This week as it was to me

Said goodbye to London and headed up to Nottingham for the BPS annual conference. Saw some of my colleagues there and took some photos together. Then up to Newcastle again. Nice to be back.

Over the weekend I’ve had friends up, Alice and John. It was really great to see them, but the experience was marred by screwing up my digestion, badly. For years I’ve avoided milk and gluten-containing foods which does a lot for my digestive health, but every so often I get slammed, in a pattern I’m starting to tie to alcohol and spicy food. So I’ve been a bit of a ghost for the last couple of days, that’s also the reason I’m late with this.

We did manage to make a day trip out to Belsay Hall, though, which was really interesting. The gardens are built into a quarry to produce a microclimate sustaining unusual plants for the region.

 

Building

I’ve officially entered Beast mode for the book, as the scale of what’s left to do has become clear. As I write this section (Thursday) I’ve made 12 steps forward.

2 rounds of nothing to something

5 rounds of “something to first“

3 rounds of “first to second”

2 of “second to final“

I can break this down in fact I’ve done it at this post here.

(Update: since writing this the beast has had a thorn in its paw, so I’m now behind schedule. Eek.)

 

Art and improv

Saturday John and Al gave back-to-back workshops on two sides of improvisation, “Explore and Exploit,” and it was really fun to take a class from my friends and see their philosophies given a bit of time to be spelled out. It was also really great for our students to have new people about.

The only touch of sadness I have is how few of the local performers / improv students with the other school seem to have appetite to take new classes with different teachers. I don’t think I’m unusual in always being hungry to learn new perspectives, and especially when this is the first class from out of towners all year, I would think that would be an exciting prospect…

We also did a Dreaming show as part of the Newcastle night we run, and we had a great time, everyone else did great, and it was a ton of fun.

Giving and receiving

Mainly family stuff in London, and also ferrying around an unexpected family guest from overseas back and forth from tube stations and to the supermarket to buy my mum a gift.

My Newcastle housemate was a lovely co-host for my guests, and we wouldn’t have made it to Belsay if it wasn’t for her volunteering to drive; (I was too zombified to be trusted in front of a wheel).

Branches outward

Hostile architecture: definition, example, podcast.

Blogpost on advertising industry. A few gems, including the importance of sleeping on it – “Have you ever tried to have an idea. Any idea at all, with a gun to your head?” – and  on the entrapment of creative types: “The compulsion to create is unstoppable…Apart from the occasional severed ear or descent into fecal-eating dementia the creative impulse is mostly little more than a quaint eccentricity. But introduce this mostly benign neurosis into a commercial context.. well that way, my friends lies misery and madness.”

Recommendations

I don’t need to point you towards the Donald Glover video that’s trending everywhere, but it’s good. (rough in places.)

Stan Rogers:

Other than that, I started watching Outlander with Alice as sick day solace. First episode is slow but still involving. It’s got action, history and some ideas but is unashamedly a romance story, and it’s interesting to see how it differs from a more male-centric genre in how it plays with desire, love, and tension.

Reading

As per the last few weeks, nothing much beyond work reading (I’ve nearly finished Slime Mould too).

But I brought a bunch of books back from my mum’s house, including Philosophy in the Flesh, Super Cooperators, and  my copies of EF Schumacher’s work. I have a feeling that I had a reason to re-read one his books for input on something I’ve been thinking about, but can’t remember what it was…

And also some books I inherited from my great aunt, including TH White’s The Once and Future King. So a big ole pile to get through.

Thinking through

I had a quick trip to Nottingham mid-week for the BPS annual conference, and sat in on an interesting late night session on open science and moving psychology forward. One proposal there was to move scientific authorship to a more horizontal approach, allowing people to build a scientific career without having to be first/last author on publications (which typically involves “having the idea”). Instead, people can use their strengths and participate as analysis design/delivery or method development. I wonder whether skilled science (or humanities) communicators could also take part in this process and gain academic credit for writing? Or can you be academically credible for putting someone else’s idea through its mathematical paces, but not for putting it into accessible and more understandable words?