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).
October 2023 Covers
2023 Author Cloud - October Update
