My partner got invited to present at Beakerhead with a team of science communicators from the University of Calgary. I got to tag along and it was a really fun day.
My Microbes and Me was a chance for people to see what their microbes looked like either by taking a culture from somewhere on their body or by swabbing their cheeks and getting to look at those swabs under a microscope. The cultures were tagged with an anonymous number and people can go look at their swabs after a few days by going to a site and finding their tag.
It was a lot of fun and I was really glad to get to hang out with a great group of science educators and the kick-ass grad students who helped make it all happen.
Things I learned (or relearned) at BeakerHead:
- The bacteria on you feed tend to grow best at a lower temperature than other parts of your body so they need a special growth medium.
- Microscopy is really fun.
- The university could probably use a really robust set of lending technology which includes an audience setup for a microscope.
- I’m not great at putting parafilm on petri dishes.
- I like organising events and managing the back of stage stuff.
- I struggle a bit with the speaking up to do the communicating.
- Standing for six hours kinda took it out of me and it really is time to get some strength and stamina back.
Since then I've been thinking about what I could share at a Beakerhead setup and I think there are a lot of fun collaborative AI projects (what if instead of the an LLM picking a word, what if people build up the model) and also some art (there are some old swarmart projects I'd love to revisit and play with further).
