Google Boldly Goes...

Forgive me for the dreadful title?

It's the 46th anniversary of the original Star Trek series! The first regular episode was 'The Man Trap' shown on Thursday September 8th 1966 at 8:30 - so guess what I'll be watching this evening... well probably the Paralympics actually, but maybe Star Trek in tiny bursts  during the advert breaks.

Google have celebrated with a commemorative Doodle:

Screenshot from Google

It incorporates lots of nods to iconic scenes to keep fans happy, and it's fun. Here's an interview with the guy who designed it: http://www.startrek.com/article/celebrating-46-years-with-a-google-doodle.

This video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVpCUZ2c4qc shows all of the little animations - it's much more fun to try them out for yourself though! If it's not the 8th anymore then you can find it here http://www.google.com/doodles/finder/2012/All%20doodles.

*spoilers alert*

Hats off to Google: they've thought of everything! We are treated to tribbles falling out of an overhead locker, the Gorn fight, the bridge console will cycle through sound effects including the communicator chirrup, they've even reproduced the soft-focus-close-up-shots-of-attractive-female-characters thing for if you click on Lieutenant Uhura at the beginning! (admittedly the latter was a completely unnecessary quirk in filming the series, but since it was there, it's here).

Poor redshirt 'e' gets hit by Kirk's stick bouncing off the Gorn and splattered by the makeshift cannon, but he does manage to survive the 'episode', so he can't complain.

I only wish that 'Google' was seven letters so that there could have been a Scotty letter...

Medical School

So I got my grades and I'm off to medical school this month :D - my excitement matched only by my nervousness. Now that I'm back from holiday it all feels very imminent and a bit surreal. I'm sure I'll get used to the idea once I get there though.

National Transplant Week

So last week was National Transplant Week.

I think I can say with some certainty that this is an awareness and donor numbers-boosting thing rather than the only week in 2012 when organ transplants are done in the Britain.

Three people die every day waiting for a transplant in the UK. You can join the organ donor register here. It's really easy and will take 5 minutes. Or you could spend one second ticking a box when applying for a driving licence. One of the slogans on posters at the moment runs 'if you believe in organ donation, prove it', which is shockingly apt. (Figures from here) 96% of people when asked say that they believe organ donation is the right thing to do, and how many have joined the register? 33%.

It is important to register and to make sure that your family and friends are aware of your intentions so that they will be carried out. Relatives are statistically much more likely to agree to a donation if the potential donor was on the register.

(Infographics from the NHSBT website.)

An interesting fact from the NHSBT (NHS Blood and Transplant) website: the oldest donor and recipient of a cornea were both 104.

The NHS Organ Donor Registry, incidentally, was established in 1994, which means it's younger than me and it's done more good in that time than I'm likely to in my entire life.

Long time, no blog update

But look: I drew you flowers.

I plead insanity - or more specifically A2 exams and going to Wales. The trouble is, one feels obliged to end one's absence with a particularly deep and meaningful/entertaining post, so one ends up waiting to return until one has found such a topic. Or giving up and posting anyway.

Things that have happened:

- I was attacked by a chicken

- I discovered lemon and ginger tea, and Welsh cakes - delicious!

- Exams are over (huzzah!)

- And Murray lost the tennis...

I've got a few ideas for posts waiting, so updates should be a bit more regular from now on.

Avengers!

I'm going to come clean here - I have, in fact, been to see this film multiple times since it came out. You'll have to trust me that that is testament to how awesome it is, rather than how desperate I am for excuses to avoid revision.


It is actually more awesome than Kirk thinks he is:

...and that's a pretty high level of awesome.


It was funny, it had snarky banter, it had (pseudo?)science, it had a 'blue stick of destiny', it had LOKI, and a character who, as we learnt in Iron Man 2 actually speaks Latin!!! It basically had everything, including a lack of excessive romance (I'll take banter over romance any day). It was hugely entertaining and I wholeheartedly recommend it - although you might want to watch Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Captain America and Thor before you see it, for character background. 


If you are also now in Avengers-withdrawal - here are some hilarious and cute comics of the characters (this artist is amazing, she also does the Broship of the Ring, X-Men stuff, Harry Potter stuff, Sherlock stuff... I may be a little in love).  

Physics is also Worth Funding

(Sorry about the delay - life happened.)

I'm not sure what happened to it in the budget, but beforehand the UK government put something in the region of £70 million a year into CERN and, according to my physics teacher, someone did a survey and found that 30% of people think this is a good use of taxpayers' money.

When I first heard this, I thought 'that seems like quite a lot of money being spent on something which is not terrifically useful', but I have now realised two things: for a government it's not that much, and it is useful. I'll explain my u-turn (with the caveat that other people definitely know more about this stuff than me).

Firstly, if we don't put any money into shared facilities like this, then we're going to fall behind areas of research like particle physics and astronomy, which often need pretty massive bits of equipment to test/observe things.

Huzzah! A particle accelerator!

Unless you're Tony Stark and can just build one at home one afternoon. See here for how much he may have had to bend reality to do this.

You have seen Iron Man 2, right?

These areas are some of the most 'wow!', and so important in encouraging children to take an interest in science.

Like Gru in Despicable Me, but hopefully without the career as a supervillain.

Also particle physics has all sorts of medical applications - cancer therapy, diagnostics, biomedical research into the structure of proteins - and makes itself useful in lots of other ways too.

Finally, you can't direct the course of scientific progress. Sure you can choose which research areas to fund, but you can't force breakthroughs to be made, or predict the applications for new discoveries. The most groundbreaking inferences are often serendipitous, so no area should be considered unworthy of investigation.

Physics is Cute

When I say I take physics A level, people's reactions tend to range from 'why?' to 'you poor thing!'. They probably assume physics = hard maths. Maths is often involved (and sometimes makes me want to disembowel myself with a spoon), but the physics department also get away with the most ridiculously fun stuff by claiming it's educational.

Exhibit A: Visits to theme parks. It was just the once, but still. We had a day out of school so that we could ride on roller-coasters and 'experience' the gravitational energy changing to kinetic energy for our coursework. The chemistry equivalent is dripping things into test tubes under exam conditions. No contest.

Exhibit B: The Particle Zoo.

Aww

Ninja!

Our physics department owns most of a full set of these plushies. They do have explanatory tags and are used as a teaching tool - but mainly they're incredibly awesome and cute. And the strange quarks have three eyes and the charm quarks have roses!

So much!

In all seriousness, the actual physics is pretty awesome too, especially particle physics and astrophysics: the mindbogglingly small and the mindbogglingly big. I defy anyone to look at images of nebulae and tell me they're not beautiful. The sad thing is that although I have seen the Enterprise mentioned in an old textbook, that was to say that using antimatter-matter annihilations to power the ship probably wouldn't work...