Two years ago I posted links to ten (relatively) mindless online “games” as a bit of fun, and as something not too taxing to indulge in over the holiday break.  Having reached that point again where anything more intellectually challenging than tic tac toe makes my head hurt, I thought I would revisit and update the 2020 Science Compendium of Mindless Games. The only criteria for inclusion: an ability to retain my attention for more than 10 seconds, minimal thinking required, a high smile-factor, and absolutely nothing of overtly educational value!

Just in case you are looking for something a tad more intellectually stimulating, you can always try the Royal Statistical Society Christmas Quiz instead!

Have fun, and Happy Holidays!

___________________

Science Crossword

Two years ago I started off with a simple crossword to give the illusion of intellectual integrity – here’s another one in the series.

If you enjoyed this, there are fifteen other science crosswords to keep you amused ScienceCrossword.com

Levers

Retained from two years ago – a deceptively engaging bit of fun from VectorPark.  Like all games from VectorPark, it’s up to you to discover the rules by trial and error.  Or you could just sit and watch your mobile twist and turn on the screen – my recommendation after a heavy Holiday meal!

Monkey Lander

I spent some time looking for an alternative to Monkey Lander – but failed to find anything quite so mindlessly enjoyable.  And the neat thing is, the gravity-thruster simulation isn’t half bad

Acrobats

Another brilliant offering from VectorPark, and something that’s new to this collection.  Just play with the controls, move the acrobats with your cursor, and enjoy!

Simon Says

Confession: I was going to include something with a more artistic bent from Paul Neave’s great online collectionbut I couldn’t resist this piece of retro-nostalgia!

Gravity Launch

Another game I had to keep! Gravity Launch almost didn’t make it into the mindless game compendium last time round – it teeters on the edge of being too educational.  But despite this obvious flaw, it’s still a lot of fun – and simple too.  Just adjust the rocket’s thrust and takeoff angle, and try to dock with an increasingly complex array of space stations.

Snowflake Designer

I must confess that the simplicity of this application had me enchanted.  Design beautiful “snowflakes” to your heart’s content.

Seasons

Yet another VectorPark application that’s new to this compendium.  It has all the hallmarks of other applications from the same shop – deceptive simplicity, beautifully imagined graphics, and delightful serendipity.  Move the cursor around and see what happens. To move to the next season, simply move the cursor to the right of the screen.

A load of Jackson Pollock?

Not a new application, but still worthy of this collection: design your own Jackson Pollock lookalike painting.  The secret is in knowing when to stop!

Feed the Head

In 2009 I finished the brain candy collection with a really trippy piece from Vector Park.  And here it is again – I couldn’t resist!  Follow the mouse, and see where it leads…

You sent me an email and didn’t hear back?  This might explain it:

OK so it’s not a serious decision chart.  But it’s beginning to look increasingly attractive!

I always have the best of intentions when it comes to keeping up with my email correspondence.  But increasingly I find myself struggling to keep up. The problem isn’t so much the volume, as the expectations.  I have a constant stream of email asking me for stuff – presentations, reviews, advice, comment.  Each request is important to the sender I’m sure.  But if you are asking me to do something that I’m not directly paid to do, doing what you ask means that I to sacrifice something else to respond.  And that inevitably ends up being my personal time, family time, meal time or sleep time.

That said, I don’t begrudge people asking me to do things for them, and I usually try and accommodate requests. But if you have sent me an email that seems to have disappeared into a black hole, the chances are that it has been swamped by hundreds of others like it, or I had to decide whether to spend time with my wife and kids or with your request.  And if it was really important, there’s never any harm in resending!

Note: In the “Is it from someone important?” box, I should point out that this includes family and friends!

With the new university year just about to kick off, I thought I would brush off that most essential of items that no faculty member is ever without: the Academic Time Planner.  Here’s what it looks like:

Things to do this year:

1. Prepare and deliver a great number of mind-blowing lecture courses that make even the most tedious subject seem exciting.  Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
2. Mentor students, exhibiting God-like levels of omniscience and patience while helping them discover their inner potential.  Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
3. Participate fully on faculty committees, embracing the opportunity to contribute to the great engines of bureaucracy they represent.  Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
4. Write grant proposals that will bring in millions of dollars to help make the world a better place in the future, while paying the bills in the here and now.  Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
5. Carry out research on esoteric challenges which, despite their apparent obscurity, are vital to the continuation of life as we know it.  Time commitment: 40 hours.
6. Write bucket loads of peer reviewed papers for high impact peer review journals that, while possibly unintelligible, nevertheless appear awfully clever.  Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
7. Talk to people all over the world about awesome stuff that they really need to know – whether they realize it or not.  Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
8. Participate in important committees and advisory groups that are critical to creating even more important committees and advisory groups.  Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
9. Hobnob with people who are interested in what we do here – and who might even give us some money to do it!  Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
10. Continue to build the Risk Science Center into a kick-ass place for risk science.  Time commitment: 40 hours/week.

Total time commitment: 40 hours/week

Sorted!  And I even have some time left to actually have a life by the looks of it. Not like many of my poor colleagues who are so over-commit that their work is their life.

Go figure that one out!

I think I might have just accepted one speaking engagement too many!  After years of patiently bearing the brunt of my grueling travel schedule, my wife Clare has finally put her foot down.  Sorry folks – if you want me to speak at your meeting, these are the new rules!

After nearly 24 years of my husband disappearing off to conferences, speaking engagements and sundry other events, I’ve finally got to the point of putting my foot down. Andrew usually claims he doesn’t want to go to Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, the middle of nowhere; he simply has ‘a rather large sense of civic duty.’ My opinion: he’s just someone who can’t say ‘no’. Someone asks him to speak, to do them a favor, and he’s off. I’ve finally concluded that his health and his family deserve better, and have come up with a set of rules that we will be following from now on.

From now on, if you need him to speak you’ll have to go through ME first!

Clare’s Rules for NOT Accepting Speaking Engagements

Any request that coincides with the following is an immediate ‘sorry no can do!’

• Family birthdays or anniversaries. Last year we celebrated Andrew’s birthday on the right day for the first time in 4 years!
• Holidays such as July 4^th, Memorial Day or Thanksgiving weekend – boy are we sick of July 4^th on our own!!
• Children’s concerts or other important school events – I’m done being a single parent as far as the school goes.
• No weekends – someone needs to do the cleaning round here.
• No trips of more than 3 days – I’m not willing to walk the dog in the dark or wet more than 2 nights in a row!
• No engagements that necessitate weekend travel – coming or going
• No meetings that involve leaving or returning home in the middle of the night
• No events involving flights that are likely to be delayed or cancelled
• Nothing that involves having to eat airplane food
• Nothing that involves eating out every evening for a week
• Absolutely nothing where we end up paying for the privilege of him traveling!
• No meetings where we’re expected to pay $1000′s up front for plane tickets and wait months to get the money back – we are not a lending service!
• No boring meetings
• No summer meetings
• No meetings from which he arrives home with a week’s worth of dirty washing
• No meetings where he isn’t loved, appreciated and pampered as he would be at home

In fact, if in doubt, just assume the answer is ‘NO!’ Someone has to look after him …

Thank you!

In 1987 I got my Bachelors of Science in physics, Prozac was launched in the US, and James Gleick published Chaos.  I don’t think the middle one has any bearing on the other two.  But the first and last are tentatively linked because, despite being completely jazzed on physics, I didn’t read it.

Being a young physicist with a new-found appreciation of the universe and just how complex it is, I quickly found there was nothing thing quite so irritating as a popular science book.  Just imagine, after three years of sweat and tears you begin to get a feel for the basics of your chosen subject, when some smart alec arts student comes along authoritatively sprouting stuff that you think you should understand, but don’t – and all because they’ve read the latest best seller in the science charts.

Humiliating?  Not even close!

But time and maturity help to break down the fragile arrogance of youth, so when I was asked to review the just-released enhanced e-edition of James Gleick’s best-seller Chaos, I willingly agreed.  And I’m glad I did.

The enhanced version of the book has just been released as an ebook for Kindle and iBook platforms by Open Road Integrated Media.  It’s based on the 2008 update of the original 1997 book, and includes seven new embedded videos, as well as links to supporting material within the book.  However, it should be noted up-front that the audiovisual content is not accessible on the Kindle reader.

For this review, Open Road kindly provided a copy of the book for the iPad – the $12.99 this saved me has undoubtedly biased my impressions, but don’t let that deter you from reading on!

In sitting down to write this, I intended to focus on the experience of reading it as an “enhanced” ebook on the iPad – after all, the text itself has been commented and re-commented on ad nauseum over the past twenty odd years.  But it is worth saying something about the content, as this plays such an important part of the overall experience of reading – irrespective of the format. And here, I must say that I was pleasantly surprised – even riveted at points.

For those who were too young, too disinterested or, like me, too arrogant to read the book when it first appeared, this is the story of how a group of scientists and mathematicians from very different backgrounds found a new way to describe the world.  Traditionally, scientists had tried to understand natural phenomenon and systems as stable or almost-stable systems.  And it was assumed that complex systems needed even more complex models and webs of equations in order to fully appreciate them.  Yet to traditional science, an understanding of even the simplest of natural systems – clouds, air movements, the patterns made by ink drops in water, remained elusive.  Little by little though, researchers from different backgrounds began to realize that complexity could stem from very simple equations, that complex and apparently chaotic systems showed “regular” behavior, and that utterly different systems – noise on telephone wires, dripping taps, heartbeats and many, many others – demonstrated remarkable similarities.  No longer did it seem necessary to develop ever-more complex science to understand complex natural systems.

This represented a profound change in understanding in the science community – and one that wasn’t necessarily welcomed with open arms.  In the words of Gleick in his 2008 afterword to Chaos,

“… a new generation of scientists has come along, armed with a more robust set of assumptions about how nature works.  They know that a complex, dynamical system can get freaky.  They know, when it does that, that you can still look it in the eye and tale its measure.”

If you are looking for a deep exposition of chaotic and non-linear systems, and the science and mathematics needed to understand them, you should look elsewhere – Chaos is not a text book.  But if you want to get a flavor for how this new understanding came about and what its implications are – and along the way get an inside track on how science really works (or as is often the case, doesn’t), Gleick does a masterful job.

Interestingly, although many of the concepts surrounding chaos are now mainstream, Gleick’s book serves as a reminder to us science-practitioners that there are ways of understanding complex systems that aren’t always obvious.  The study of dynamic, non-linear systems is now commonplace.  But still, this is a relatively new field in terms of its influence across the multifarious disciplines that make up science. Over the past twenty years, I have used some of the concepts that come out of the field in my own research – using fractal dimension to describe agglomerates of nanoparticles for instance.  But there are many areas where traditional steady state, reductionist philosophies continue to hold sway.  Which makes me wonder whether Gleick’s Chaos doesn’t still have the power to jolt researchers out of their established thought-patterns, and make them think about their work in new – and perhaps more revealing – ways.

But I digress, because wanted to focus on this particular edition of Chaos.  And I wanted to do this from the perspective of reading it as an ebook rather than a paper book (a pbook?), and from the perspective of that “enhanced” tag.

First, the ebook experience.  I read Chaos on my iPad 2.  The last experience I had of reading a book on the iPad was not a good one – earlier this year I got half way through Iain M. Banks’ Surface Detail on my original iPad before abandoning it for the pbook version.  The transition was bliss.  Granted, the ebook was convenient.  But the intangibles of the pbook reading experience – the texture, form and weight of the book, the tactile turning of the page, the smooth, high resolution text, the ability to flip it open and start reading at a moment’s notice – transformed the experience from a utilitarian reading of words into the fully full immersion I usually look forward to when reading a novel.

So I was a little anxious as I opened up Chaos – the enhanced version.

To be honest, I quickly discovered I would have preferred to be reading the text in a conventional book.  But reading on the iPad was OK.  Reading non-fiction, the experience becomes less important than the assimilation of knowledge to me, so the iPad served its purpose.  And I must admit, the iBook interface on the iPad is pretty slick. The weight and feel of the iPad still bothers me when reading – it’s alright for the first few minutes, but quickly becomes wearing on the arms (strangely, as books with a similar weight don’t bother me).  But as I said, it was OK.

Of course, the supposed beauty of ebooks – and this one in particular – is the stuff that you just cannot do with a conventional book.  Chaos – the enhanced version – has two key enhancements that I could see.  The more trivial of the two is hot-linking between the text and supporting notes – more on that below.  The one that really pushes the boundaries of ebooks is the embedded videos.

The ebook includes seven embedded videos, that illustrate different aspects of chaotoc systems.  And they start with an interview with James Gleick (see the video below).

These are interesting.  It’s kind of cute to click on them and see the mathematics being visualized.  And Gleick’s introduction is worth watching.  But to be honest, I found they really didn’t add to my experience in reading the book.  I didn’t want to take a 1 – 2 minute break to watch an animation in the middle of reading I discovered.  And compared to reading, the rate of information transfer from a video seems glacial!

For me, the videos were an unnecessary distraction.  But of course, to others, they may not be – and to give them credit, they were short, unobtrusive, and well done.

Then there were the hot-links to supporting notes.  After the first few of these, I gave up using them.  The system works pretty well on the iPad – you touch the highlighted words to take you to the note, then the corresponding highlighted words in the note to get you back to the main text.  But I found this disruptive to the flow of reading.  More irritatingly, many times the notes didn’t make too much sense!  Take this example:

[Text] It is what some scientists call the White Earth climate [link]: an earth whose continents are covered by snow and whose oceans are covered by ice.

[link] THE WHITE EARTH CLIMATE Manable

Less than revealing!

Not all links are as obtuse, but I wouldn’t consider then particularly helpful.  Of course, these may directly reflect footnotes in the original text (not having read it, I wouldn’t know!), but I would have thought that this was an opportunity to clarify rather than propagate obfuscation!

Interestingly, the enhanced ebook doesn’t link to on-line resources.  At first I was bothered by this – it seems such an obvious way to add value.  But as James Gleick notes on his blog,

One doesn’t want the reader yanked away to a page listing the Great Luxury Hotels of Los Alamos. Or to any page. One wants the reader to get sucked into the book, there to remain.

This makes perfect sense, and I’m rather grateful to Open Road for not giving in to the temptation to include web links.

Overall, the Chaos ebook is well worth reading.  The enhancements I can take or leave – others may appreciate them though.  But the text still has the power to make you think, and force you to see the world another way, whether it’s observing clouds, listening to a tap drip, or idly watching the way the bubbles swirl in your just-poured glass of beer.

Chaos: Enhanced Edition (ebook) is available from Amazon.com (Kindle edition, $9.89) and Apple iBooks ($12.99)

This is not a science and technology post – which is a bit odd for a science and technology blog.  But I wanted to introduce five people who together shake up the whole idea of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos as being an elitist and increasingly irrelevant gathering of middle aged balding guys in suits – the Davos Teens.

Rather than write a deadly boring post (which this was until a couple of minutes ago), let me dive right in:

The Davos Teens are a small group of teenage (or thereabouts) social entrepreneurs, selected by their fellow Global Changemakers to attend the meeting.  The whole Global Changemakers shebang is organized and supported by the British Council, is committed to empowering youth to catalyse positive social change through Learning, Doing, and Advocacy, and includes over 600 young people from 110 countries.

This year’s Davos Teens are:

Anjali Chandrashekar (India) - a two-time national award winning visual artist and activist who has been using her artwork to raise funds and awareness for many national and international organisations

Dan Cullum (New Zealand) - a guy who has a vision to empower youth throughout the world to make a difference through simple act of wearing the same tee-shirt for a year – as well as working with underprivileged Maori and Pacific Island youth in South Auckland.

Mai Shbeta (Israel) – a young woman with Palestinian/Jewish parents, and living in a mixed religion/race village in Israel, who aims to bring Palestinian and Israeli youth together through peace camps.

Raquel Helen Silva (Brazil) – a social activist and community volunteer for the last decade, Raquel is working to improve the lives of girls and young women in Brazil.

Trevor Dougherty (USA) - an online activist since 2007, Trevor is dedicated to transforming the “me” on-line community into the “we” online community, through innovative uses of social media.

You can find out more about each of them here.

This morning, the five talked about their ideas and aspirations with Davos delegates in one of the most stimulating and worthwhile sessions of the conference.

Facilitator Nancy Lubin (CEO of dosomething.org) reminded us “old” people that we weren’t there to mentor these young people, but to work with them as equal partners in exploring new solutions to pressing problems. As a result, I found myself in a room full of energized and engaged business leaders, social/government leaders and entrepreneurs working with the Davos Youth to find new solutions to serious problems.  No paternalism or teaching or training – just a partnership between great ideas and seasoned know-how.

The collaboration between everyone in the room was electric, and I guarantee that it led to many people – young and old – leaving with new ideas and new plans.

Here and in numerous other places, these five young people are providing input to the Davos meeting that not only enriches it, but has the power to touch and influence event the most aloof of world leaders gathered here.

In other words, this is a model of partnership between youth and experience that is proving its worth many times over, and is ripe for growth.

Pretty enlighteneding for a gathering of “middle aged balding guys in suits”

The Davos Teens are guest-blogging for the Washington Post this week

Read last year’s blog on Global Changemakers at Davos here.

Sitting in a meeting on informal science education recently, I was intrigued to see a respected academic working on her knitting.  And she wasn’t the only one.  Now I may have had a something of a sheltered life, but in over twenty years of attending scientific conferences and workshops, I think this was the first time I had come across public acts of wool-work.

I was fascinated.

This was reinforced the other week when, following Tweets from a science policy event at the British Library the Science Blogging Talkfest in London, Stephen Curry announced “I can confirm that @alicebell is indeed knitting.”

Alice Bell's "leaf scarf" - clearly, knitting is about more than woolly jumpers and never-ending scarves!

As well as being a lecturer in science communication at Imperial College, Alice Bell is also something of a knitting maven.  So I asked her whether there was anything I should be reading to explore this new-found fascination with knitting in meetings.

Instead, Alice threw me down the metaphorical rabbit-hole! Who knew there was such a rich intersection between science, math, and working with yarn?

I was aware of the work on modeling hyperbolic geometries by Daina Taimina of Cornell University, using crochet. (can I mention crochet in a knitting blog?)  But, as I’m discovering, there’s a whole sub-culture of knitting and crocheting science out there!

Alice pointed me to this piece she wrote last year that touches on science and mathematics-themed knitting.  Based on an interview with Wired UK, it explores a seemingly growing fascination with knitting on the web.  Alice used the piece to explain why the explosion of the web-based knitting community is about more than just a “nerdish inclination” to use knitting as a way of realizing coded information and expressing science-themed ideas.  But this is certainly an aspect of knitting that she is no stranger to.  According to the Wired article, she has

…knitted a scarf that depicts the power spectrum of cosmic radiation, and other Ravelry users have recreated the emission spectrum of caesium and  reimagined Klein bottles as hats.  But why are knitters looking to science – or, indeed, scientists turning to knitting? [Ravelry is a popular knitting website]

“I think it’s partly the maths,” Bell says.  “Creating objects out of coded formulae – that’s what a knitting pattern is.”

Knitting patterns as code for complex three dimensional structures – it’s an idea that makes perfect sense when you think about it.  After all, DNA uses sequences of four molecules to code for complex protein structures, so why not use deceptively simple “knit one purl one” – type sequences to construct complex shapes?

The Rosalind Scarf, by Alice Bell

Of course there are limitations here as you would expect, but it’s surprising what can be done with a ball of wool and a few needles.  Alice sent me this link to Wooly Thoughts – the work of a husband and wife team of mathematical knitwear designers.

The “illusion knitting” is pretty impressive – where the image only becomes apparent when the piece is viewed at the correct angle.  Continuing the DNA theme, Alice Bell has used the technique for what she calls her “Rosalind Scarf” (after Rosalind Franklin, naturally), which only reveals its embedded double-helix structure to those that know how to see it – messages within messages here methinks!

Knitting and crocheting as a means of creating complex geometrical forms has a long and illustrious history.  Alan Turing was often seen knitting Möbius strips and other shapes in his lunchtime apparently, according to this 2008 MSNBC piece.  The work of Taimina and others on exploring hyperbolic planes – and their relevance to biology – has been groundbreaking (I know it’s crochet, but Margaret Wertheim’s TED talk on crochet coral and complex math is excellent here).  There’s even a book on how to do explore math through knitting – Making Mathematics with Needlework: Ten Papers and Ten Projects.

And then there are the knitters who use their craft to visualize three dimensional objects.  From dissected frogs to neurons to three dimensional models of the brain.  Everything is fair game here, as this beautiful sequence of images from Discover Magazine illustrates.

Interested in DIY-microbes?  Forget synthetic biology – just download a knitting pattern!  The Big Microbe Knit at last year’s Manchester Science Festival featured instructions to create everything from a Salmonella bacterium to an H1N1 virus.

Karen Nordberg's knitted brain

Clearly there’s a rich and complex intersection between science and knitting.  This is knitting as a method of storing, transmitting, manipulating and using information, as a way of realizing complex mathematical concepts and structures, and as a form of visualizing the world we live in in new and insightful ways.  It’s an area that is begging to be explored more thoroughly in the blogosphere.

But that’s a blog that will have to wait. In the meantime, I wanted to extract myself from the rabbit hole Alice Bell kindly opened up for me, and get back to where I started – knitting in scientific meetings.

So why don’t we see more knitting in scientific meetings?  Is it simply that these meetings are still often dominated by men, who – lets be honest – haven’t embraced knitting to the same extent as women have?  Are public displays of knitting deemed unprofessional and unbecoming at scientific conferences?  Or is it just that we’re a bunch of stuck-in-the-mud fuddy duddys, who are scared stiff of being pushed outside our comfort zone?

Do It Yourself biology - knitting-style

Knitting in meetings doesn’t seem to distract people if done discretely.  I suspect some knitters find it a useful way to remain focused on what is going on around them while keeping their hands busy.  And of course, if it’s a particularly tedious meeting, knitting is a less obviously antisocial way of coping than pulling out a good book or falling asleep!

There are even some suggested rules for knitting in meetings posted on the WhatIfKnits blog.  I particularly like rule 5:

Don’t be flashy. Certain kinds of knitting—socks on multiple double-points, for example, or colorwork involving several balls of yarn—can be particularly attention-getting for non-knitters, even if you have them mastered and don’t need to refer to patterns and the like (see 2). Remember, you knit because knitting is fascinating, but you don’t want to fascinate anyone else when there’s other work at hand.

To be honest, having seen meeting-knitting in action and reading about science-related knitting, I’m tempted to brush up on long-neglected knitting techniques (I think the last time I knitted something, I was elementary school age) and try some myself!

I wonder what the reaction would be if I calmly took out my (still hypothetical) needles and wool at the next scientific meeting I attend, and started to knit?

Would I attract the admiration of my fellow scientists as I challenged preconceived notions of what it means to be a male scientist in a notoriously conservative culture?

Or would I simply make an ass of myself?

I suspect the latter – although I’m not sure I’d ever have the guts to try it out and see.  But I must confess, I do like the idea of scientific meetings that are informal enough for people to indulge in public knitting.  And I have a suspicion that knitting isn’t such a bad way of maintaining concentration in such situations – as long as the rules are followed!

And of course, there is the intellectual stimulation of being involved in something that goes far beyond making scarves and woolly jumpers.

Maybe it is time for scientists to shrug off their cultural inhibitions, and embrace their inner-knitters!

Now, where to begin…

Update 7/26/10 – Huge apologies to Alice Bell for getting the venue where she was spotted knitting wrong (see comments below)!  It was, in fact, a Science Policy event at the British Library on July 12.

I owe my nearly-thirteen year old son – big-time!  This time next week he will be the proud recipient of an iPad – part birthday present, part relocation “compensation” and part his own personal investment.  But in the meantime, I’m here at 30,000 feet, typing on his intended device – being a kind soul, he graciously allowed me to give it a test run!

Reading all the publicity and chat surrounding the iPad, I’ve been intrigued by it’s potential as a work-aid.  Forget the fancy games, the videos and the photos – I wanted to see if it could make my reluctant road warrior-scientist existence just that little bit easier.

So taking advantage of a short trip to Minneapolis, a shiny new iPad in the closet just begging to be used, and my son’s generosity (I asked first!), I’ve been putting Apple’s latest gizmo through it’s paces.

As I write this, I am coming to the end of 48 hours on the road with the iPad.  In bringing the device with me on this trip, I had a pretty specific aim in mind – to explore how effectively it could replace my laptop while traveling, and whether it would make my life easier.  In other words, is it just an expensive solution looking for a problem, or does it truly have the potential to ease my workflow while on the road?

Out of the box. From the get-go, setting the iPad up was simplicity itself.  First, the packaging is inspired – open the box and all you have is the iPad, a power supply and a USB cable.  This device is designed to be intuitive – you are immediately invited to just switch it on and follow the instructions.  Syncing with iTunes on my laptop and loading up the new apps was a breeze – within a matter of minutes I was ready to rock and roll.

But how did the apps themselves fare?

Editing a Keynote presentation on the iPad

Talking the talk. What most excited me about the iPad was the possibility of using it to give presentations, without having to lug my laptop around with me.  I give a lot of talks, and some years ago I standardized on Apple Keynote as my presentation platform of choice.  So I was more than a little excited by the prospect of using the iPad version of this app.  Scheduled to give a keynote talk at an event on Thursday morning, this was my chance!

There’s been a lot written already about the iPad version of Keynote, and not all of it positive.  Although presentations on the app can look stunning, it isn’t directly compatible with the desktop version of Keynote – custom fonts don’t transfer; there are a limited range of templates available; presenter notes aren’t supported; and the app has a nasty habit of messing up presentations that are transferred back and forth between the iPad and a desktop computer.

Armed with this intelligence, I transferred a  copy of my presentation to the iPad before heading off to the airport, and spent half the flight between DC and Minneapolis tweaking the iPad version.

As it turned out, this wasn’t too hard a task – helped no doubt by the rather minimalist slide design I use.  It took a little time to get to grips with the Keynote iPad app limitations – not being able to group elements on a slide was a bit of a killer for instance – but within an hour I had a slick looking presentation all set to go.

Come Thursday, the actual presentation went seamlessly.  Plugging the iPad into the projector using Apple’s VGA connector and hitting “play” brought up the presentation on the screen immediately, and controlling the flow of slides was simple from the iPad’s screen.  I was impressed – I was able to give a slick, professional looking presentation from a slab of glass and aluminum a fraction of the bulk of my usual laptop.  And it all went without a hitch.

Keynote on the iPad is far from perfect.  But it’s good enough that, if you approach presentations from the perspective of designing them for the device, it works well.  I actually suspect that the simplicity of Keynote on the iPad has the potential to help people design better presentations, precisely because it’s limitations force you to think more about content and delivery.  And I must confess, slideshows on iPad itself can look stunning using the the features that are available.

For me, the’s no question that I would happily use this app in place of my laptop.  For others, Apple will probably need to work on features like handling groups and showing presenters notes (which it is incapable of handling at present) before it’s ready for prime time.

Viewing a publication in Papers on the iPad

The paperless office. I’ve long had fantasies of a portable device that gives me easy access to PDF files while on the go – meeting documents, reports, scientific papers and the like.  When electronic books came into vogue a few years back I had high hopes that I could ditch the stack of papers I constantly seem to cart around with me and transfer them to an ebook.  No such luck – although I gather the Kindle DX is better than most e-books in handling PDF’s, my experiences with other e-books were not happy ones.  So I was particularly interested in how the iPad would fare in this respect.

Before setting off, I loaded up two very different apps for working with PDF files: PDF Reader HD for viewing PDF files, and Papers – an app that allows you to carry a searchable library of academic papers around on the iPad, and sync them with your main computer.

Both apps displayed documents in what I can only describe as stunning detail.  It’s hard to over-emphasize how good these files looked on the iPad – the closest thing in my experience to date to having the original paper copy in my hand, but with the advantages of being able to search and scan the documents in ways impossible with hard copies.  I loved being able to magnify plots in papers and inspect them in depth, all with a flick of my fingers.  This feature alone made the iPad experience richer than accessing the papers on my laptop or as printed documents.

The Papers app allows documents to be synced between the iPad and a computer running the desktop version of the program.  The system worked smoothly – my only gripe being that you are limited to having 1000 papers on the iPad.

Transferring files to PDF Reader HD is a little more convoluted – you either need to use the iTunes interface, or transfer files via an internet browser over a wireless network.  The system works, but it’s messy.  Nevertheless, it was relatively easy to transfer a suite of useful files to the iPad so that I had them at my fingertips.

Taking note. I’ve recently started using EverNote to take and sync notes between my laptop and my iPhone.  The basic service – which is free – stores indexable notes in the ‘cloud,’ allowing access to them from wherever you are – a great idea for jotting down ideas and keeping track of thoughts while on the go.  EverNote for the iPad extends the number of devices these notes can be written and accessed on.

Despite the occasional crash, I found EverNote a useful tool on the iPad.  In the meetings I was in I could quickly jot down notes, and retrieve them later from whichever device I had access to – whether it was the iPad, iPhone or laptop.  What I particularly liked was how easy it was to break out the iPad and type something in – faster than getting the laptop out, and easier than typing on my iPhone.  In fact, I have found typing on the iPad in landscape mode as fast, and nearly as easy, as typing on my laptop.  I suspect it’s because I am a rather sad two-finger typer (a friend who is a touch typist was completely flummoxed by the iPad keyboard), but I had no problems with the virtually keyboard.

The free version of EverNote only allows access to notes when on line – there’s an annual charge for accessing notes off-line.  As it isn’t always possible to access a Wi-Fi internet connection with the current iPad, this is a potential issue.  But overall,I found EverNote on the iPad a great way to keep track of thoughts ideas and the occasional important piece of information that came my way.

Checking email on the iPad

Keeping in touch. Email was great on the iPad.  It took just a few minutes to establish access to my Mobile Me account and my University Exchange account, both of which allowed access to my email, calendar and contacts from the iPad.  Working with the built in email client was simple but effective – very similar to using the iPhone, but on a big screen!

My calendar on the iPad using the built in app was gorgeous!  Not only was it easy to flick through, add and edit appointments, but the slick presentation made working with my schedule extremely easy.  In terms of an organizer, I would rank using the iPad far above the iPhone or my laptop.  This is the digital calendar I’ve been waiting for all my life – I just didn’t know it until now!

The iPad’s address book was similarly slick, but didn’t quite have the wow appeal of the calendar. It was simple and effective though, and again much easier to access than having to pull my laptop out and power it up.

What I particularly appreciated with the calendar and address book applications was the ability to sync with various sources.  As I sit here typing, I can access my Exchange and Mobile Me calendars, as well as a separate set of appointments and contact that are synced with my laptop.  It makes working with my information in the way I want to surprisingly easy.

Getting organized with Things on the iPad

Getting organized. I use Things from Cultured Code on my iPhone to keep track of the myriad tasks I need to keep track of – it’s a beautifully simple application that works well with my less than organized approach to life, rather than forcing me to adopt a restrictively awkward work patten.  Initially I was hesitant to load the iPad version of Things up because of the cost – it will set you back close to $20.  Fortunately, the kind folks at Cultured Code allowed me access to an evaluation copy for the purpose of this review.

Things on the iPad works extremely well.  It has the same functionality as the iPhone version, but with the larger screen it is transformed into a far more productive tool.  And compared to the desktop version of the application, i found having my to-do list at my fingertips while on the go invaluable.

When on the same Wi-Fi network as a desktop version of Things, the application will sync information seamlessly between the iPad and the computer.  I had no problem syncing Things between my laptop, iPad and iPhone in this way – no matter where I was or what I was using, I knew what I was supposed to be doing.

The bottom line. Overall, this has been a great experience with the iPad.  I’ve loved the immediacy and accessibility of the device – it’s placed information and tools at my fingertips that have helped me work faster and more efficiently, and all with a minimally short learning curve.

Don’t get me wrong, the iPad is far from perfect – there are things it doesn’t do that a PC does.  But the way I have been using it, I think that some of the downsides that have been discussed on line over the past couple of weeks aren’t as relevant to me as they perhaps are to others.  The iPad i’ve been using hasn’t got over-hot during use.  I haven’t had problems connecting to the internet.  The lack of multitasking hasn’t been a serious issue.  I haven’t been stymied by a lack of Flash when accessing the web.  And typing has been straight forward on the virtual keyboard – the first draft of this piece was typed in Pages on the the iPad with no trouble at all.

That said, the iPad clearly is not a laptop replacement.  For example, I had hoped to be able to post this blog direct from the iPad, but difficulties using WordPress from the device would have meant posting the piece without formatting, hot links or images.  And the file handling is rather crude and limited.  But as an extension to a laptop and a means to making life on the road less stressful and more productive, the device is a wonder.  Think of it as a smart digital briefcase that you can pack your important files into when you hit the road, and that connects you to your digital world when your laptop is just too cumbersome and your smart phone just too small.

So, after 48 hours, what’s the verdict?  Is the iPad essential?  No. Does it make life easier?  Without a doubt.  Is it a worthwhile productivity tool for the itinerant scientist?  Absolutely.  Do I want one?  What do you think?!

In other words, I’m sold on the thing.  The only challenge now is how to scrape the dosh together to buy my own after this one has been returned to it’s rightful owner!  On the other hand, I wonder if he would miss it…

___________________________

Endnotes. Someone mentioned in passing that you can also play games, listen to music and watch videos on the iPad.  Honestly though, who would want to indulge in such frippery when you have such a great set of productivity tools at your fingertips…

Actually, I would have loved to have spent time within the wider world of iPhone apps, but time and schedule didn’t allow on this occasion – and I was supposed to be evaluating it as a business tool.  But I can say – from my limited experience – that photos on the iPad are stunning, video works exceedingly well, and web-browsing was as smooth as any experience I have had (assuming I wasn’t trying to view Flash-based sites).  Even the built-in speaker is adequate.

I was also fascinated by the increasing range of useful apps, as opposed to entertainment apps.  I only had time to load up and play with a simple calculator app and Wolfram Alpha – both were impressive though.  Wolfram Alpha in particular looks like it’s worth exploring in depth on this platform – the app takes full advantage of the format, and provides a portal to a vast information resource.  I can see this taking of as a serious platform for science  and education apps.

From this very brief encounter, the real bottom line is that this is a highly innovative and intuitive device that I can see becoming increasingly useful in the future to scientists and other professionals, whether on the road or not.

Screenshot of Wolfram Alpha on the iPad - an app that begs to be explored more!

Well, it’s been a week since I upped sticks from D.C. and started my new life as an academic in Ann Arbor. It’s been an eventful week, with the start of a several-month commute between my family who are still in Northern Virginia and Michigan, and beginning to find my feet in a new town, organization and position.  But I think I’m going to enjoy it here.  The move to academia does mark a major shift in my career however, and the start of a steep learning curve – almost as large as the one I faced when I moved to D.C. to take up my previous appointment.

Five years ago when I left government research to join the Woodrow Wilson Center in D.C., the culture-shock was jarring.  This was a town populated by lawyers, lobbyists and policy wonks (a term I rapidly added to my vocabulary), where knowledge was power, and where politics was everything – a culture light-years from the cosy world of my lab back in Cincinnati. Within this baptism of fire I remember clearly a good colleague impressing on me the quip attributed to Harry Truman: “If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog!”

At the time I thought it was rather cynical.  Five years on, I know better!

I mention this because my first week in academia-proper (as opposed to those rather cloistered government labs) has been threaded through with another aphorism.  Within the space of a few days, I’ve already lost count of how many people have noted that “academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low!”

Now I’d hate for this perception to cloud my judgment, and I should note for the record that my first week at the University of Michigan has been overwhelmingly positive – people have been universally welcoming and helpful.  But I must admit that there is an interesting dynamic here that is quite different to that in D.C.  It seems – from first impressions at least – that academics are adept at jockeying for position within a complex intersection of groups and factions, and demonstrate a skill that would put a pack of wolves to shame.  In political terms, it’s a little like trading the grand spectacle and backroom maneuvering of D.C. for bare-knuckle fighting – more Fight Club than Mr. Smith Goes To Washington!  I suspect that’s partly due to the unique mix of bureaucracy, hierarchy and personal latitude that comes with the territory – I’m looking forward to it

There was another reason why I turned to thinking about these two quotes though.  Both of them are somewhat apocryphal.  Truman’s “dog” quote seems to be traced back – at least in its most widespread form – to a 1989 article in the New York Times by Maureen Dowd.  Widely attributed to Truman, Dowd seems to have played a pivotal role in its evolution.  Similarly, the quote about academic politics is somewhat hard to pin down.  It’s often attributed to Wallace Sayre, a political scientist at Columbia University, although Henry Kissinger is routinely associated with it.    However, I was intrigued to see that the saying may have originally come from President Woodrow Wilson – a President who was no stranger to academia.

A rather neat piece of symmetry I thought as I move from an institution memorializing Woodrow Wilson, to one (possibly) immortalized by him!

By Ruth Seeley, No Spin PR.

A little over a year ago, Ruth Seeley – a freelance communications consultant – rather bravely approached me with a proposition:  She would help me develop a social media strategy for 2020 Science, if I would let her write the experience up as a case study.  Was she mad?  Did she not know how impossibly contrary scientists are to work with?  Or was she simply a sucker for punishment?  Twelve months on, I’m pleased to say that Ruth is still speaking to me.  But how did the experiment go?  To find out, read on… -AM

Despite having once shared an award for client service with a much more senior colleague, I would be the first to admit that client service – in the sense of getting along with and working closely, productively, and harmoniously with clients – has never been my strong suit. As an ex-global public relations employee gone (briefly) ‘corporate’ and now a solopreneur, I’ve had many challenges, not least of which was aligning myself with the kind of clients who don’t need a lot of handholding and who have either a learned or an instinctive understanding of what public relations is and what it can do for them. Managing client expectations and educating them is fine and dandy when you have a client willing and able to pay for their learning curve. Being asked to teach, explain, or worse, being second-guessed at every step of the way (which is what tends to happen when your client is another solopreneur with little corporate experience and a miniscule budget) is, frankly, both intolerable and unprofitable. Another real stumbling block for me was the fact that I no longer had a team – virtual or in-person – to draw upon. Nor an IT department to help me with technological challenges, ranging from viruses to actual laptop meltdowns. Couple that with the fact that I decided a decade ago that it really was time to stop and smell the roses, and I was faced with a dilemma when I decided to give public relations one more shot in late 2008 and see what I could make of No Spin PR.

Having decided that I wanted to focus on clients in the nanotechnology and clean energy technology sectors, I set up a Google Alert on nanotechnology and started doing my research. Among the first of the nanotech blogs I found was Andrew Maynard’s, and to my delight, one of the first 2020science posts I read was this one. As an English major I felt myself on firm ground – he was talking about books, after all, one or two of which I’d actually read. Emboldened by the reading I’d done to date on social media in general and the blogosphere in particular, I didn’t hesitate to comment. Twice, in fact, on that post. I also did some research on Andrew Maynard, and particularly liked what I saw of the way he handled himself on the Fred Friendly Town Hall simulations and how obviously genuine he was as evidenced by the Twinkie Guide to Nanotechnology. He wasn’t smooth and he wasn’t exactly succinct [so much for practicing in front of the mirror! -AM], but his passion for his subject matter, his desire to communicate effectively and his patience, humour, wit, and intelligence shone through. The fact that he was obviously having a good time, more than anything else, made me want to work with him.

When I concluded I could no longer ignore Twitter as I began my social media immersion, I searched for, found him, and started following him on Twitter in late 2008. To my surprise,  he was busily conducting a social media experiment – five tweets per day (and only five) over the course of a week, in an attempt to impart meaningful information on emerging technologies, including both nanotechnology and synthetic biology, 140 characters at a time (there were no links in those tweets). And so I approached him via email to ask if I could help him develop a social media strategy for 2020science.  Surprisingly, he agreed. Our formal terms were simple: I would provide my services on a pro bono basis if he would allow me to write a case study at the end of 2009 that would demonstrate both my social media and nanotechnology expertise (and he would have the right to review and approve the case study).

From the beginning, Andrew was an amenable but amusing client [I was clearly a little confused about the client-consultant relationship –AM]. I started writing plans using the formulas I’d been taught – call them RACE (research, action, communicate, evaluate – here’s an example of one campaign using that formula) or whatever you like, you begin with four basic questions: Where are we now, where do we want to be, how will we get there, and how will we know we’ve arrived? Situational analysis, objectives, strategy, tactics that map to strategy, and some form of measurement. I did MindMaps (he liked the MindMaps) [J -AM]. I urged him to create YouTube channels, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. I nagged him to get Google Analytics on the blog. I touted the benefits of podcasting [repeatedly, I recall –AM]. I attached dates to various initiatives. Somehow this led to several blog redesigns in the first quarter of 2009, for which I was inevitably blamed (I had said nothing about redesigning the blog, I swear!).  In terms of goals, I think the only one I could get him to commit to was the overarching goal of having fun. I stopped talking about goals, although I do recall saying our target for Twitter followers for the year should be 5000 followers. Looking back at my plans, I see that on January 21, 2009, 2020science was following 48 people and had 191 followers. I urged Andrew to take his personal branding a little more seriously, and to at least create an email signature that included his blog address and his Twitter ID. He saw the good sense of that suggestion and immediately implemented it. We stopped revising the plan.

And it was at that point that all sorts of good things began to happen. Andrew created an Alltop channel for 2020science. In mid-February, Lon Cohen recommended Andrew in a Mashable post on Twitter professors, and the next month Andrew himself approached Mashable about writing a post on tweeps (primarily although not exclusively science folks) who would change your perspective on reality. Except, of course, being British, he was adamant about referring to them as twits rather than tweeps. I had some input into the choice of those he recommended, and Andrew took some of my advice (ok, in this instance he was actually pretty tractable, let me do some editing, and he certainly honoured my wish not to be included in the list! Because, you know, I am not the story – he’s the story). And no one seemed to mind, although the sudden increase in followers led some of the 13 listed to conclude their computers had caught a virus – it didn’t occur to me till after the article was posted that we should have given them a heads up that they were about to be mentioned in the article [put it down to being British again, but I did get a chuckle from watching the 13 tweeps go through the same confusion I experienced after appearing on Lon’s list – I seriously thought I was the unwitting victim of a spam-attack! –AM] . Less than three months after beginning to approach his social media efforts more strategically, 2020science had more than 5000 followers on Twitter.

In terms of other forms of measurement, the blog’s Technorati  authority has increased from 11 on January 21, 2009, to 122 as of January 3, 2010 [although with the new rating system, I have no idea what this means – AM]. Almost 500 people now subscribe to the 2020science RSS feed (up from 8 on 21/1/09) – and more than 5700 followers on Twitter. I was initially concerned about Andrew’s following:follower ratio (he is still only following 195 tweeps – fine – twits). But by assiduously checking his @messages he has been able to interact with far more than the 195 folks he follows, and has also, I gather from our last conversation, managed to not drive himself insane attempting to cope with the tsunami of information that is Twitter while continuing to hold down a full-time job, stay married, and actually be present in his relationship with his children.

More important, he has embraced the principles of social media so surely and so instinctively that he has made working with him a constant pleasure and a continuous learning experience for me. He’s (a little stiffly, mind you, and with properly British reserve) embraced Facebook and if you don’t contribute your suggestions regarding what you’d like to see on the 2020science blog you will not be eligible to win one of the brilliant (and my current favourite coffee-drinking vessel) 2020science blog mugs. But in addition to maintaining his own enthusiasm for blogging and communicating about science, technology, society and innovation, he has also succeeded in creating a community of folks who are asking some of the questions that need to be asked in these still-early days of the 21^st Century: who really benefits from the scientific research that’s being done? How can we share the innovative technology we’re capable of producing? How do we communicate effectively – and by that I mean, how do we manage to both listen and to express our own point of view or that of our organization in order to arrive at agreement rather than polarized entrenchment of existing views? From my own perspective, what he’s taught me is that letting go of the message, giving the client his head, as it were (or, you know, enough rope to hang himself), and adopting a far more hands-off, coach/consultant role rather than creating scripts that must then be memorized and delivered after arduous rehearsal, is the way to go, and is the future of public relations rather than its death knell.

2010 – the year of the 2020science podcast series? Stay tuned. My middle name is Persistence.

Despite my quips above, this has been a great year working with Ruth.  At the beginning of the year, I really didn’t know where I was going with 2020 Science.  I still don’t know, but now I don’t know with style!  Actually, that’s not true – as she says, Ruth forced me to take the blog—and the 2020 Science brand—seriously, and think more clearly about what I was trying to achieve.  In some ways I was a difficult client – I listened patiently to Ruth’s suggestions, then happily went off and did my own thing!  But at the end of the day we forged a partnership that worked very well.  In reality, she coached me to work effectively with social media—acting as a guide, sounding board and, occasionally, a taskmaster (but not often).

So was the experience worthwhile?  Absolutely!  2020 Science always will be something of a niche blog.  But at least it’s now a social media-savvy niche blog, written by someone who has a slightly better idea of why he’s doing it than he did a year ago.

But I do draw the line at podcasts–for now… -AM

Now you see what I’m dealing with – he asks me to write a guest blog and thinks he can have the last word!

I know you’re supposed to look forward at the beginning of the new year, but having done that the other day, I thought I would take this opportunity to have a quick glance back at the last 12 months of 2020 Science.  And just to keep your attention – I know how tedious these retrospectives can be – I’m throwing in a chance to win some “fabulous” prizes at the end of the post; so don’t go away just yet!

2020 Science was never going to be a mainstream blog – aside from it being written by me (in the main) in my spare time, the broader opportunities and implications of emerging technologies is something of a niche subject.  But with the help of Ruth Seeley at No Spin PR, 2020 Science grew up in 2009 – what started as little more than a hobby blog began to have some serious impact!

Over the past 12 months, 134 blogs have been posted, covering subjects as diverse as nanotechnology to pneumatic toilet seats, and geoengineering to on-line games.  Four specific blog series have been run, and posts from eleven guest contributes published.  The blog has received over 76,000 visits, with over 120,000 pageviews.  Monthly pageviews have grown from ~6300 in February (January was an incomplete month for the stats), to over 20,000 in December.

I’ll be posting more specific stats on the 2020 Science Facebook page (please sign up – it’s a great way to get the inside track on the blog, and interact with other readers).  But for the rest of this retrospective, I wanted to highlight some of the key posts of the year:

Top Ten Viewed Posts

With the highest viewed posts first, these were:

1. Synthetic biology, ethics and the hacker culture (June 13)
2. Is nanotechnology poised for the ride of its life? (August 18)
3. Nanotechnology on Twit TV’s Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour (July 2)
4. Ten emerging technology trends to watch over the next decade (December 25)
5. Texas Instruments – transforming the world, one calculator at a time (or, What Went Wrong with my Life?) (September 13)
6. Roll over nanotechnology, synthetic biology is coming! (May 18)
7. Geoengineering the climate: A clear perspective from the Royal Society (September 1)
8. Nanotechnology: From nano-novice to nano-genius in 13 steps (May 26)
9. Deconstructing the “Fry Event Horizon” (March 6)
10. Industry critics give nanotechnology sunscreens the thumbs up (July 3)

Ten Personal Favorites

As always, the blogs I felt particularly good about didn’t always coincide with the ones others enjoyed reading.  Here are ten of my favorite blogs from 2009:

• Geoengineering: Does it need a dose of geoethics? (January 28)
• In space, no one can hear you scream – unless you’re in a sci-flick! (February 16)
• Darwin, evolution, and the genesis of intelligent design (February 11)
• Science, society and the Second Enlightenment (February 23)
• Blogging the demise of science journalism (March 20)
• Cultural smokescreens (May 6)
• The long shout (May 13)
• Roll over nanotechnology, synthetic biology is coming! (May 18)
• Sunscreens and Alzheimer’s – solid science or scare-mongering speculation? (August 25)
• Hooked on science – ten things that inspired me to become a scientist (September 3)

Five “orphaned” posts

And for a final list, here are five “orphaned” blogs – posts I thought should get way more views than they did

• Confessions of a “media hog” (March 26)
• Nanotechnology in motion: the good, the bad and the.. just plain weird? (April 25)
• Celebrity scientists – it takes more than stardust (June 27)
• Yodeling Cowboys at 3 o’clock (September 24)
• “Nano” from the 1970’s. Don Eigler, eat your heart out! (October 1)

And that competition?

To kick off 2010, I’d like to know what you would like to see on 2020 Science – what works, what doesn’t, what I should do more of, what I should drop as fast as possible!  I’m also hoping to get more people involved on the 2020 Science Facebook page.  So to kill two birds with one stone, I’m offering the chance to win one of two rather nifty 2020 Science mugs (see below) in return for a bit of Facebook-feedback.  To find out how you could be the proud owner of a 2020 Science “blog on a mug,” simply follow the link.

Happy New Year!

Your chance to win a 2020 Science Blog on a Mug!

Brain-candy for the intellectually incapacitated.

To help the brain cells recuperate from over-exertion (and quite possibly over-indulgence) this Holiday season, here’s a short compendium of mindless games – the sort of things scientists and others indulge in when they think no-one’s looking!

The selection rules here were simple: Anything that didn’t hold my attention for more than 5 seconds, required a double-digit IQ, or was associated with “learning goals,” was ditched faster than a game of Klingon Scrabble.

Of course, you’re expected to pooh pooh the resulting collection to friends and colleagues as being nothing but mindless drivel – got to keep the side up after all!  But when you’re alone, check out the games.  Believe me, your over-exerted brain cells will thank you!

Happy Holidays

___________________

Science Crossword

I thought I’d start with at least a pretense of intellectual stimulation with this science crossword.  Pretense is the keyword here – this isn’t quite Times Crossword territory.  Which is a relief, as completing it is straightforward, even if most of your brain is still off partying elsewhere.

If you enjoyed this, there are fifteen other science crosswords to keep you amused ScienceCrossword.com

Levers

Here’s a deceptively engaging bit of fun from VectorPark.  Just build a mobile from the pieces provided.  Each time you get the thing to balance, you get another piece to add – how far can you get?  Like all games from VectorPark, it’s up to you to discover the rules by trial and error.  Or you could just sit and watch your mobile twist and turn on the screen – my recommendation after a heavy Holiday meal!

Monkey Lander

You know the slogan “a minute to learn, a lifetime to master?”  At least half of it applies to Monkey Lander.  The mission is simple – steer Monkey’s ship to collect the fruit (then get Monkey safely to the landing pad).  The science-ish twist? – some of the more obvious laws of physics (and rocket-propelled monkeys) apply.

Science Fiction WordSearch

Another option for people who prefer words to spaceship-flying monkeys.  There are four scifi-themed word searches in all here.  None of them are too taxing – which is quite alright by me.

Spider

Some more fun from VectorPark.  I’m not entirely sure what is supposed to happen here, apart from a six-legged dog/bird hybrid eagerly following a spider around the screen – maybe I just haven’t played with it for long enough.  If you find out, let me know.

Neave Vote

I really struggled to decide what to include in this compendium from Paul Neave – there’s so much great stuff on his website (thanks to @Alessandro on Twitter for the recommendation).  But this tickled me – it’s the perfect antidote for anyone who takes on-line polls too seriously!

Windosill

Back to VectorPark for the next game.  This is another game of discovery – no rules; just a mouse, a screen, and a bizarrely elegant world.  Then it’s up to you.  The first couple of levels are free (if you can work out how to move on from the opening screen), but to play the full game, it’ll cost you $3!

A hint – follow the car.

Gravity Launch

Gravity Launch almost didn’t make it into the mindless game compendium – it teeters on the edge of being too educational.  But despite this obvious flaw, it’s still a lot of fun – and simple too.  Just adjust the rocket’s thrust and takeoff angle, and try to dock with an increasingly complex array of space stations.  Thanks to @science_4_all on Twitter for bringing this one to my attention.

The Eyeballing Game

I thought I’d throw this one in for engineers… and other obsessive-compulsives. How well can you complete each pattern, just by “eyeballing” it?  Harder than you think – especially if you’re a little worse for wear!

Feed the Head

Finally, I thought I would leave the most bizarre game to last – and no surprises that once again it’s from VectorPark.  Feed the Head is a Pythonesque piece of trippy weirdness that will either have you hooked, or doing physical damage to your computer in frustration.  If you think there’s a danger of this, best stick to flying monkeys. This is another game of discovery – follow the mouse, and see where it leads…

_______________________

End Note

Okay, so I have a confession to make.  Despite my aims of embracing the trivial and avoiding learning experiences at all costs, these games have a little more in common with science and technology than might be immediately apparent.  With a couple of exceptions, there’s a discovery and prediction theme going on here that reflects how science tends to work, not to mention some rather cool physically-realistic modeling.  But don’t let that distract you from enjoying the games for what they are – (relatively) mindless fun!

I always thought mathematics at school was all about being taught a new language – one that helps us live in a culture built on numbers, enables scientists and engineers to understand and control the world we live in, and enriches us by revealing the underlying complexity and beauty of the universe.

I was wrong…

I now know that mathematics at school is all about learning to use a high end Texas Instruments graphing calculator.

I came to this revelation while purchasing my 12 year old son’s school supplies a couple of weeks ago.  The supply list stated, and I quote,

“ALL Algebra I and Algebra I Honors are REQUIRED to purchase a TI-83 plus or TI-84 calculator”

(The emphasis has not been added – this is how it appears on the school’s web site)

The TI-84 Plus graphing calculator - every seventh grader should have one!

Back when I was at school, my math teachers had some funny ideas.  They thought it was possible to do mathematics with a pencil and paper.  They had this idea that equations could be plotted and solved using graph paper.  And they adhered to the archaic notion that learning the language of math was more important (at that stage) than the actual numbers.

No wonder I’ve had such a stunted professional life as a scientist – unlike today’s enlightened education authorities (in the US at least), my teachers didn’t realize the absolute necessity of owning a graphing calculator.

I must confess, because of my ignorance, the penny didn’t drop when I first read my son’s supply list. Because I had been so sadly impoverished in my mathematical education, I assumed that these TI-gizmos were bulk standard scientific calculators.  Oh no – these are top of the line Texas Instruments graphing calculators; the cream of the cream in the world of pocket sized number crunchers.

Conveniently, the local Staples store had a prominent display of the calculators, and boxes of them just waiting for parents eager to give their seventh graders the best possible math education.  Very kindly, the store was also selling insurance policies to go with them – just in case your son or daughter lost or broke their beautiful new $100 purchase.

I must confess though, I was a little shell shocked by the cost and complexity of this algebraic marvel – probably because I hadn’t had the benefit of such a wonder as a child.  So I did a little digging around as to whether this is a standard item in the young person’s mathematical education, or whether it was just a local thing.

I now know that almost every reader of this blog in the US who graduated sometime in the past 20 years or so will have had the advantage of a TI graphing calculator in their mathematical education.

Apparently, the TI-83 or (ideally) the TI-84 graphing calculators have been essential items in US schools for decades.  There are even textbooks (so I’m told) that require these devices, and exams that are impossible to take without them.

Interestingly, it always seems to be the Texas Instruments calculators that are needed.

It was at this point that it hit me: This is where my life had gone wrong.

Up until now, I thought I had been doing okay.  I had a good degree in physics.  I graduated with a doctorate in physics from the University of Cambridge in the UK.  I’d managed to do some reasonably innovative research over the years, publishing a few papers – although admittedly, only a handful have been in high impact journals like Nature.  I even had a reasonable job.

But I had never had a TI-83 (or TI-84) graphing calculator!

For years, I’ve been under the delusion that a $20 scientific calculator is all you need to make it in this world, together with pencil and paper, and maybe a computer for the complex stuff.  I can only imagine what heights I could have scaled, if only I’d of had a TI-83 from Texas Instruments!

My one consolation is that I’m not alone in this.  Having become aware of this crippling omission in my professional life, I began asking colleagues about their own experiences.  And here’s the real tragedy of this story – so many great intellects around the world have been held back it seems, because they never understood the importance of a good graphing calculator.

A senior research advisor in UK admitted to me just this last week to never having fathomed the relevance of these instruments.  Another good friend and highly influential scientist was highly skeptical of these button-festooned pocket data plotters.  Who’s to know—with a TI-83 graphing calculator, they could have been advisors to prime ministers, or Nobel Laureates!

In fact, I’m left wondering whether the mandatory use of TI graphing calculators in US schools has been the secret of the country’s mathematical success in recent years.  I’m sitting on a plane while I type this, and so cannot check the figures.  But I bet when I do it will be clear that, thanks to Texas Instruments, the mathematical ability of students in United States far surpasses that of other countries.  Unless of course, TI have been generous enough to share this intellect-expanding invention with education agencies, boards and curriculum developers beyond US borders…

Fortunately, I now have a chance make sure my son has the advantages I never have.  And there’s going to be no expense spared.  I was tempted to buy him the cheaper TI-83 plus graphing calculator.  But I gather from my research that the $120 TI-84 plus has a significantly faster processor and is the recommended choice by many.

It hadn’t struck me before that processing power is important when it comes to buying a calculator.

Now I know better.

Thank goodness for the internet for that piece of enlightenment – I could have ended up buying my seventh grader a real dud.

And thank goodness for Texas Instruments – today’s highly mathematically literate generation owes you.  Big time!