifugal compressors are rather different to large axial-flow units, but meh, whatever.

The problem was that the build wasn’t a jet-propelled bed. It was a jet-propelled go-kart with a bunk bed welded on top. The driver sat in the go-kart, not the bed. Then, of course, with no roll cage or … well, safety features, the kid himself wasn’t allowed to drive the bed (which wasn’t adequately explained) and they ended up with The Stig from Top Gear doing it.

Which is fine, but… they ended up with a mute guy in a racing outfit driving a sedate if noisy kart. Which is a long way from the original image of a kid in bed rocketing down a runway, a whole lot less appealing, and… I can’t see why. I may be rubbish with a welding torch, but I know a thing or three about designing achievable bespoke engineering for television, so I say with both conviction and authority: this could and should have been better.

It’s not a bad show, and for a first series is actually remarkably good, but… gaaaaah, it’s annoying. All these mistakes have been made before, and it’s frustrating that the show isn’t better. I’ll have to watch more episodes before I really lay into it, but at first glance – so close, yet so avoidably limited.

(as far as I can tell, there’s no CBBC website for the series. Which is bizarre, and possibly suggests it’s not coming back. Wikipedia have a very brief entry.)

My N95 has crashed three times tonight. It also drops calls, or places calls without managing to route outgoing audio. Which is, you know, pretty sucky for a mobile phone.

Hmm…

Strange as it may sound, I’m starting to like the N95. It’s taken me the best part of a week, but the whole ‘everything bar the kitchen sink’ aspect of it is quite compelling. What’s less compelling is the execution. There are some remarkably awful bits of user interface, and the consistency and coherency one expects of a UI in the second half of the first decade of the twenty-first century is – notably – lacking. Take the following situation:

I just got cut off in the middle of a call, ‘Connection error.’ OK, fine. Redial, then. Umm… how do I do that?

On first try, it’s eleven clicks. Seriously. Main menu→up→right→Log→Recent Calls→down→down→Dialled Numbers→Last number→Call→Voice Call.

A wild guess got me down to four; Green→last number→Call→Voice call. That’s not too bad, but still…

What’s really interesting is thinking about how many of these problems go away if you have a touchscreen, and only a touchscreen. Which, of course, is how the iPhone works. While I hadn’t previously considered mobile phone UI to be sufficiently broken to allow room for the iPhone, I’ve only previously had simple phones. This one isn’t, and it really isn’t.

The hardcore gadget freak in me is quite entertained by the mental gymnastics involved. The Mac-using video producer/writer/blogger/getting stuff done guy in me is jaw-agape, knock-me-over-with-a-feather appalled that Nokia consider this shit shippable, let alone a flagship product.

Fun.

I’m a big fan of computerised forms. In principle. In practice, designing them is hard. Things I hate about the expenses claim I’m filling in right now:

1. The Excel file contains eighteen other forms in addition to the one I want. As a result, it’s about half a megabyte in size, and takes 2 minutes to open while all the graphics files convert.
2. The worksheet is protected, so I can’t change that.
3. There are ten lines in the entry table. I have upwards of 70 receipts.
4. The worksheet is protected, so I can’t add lines.
5. The ‘Description’ box, despite being quite sizable, does not allow text to wrap. Thus, descriptions fall out of the box and are obscured.
6. The worksheet is protected, so I can’t set the text to wrap, or reduce the font size.
7. The box into which I type my bank account number strips leading zeros. This is unfortunate, since they’re an essential part of my bank account; without them, the payment will fail.
8. The worksheet is protected, so I can’t correct that.
9. It would help for cost reporting at the recipients’ end if I could categorise the receipts I’m filing. However, the form was designed for simple overnights and meal costs, not props, video equipment and consumables, workshop catering costs, ferry fees, and so on. So there’s no place to note such additional information.
10. The worksheet is protected, so I can’t correct this.
11. If I’d thought a little earlier, I could have opened the file in OpenOffice and fixed all this, since it appears to ignore Excel’s sheet protection stuff. Gaaah!

Heigh-ho. So far, I’m up to £1019.78. Ouchie.

Dit-de-deee-dit-de-deee-dit… breaking news, coming in on the wires:

[bong!]

Jonathan was in Devon last week, running a couple of SciCast workshops. He had an unreasonably good time.

[bong!]

It is, however, a long way from Glasgow to Devon.

[bong!]

 

For reasons that aren’t remotely clear, it’s even further back from Cardiff to Glasgow.

[bong!]

 

The delightful Flossie toddled on down, whisking Jonathan to the Eden Project on Wednesday. That was fun.

[bong!]

Jonathan has a new phone! It’s a Nokia N95 gadgetphone, of which there’ll be a full review in due course, but in summary: man, the iPhone is going to rock.

[bong!]

Jonathan’s off to Lisbon on Wednesday, for the Ecsite conference of European science centres. This is odd, since he’s (a.) speaking, and (b.) not a science centre.

[bong!]

…and finally: Flossie revealed a previously-unknown talent for identifying six species of barnacle. I’m so in love.

[bong!]

You know, if there was a way of making this post skittle across the screen as a ticker-tape, I should probably have done that. Does <MARQUEE> still work? [shudder]

Monkeys. I missed Talk Like a Pilot Day yesterday. Excellent list of UK- and RAF-derived slang here. I’m slightly surprised at how many of these I use already.

Add this to my dreadfully dull shopping list; an Elgato turbo.264. It’s a USB2 stick carrying a media processor dedicated to hardware-accelerating H.264 video compression. For €100. I’m currently doing quite a lot of H.264 Quicktime compression on a 4 year-old 933MHz G4 Power Mac, hence my interest; this thing would be something like 20x faster, as a rough guess. Though ironically, the Power Mac is so old it predates USB2, so I’d need one of these as well.

…which leads to something of a dilemma. The turbo.264 is about 4x faster than a 2GHz Core2 Duo, which on the face of it is worthwhile – I’ve always had a rule of three about processing speed. That is, anything that gives me a three-fold improvement is worth doing, because it transforms jobs that were in the hour or so ‘too slow to bother with’ bracket and shifts them into the 20-minute ‘put the kettle on’ space. 20 minutes is about the threshold for feeling ‘interactive’ – it’s thinking time, and short enough that you can do it during the day rather than overnight.

But 4x faster than a 2GHz Core2 Duo is… roughly as quick as a 4-core 3GHz Mac Pro. Ah. See, the turbo.264 is going to be overtaken by CPUs relatively soon, and doubtless we’ll be running video compression jobs on our graphics cards’ physics engines within a year too.

So: cute little device, worthwhile if you’re doing lots of H.264 compression now. As with old supercomputer purchases, wait until the last possible minute to buy hardware – waiting for newer processor technology can sometimes cause your job to finish sooner anyway.

One last caveat: it looks like the thing only works with iPod, Apple TV, and PSP presets. I see no suggestion that it’s possible to tweak the export settings. For me, this is a deal-breaker, since the films I’m encoding for SciCast use a different frame size. Gaaaaaah!