Author: jonwoodscience

Despite me sharing a visual history of my life on Facebook, the vast majority of people who read this would not have known me when I was at school. I’m sometimes asked what I was like at school and the answer is generally quite dull. I did what every other kid did, which was to keep my head down and keep out of trouble. The best way we could accomplish this was to spend a lot of time in the dark, waggling our joysticks.

While I was introduced to computers in junior school, it was quite limiting. Partly because the hardware in question was a Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 and secondly, programming beyond the basics of “Hello World” was beyond the skill set of most teachers.

Continue reading “Error 4 – Out of memory”

During the chaos of being on tour I was asked to write a few lines about how the science communication scene had grown during the last 18 months. It left me pleasantly surprised.

In February 2014, Birmingham held it’s first Science Showoff and now has an established regular Bright Club too. These brought local performers and researchers together with not just the public but also practitioners from around the country. It’s been especially nice to see people come to one show, see how it works and sign up as a performer for the next one. It was wonderful to receive an email asking me whether there were any other outlets for performing science stand-up as they had ‘got the bug’.

Continue reading “When I Was One, I Was Just Begun”

Not quite the Rolling Stones, but I’m excited to be taking both Half Baked Heroes and Subliming the Ridiculous shows on tour this year. I’ll be at the Cardiff Science Festival and the Lancashire Science festival. The latter almost feels like a residency as I’m performing over three days. You have no excuse to miss this one.

Aside from new things, I’ve been revisiting old favourites. When I first started along the path that has led me here it was because I delivered an outreach session at Aston University. It was a workshop on EEG, which was a variation on a practical I taught on the psychology undergraduate programme. That element later became a favourite in an early variation of the Fifty Shades of Grey Matter session I developed on the history of electrophysiology and neuroscience. While it remained in the full version of that workshop, the EEG practical got cropped in versions I did for the NeuroCafe as part of the Flatpack Film festival in 2014.

Continue reading “On Tour”