So I Finally Feel Productive!

Generally, I spend most of my time procrastinating and / or nerding out, for that is the typical behaviour of the dorky student. But I have been doing things recently that are making me feel productive for longer than it takes to do them, which is the downfall of any work done towards my degree.

For the past few months, I have been putting a lot of effort into something that started out with a bunch of silly jokes - as do most of the things I do. But this, unusually, has got me excited in a way that the feeling has persisted since last October and it is still making me delirious happy.

Tim

Last year, as part of my degree, I did a module studying Short Film (and I got a first in it, which is a bit irrelevant, but made me super happy). Tim, a friend from the course, and I decided that it would be fun to make the films that we had written and had planned to write, rather than having just a bunch of short film scripts gathering digital dust once we had finished the semester. We also figured that this would be a good way of building up a creative portfolio before graduating from university, not only for us but for anyone else who wanted to get involved - other writers, directors, actors, editors, crew... We bounced the idea around some of the people on our course and they seemed to like it.

Then, one day, Tim and I showed up for a seminar that had been cancelled. Neither of us has received the email informing us of this, sent little more than an hour before the start of class while we were in different lessons. In a bit of a first-world-problem bitch fit (in which we bemoaned how much we were paying to be at university and still getting stood up), we decided that we did not need our teacher and were perfectly capable of writing and making short films by ourselves.

We were sort of right.

In that afternoon, we came up with a name, half a dozen potential script ideas, an email address, a Twitter account, a Facebook Members' Group and a Facebook Like page. In short, Tiny People Fabulous was born!

Terry the Toucan, the mascot
of Tiny People Fabulous

Over the next few weeks, the two of us met regularly to expand on this. We messaged people on our course asking if anyone else wanted to get their films made. We left link to our Facebook Members' Group on the message boards of various local and uni-based drama groups. We turned some of our script ideas into actual scripts.

As the weeks went on, people started noticing us and asked if they could get involved. There was a massive (but inevitable) imbalance in the favour of young actresses, so we spent an afternoon emailing anyone who looked valuable asking if they would like to get involved. Some of them did.

We started filming what was going to be our first short film shortly before Christmas of 2012. We had loads of issues from the beginning, but we had expected that we would and we approached them with the kind of optimism and eagerness typical of such newbies as us.

On set of the first film we shot!

On the day of shooting, for instance, the heating went out in my house, so we had to fill a bath with water from the kettle. It took more than an hour. It was hilarious.

Somehow, miraculously, we got the whole of the film shot in one afternoon.

Then we had to delay the voice-over recording, which meant that the editing was also delayed, and we could not get the film finished by the deadline we had set for ourselves. We had hoped that we would be able to have at least one done before the end of the year. 

We did not.

We have since been told that that deadline was wildly over-ambitious and that there was no way we could have done it without cutting some serious corners. So we chose to see our first fuck-up as a learning curve rather than a failure. This film is still not out, sadly, but it is very nearly finished, so it should be very soon!

We took a break over Christmas while everyone went home from university. I used the time I had free to get some scripts written and to do as much admin stuff as I could so that we could get right into creating when we got off our holidays. We began shooting another film (sadly also not yet edited) upon our return to London in January, which we had hoped to release before the end of the month to suit its theme.

One setback that has plagued us is our own silliness.
I had to put Tim and Rianna in the naughty corner to stop them
disturbing the process.

Again, we have been advised that this was somewhat ambitious of us, and again we decided to learn from this.

We did not.

Around the end of January 2013, we planned and shot a film designed to be released by Valentines' Day. Needless to say, it was not.

Kim, director of "Pulled"

We had all of the filming done well within our chosen deadline, but we had the same issues with editing as we did with the other films. We had very few editors and even less available technology, and we are still now sorting out putting it together. But being sorted out it is, and come together it will! It was an amazing experience making this film. Our director, Kim, was incredible and had such amazing and specific ideas - she knew what she wanted, and what she wanted was original and cool. She did great things with the script and made it very personal and very unique. We were lucky enough to be working with some devoted actors who pushed themselves to do new things for the sake of our art.

Dressing our beautiful leading lady
on the set of "Pulled"

For all of our films so far (excepting some uncomfortable friction with a temperamental director), I have worked with some incredible people, mostly students at university with me but not exclusively. Everyone has been gloriously dedicated and enthusiastic about everything; their attitude has made every process feel so much more exciting.

Working on a creative project personal to us with no other reason than that we wanted to was - and is - amazing. I have had so much fun with Tiny People Fabulous despite the setbacks that pretty much all of our projects so far have suffered. Keeping optimistic has been essential, but I think it is beginning to pay off.

Admittedly, our first film is short and silly - and so our most of the others we have planned for the future - but it is our silly film and it suits us perfectly! Tiny People Fabulous was born in silly circumstances (the first three or four film ideas we had were based purely on dick jokes of some description) and it would not have made sense to us to do any of it without a sense of fun.

Our first uploaded film, "Get Out Of My Room", is a great way, I think, of introducing Tiny People Fabulous to the world. Being based loosely on real life, it lets you all see what you're getting in for when you get into us - and unashamedly so.

We shot it in one absurd but efficient afternoon, edited it over the next few days and actually had the whole thing complete in about a week or so. It all went incredibly smooth and went pretty much how we had hoped the others would. It was a far simpler film to put together (with only one location and nothing as fancy even as voice-overs), and having both editors and technology freeing up right around the time we needed them certainly did not hurt the process.

Our modest editing crew

We are very pleased with how it turned out and supremely grateful to everyone involved in making it, as well as everyone who has watched it already and offered us some feedback.

I am so looking forward to the next few weeks and the release of the rest of our films already in progress. I cannot wait to start shooting again because I have already had so much fun and worked with some incredible people. I can only see good things happening for Tiny People Fabulous.

On set of our very late January production.

In the meantime, I can only offer a thousand of my most heartfelt thanks to everyone who has contributed even slightly to everything we have achieved so far and to offer this to the rest of the world...

Thanks!

Tim and I on set. We're definitely not messing around.

$1.4 million Raised for Nikola Tesla Laboratory: Faith in Humanity Goes Up Ten Points

(Before you ask, I'm not keeping a tally but, if I was, Tim Minchin and his wonderful nerdy ilk would be responsible for most of them.)

Hardcore nerdism is apparently rife in Shoreham, New York, where the Tesla Science Centre at Wardenclyffe group has raised $1.4 million via online crowd funding to buy Nikola Tesla's laboratory in order to turn it into a museum. As a soon-to-be owner of a Nikola Tesla T-shirt, this excites me very much.

It being in America both disappoints and thrills me. I am disappointed because, unless by some miracle I suddenly get very rich, it is unlikely that I will be able to go. However, considering the sheer stupidity that has come out of America, I am overjoyed that this has happened at all. Reading about it only makes it seem so much better.

The point of the museum is that it is a place that is dedicated to science and education with Nikola Tesla - an inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist and futurist whose work led to the way electricity is used today - at its foundation.

Tesla was born in Serbia in 1856 and emigrated to America in 1884 to work for Thomas Edison. He soon moved on to work for himself and conducted high-voltage, high-frequency experiments, which resulted in inventions that made him world famous. Essentially, he made explosions out of electricity for a living, which is pretty damn awesome as far as I am concerned, never mind everything else for which we have to thank him.

In typical mad-scientist fashion, he spent as much money as he made on more and more experiments and ended up dying penniless in January 1943. But still managed to keep his hair suspiciously neat, judging by the pictures of him.

In 1901, Tesla bought 200 acres on Long Island's north shore where he established what is now his only remaining laboratory. It was purchased with the intention of building a wireless transmission tower but was never fully operational. Wardenclyffe Tower - also known as Tesla Tower - remaining, even if in diminished form, as a tribute to his life and achievements is amazing. It seems only fitting that that the group also hope to have it provide space for companies to perform scientific research.

Aside from his brilliance as a scientist, Tesla was one damn incredible human. He lived his life by a strict routine, squishing his toes one hundred times per foot in the belief that it stimulated his brain. Judging by his work, he may well have been right. He worked from 9am to 6pm, at least, every day, often continuing until 3am once he had had his dinner. He walked 8 to 10 miles ever day to keep in shape; he was elegant, stylish and incredibly groomed (just look at his hair!). His gray-blue eyes, he claims, used to be darker until they lightened due to so much use of his brain.

Tesla never married, but even he admitted that it was a bit of a loss to the world that his genes were not preserved. Then again, he also said that being celibate allowed him a lot more time to devote to his work, which was most certainly a good thing. However, he was sociable, and everyone who knew him loved him. He was considered to be charming and lovely and poetic, and it is almost no surprise that so many women threw themselves at him.

After all, he made shit like this possible...

He was wonderful. If he were alive today, he still would be. It is a shame more men are not like him in this world. I am a little bit in love with him. And with good reason.

If I ever get the chance, I am going to that Tesla museum and I am going to behave like a stalkery little fangirl and I am going to love it.

Funds are still being raised on the Tesla Science Centre website to continue with the restoration of the laboratory and the creation of the museum.

It is going to be awesome!

Neal Stephenson Is Making All My Dreams Come True and Blowing My Mind

Everyone who knows me know that I am quite the little nerd - and proud to be. My hero is Dr Ben Goldacre and there is a video somewhere of a tipsy me describing how I would abuse my patient privileges if he was my doctor. I blog about planets and bacon and the Higgs boson particle, for fun. I love New Scientist magazine and have been grappling with the desire to buy a subscription for a few years. I volunteer at the Science Museum in London and my face nearly exploded with joy when I got offered the job. My Twitter feed is flooded with tweets from groups like The Science Plaza and PhysOrg Science News. I love libraries, book shops and Forbidden Planet. I once cheered aloud when I stumbled across a repeat of Professor Brian Cox's Wonders of the Universe and again when I found Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time for £2 in a charity shop. I kind of have a thing for Iron Man (not Robert Downey Jr.; his kid is nearly my age, so that would be weird - I like Iron Man ... but it doesn't hurt that he has Robert Downey Jr.'s face, body and personality). I am addicted to TED talks. I have cried on three separate occasions when I did not get tickets to see the recording of Infinite Monkey Cage from the BBC (damn them). I have a favourite moon, and it's not even one of ours. I wept in a room full of strangers at the beauty of Adam Rutherford's video about all the history of NASA, with all its achievements and failures, simply because science is beautiful.

But I study Creative Writing and English Literature, which is one of those arty-farty degrees at which real scientists probably sniff. I am an amateur nerd, really, and this is unlikely to change any time soon. I am very much a nerd groupie, but that is hardly the same thing. A friend of mine told me that this is silly of me and that I should be studying particle physics or something, but I would just get too excited being surrounded by all those huge sexy nerd brains all day. I simply could not do it.

Some lovely, lovely nerds, including Ben Goldacre, who is all kinds of lovely,
and Tim Minchin and Adam Rutherford,
who have both made me cry by being wonderful

I do try to combine the two. I once wrote a poem about how the colour magenta exists only in the mind. It referenced The Matrix. I could have written the same one about the colour cyan, because human brains and eyes are strange and wonderful things. I did it because it is true and because it blows my mind a little bit.

But it was not a huge contribution to the mating of science and the creative arts. It was hardly Storm (which licks tits). It was not really significant at all, in fact. But it was an effort, a start, an attempt to combine what these two things that excite my brain cells.

A real achievement in this area, though, has to be the Centre (or Center, as it is in America, but my British computer does not like that) of Science and Imagination. I first came across this in an edition of New Scientist magazine that I had purchased to entertain myself while locked out of my flat (no, really). A couple of days later, it was all over my geek-heavy Twitter feed.

It looked fucking ace.

Yes, I did need to swear. It is just that exciting a development in the world. And my life.

It is not a surprise that science fiction fuels real science. Creative nerds come up with cool technology that they wish existed and scientist who agree that it is awesome try to come up with a way it could work in the real world. Take, for instance, the once imaginary flying machine, or the still semi-imaginary hover car. Just because it is still a work in progress does not mean it is not happening. Also included in this long list is Neal Stephenson's stratosphere-reaching tower, designed to study weather patterns, dock planes and launch rockets; it is currently being studied by Keith Hjelmstad at the Arizona State University to try to conceive of a way in which it could be made in real life.

This is all supremely cool; it always has been.

Author Neal Stephenson, as well coming up with the concept of the 20km-high tower, is taking it one step further, and blowing my mind in the process.

His work has largely been speculative fiction which explores mathematics, philosophy and science. The fact that he also looks quite like a wizard only makes him more my kind of nerd.

He is currently collaborating with the Arizona State University to attempt a project that will bring together writers, artists, scientists and engineers: The Centre for Science and Imagination. Its aim is to further science with radical thinking, to get scientists to go beyond the current parameters of technology and innovation to push the limits of knowledge to achieve the kind of advances that led scientists to the industrial revolution. It maintains that science should remain ambitious and that discoveries made now can be as incredible and life-changing as those made in the past few centuries. The belief is that creative thinking leads more effectively to tackling challenges still faced by mankind, that by not acknowledging the limits we set on technology we can find new ways to create that have not been previously considered.

Its progress - as well as forums encouraging discussions that could fuel these great innovations - can be followed on Hieroglyph, and anyone can join and participate. It is truly an amazing project that could well change the way that technology evolves in the coming century.

Nerdy Bacon Enthusiast Seeks ... Well, Bacon...

It only takes five minutes of surfing the net to know that nerds worship bacon. Adoration for it far surpasses the fervour of even the nuttiest religious zealot. It is only a matter of time before there is a bacon-centred faction of the Westboro Baptist Church picketing Weight Watchers meetings with signs claiming God's hatred for those who reject bacon and all its piggy goodness. Bacon overrides God, not only because it can be proved empirically, but because it is damn tasty. I highly doubt that God tastes any better. Anyone who can prove otherwise is welcome to correct me.

In short, bacon is the chosen nectar of the computer geek and it is undisputedly better than sex.

See? We're all actually exactly like that. Every single one of us. We just don't get out much, so not many people believe we exist. But, really: give us some bacon and we will do anything you want.

Anything.

Yes, even that.

Just showing us this image gets us all hot and flustered and, well, within a few minutes we're just like putty in your hands...

Ooh, yeah, that's good.

Some sexy bacon fiend even took the time out of his busy life to put this image of Van Gogh's Starry Night together out of bacon:

Now, there is a guy who is going to get himself a lot of nerdy, bacony tail. Seriously, that took effort and he is going to get one hell of a reward. At least, he would if I knew who he was. Might be a girl. Doesn't matter: Google provided it.

This almost universal obsession has not gone unnoticed by those seeking a profit. In my lifetime of nerdism, I have come across many instances of this: gay bacon, bacon sundaes, bacon coffins, bacon-scented hand sanitiser, bacon-flavoured toothpaste, bacon shoes, bacon-scented air freshener, bacon-flavoured lube, bacon wrapping paper, bacon typeface, bacon plasters, bacon-smell-releasing alarm clocks, Bendy Mr Bacon, bacon-flavoured envelopes, bacon roses, bacon-scented soap, bacon plushies ... there are even whole websites devoted to all this bacony goodness! If nothing else, they will certainly have a far more comprehensive archive than I!

Although, I do have to point what is probably my favourite thing across which I stumbled in my research (yeah, I know, I actually RESEARCH this bullshit):

YES! BACON VODKA!

Then there is Cybercandy.

Things that smell like, look like and incorporate bacon are all very well, but Cybercandy takes it all one step further. One glorious, bacony step. Cybercandy takes things that aren't bacon and makes them taste like bacon. They are amazing. I even bought one of these bad boys for a friend's birthday this year:

The lucky thing is that he is skinny enough and with a scarily powerful metabolism to be able to handle the calories.

Yeah. That's really what it says. That's nearly FOUR DAYS' worth of calories in one of those lollipops. Ouch. It is made purely of sugar, food colouring and bacon flavouring and it would fuck with the insides of any normal human being. Probably. I don't really have the balls to try. I dare you, though! It would be quite the achievement.

Totally worth it, though. Obviously. I mean, it is bacon...

I'm Going to Mars!!

It is virtually undisputed that outer space is supremely cool. It is creepy and mysterious and captures the imagination of people across the world. People devote their lives to the study of it, whether in the more abstract and often less accurate joy of science-fiction writing or in the pursuit of answers through hard study and research. It has warranted the creation of NASA, which is one of the most amazing things ever to have come out of America. Outer space is where the secrets of the universe lie; pretty much everything we can learn about Earth has been learned and all the mysteries left to solve are somewhat further afield. The only people who disagree tend to be unimaginative and drab, rather like this idiot, who can’t even structure a sentence properly:

Some dickhead's ignorant opinion, courtesy of Facebook

(I considered ranting for a bit about precisely why this is ignorant and about how beneficial ALL scientific research is, even when it's an accident, but I already did it, here, so I figured I didn't need to do it again.)

Very recently, NASA’s Curiosity Rover landed safely on Mars and has started sending back pictures already. They are amazing. They aren’t the best quality photographs in the world, but they did come from Mars. Obviously, this made me very excited and I enlisted Google and Twitter to take me on a big old nerd binge.

Bas Lansdorp

In doing so, I stumbled across the Mars One Project. It is a private enterprise run by Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp and its aim is to set up a colony of human beings on Mars over the space of the next few decades. The mission objective is to “establish the first human settlement on Mars by April 2023”. The Mars One team has been working on the plan for it since early 2011 and have the support of a number of “ambassadors”, including the Chairman of the Netherlands Space Society, the co-creator of Big Brother and CERN physicist Prof. Dr. Gerard ‘t Hooft, who was presented with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1999 for his work on the quantum structure of electroweak interactions.

The first forty astronauts to be sent to Mars will be selected in 2013. They will all have to train for ten years so that they are prepared for their trip. A replica of the Mars One settlement will be built in the desert on Earth to serve as a place for the astronauts to prepare and train as well as to test the equipment. In January 2016, the “supply mission” will be launched, sending 2500 kilograms of food and other supplies in a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. In 2018, a rover will land on Mars to explore the selected area to find the best spot for habitation. In 2021, two living units, two life supports units, another supply unit and another rover will have arrived on Mars, prepared for the arrival of the astronauts. All “water, oxygen and atmosphere” production will be ready by the beginning of 2022 and the first group of astronauts are due to be launched towards Mars on September 14^th 2022.

The first astronauts will be due to land on Mars in 2023 after an estimated 7-month journey, where the rovers will take them to their new home. More astronauts will be launched in groups of four every two years so that the colony will have reached 20 settlers by 2033. The Mars One team plan to send more hardware up with each additional group so that more and better exploration can take place as well as providing them with updated technology and providing better quality of life.

The plans for the 'settlement' to be built on Mars

Getting back from Mars is a hell of a lot harder than getting to Mars – look at how long it took for us to develop rockets on Earth. The astronauts will not be visiting, but emigrating to Mars, where they will be expected to stay, possibly for the rest of their lives. They will have to leave everything on Earth behind in the attempt to learn more about the red planet. Training for the astronauts before they leave will include staying in simulation bases to see how they cope with being secluded, away from everything they have ever known and loved, and being left with only the other astronauts. They must be extremely intelligent and able to cope in unfamiliar environments, as well as being able to solve any problems that may occur by themselves, especially those in the first team of four who will be alone for two years on a different planet. They must also have a knowledge of engineering, in case anything goes wrong with the technology, as well as the ability to cultivate crops and see to any medical problems. The team at the moment predict that they may well stay there for the rest of their lives, but it does not exclude the possibility that the technology necessary for a return rocket can be sent to Mars after a few years so that astronauts can return if they wish. Considering the state of technology now, and given the amount of time for proliferation between now and when the return rocket will be required, this is not an unreasonable estimate.

The settlement on Mars will include “inflatable components which contain bedrooms, working areas, a living room and a ‘plant production unit’, where they will grow greenery”. Within the settlement, the Mars One website predicts that the astronauts will “lead typical day-to-day lives”. There, their task will be building and researching. They will have to prepare for when the other groups land as well learning about Mars. Their research will include how people and plants respond to life of Mars as well as things like Mars’s geology and biology. Essentially, imagine everything the scientists throughout history have learned about Earth - forty people are going to be sent to do all of that on another planet.

Reading the information offered by the website does seem like they have thought of everything. It does not go into great detail, but it does offer an FAQ page as well as a contact address for anyone with further questions. The page explaining why and how the astronauts will emigrate to Mars is quite cool. They claim to have found a place where there is water ice beneath the surface that can be cultivated to provide hydration for the astronauts. They describe how everything will be powered by solar panels so that they do not need to go to the hassle of building a nuclear reactor for energy. They go to a lot of effort to ensure that people know that they understand what they are undertaking.

The Mars One website has a Sponsorship page, inviting businesses and companies of all sizes to sponsor the project and “play a significant role in creating World History” and “make the next giant leap for mankind”. However, the project will mainly be funded by having the whole thing being as a reality TV show. Suddenly it makes sense that the Big Brother guy is involved; otherwise, he really stuck out as a bit of a loser in amongst all those people with physics doctorates…

From the selection and preparation of the first astronauts, right through the launch of the first rover to the point at which a colony has formed on Mars, everything will be broadcast on television and be made available online for the public to view. The Mars One team insists that there will be no gimmicky bullshit like in most reality TV shows, that the integrity of the mission itself should be more than enough to attract people to watch. I know I would watch, but I’m a nerd, and generally I hate reality TV, so I don’t really know if I’m a good example.

I actually think this is brilliant. I don’t know if it will work. I don’t think that there have been enough critical analyses of the plans by people who have a lot of in-depth knowledge about all the necessary science for me to draw any proper conclusions. I have had a look at the Wikipedia entry for Mars One as well as the one for Prof. Dr. Gerard ‘t Hooft, the most advertised of the team’s “ambassadors”. I have had a very long look at the website and I, with my nerdy but nonetheless layman’s knowledge, think it is pretty awesome, but it only makes sense to remain sceptical before I have a bit more information. They seem very determined that everything go right and well and that all the science be absolutely fool-proof, so that they are taken seriously and so that they don’t end up stranding forty well-meaning astronauts somewhere between Earth and Mars without food or oxygen. It does feel a little bit like that episode of The Simpsons in which Homer went to space, but science is not about feelings – it is about doing research and getting results and using the information gleaned from crazy ventures just like this to make a better world for generations to come.

Now I know I’m not exactly astronaut material right now – but if Homer Simpson can do it, anyone can. Besides, there is another year before the selection begins and I will be thirty when the first team is launched, so I've got time to prepare. I won’t lie, I have already signed up for some free online study groups beginning in January of next year that focus on biology and other things that may come in handy with my application, but I was already signed up for one about astrobiology and I don’t have much going on during the time of course, so my nerdism probably would have led me to do them anyway.

I would like a bit more information about it, maybe some objective opinions about it from more than a handful of people. I would like to see the specifics of the plans – more details, for instance, about exactly how they expect me not to die. If this project really is as good as the website makes it out be (which it probably won’t be; nothing ever us, but we may as well be hopefully), I would happily sign up. Never mind that my nan doesn’t like me living as far away as London and is such a technophobe that there is no way she will trust the video messaging system, even though I know for a fact that they guys at CERN currently use Skype (Brian Cox did it at Uncaged Monkeys in December 2011; I was there, it was awesome).  Never mind that the minimum age limit is 25. Never mind that it may mean spending most of my life on Mars and much of the time beforehand training and studying to be competent enough to go to Mars. Never mind that if I do spend a lot of time studying and training and then end up not making the final cut that I would have wasted as much as ten years of my life (provided I start working for it now, or at least in the next six months or so) for something I never will do. None of that matters.

This is Mars. The planet. This is a chance to go down in history. This is dangerous and exciting and amazing and unbelievably nerdy. Space exploration is one of the coolest and most incredible things that mankind has achieved and it is all done by amazing nerds, which Hollywood will have you believe are all also total babes. This is not always untrue.

The fact is that Mars is the next thing that mankind has to explore. Maybe we haven’t learned everything there is to learn about the moon or even the Earth, but we will, and why shouldn’t we be heading off to Mars too, so we're there ready to start working when everything else is done? We all know it is going to be awesome, but you don’t have to believe me, because my opinion is only mine and I am obviously not the best spokesperson for this sort of thing.

Rather, believe Carl Sagan:

Did you think I was going to shut up about the Higgs? You were wrong.

In this very month, the wonderful nerds at CERN announced the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson particle, for which they have been searching since the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, in order to confirm or debunk the Standard Model of the universe. They found it (more or less). The Standard Model works – the mathematics of it fit our universe in a way that explains it in a rather complex but understandable model. The Higgs boson was the last piece of the puzzle and now we have reasonable evidence that it exists.

At this point, it depresses me that a lot of people now say “So what?”

I heard some innocent person – who was actually trying to defend the expense and effort put into this research – reply “Well, because they were curious. They just wanted to know.”

And, to some extent, that is true, but that response could be said of any and all science and it strips it down into its absolute barest motive. There is no doubting that curiosity is at the base of every scientific experiment, every theory and deep in the heart of every person who has ever been interested in anything even remotely scientific. But to say that all of CERN and everything it has achieved has been only to satisfy the curiosity of a handful of nerds is to massively devalue all that it has done and all the benefits it has bestowed upon civilisation.

If you ask any random person on the street what CERN has achieved in its lifetime, they probably will not be able to give you an answer, unless by some tiny chance you asked someone as nerdy as I am. You might get someone moaning about how much it cost. But that is relative and, when you think about what it actually has achieved, you realise that all the money gone into it is actually piss in the ocean.

The science budget in most western countries is miniscule when you think about how much governments waste on other rubbish. Take, for instance, the now quite famous government spending chart from The Guardian in 2008, which shows quite clearly how more than £620.6 billion was divided between all the things for which the government wanted to pay. All money put towards science came under the heading “Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills”, which received, of all that money, only £3.3 billion. That £3.3 billion includes all medical research, space exploration, developments in technology and engineering as well as things like arts and humanities that need money to flourish and come under the same heading. That tiny fraction of government funds is not a lot of money, especially when you consider that science pays for itself sooner or later. The Apollo programme, for example, paid for itself fourteen times over. That means that for every $1 that the American government invested in the project, it put $14 back into the economy. On average, the American government earns 700% profit on money put towards NASA. Research in quantum physics led us to a better understanding of the way our world works; scientists exploited that to create the transistor, which is the building block of pretty much all modern technology, including phones, radios and computers. Pretty much any development in the understanding of how our universe works will lead to more improvements like this in our lives.

CERN has been around since the 1950s and the LHC was built between 1998 and 2008. Everyone – particularly those who have seen either my FaceBook page or Twitter feed – knows its most recent news, but many more of its achievements seem to have been completely forgot. The progressive achievements in particle physics are numerous; between 1973 and 2012 they found far more than just the Higgs boson. In 1984, two CERN physicists were awarded a Nobel Prize for their work there and the discovery of the W and Z bosons. And to anyone who says that now that the Higgs has been found that the LHC is now worthless and no more than a blight on the Swiss landscape, you’re wrong. It is now being used to study dark matter, one of the most mysterious things in physics, and could tell us more about the universe than any discovery in the history of science if its work in the future is half as successful as it has been so far.

The fact is that there are loads of things going on at CERN, but the discovery of the Higgs boson particle is the only one that has really been publicised because of the massive machine it took to find it. The real problem with these achievements is that they only really have relevance to those who know how to use them, those physicists who care about finding the answers and confirming models of the universe. But these are quite a small minority of the people; most people will happily take advantage of all these developments without really caring how or why it works. But that is not to say that these findings do not have a huge impact on your life.

I can guarantee that everyone reading this has used – in fact is using right now – the biggest thing to come out of CERN. I would very much like to dither for a while and let you squirm or maybe get a bit defensive and insist that of course you have not used this thing that is so popular because of course you would know that it comes from CERN if it was that amazing and that big a part of your life. But, actually, it is pretty amazing and you definitely use it.

A project called ENQUIRE was born in CERN in the late 1980s. It was based on the concept of hypertext and was designed so that researchers could share information from different parts of the word. In 1993, the World Wide Web became free and available to everyone and anyone.

No matter what else it does, CERN will always be the birthplace of the Internet. Think of all the money that has been saved and made because of the Internet, both by independent business, people and even governments and huge corporations. Think of everything that is on the Internet that otherwise humanity would not have. Forget the spam and the porn and the whining teenagrs complaining on FaceBook about how much they hate life even though they are luckier than any other generation. Think about how easy it is to share information, or to start up a business. Forget that without YouTube there would be no Justin Bieber and remember that without YouTube there would be no TED talks. Think about having a forum for your opinion and your thoughts no matter who you are or what you think. Think about a freedom of debate and a simple and easy way to connect with people just like you, no matter where they are in the world. Think about having global news at your fingertips whenever you want it and think about how seeing a silly reblogged meme face can make your whole day.

Think about the hypocrisy of some nutter blogging or tweeting about how the LHC is unnecessary and CERN is a waste of money and effort.

Now thank CERN for providing you with such an incredible gift given free to the rest of mankind and stop calling it the ‘God particle’.

Is Evolution Really That Difficult?

No, no it's not.

A friend of mine – an intelligent, well-read, scientifically-minded friend, I might add – was recently chatting to me about an archaeological dig which had revealed a 2-million-year-old skeleton that appeared vaguely human. The significance of the story was that it was the most complete and intact skeleton that had been recovered in all the digging-up of ancient bodies. I found it quite interesting. So did he.

Then he asked if scientists had “discovered the missing link, yet, or have they given up?”

This concerned me. Of all my friends – and I have a few – he is one of the few that I might consider about as nerdy as I am. I might have imagined that he would know the answer to this question, already, particularly as it isn’t a difficult one to answer for anyone who knows much about the current state of evolutionary science.

The fact is that scientists have had the ‘missing link’ for years. There are dozens of transitional fossils between Sahelanthropus tchadensis and Homo sapiens, the oldest being about seven million years old and the most recent being, well, us. All the different species have been found in fragments and are usually separated via the skull, particularly the brow and jaw lines. As far as I was aware, the only people who don't believe in a ‘missing link’ these days are religious morons who refuse to accept evidence when it is staring them in the face, and the poor neglected people who have been brainwashed by said religious morons into not looking at evidence. On top of that, scientists are finding new links, between links, every day. There are complete lists of them all over the internet, and there was an article about a new species of Australopithecus in New Scientist magazine just a couple of months ago. I know because I bought it (I’ve wanted a subscription for a while, but couldn’t afford it, so I bought it this time because I needed a magazine for an assignment at uni, and thought it was a perfect opportunity to indulge my nerdism). I remember it because it also had a picture of Professor Brian Cox on the front, which is always a bonus.

Alright, so the evolutionary line is still not perfect and there are still some species left to be discovered. But, so what? There is enough evidence for it that there really is no room for debate about evolution any more. Religious or not, there is no empirical evidence against evolution (the Bible doesn’t count as evidence). Quite frankly, anyone who ignores all the substantial evidence for evolution is going to get dumped in with the nutter who wrote the letter on the right.