A better shade of grey

When I lived in Durham you could stand on Prebends bridge and see this view of the cathedral. Etched into the stonework are Sir Walter Scott's words

"Grey towers of Durham

Yet well I love thy mixed and massive piles

Half church of God, half castle 'gainst the Scot

And long to roam those venerable aisles

With records stored of deeds long since forgot."

Since moving from a southern-like city in the north to a northern-like town in the south I have been in search of an equivalently evocative poem about Didcot's very own grey towers.

Kit Wright has put forward his attempt to the BBC's verse competition. Check it out here, It starts with

"What vasty thighs outspread to give thee birth," and gets better with lines like

"DIDCOT, thou bugger!"

It's certainly a source of much inspiration, find out more about Didcot through Demontrout's piece here and longtalljohnny's post a while back.

I can't stop thinkin', Thinking 'bout sinkin', Sinkin' down into my bed

It's a bad obsession It's always messin' It's always messin' myyyyyyyy mind....I can't stop thinking 'bout white bears! one more time. Ah but no, actually now I'm more thinking about how much I used to like that song aged 12 without ever reading the lyrics. You can find them here if you're interested.

Anyway, the similarity between white bears and what Axl is calls his mum, is that they are both things I have been trying quite hard NOT to think about this evening. This brings me to a fantastic book, 

You can test one of the wacky experiments in here by sitting in an empty room and trying NOT to think about white bears.

Ha! not as easy as you thought is it

Better still get yourself a copy of Alex Boese's book and see the other tricks that his great conversational writing can play on you.

This experiment is fully documented in

Wegner D. M., Schneider D. J. "Paradoxical effects of thought suppression" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53 (1) pp 5-13

Online communities - are they the best way to get help and guidance for all life's issues?

I do often think that death and cancer are strange taboos given that so many of us are affected by them directly or indirectly.

A study published this week by Lorraine Buis and coworkers looked at online communities for cancer sufferers (see article here). Apparently cancer sufferers are increasingly being pointed in the direction of these communities to get information and emotional support. The aim was to see if there was a link between the survival rates for the cancer and what people tended to be talking about on the forum.

The results were as follows:

• Online support communities for high survival rate cancers are more orientated towards emotional support than forums for cancers with low survival rates.
  

• Support communities for low survival rate cancers contain more information than online support communities for high survival rate cancers.

The authors hope that this work can help the medical profession make informed decisions when recommending online communities. In this case the families of those who passed away are clearly going to have very different thoughts and priorities to survivors and their loved ones. They will therefore participate in communities in different ways and perhaps not always be providing what their fellow community members might need. I wonder how prevalent this type of discrepancy is in online forums in general?

Science and Truth

What I've been looking for recently are places to discuss the big issues in science and get them out to the world at large. In my post on CERN I challenged scientists to get their message across in simple and effective terms so as to avoid malicious rumours. David Weinkove is very experienced in these events and brings us a new and interesting format with his brother:

A Talkaoke at the Science Museum this Tuesday at 7 pm

In a recent Essay at LabLit.com he challenges scientists and non-scientists alike to

get off your pedestal and get round the table

It certainly sounds an interesting format, a type of interactive round table talkshow. I'm going to try and grab a ticket as there still seems to be places available.

It's free, at London's Dana centre in the Science Museum, you can find out more here and see the facebook page too.

Parley with a parochial perpetual perceptive popular poster!

Get that?

I have been answering some questions about why I write this thing.

You can look in wonderment at Sylwia Presley's blog to find out more. It's often an interesting site, this week covering the ethics around the US election as well as some great photos and blogging tips.

It's been great to take part through her series of blogger interviews. Other subjects have included Karl, Lolly, Colin, Rich, and the prodigies that are Kid tech Guru and Monik.

Sparrow's Spleen

JET set for an open evening

The UKAEA team, who were at the science event in Didcot emailed me with some dates for public open evenings at my local fusion experiment.

Sounds interesting! Looking back over the power plants I've visited since I was a kid, my CV reads like this:

• Nuclear
• Coal
• Hydro-Electric
• Tidal Barrage
• Wind
• Pumped Storage

I've also been to the centre for alternative energy in Wales and seen solar water heating and geothermal energy in use in France.

Fusion can be my next, hopefully ITER, the next big experiment will viably produce power!