You Can't Polish a Nerd - Festival of the Spoken Nerd ****

The Festival of the Spoken Nerd have become the definitive example of the best in performance science and maths (yes, it's really a thing). If you haven't come across them, they're mathematician Matt Parker, physicist Helen Arney (who mostly provides the musical side of the evening) and experimenter Steve Mould who does the dangerous experiments we'd all love to do, but probably shouldn't.

I've attended FotSN's shows and a live event is, frankly, the best way to see them. Just like a standup comedian, this standup science does work best when you're surrounded by an audience - and there's usually some entertaining audience participation. However, if you don't manage to make one of their shows, this is still a good way to get a highly entertaining dose of nerdity.

When Mould tells us he has been experimenting with his microwave at home, you just know that something interesting and quite possibly dangerous is going to happen - and it does. We begin with a microwave in a video, but it moves on to live action on the stage. Arney's songs are entertaining as usual, whether her own quirky numbers or Tom Lehrer's element song. And Parker proves himself as usual to be the best of the three as a straight comedian, and though his mathematical explorations are, as always entertaining, he excels himself visually by exploring spherical geometry (and some aspects of Escher's work) using a camera that can see the whole view around it at once (he tells us off for calling it a 360 degree camera).

And, of course, there's more. Whether its Mould querying a dodgy statistic in a children's book and demonstrating gravitational waves with a rubber sheet or Parker having a good spot of tessellation and using a huge circle of pies to estimate the value of pi and leading onto some of the bizarre places that pi appears.

If, for example, you enjoy watching Dave Gorman's Modern Life is Goodish, you'll love an evening with the nerds. This is funny, nerdtastic, and genuinely entertaining.

Best bought from the FOTSN website - you could even get it on a floppy disk (come on, Nerds, that's not a floppy disk, it's a diskette), but they're sold out.

DVD:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here. We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...

Search This Blog