Nothing to do with my work

This post has nothing to do with my work, other than it stopped me doing it for a few hours. It does have something to do with openness …

How to hang a door in ten easy steps:

1 Ignore – preferably for several months – the fact that the sitting-room door won’t close properly and is getting, ever-so-slightly, a bit worse every day.

Put this down to either (a) the weather – the infernal English dampness getting into the wood and making it swell or (b) the yucca plant, in an ill-advised bid for freedom, making an escape attempt by curling its leaves around the door jamb. Think that at some point, one will probably get the plane out and shave a bit off the door. Probably.

2 Attempt to enter sitting room while carrying a cup of tea. Discover door now won’t open. Bang nose on door and throw tea down one’s front.

3 Swear

4 Don dry clothes and inspect door. Discover hinges are pulling away from jamb at both top and bottom.

5 Swear. Prop door up with pile of heavy books.

6 Next morning, gird loins, drink strong coffee and eat flapjack (important to keep up one’s strength).

Discover only six (of eight) holes actually have screws in them. Extract screws. Top hinge has two: one 2cm long (useless), one 3cm (and not even a wood screw). Bottom hinge has four: three 8cm long and one 6cm. Walk into town and buy 8 new, all-matching, long screws. Get home and discover pack only contains 6 …

7 Have a scrabble around in the shed for anything useful, such as two long wood screws. Discover tube of ‘no more nails’ glue. Decide screws are just nails with attitude, so glue might come in useful, especially as wood around bottom hinge resembles mature Emmental.

8 Hold up (did I mention it was very heavy?) door for a very long time, while son adopts usual manly role of tool manipulator. Allow blood to drain from arms while holes are drilled, glue inserted and screws screwed.

Allow bottom screws to go in with no discernible grip on surrounding wood. Close eyes to this and concentrate on fact screw heads are at least flush with wood. Allow top screws, on the other hand, to stick out for varying distances from the hinge. Such a pretty pattern!

Take over screwdriver from son in attempt to see if fresh (if feeble) muscle power will move the more prominent screws in a bit. No. Try different screwdriver. Still no.

9 Swear.

Extract long screws from top hinge and scrabble around in screw box for shorter ones.  Insert shorter ones; ignore the fact they go in with no discernible … (see above).

10 Prop door up on several maps and a biography of Isaac Newton; after all, it’s got to be important to allow glue plenty of time to set before attempting to close door. Gloomily suspect that we’ll be back to point 3 before long!

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The index of interest

I‘ve taken a day off, unbound the fetters that currently lock me to my computer, and gone to a conference.

I’ve also unplugged the academic tone-filter – I’m writing up my thesis, so everything I write has a profusion of sub-clauses, brackets, dependencies and semi-colons – and hoping this will come out like normal English. This is also why this blog has been quiet for a bit. Too many words!

However, it may just sound garbled. This is because I got up at five to catch a very early train and yet still arrived just as the big ush into the auditorium began, thereby missing that very vital first cup of coffee, essential to get me through an extended session in semi-darkness.

This is a very online conference. Almost all the conferees are carrying one, if not more, tools for communication. During the morning’s keynote, I was fascinated by the rise and fall of the barely audible sound of fingers hitting keypads and tiny switches clicking; an instantaneous index of interest in the speaker’s remarks. (Drat – I’ve just realised that’s a very poor sampling technique; not taking in the legions of i-padders, smart phoners and the (like me) rare souls who insist on scribbling on real paper. Damn – gravelled for lack of matter.)

So far, it’s the usual conference mix of ‘whoo, interesting’, ‘er, dull’, ‘I wanted to say that’ and ‘I wish I had the gumption to stand up and argue about that’. Sadly, comments on ‘the public’ are the biggest fillers of the latter category. The poor old public has been educated at, communicated at, engaged at, been wondered whether it’s capable of understanding … and we haven’t even reached tea on the first day. I’m sure the commenters don’t mean it but – and I’ve moaned about this before – there’s low awareness of research in public engagement in the wider scientific communities. In the community I’m currently conferring with, that would probably be my fault. Back to the need for a gumption insert.

Day 2. Is may be me but aren’t panel sessions just the most drear?

Today was a brave attempt at an unusual format. Second days of conferences often lack energy – depending on one’s sociability level either one hasn’t slept properly or has spent too long in the bar the night before – and conferees can need a boost. So the day was themed around workshops on ways to open up the science for a small foundation supporting research into a rare but tragic childhood condition – Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Having learned a little about the condition, we split into workshops to look at using social media (like Storify, to agglomerate twitter commentary), data visualisation, xxx and yyy. But unfortunately – for various technological and organising reasons – it didn’t quite happen. Pity – I liked the idea of focussing on a genuine problem and attempting to do some real science, albeit in a short time.

But I feel kind of refreshed, I got to listen to some interesting stuff and I have pages of notes, studded with asterisks for ‘find out more’. And I have a few new thoughts for the thesis, which could well be a relief for its eventual readers.

NB It’s http://www.scienceonlinelondon.org/