Category: Events

I quite enjoyed my Cafe Scientifique talk

Enigma rotors by Foo

Photo by Bob Lord via Wikipedia

Of course I never actually mentioned here (at least not recently) that I was giving a Cafe Scientifique talk, but I did and it went fine. I gave a presentation last night at the Common Cup coffee house entitled “An overview of cryptography: What happens to your credit card number on-line, and is that e-mail really from your boss?”. The audience was small (20-ish?), but attentive and interested, and I think it went nicely. The truly shiftless can download a PDF copy of my slides for their amusement.

Many thanks to PeeZeed for bringing this wonderful Cafe Scientifique idea to Morris and organizing the events. The quality of both the talks and the audiences has been very high, and I know I’ve learned a lot from attending.

The one slightly unfortunate thing has been the degree to which the audiences have been primarily University folk, and science folk at that. Nothing wrong with that (I got lots of very cool questions last night, for example), but if one of the goals of C.S. is to bring science to the “general public”, having the audience be largely university science faculty isn’t quite the game plan.

Cafe Scientifique logo
I think that there are some historical and cultural issues at work. Also, despite the oft-heard mantra that “There’s nothing to do in Morris”, there were quite a few competing events last night that I know pulled quite a few people away. Ultimately, though, we haven’t done a terribly great job of advertising/promoting these things. Sadly, I’m as guilty as anyone here. I had grand plans to promote last night’s talk (radio interviews, newspaper promotion, posters, etc., etc.), but in the end life pushed this right on down the list of important things to do. Sigh.

We’ve got one more this school year, with Mark Logan discussing origami and mathematics, which should be a fun evening. We’re great at the science – now we just need to work on our PR. :-)

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The end is nigh for Turq

Things are never quite clear in your dreams
I am sad to announce that after some 12 years of craziness, Turq’s wild run is likely to come to an end this week. He’s had feline leukemia for nearly 3 years, and when he was diagnosed they only gave him a few weeks to live, yet here he still is. The leukemia, plus surviving being hit by a car a number of years ago (which included getting disoriented and lost and living rough for almost a month with a badly broken jaw before we were reunited), suggests that he’s used up all his nine lives and a few of Portia’s.

It’s all catching up with him, though, and things have deteriorated to the point where we all agree that the time has come to put him to sleep, probably this week.

Sniff.

Turq was born almost the same time as Sub-Evil Boy and they’ve spent pretty much their entire lives together. (We’ve got some amazingly cute pictures of them together as baby and kitten.) It’ll be interesting see how Portia (who’s 2 years older than Turq) reacts to his absence. She’s been doing this weird stress thing where she sits and pulls out clumps of her hair and we don’t know why. Having this happen, as well as the chaos engendered by the bathroom remodelling (more on that later), may really freak her out. Hopefully not, though…

In these last few years of his life there have been more than a few times where he’s been, well, pretty gross (chronic sinus infection and less than optimal personal hygiene), but he was always an amazing character in the best sense and our lives are all much richer for knowing him.

We’re probably going to scatter his ashes in the yard where he spent many happy days lording over his domain. Sub-Evil is planning on inviting some friends over and we’ll make a proper ceremony of it. So raise a toast to our strange little friend.

3 not 2

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