Vivat Libertas

I happen to think pop science gets a bad rap. It's regarded as dumbed-down science at best, or unreadable if not dumbed down (but seriously, how is Scientific American considered unreadably technical?). I can see how this bad reputation comes about; it's difficult to balance the deep technicality of science with the ability to entertain and inform a public largely unfamiliar with these technicalities. This isn't to say that the average person is stupid - in fact, patronising your audience makes for terrible science communication and angry reactions - but to say that science is heavily specialised. Writing about specialist concepts for a general audience is hard , and it takes time. So most of the people doing it aren't the people who have been working in these fields. In fact, they're unlikely to have any scientific training whatsoever. In an age where most people won't go a day without using some kind of scientific achievement, good popular science is more ...

On Saturday, after much squeeing from me, my partner and I went to the Colour and Vision exhibition at the Natural History Museum . I had wanted to go for a while, mostly because I'm a sucker for colour and shiny. It was all that I expected - and a little more besides. As you'd expect for an exhibition which is all about seeing colour, it's visually very attractive - which is why I came in the first place! The first thing you see as you walk in is an installation - Our Spectral Vision - by artist Liz West , who primarily works with colour. Despite basically being a room filled with prisms which change colour with angle, it's surprisingly serene and contrasts sharply with the hustle and bustle of the Natural History Museum on a Saturday during school holidays. As you walk through, be sure to look at the floor - it asks questions about colour and how we perceive it. Some of them stick. Our Spectral Vision (Liz West) The first part of the exhibit is all but mono...

I'm a philistine. I'm not necessarily proud of this, but I'm a philistine all the same. I simply find it difficult to connect to, say, the visual arts or poetry in the same way that I connect to prose or music - especially music. My wonderful boyfriend is planning on entering the National Poetry Competition , which is a really huge fucking deal , and asked me for critiques on the poems (I think this is a bad idea because I don't consider myself a particularly great judge of poetry; more on this later). I browsed about fifty poems, from first prize winners to commendations. I pored through fifty poems by some of the most promising poets worldwide. Precisely one touched me. Out of fifty poems by the cream of our literary crop, I would have come back to only one of them - Hill Speak by Zaffar Kunial , if you must know. This is because for all that I'm coarse and unappreciative of the fine art of poetry, wrought by pointed hand, I really love all the little det...

Growing up is tough to do. You find a sense of self, almost immediately quash it to avoid relentless bullying, and your hormones start flowing all over the place. You have to learn to navigate among your peers, who are all as confused as you but never show it, and have to plan your future. (Take heart; actual adults can't do this. We're all just faking.) In light of this, it's no wonder that we all tell each other to stop getting attached. There's some good points in that; everything is temporary, people are fickle and the world is cruel. Assuming people and things will stay in your life is a good way to make yourself deeply unhappy. At the same time, some of the aspects of not getting attached are utterly shitty. Relationships between people are built on trusting someone else to see your vulnerabilities and not immediately exploit them. Throwing yourself into something enthusiastically , even knowing it won't last, is a good way to find something to actually ...

A while back I wrote about the chilling effect that sanctimonious vitriol can have on discourse. It punishes people, particularly the most vulnerable people, in the name of some righteous cause or other, and because it's an exercise in influence, a lot of people don't want to get in the way of seemingly justified anger. A perpetual worry is that the fear of giving offence causes people to self-censor. Given that the internet is full of people who think that holding a shitty opinion is literally the worst thing you could do and that it's acceptable to threaten people until they shut up, this is perfectly understandable. Even then, there are issues and nuances; on a trivial level, people self-censor all the time. It's why politeness exists. Some level of self-censorship is normal in most societies to stop us from fighting all the time, because there are times that are bad to pick fights and times that are worse to pick fights. The internet is now a perfect place for pe...

(or: how ignorance is a privilege) My friend has started working on her MA thesis and I am so pleased for her! Her particular discipline, disability studies, is comparatively little-known compared to more fashionable fields like feminist theory or queer theory, so it's very much an uphill struggle. Even then, disability is multifaceted and it's very difficult to get people to acknowledge this (including disabled people ourselves, because not everyone is experienced on every disability ever by virtue of having one particular disability). (Speaking of identities, here is Melanie Yergeau on "shiny identities" . She's so fantastic.) Anyway, as my friend is working on her thesis, she is reading various different writers and introducing me to them; in particular, the work of the poet Tom Andrews struck me. It's dark and funny and pulls inspiration from every aspect of life. (Also poetry about disability: Karl Mercer is busy moving his stuff around, but To D...

The Guardian's on a mental health kick again. A couple of weeks ago, it put out a request for people's experiences with Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) . In the UK, it's a specialist service which helps under-18s with difficulty with emotional or behavioural wellbeing. I filled in their form for a laugh; I'd had a pretty bad experiences with my local CAMHS branch. I certainly wasn't expecting an interview request to come my way. (Fingers crossed!) I've written about mental health many times before . This is because having a chronic condition is something which affects me every day. What I've never really done is written about mental health for anyone other than myself, and certainly not for old media. I've only done a couple of old media things before, but I'm worried that if I keep doing them I'm going to be seen as part of the media establishment rather than someone who just really likes hearing the sound of her own v...

Every time an article is posted about, say, the gender gap in certain sciences (physics and engineering are particularly bad offenders here), or the experience of LGBTQ+ scientists, the same kind of comment always comes up: why don't we just focus on the science? Why do we need to bring in politics or matters of identity? I think these kinds of comments are missing the point. Certain types of science, in particular more abstract or fundamental disciplines, don't care about the gender or race or sexual orientation of the scientist. The laws of physics are described by the same equations wherever you are on the planet, regardless of your identity. (More or less - the laws of physics as we've currently formulated them break down at edge cases, such as black holes, and it's not inconceivable that some alien civilisation might have formulated them in a completely different but hopefully mathematically equivalent way.) However, there is an argument to be made that a theor...

I'm pissed off and disillusioned. Academics like fashion just as much as the rest of us. Fads and fashions exist in every discipline, from economics to physics to history to I don't know what. I happen to think that this is a terrible thing; in some disciplines, if you're not working on the most fashionable idea, getting funding is hard. (Witness the funding of string theory relative to other theories of quantum gravity - although I think it's running out of steam, which frankly is a good thing.) I can't see this as anything but an obstruction to potentially good ideas in any discipline. I am angry. I am angry because this desire to follow fads and fashions extends to spaces like feminist theory and queer theory - spaces which are ostensibly about understanding and unpicking institutionally oppressive systems, at least to my limited understanding. Instead, when funding is denied for less fashionable but still important projects while fashionable if, say, ableis...

Last week Glastonbury, the biggest festival in the UK, took place. This week everyone has now got back to larger supplies of running water and is busy posting about how "we are one". Foolishly, I thought "we" referred to "people living in the UK" rather than "people who went to Glastonbury". If it's referring to the latter, well, I wasn't there but fair enough - glad you enjoyed yourselves. If it's referring to the former, I know we should be focusing on uniting rather than dividing the country; I'm usually one of the first people trying to build a grand coalition and decrying infighting. But no - I don't feel like we are one. Getting to Glastonbury isn't easy for a multitude of reasons - ticket availability, ticket pricing (seriously, for the price of a ticket and booking fee I could spend a week in Germany not getting rained on), actually getting there, additional expenses...I feel more than a little patronised being...