Check out this great interview that we did with our twitter buddy, James T Kelly. We answer all the questions you could ever have been wondering about us (or not, perhaps you want to know our favourite food or colour or the shampoo we use to wash our hair…we don’t answer that, it would have been slightly creepy….sorry…. but just comment and we will tell you!! 😛 )
Latimer and I have a happiness curve. Well, it should be a happiness slope really. It goes from the lofty level of the thrilled ‘Huzzah’ and plummets down to the blue depths of the ‘Bleugh’. We thought we were great, making up the name, ‘happiness curve’ but after a quick Google search, it turns out it’s already in existence…darn it. But! This is our version, and it’s a little different.
While both ends represent happiness in the usual curve, with ours, one end is total happiness and the other is…not. Both points are so extreme, only sounds can truly express them. There are, of course, little steps along the sloping road, the ‘that was epic!’ the ‘yay, yay!’, the ‘oh noo!’ and the ‘why me!’.
Throughout the process of our book being published, Latimer and I have swung from both extremes, pinged and ponged from one to the other. From when we finished writing it with premature ‘huzzahs’ to the double synchronised ‘bleughs’ as we forced ourselves to format, ‘one more time’.
Despite this though, skating up and down the slope has to be one of the most exhilarating and fun experiences that we’ve had in our short lives. We’ve had the ecstatic arrival of our book cover, where we spent over a week frequently wandering around staring at the image with dopey smiles while bumping into people, poles, bins and getting tangled in dog leads. To the following week where we nursed the resulting bruises, and started the brain-hurting job of teasing out the tangles within our manuscript.
But publishing is not the only place you’ll find happiness curves; there are those that occur within a really good book, well mini ones anyway. Actually, it is always more of a happiness squiggle. Once sucked into another world, you can roll along through moments of sqwee-ing, jealousy, danger, action and sadness. It can often be like a rollercoaster. This fantastic ride is something we’ve always strived to achieve in our own writing. So we hope you enjoy the skating along the happiness squiggle within our book, Legend Unleashed (which you could win in our new giveaway, see below!).
Huzzah!! Free things! 😀
Don’t forget to click and enter the LEGEND UNLEASHED GIVEAWAY, ah go on, you know you want to. Click it! Haha. 😀
Do you have a happiness curve, squiggle, line or circle? We love to hear about all your different shapes and where you are on them!
December 15 – James T Kelly – Interview (Thank you to James for letting us gate-crash his blog for an interview!)
December 17- Magical Manuscript Interview– Interview (Return to Magical Manuscripts for a belated interview – thank you to Sandy for having us again! Hope we didn’t wreck the place :))
Latimer and Ridley are off on a wintry adventure!! 🙂
Latimer and Ridley are wrapping up warm this December (got cool new winter fashion and everything!).We’re leaving our internet camp to go trekking across the webs to visit other blogs! HUZZAH!
We’ll have guest posts, promotions, interviews and reviews. It will to be interesting! We’ll make new friends, say hello to people and (terrifyingly) find out what people think of ‘The Book’.
If you won’t get a chance to wander with us, make sure to stay tuned here anyway, as we’ll have our own little give away! Yay, free things! 😀 They’ll be purdy things too, even we don’t own these yet, though we want to!
December 15 – James T Kelly – Interview (Thank you to James for letting us gate-crash his blog for an interview!)
December 17- Magical Manuscript Interview– Interview (Return to Magical Manuscripts for a belated interview – thank you to Sandy for having us again! Hope we didn’t wreck the place :))
Ridley: I was in Kyteler’s Inn in Kilkenny at the weekend, it’s one of my favourite places in the city to visit, I always get the breaded chicken with garlic butter for lunch. Yummers! I also always spend my meal chewing and staring around at all the different bits and bobs lining the walls and shelves; rusted trombones, old jars, flags, plates and impressive wrought iron chandeliers. Not to mention the fake witch huddling over a cauldron in the hearth of a massive fire place, over to the side. (She gave me a fright the very first time I saw her!)
The best thing about Kyteler’s Inn, other than the food, is the story behind it. It’s a really old stone house, in the style of an old merchant’s building or a tavern, and its final owner was accused of witchcraft. This accusation was one of the very first in Europe. Lady Alice Kyteler managed to get away, though her servant was caught. She was forced into a fake confession, implicating Alice and then she was burned at the stake.
Another really interesting point, Lady Kyteler is mentioned in the poem, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen by William Butler Yeats, which makes reference to these accusations.
There were various reasons for these charges. Alice Kyteler was married four times; each of her husbands died, there were rumours all through these marriages that she was poisoning them.
Spreading and listening to these stories, the children and relatives of her husbands accused her of murder. It was also said she was a very good looking woman, who could ensnare men with her charms and manipulated them into lavishing her with gifts. Unnatural looks and unnatural charms, possibly due to magic spells, everyone whispered.
There was also major resentment within the community from her involvement as a money-lender; she was supposedly quite ruthless.
So we are left wondering whether she had any allies, though she must have done as she managed to escape to England and never stand trial.
When you visit the inn now, her story is on the menu, so if you go there, not only can you order the garlic butter covered breaded chicken but you read all about Alice for yourself!
Spooky, ghoulish goings-on, in the courtyards of Dublin Castle this bank holiday weekend… welcome to Bram Stoker’s imagination!
Ridley: The Bram Stoker festival was packed with things to do all weekend, from talks by Patricia Cornwell, writing workshops for children, plays and discussions on vampires. Christopher Lee was even awarded the Bram Stoker Gold Medal by the Philosophical society in Trinity College for his past role as Dracula. Bram, in his time at Trinity, was the president of this society.
So many of these events were ticket only and sold out quite quickly!
Latimer: We didn’t realise until too late that you had to have tickets for these events! So we really missed out. Derek Landy (author of Skulduggery was talking in one of the theatres) and there were lots of talks about vampires and vampirism in Trinity College (as Ridley says, Bram’s old Alma mater). There were a lot of interesting talks, and I was really disappointed that we didn’t get to go to them! 😦
Ridley: Well, no matter, we did manage to get tickets to one event at least!
We attended a night time, outdoor performance by the award winning street theatre company, Spraoi, in the Grand Courtyard of Dublin Castle. It was held there as Bram used to have a tedious desk job in one of the offices in the castle.
Latimer: I like to imagine Bram sitting at a desk inside the fantastic building that is Dublin Castle, daydreaming about Romania and vampires! I wonder did Dublin Castle spark off any dreams of Vlad’s castle? You can just picture vampire’s roaming the darkness of the Castle courtyards…
Our good friend Orbie joined us on this night of terror! She told me that there was a Bram Stoker App (made by the Science Gallery), that was devised for the festival. The App uses your phone GPS to tell you if you are in a hotspot for vampires or ghosts in Dublin. When it tells you, you are, you take a photo of the street or area, and a ghost will appear on your image! Or so Orbie told me… While we waited in the queue to go into the Castle courtyard… we tried to find some ghosts!
Then we got bored and the queue started moving, so we were swept inside and pretty much forgot until now about this App!
There was the chilling sound of people moaning like ghosts… The idea of the event was scenes and characters from Dracula. As the crowd moved forward under the arch into the courtyard, we were met with a massive moon display, against the backdrop of a dark and eerie courtyard. There was a man sitting within the moon, screaming and shouting…
We were pulled into a dark world, filled with vampires and ghouls. There were performers wandering around the cold courtyard, screaming and hissing.
As I was standing staring at an eerie display (wedding dresses hanging off a man-made tree) a ghoulish performer came up to me and started pulling at a plastic bag I was holding (it contained a proof copy of our book, which I was handing off to Ridley). I gave a nervous laugh, “you’re really getting into this” I said, there was absolutely no break in character, she raced off to pull at some of the other people (some of the crowd was also dressed up for the night as vampire’s and devils – she was particularly fascinated by these people, me in my north face jacket didn’t do much for her! Boring I guess!).
As we walked from display-to-display, a rock band played Gothic sounding music under arches lit in an eerie green glow…
Vampire girls dressed in haunting white dresses stalked through the crowd. They came together at one display (a bench lit by a single street lamp) and performed a strange struggle – pulling out of a young girl dressed in white (eventually turning her into a vampire). I think these girls were Dracula’s vampire women!
As Orbie was talking her photos of this performance… this girl crept up behind her!
Naturally, I started snapping photos, THEN, I said “Orbie… behind you!” and she turned and jumped out of the way with a yelp, “JAYSUS”!
The crowd started to move then over to a macabre display of an autopsy table… two vampire ghouls were pulling at the body… Afterward I got some photos and it looks pretty creepy… The face… the face! Very scary!
All the while, a carriage was working its way through the crowd… the man inside looks like he could be someone important… eh? Well, yep, as it turns out, this guy was playing Bram Stoker…
He was heading towards this large wooden construct;
Once he reached the top he read to us, telling us to stay in the light, and out of darkness… away from the shadows…
He then sat back, writing at a typewriter.
Nearby, there was a display in the corner that looked important..
There was a massive coffin beside it… Dracula making his way from the port (as in the book… which for me is actually the Gary Oldman movie… I remember the port from the movie!)
Out of it came this massive skeleton! Dracula!
A performer dressed up as a more manageable-sized Dracula, made his way to Bram in his wooden tower, along with all the hissing vampire ladies!
Dracula looks like he’s smiling here, haha, going, ‘this is great! look at me Mammy!’ haha
Bram brought the night to an end, with a brief final reading from the book. It was pretty cool.
Ridley: The event was really interesting! (Though it was wet and absolutely freezing!! Our hands were red raw, time to buy some gloves, me thinks!).
Latimer: Yea! My hands felt like I’d stuck them in a -80 freezer! The pain traveled right up my arms! It was so cold! God bless my north face jacket (the best buy ever!) – it did save me from the cutting breeze, I just needed some gloves!
Well, afterward everyone made their way home, out of Bram Stoker’s dreams and back to reality… Which took the form of a woman dancing in the window of her apartment (which faced an entrance to Dublin Castle)! She had the lights on, the curtains pulled back and was going wild dancing. Everyone stood there laughing (of course she knew everyone could see!). Then she jumped away, leaving her two flatmates (who were sitting down on the couch) staring blankly out at us!
The festival was fun, hopefully they’ll make it a yearly thing! It would be pretty interesting. We’ll hopefully be more prepared next year! 😦
Ridley: I adored the nineties. My brother says I’m stuck in a nineties time warp. The TV shows, the movies, the music, I still love it all. I definitely think I have a bit of that ‘back in my day’ syndrome. Who knows what I’ll be like later in life when I’m already like this in my twenties!
I’ve watched two films that were made in the nineties in the last few days, I have to say, I never grow tired of them. Even though it’s been many years since they were first released, people still sit down and become enthralled by them again. There were numerous epic thrillers and disaster films made during that time, but they also had heart. In the middle of the attacking aliens, stomping giant monsters and reincarnated mummies, there were also well told touching stories which centred around the characters. The heroes were flawed, damaged and vulnerable. The relationships were fantastic and over came all the odds.
What was not to love?
Does anyone remember these:
My my, did my obsession with dinosaurs ever start after I watched this film. It was just fantastic, wasn’t it? With the velociraptors learning to open doors; ‘Clever girl,’ to the scene where the giant T-Rex bursts out of the trees to storm after the Jeep? As Ron Weasley would say, ‘Bloody Hell’!
The funny thing is, I have the television on as I’m writing this and Twister is on on Sky Modern Greats. I’ve seen this film dozens of times, if I notice it’s on, I’ll grab a cup of tea, change over and watch it. It’s one of my favourites, with the rekindled love between the two main characters, the epic tornadoes and the team’s pursuit to gain information about them so they can save lives. This need is particularly heightened and made more personal for the audience when the main character’s loveable aunt, who we’ve already met, is caught unaware by a tornado and nearly killed. The ending, while more than likely quite unrealistic, is still fantastic!
Anna and the King is such a heart wrenching tale, but definitely one to watch. Plus Tom Felton (the guy who plays Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter) is Anna’s son in it! He’s so young looking!
Ah, surely everyone knows Braveheart? The quotes from it are brilliant.
“Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you’ll live… at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin’ to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take… OUR FREEDOM!”
Who knew a board game could be so dangerous. If you hear those drums, run, especially if they’re coming from a Monopoly box, who knows what would happen if you were pulled in there! Haha. No, seriously, think about it, it’s quite a unique storyline, isn’t it? (this is where about a dozen people tell me there’s a hundred other ‘the board game came to life’ stories out there!) Again, there’s action, adventure, overcoming the odds and a love story in the middle of it all. It may be fantastical with crazy knife throwing monkeys (i loved them), hunters and monsoons, but fundamentally we can all relate to the characters and how they’re feeling. The feelings we have are just because of more mundane less dangerous reasons, we generally don’t have stampeding wild animals bursting through our houses.
Godzilla, he fed into my dinosaur obsession! I used to watch the old old Godzilla films too, where you could see the strings attached to the flying monsters! Haha.
Ah, Will Smith and Tommy Lee, could you ever fault a combination like that??
Magical tiny creatures fight against the giant, human loggers trying to destroy their home. Really great!
Another one up there on the pedestal with Twister. I’ve seen this a million times and I still get a bit teary-eyed when the president gives his speech as the soldiers are off to begin their aerial attack.
“Mankind.” That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences any more. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it’s fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom… Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution… but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: “We will not go quietly into the night!” We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!
This is played EVERY Christmas in my house, particularly as we’re putting up the Christmas tree. I love the music and the Muppets! Bit early in the year for this I know, still a great song though!
So creepy, the black rider’s teeth are like a shark’s fangs, he always made my skin crawl! Absolutely great though and while it’s another Gothic type film from Johnny Depp, it’s a good one.
Honestly I got a bit tired of these films after awhile, but I still loved the first one when it came out. Da Da dada da….
The Lion King, need I say more? And every other Disney film that came out in the nineties should go here, I just figured it didn’t need to be said. 🙂
A Bruce Willis film, quite scifi-y and very different from his other movies, but brilliant nonetheless and a great ending!
The Mummy, I’ll include two and three in this, who doesn’t love them? They have an ancient love story, a modern one, magic, Egyptian everything (both Latimer and I at one point-separately too, we didn’t know each other at the time-both wanted to be Egyptianologists when we were younger! Crazy, eh?). There were also gun fights and handsome sword-wielding Medjai in these movies! While I’m aware they made four films, I only count the three with Rachel Weisz playing the mother as the proper ones, that last one, while it had Yetis, I didn’t really like it.
Cult classic. If you haven’t seen this, then you’re really missing out. It’s a skilfully made stop motion animation, Tim Burton is behind it (another one he also produced in the nineties was James and the Giant Peach). Nightmare Before Christmas also had catchy songs!
Loved the first film….I got lost though when I watched the rest of them 😀
Like Twister, but with a volcano!
Ah Pixar, I’ve loved all their films. This was the start of a fantastic trilogy.
‘Yippie-kai-yay….’ I love all of them.
Brilliant sound track by Aerosmith came along with this. The end of the world is upon us and we follow the struggles of the oil drilling team to save us all. This film is fantastic, I still well up in parts when I watch it too. Another great Bruce Willis film!
Even though everyone knew the ending going in, the ship sinks, it’s quite a touching film. You couldn’t help but be moved, knowing that ultimately it’s a true story. Obviously not the part with Leo and Kate falling in love and her throwing off the shackles of her class, no it’s the bit where hundreds of people perished in the horrific accident all those years ago. Absolutely heart-wrenching.
Once my favourite Bond, Pierce Brosnan has since been replace by Daniel Craig, how fickle I am! Still, fun films to watch!
Ah Nick Cage, personally I think it’s one of his best films! And John Malkovich is in this, you couldn’t go wrong with him!
And that’s just scratching the surface of what we used to watch in the 90s! (there was also My Neighbor Totoro, The Rescuers Down Under, Dragonheart, My Girl, Home Alone)
As you scroll down through the movie posters, for the ones you’ve seen, you remember them, don’t you? You remember the people, the story, how it made you feel, where you were when you first watched it? I know I do!
I’m not saying there aren’t good films being made now, there are, numerous ones, but for some of them these days, it looks like (not even trained!) monkeys pushed buttons and that was how they decided on what would happen in them. A lot of them really don’t feel like they’ll endure as long as some of the films made in the nineties have done-most of which have become modern greats.
Am I wrong? Do other people love these as much as me? No?
Latimer: A series of unfortunate events leads me to writing this entry. It’s basically a more somber version of Ridley’s.
Firstly, the number one thing you need to understand is my laptop is not a thing. It is actually an extension of myself; and so, I am currently suffering from phantom limb syndrome, because said extension has been removed from my person.
I should preface what comes below by stating emphatically I am a laptop addict. That’s a fact. And even though, I will often say this in a joking manner, I am in fact deadly serious. It’s not as insidious as a blatant addiction to say, alcohol or drugs, but actually it’s just as real. The scary thing, and the thing I often ignore, because it’s not something I like to dwell on, is that I am in fact addicted to my laptop and the internet. However, I think this is an expected addiction of the modern age (you can tell I’ve had a lot of time to dwell on it, in light of being separated from my laptop). The edge has been taken off by virtue of the fact that I own a smart-phone and therefore have an internet-based outlet.
The whole event started on Monday night.
I tried to turn on my laptop and it wouldn’t start. I tried again, and again and again. But my beloved was having none of it. I wasn’t as concerned as I expected I would be. Usually such an event is followed by nervous lip and finger biting, and heart palpitations (this, is what my naïve mind assumes is a very, very, very mild form of withdrawl symptoms!).
When things happen to my laptop, on this scale, my find is filled with white noise… a blankness as if someone has stuffed cotton wool into my brain, leaving me to float in a cloud of despair.
This despair was present but at very low, semi-undetectable, levels. I was able to breathe and knew there was nothing I could do. So I stopped trying and decided I would go to the ‘IT crowd’ in my college the next day and see what they could do.
I slept well that night. I was in the ‘acceptance of powerlessness’ stage!
The next day I handed it over to the IT crowd. That was like walking into a wondrous world I didn’t understand- the world of hope for the uninitiated! I know what technology can give me, but when it fails (as badly as it had) I’m lost, baffled, confuddled. It was like I was a child, handing over my laptop to God, going; ‘Pluh-ezz Mister, can you fix it?’
I left it with them and went to work. As I muddled around the lab, time ticked by and I thought; ‘this is not good’. Picture me, staring into space, pouring acid into beakers, a dazed expression on my face; ‘Pluh-ezz’.
The more time that passed, the more I slowly came to terms with the fact that I would be laptop-less for a while. I back-up my file regularly (I cannot stress the importance of this!), most recently that weekend, so I wasn’t getting as worried as I would have otherwise. I use my laptop for work; it has lots of project data on it. So, this is very serious!
To add injury to insult, my lab-based machinery broke down at a critical point in my experiment! I couldn’t help but laugh (though inside a tiny part of me died- this is not the first time this has happened either and it always seems to happen when I really need it to work- Murphy’s Law in play).
The whole day got me thinking on the importance of technology.
We need it for everything nowadays.
I need it for my work. I need it in so many ways to look at data and very importantly to find information. It’s like a giant library. Old school scientists used to talk about how ‘in my day I had to go through catalogues and mark out all the papers I wanted to read, then go to the library and get them to order the papers for me! It could take months!’ whereas today you go online and have access to everything and anything in seconds. If you are sitting somewhere and someone asks a mundane question, you can just google it and find the answer.
I started writing a blog post on a piece of paper- full of misspellings and so on. Holding the pen like it was an alien tool, staring at it, ‘how does one write?’.
It got me thinking on my, our, dependence on technology and how your vast world shrinks to a tiny spec in its absence.
As I wrote my blog post, I slowly realized; ‘if I don’t have a laptop, how the hell does this even get out there? Who’s going to read this?’
And more and more the world shrank around me.
And you know what else- I lost that bloody piece of paper! My words and thoughts were gone. Much like my laptop.
The long and short of it is this; my laptop is gone for good (that was something I did not expect on Monday!). Amazing how surprising a week can be!
I don’t know how it happened or why, but there it is. My hard-drive is possibly salvageable but I don’t know yet. I’ve lost some things that weren’t backed up, little parts of myself that I’ll forget until I wonder about them and realize they aren’t there anymore. My laptop was like a second brain or something; Cyber Latimer, my me-bot.
It will be replaced by another laptop that will subsequently also become a part of me. My data will, possibly, be transferred (that’s something I’ll let you know about)… but I am left thinking I have become something of a cyborg in my later years. I remember getting my first laptop and not knowing what to do with it (I hardly used it at all- and another fact is I’ve only ever had two laptops in my life, the first was secondhand).
I remember going on the internet for the first time thinking, ‘what the hell can I use this for? It’s boring I don’t see the point’
And I remember when I didn’t have any of these things. When I had to go to the encyclopedia, which never changed or updated, and had been written in the 80s, to find out things; then Encarta was the new big thing (God, what ever happened to damn Encarta? It was a big thing when I was a kid. All those expensive CDs that would tell you everything… and eventually nothing)… Ah, that was when the world was small.
Did you see in the Olympic Opening ceremony this year when Sir Tim Berners-Lee (who invented the internet) appeared near the giant house?… when he sent that message out into the crowd; This (the internet) is for everyone….? It gave me chills. It was fantastic.
The world’s great, free, web of connection; the thing that I now use to connect to you all, people I don’t know, people I’ve never seen before, but people who I now speak to; who I now share my thoughts with.
Being disconnected from it (in a proper sense without my laptop) for a few days made me think how much it connected me to things.
Ridley wrote an entry and posted it; while I was writing on a scrap of paper thinking; ‘how am I going to post this anyways? Who’s going to ever read this?’ No one as it turns out because I lost it.
But the point is, I felt powerless.
Of course, I’m writing this now, so you’ve realized that I have other methods of connection. I’m writing on my family’s laptop. But it’s like being in someone else’s house; I could fly around my own desktop and files like flying around my own mind. This is a disjointed, confusing environment.
My old baby is gone; the only one that was with me from her first days! My first real laptop that had only ever belonged to me; she’s gone.
We watched so many things together; we learned so much, we wrote so much, all together, me and cyber-me. I really will miss her.
Latimer: Okay, so in this post I well and truly get my nerd on. What follows is an indulgence of my science fetish!
It might come as a surprise that I am a factual being, when my dreams are so rooted in the fantastical. But sometimes the truth is just as mysterious and awe-inspiring as the dream. I think that science is the great dream; the greatest mystery.
Recently I went to a general science conference, covering everything under the sun. It was the European Science Open Forum (ESOF) which was held in Dublin this year (Dublin is the City of Science for 2012 🙂 ).
This conference was incredible; for a start the program included five Nobel Laureates. Heavy-hitters as I was calling them.
The conference had two speakers that without a doubt I had to see: Prof. James Watson and Dr. Craig Venter. They’re like celebrities in science.
Now, you may or may not know who these men are. If you don’t, let me explain…
A conversation with James Watson
Professor James Watson, co-discoverer of the struture of DNA
Prof. James Watson co-discovered the structure of DNA in the 50’s with Dr. Frances Crick. He is quite an incredible man- at 84yrs of age, he is still active in research today!
The talk was a ‘conversation with James Watson’. It was very interesting. He can be quite controversal though.
He wrote a book called How to Avoid Boring People; one interest thing he said was to avoid being in a room with more than 2 Nobel Laureates (you have to laugh at the likelihood of that happening).
Watson said he hated going to the Nobel meetings because you end up with 10 Nobel Laureates in a room and they are incredibly boring. He snorted thinking you’d have to be boring to be one and that he was the exception.
It was amazing to get the opportunity to see him.
Dr. Craig Venter: ‘From Reading to Writing the Genetic Code’
Dr. Craig Venter, the background shows the cover of Science, the journal in which his group published their sequencing of the human genome in 2000
Dr. Craig Venter, sometimes called the ‘bad boy’ of science, was involved in the sequencing of the human genome. There were two groups racing to sequence the human genome at the time; the public group led by Dr. Frances Collins and the private group lead by Venter.
Venter had declared to the public group that his company could sequence the genome faster and for cheaper than they could. This kicked off the race between the two groups, leading to the genome being sequenced far faster than the public group had estimated it would be (3yrs ahead of the expected time-frame).
Craig Venter’s synthetic micro-organism, a bacteria called Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0
In recent years, more famously perhaps, Venter’s research group made the first synthetic organism.
It was very interesting to hear what his group (or an assembly of many groups) was up to and also to hear his thoughts on the future of science.
He believes, for example, that in the future, during disease outbreaks, it will be possible for people to download vaccines from the internet and use boxes, containing his technology, to synthesize the vaccines themselves.
What an amazing thought eh? And not that farfetched.
Prof. Brian Greene: ‘The State of String Theory’
Professor Brian Greene
This was an incredible talk (even though I don’t do or understand Physics!). I am fascinated by the science of the universe.
Did you know- the heavy elements in our body came from the heart of an exploding star? All the particles that make up this universe have always been and always will be; how incredible is that?
It leaves you with a sense of belonging to the universe.
Prof. Greene also mentioned the multiverse- the notion that we are only one of many universes.
If these multple universes exist, it is believed that they would collide with one another and cause ripples to pass through each universe.
Prof. Greene said, if we could detect these ripples, we could prove the existence of other universes. He said people were working on searching for these ripples (and they would be possible to find, if they exist).
Wow.
The infamous strings of String Theory… hypothecially!
Specifically though, Prof. Greene was talking about String Theory.
The idea behind it is that, if proven, it would be the unifying theory of physics- explaining all the parts that make up the whole universe and the energy in it.
It is a very complicated idea, and one that I can’t explain- so I found this brilliant TED talk that Prof. Greene gave (and it’s very similar, down to the letter in some parts, to the talk I heard). It’s about 20mins long, but it’s fascinating and he explains it in a clear way, so it’s easy to follow, if you are interested, I highly recommend it!
I left his talk feeling invigorated, awed and amazed. I had to jot down all I could remember.
Prof. Rolf-Dieter Heuer: The search for a deeper understanding of our universe at the Large Haldron Collider: the world’s largest particle accelerator
Large Haldron Collider at CERN
I couldn’t miss this talk. CERN is all over the media at the moment.
Prof. Rolf-Dieter Heuer (a particle physicist and Director General of CERN) was talking about the Higgs Boson. Which he said, if you ask him professionally he would say, ‘we have probably found it’, if you ask him personally he would say, ‘we have found it’.
Scientists, we are always so careful!
Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Director General of CERN
He was a brilliant speaker, very funny and very interesting.
Professor Peter Higgs, Theoretical Physicist who first predicted the existence of the Higgs boson
Briefly (and in a very simple way, because I am no physicist!), the Higgs Boson, when found (as it likely has been), would prove the existence of the Higgs field.
The Higgs field is the way a particle gains mass (by interacting with the field). The stronger the interaction with the field, the larger the mass of the particle.
The field also has a peculiarity, in that, it can interact with itself.
So, again, a particle gains mass by interacting with the Higgs field, in theory, but in order to prove that the field exists at all- you must find the Higgs boson.
But why?
Why would finding the Higgs boson prove the existence of the Higgs field?
Prof. Heuer had a brilliant way of explaining the reason why:
He used this analogy: if he walked into a room full of journalists (representing the Higgs field). He could pass through the crowd, unnoticed, because they don’t know who he is.
The journalists don’t react to him.
Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Director General of CERN… pointing!
However, if Einstein passes through the crowd, the journalists will react and crowd in on him.
And so Einstein gains mass (which is what the Higgs field does to particles).
The more known to the journalists, the more massive that person becomes (as they are all crowding in on them).
This is an explanation of how a particle gets mass in the Higgs field.
But, Prof. Heuer said, if for example he whispers a rumour into the room of journalists. They start to crowd in on each other, saying, “what did he say? Oh? Who?”.
This is a self-interaction of the field.
This forms the Higgs boson- self-interaction of the Higgs field= Higgs boson!
WOW! We all cheered. What a perfectly simple explanation of something I did not understand at all.
Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Director General of CERN “So, particle physics is really easy!!”
After he explained this, Prof. Heuer said: “So, particle physics is really easy!” (His wry smile implied he was making a funny; everyone laughed).
You might wonder, this is all very well and good, but how does the Higgs boson help us really?
Well, Prof. Heuer made this point; the internet was developed in the 80s at CERN. It was developed by the scientists so they could transmit their research to one another in a quick manner. At the time, they didn’t envisage any other purpose for the internet. But in later years, obviously they realised it could be used for other things. And it was only later that other uses became known.
Prof. Heuer doesn’t know yet what the Higgs boson can be used for, but in the future who knows?
I really loved this talk.
Prof. Heuer is amazing. I want to go to CERN and follow him around and have cups of tea with him and get him to tell me about the universe!
Would it freak him out? If I was in his shadow, with a cup of tea in one hand and a notepad in the other, going:
“Okay Rolf, tell me about the universe!” Latimer
“How did you get in here?!” Rolf
“I live here now…” Latimer
“Security!” Rolf
“Shush; I locked them in the Large Hadron Collider- anyway, let’s talk physics!” Latimer.
Ha…
‘What does Art bring to Science?’
Moving away from Physics now, I also went to a series of talks on; ‘What does art bring to science?’
The most interesting of these was the story of an American painter, William Utermohlen, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. This of course is incredibly sad, but Mr. Utermohlen gave a valuable, as before unseen insight into this progressive, destructive disease, by charting its progression with his self-portraits:
I found them haunting and somewhat disturbing to be honest, particularly the final portrait. It does illustrate a clear decline though, in a media that had not previously been shown.
It gaves the disease a very human element.
This was a very interesting talk; Mr. Utermohlen’s story really stuck with me.
Prof. Christian Keysers: ‘The Empathic Brain’
Professor Christain Keysers
Carrying on from this, I delved a bit more into the brain.
This was a brilliant talk about the biological basis of empathy. Prof. Keysers gave an overview of empathy research.
He explained to us that empathy is not localised in a single area of the brain, rather empathy for different things is localised in different areas of the brain.
So, people with damage to the brain, could loose the ability to feel certain types of empathy, but retain the ability to feel other types.
In terms of loosing the ability to feel empathy, Prof. Keysers said, if you loose the ability to feel e.g. disgusted, then you also loose the ability to feel the empathic disgust of others.
There was an interesting study carried out, where two groups, one male one female, were shown a card game. While they watched, the researchers monitored their brain activity.
The groups were shown a person playing fair and a person cheating, and winning. The cheater was punished and given an electric shock.
While watching the fair plays, both men and women had the same empathy levels. While watching the cheater being shocked, women had slightly reduced empathy, but they still had some empathy (sharing the cheater’s pain at being shocked).
However, men had no empathy while watching the cheater being shocked- in fact, it had activated a reward sensation in the brain! Indicating that the men were happy to see the cheater being punished, while the women were still empathising with the pain the cheater felt!
This begged the question of men and war, versus women and war. That perhaps there might be more psychological impact on women and this perhaps should be monitored more carefully.
Interesting right?
There was also a study carried out on ‘reading about emotions’. This study showed that people could empathise by reading; for example, they had a paragraph describing something disgusting and people felt disgusted by reading it.
The study suggested that people who read more may have more heightened empathy; but the reason why is not known.
Is it because people read more, that they have more empathy? Or is that they get more out of reading because they have the ability to empathise more with the characters (and that’s why they read more)?
Prof. Keyser mentioned something his old poetry teacher, from school, told him and it sort of stuck with me in terms of writing.
The teacher said that if you want to describe a person sailing on the ocean for the first time, don’t tell your readers what the ocean looks like, they already know- tell them about the person.
Tell them about their expressions. This is more informative, because this way they empathise more.
And in a scientific sense, you are activating the right parts of a person’s brain to feel attachment to your characters. So talk about the person, not the scenery.
Prof. Keyser wrote a book called The Empathic Brainand it’s a self-published one.
It describes an overview of empathy studies (not just his own). I haven’t read it, I did buy it though, it’s waiting on the Kindle- with many others, ha. But he said it was for everyone, so it’s not written in an overly scientific way.
Well, the conference was absolutely amazing.
I wanted to share some of the things I learned, though I appreciate that I might have rambled on a little. I hope it was clear and maybe a bit interesting in some way!
Being at this conference reaffirmed my love for science 🙂
Carwicky 