Skip to main content

The Joy of Festival

One of the best bits about being an author is the chance to turn up at book festivals (and as a science author, I get a double bite of the cake with science festivals).

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to two very different festivals, each with a very special feel. I've done a couple of the big numbers (Cheltenham and Edinburgh), but for me, small and mid-size festivals like these are far more charming.

The first was Taunton Literary Festival, run in a very friendly, relaxed fashion from Brendon Books, an impressive indie bookshop that mixes new and used books on the shelves with refreshing abandon. As the event was actually in the bookshop, I was expecting a tiny audience, but somehow organiser Lionel Ward managed to cram in a good 60 seats, all of which were filled by an appreciative audience. I've done my Reality Frame talk a few times, but never quite so intimately with my audience. I particularly enjoyed a moment when I was waiting to start, sitting on children's book table near the front. A lady on the end of the nearest row of seats asked me 'Have you come across this book?' enabling me to reply 'Erm, yes, I wrote it.'

Science in my granny's sitting room at Folkestone
By comparison, the Folkestone Book Festival was a significantly bigger production in the towns' delightful Quarterhouse theatre. We were booked in for two nights at the nicely renovated old Burlington Hotel, giving a chance to explore a town that had always been just somewhere we passed near on the way to the Tunnel.

On Friday I had two sessions with year five and six children (aged 9-11) - each with around 200 children packed into the theatre. They were impressively well behaved, seemed to enjoy the activities in the talk and could be relied on to come up with a whole host of questions after, from deeply serious ones about black holes to 'Which came first, the chicken or the egg?'

Interview at Folkestone
Saturday saw me switch to an adult audience for a talk based on my latest book Big Data. With over 120 in the audience, it was still a good number, and the mix of talking and a few demonstrations seemed to go down well - again featuring a good range of questions at the end. It was the first time I'd done this talk, and was interesting to see how amazing the quality of iPhone video is - I played my clip of trying to get Alexa to play Schoenberg, which looked impressively professional on a cinema-sized screen.

I'd certainly recommend Folkestone if you've never been there - there's a whole lot of art going on from the organisation also behind the Quarterhouse and the literary festival. The only festival I've attended before that did as much for its authors as Folkestone was the Isle of Man Festival - I don't know if it's something about being by the seaside, but both treated authors as someone special to pamper, rather than an irritating necessity as some of the larger festival seem to feel.

A really excellent week...

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more